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CHAPTER 1

Peng Chun Chang’s Early Life in China and Studies in the United States

Peng Chun Chang (1892–1957), or Zhong-Shu as he often called himself, grew up during a dramatic era of China’s history. He was part of a special generation that experienced the rule of the last emperor, the foundation of the new republic in 1912, and, starting in 1949, Communist rule under Mao Zedong. Other members of his generational cohort included Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), long-time president of the Republic of China, and Mao Zedong (1893–1976) himself, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China. Another famous member of this special generation was the philosopher and diplomat Hu Shi (1891–1962), who was an advocate of Chinese liberalism and language reform. Both Chang and Shi belonged to an exceptional generation of men who were schooled both in Confucian/Asian and Western traditions. As the historian Diana Lary has stated, they were multilingual, often bicultural. Many of them were committed both to China’s land and culture and to “Western” scientific method and liberal traditions.¹

This generation experienced many dramatic events, including the Boxer Rebellion (1898–1901) and the brutal reprisals that it provoked from Japan and the Western states concerned. Unlike the earlier Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Boxer Rebellion was not directed against the imperial dynasty; indeed, in its final phases, it enjoyed the support of the regime. Instead, its aggression was aimed at foreign interests, whether commercial, military, or religious in nature. The rebellion, which originated in the disaster-hit Shandong Province, was led by a secret society called the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which believed that practice of a particular martial art could make one invulnerable to bullets.² Other dramatic developments included the republican Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the First World War, wars with Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, the Second World War, and the civil war that followed the end of the Second World War. Collectively, these factors meant that the lives of the members of this generation were profoundly shaped by war, conflict, and radical political change. During their lives, Chinese society also underwent modernization, urbanization, steady population growth, social reform, and cultural transition.³

Chang and his peers lived in an era of political upheaval during which the masses increasingly sought to challenge the old imperial order. Calls to introduce a republic and modernize China, not least its educational system, were heard increasingly loudly, especially after the country suffered a series of military defeats and interventions by foreign powers. The Manchu Qing dynasty, which had held power in China since 1644, had been visibly weakened by the two Opium Wars, the first in 1839–1843 and the second in 1856–1860. Defeated twice, China was forced to accept the opium trade and to grant special trade privileges to France and Britain. China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 also contributed to a sense of vulnerability and an urge to modernize the country. The powers interested in dominating China—especially Japan, Great Britain, France, and Russia—also introduced the idea of spheres of influence in 1898 in order to make a partition of the whole country.

The Qing Dynasty and Its Education System

During the first hundred years of the Qing dynasty, China developed into a rich country that was greatly admired in the rest of the world, particularly Europe. And yet, for the remainder of the nineteenth century it became a welcome El Dorado for merchants and missionaries, mostly from Europe and the United States. China also came to be viewed in many quarters as “the sick man of Asia.” The European colonial powers arrogated to themselves so-called extraterritorial rights (rights and laws of their own that had judicial force beyond their own borders) that curtailed the authority of the Chinese state and its control of several key ports. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 also resulted in a major loss of prestige for the Qing dynasty. The superannuated Chinese army showed itself in combat to be inferior to the modernized Japanese army. The status of Manchuria was to become a highly fraught issue for China and Japan, particularly following the 1905 Convention of Peking, by which China was forced to accept that Russia would cede authority over Manchuria to Japan. The convention also resulted in Japan acquiring control over Guangdong Province, Korea, and Taiwan.⁴ The Meiji Restoration in Japan, which began in 1868, had radically increased the political and economic strength of Japan through industrialization, modernization, educational reform, and centralization of the state.⁵

The state of political crisis in China at the turn of the twentieth century prompted educationalists and politicians to scrutinize the Chinese education system of the imperial period, a system that had consisted primarily of recitation of classical works of Chinese literature under the supervision of a teacher. The civil service’s meritocratic recruitment system likewise was centered on the knowledge of ancient Chinese texts, such as the writings of Confucius. Numerous observers argued that the secondary and tertiary education systems needed to be reformed in order to meet the economic, military, and cultural challenges of a new era. This was especially true of China’s military expertise, which had shown itself to be quite inadequate in confrontations with Japan and the Western powers. The fact that university-level study was focused on law and civil administration was also deemed problematic in view of the pressing need for scientific and technological proficiency.

Many in China also regarded several of the overarching aims of primary and secondary schooling as obsolete. During the final years of the imperial system, the goals of school instruction had been described as loyalty to the emperor, respect for Confucius, public spirit or patriotism, martial courage, and a practical and technical disposition. When the republic was declared in 1912, these objectives were replaced with moral training, technical skills, instruction in “military citizenship,” and aesthetic orientation. In 1918, the goal of inculcating a spirit of popular democracy was added to the list.⁶ At the same time, no change was made to the nationalist framework, according to which school was regarded as an important instrument for the creation of a national identity. The American Scout movement subsequently became a highly valued “import” and inspiration for civics instruction in society at large.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, even the imperial regime had begun to try to develop a more socially relevant education system that was oriented toward the needs of the army and navy, an educational ambition that grew after the turn of the century to include other areas. Greater resources were dedicated to subjects such as science, agronomy, and engineering. Before its abolition in 1905, the imperial civil service examination system also began to place greater emphasis on science than had been the case in the previous century, when it had principally focused on the humanities and classical education.⁷

Looking back on these developments in the 1950s, Peng Chun Chang reflected that the old teaching forms of the imperial system, namely recitation of classical texts, were not entirely without merit. The overarching aim of this system of education had been to develop the ability to memorize and absorb Chinese wisdom and knowledge by using both voice and hearing. Recollection of a text became, as it were, incorporated into one’s own sound-memory bank. When someone schooled in the old way tried to recall a passage from a work of Chinese philosophy, Chang claimed, an observer would first hear them make a faint humming sound before beginning to recite the text. Their recall was also often perfect.⁸

Childhood and Early Education

What were Chang’s early years like? Peng Chun Chang (or Chung Shu / Zhong Shu) was born in 1892 in Tianjin (formerly Tientsin), an important coastal town in northeast China. He had one brother and three sisters. However, only one of the sisters, Zhuchun, survived, and so Chang grew up with an older brother and an older sister. His sister went on to marry the famous revolutionary and educator Ma Qianli, who worked closely with Chang’s older brother, Poling, in his Nankai school.⁹ Stanley Chang was unable to say what happened to the sister and where she lived in China: “My father’s sister was called ‘Third Aunt’ by those of us in the family, so she was older than the two brothers. I don’t know what happened to her in the later years of her life because I left China in 1940.”

Chang’s family came originally from Shandong Province, which had also been Confucius’s home province. They supported themselves by trading on the large canal that connected Hangzhou and Beijing from south to north, gradually becoming wealthy and moving to the city of Tientsin. Chang’s grandfather had a passionate interest in literature and, despite his financial success, regarded his business career as a compromise in life. Chang’s father, Jiu-an Zhang Yun Zao, 1834–1909), loved music, especially the flute, riding, and archery and spent much of the family fortune on his leisure interests. Jiu-an was forty-nine years old when Chang was born, a fact reflected in the child’s nickname, Number Nine. (In China, birthdays ending in nine, such as forty-nine or fifty-nine, are often celebrated in place of an even anniversary, the concern being that the person in question might not live for another year.) In the United States, Peng Chun Chang would often be called P. C. by his friends.

Because Jiu-an deeply regretted his life choices, he imposed strict discipline upon his children and impressed upon them the value of study. Having himself failed to pass the imperial examination, he was insistent that his own children would be educationally successful. In this respect, it can be said that the imperial examination system contributed in different ways to disseminating a culture of learning in China: partly by selecting those who would go on to enter the civil service, partly by imparting knowledge about the system and a passion for it further afield, including among those who had themselves not passed the examination.¹⁰

Chang’s older brother, Poling (Shouchun), born 1876, was subjected to corporal discipline by his father as a spur to study. By the time Chang was born, however, Jiu-an had moderated his approach to parenting, with the result that the younger son was given very different treatment than his brother. One important legacy that Chang received from his father was music. As a child, he accompanied his father to several opera performances. Chang’s mother (Yang Shi, 1850–1922) is an invisible figure in his “history writing.” Stanley Chang remembered Peng Chun Chang talking on some occasions about his father but never about his mother. The fact that Chang never discussed his mother’s life with his own son is very striking and raised questions about his childhood. Instead, the most important figure for Chang was Poling, a powerful personality who dominated Chang’s life virtually from cradle to grave. Poling’s nickname was Number Five, because he was considered the fifth child. According to Stanley, Poling was also a nickname that his uncle had been given. In Chinese tradition, children are customarily given two nicknames.¹¹

Poling was sixteen years Chang’s senior and thus became a kind of a father figure to him after the death of their father in 1909. Poling had evidently inherited his father’s severe attitude toward child-raising and began regularly thrashing Chang, something that was to affect his life profoundly. Despite his severe parenting style and the large age difference, Poling influenced Chang’s life in several regards, positive as well as negative, and inspired him in his studies and choice of career. According to Stanley Chang, it seemed as though his father perpetually sought his brother’s approval and in certain situations was highly dependent upon his brother’s advice on different matters. The problematic nature of Chang’s relationship with his brother was to express itself in different ways, among them Chang’s continual traveling.

Chang’s deep and lifelong interest in art, theater, literature, music, philosophy, diplomacy, and politics may even have been a way for him to break loose from his older brother, rather than merely emulating Poling’s interests in school, sport, and education in a wider sense. Involvement in his many other activities was likely a way for Chang to dispel any suspicions that he might be clinging to his elder brother’s coattails.¹² However, it is obvious that Chang had a genuine interest in many fields and activities in which he also excelled.

The Nankai Schools

Poling’s interest in educational issues was to affect Chang visibly throughout his life. In 1904, Chang entered the Nankai School, which his brother had been involved in establishing and subsequently administered. After a while there were several Nankai schools. In addition to the school in Tientsin there was also a school in Chunking. After 1919 it was also the Nankai University in Tientsin. Among his classmates was Mei Yiqi (1889–1962), who later became a famous educator in China. (He became the president of Tsinghua University in 1931, and during the years of the Second Sino-Japanese War, he was president of South West United University in Kunming.) Chang concluded his school years in China at Zhili (Chihli) provincial college in 1910.

Together with the educationalist Yan Xin, Poling had founded Nankai School in 1904 with the help of donations during a climate of rising discontent with China’s old educational system and the political situation.¹³ The original cohort of students consisted primarily of the children of friends, neighbors, and relatives. The school was located on the south side of Tientsin in an area known as Nan-Kai (“the open space in the south”). Thereafter it expanded in its number of buildings, students, and levels, and in 1919, as was mentioned before, a university under Poling’s direction was established.¹⁴ In 2017, Nankai University consists of two campuses—the older one in the city of Tianjin (Tientsin) and a newer one in a suburb. In a speech given in 1956, Chang recalled his early experiences of the school:

The school (which started in 1904) began with an enrolment of 73 students. It carried on its work in the courtyard of a private residence and had at its disposal only three large rooms for classrooms, one small room for the use of teachers, and a hall for schools assemblies. It would be natural to ask how so humble an establishment could have been the starting place for any story worth relating. Yet the growth of this institution in the first twenty-five years of its life is perhaps one of the most phenomenal chapters in educational history anywhere. By the beginning of the second year, the school enrolment had swelled to burst the confines of the old courtyard. Something had to be done, and quickly, to find new quarters. After persistent searching and pleading, a piece of land was located; and it was donated to the school. It was situated to the south of the city of Tientsin in an area called “Nan-Kai,” meaning “South Open-Space.” New buildings were speedily erected. And we moved into our new compound in 1907. The name of the school was changed to “Private Nankai Middle School.” From that day on, the name “Nankai” became increasingly famous, eventually reaching far and wide.¹⁵

In addition to their emphasis on sport, art, and theater, the Nankai Schools were permeated by the creed of strict discipline, healthy living, and a strong spirit of nationalism. Poling had served in the navy, where he had been trained by English officers. His experiences there had led him to become increasingly involved in the struggle for Chinese independence.

In the late 1800s, Poling witnessed an event in the port of Weihaiwei that acquired a profoundly symbolic importance for him. He watched as the Japanese flag was lowered to signal the transfer of authority over the port to China. The Chinese flag was raised, but only for a moment before the British flag was raised—and left flying. After this painful and humiliating experience, Poling resigned his commission in the navy and at the age of twenty-three dedicated his life to sport and teaching.¹⁶

A characteristic saying of Poling’s was that a good teacher must also be a good athlete. As he saw it, the dire state of affairs that the schools needed to remedy comprised: (1) physical weakness and poor health; (2) superstition and ignorance; (3) economic poverty; (4) insufficient community spirit; and (5) egoism. When it came to childrearing, Poling’s watchwords were “ability” and “social responsibility.”¹⁷

Poling was also a driving force with regard to China’s participation at an early stage in the Olympic Games. Poling’s efforts to promote sport in China in the 1900s were publicly acknowledged when China hosted the Olympics in 2008. In a book published to coincide with the games, Poling was described as the father of Chinese Olympic sport by Jacques Rogge, then president of the International Olympic Committee. Poling’s contributions to sport have also greatly enhanced the prestige of the Chang family name in China today.¹⁸ While Poling is fairly well known in those circles in Chinese society who are familiar with Nankai, his younger brother Peng Chun is not. The same is clearly also true in the Chinese university world.

Although the old school system was not entirely without merits—such as the forms for reciting the classics mentioned by Chang—it became increasingly apparent with the passage of time that a more modern educational system was required. It was in the shadow of these circumstances that Poling became involved in creating a new educational model. Initially influenced by the Japanese educational system, he became increasingly inspired by American educational ideas after making a study visit in 1908–1909 to the United States, where he visited seats of learning such as Princeton and Harvard Universities and Wellesley College. Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, proved a particularly strong source of inspiration by virtue of its emphasis upon the notion that students and the entire staff should collectively form a kind of educational family.

The Nankai School system was on several accounts a runaway success during the republic, with Chang’s brother playing a decisive role. According to Chang, the rapid expansion of this school system was probably one of the most astonishing occurrences ever to take place in the history of secondary education in China. From this point on, Chang himself became highly involved in helping his brother to expand and run the Nankai Schools. As mentioned earlier, further expansion resulted in the creation of a university—Nankai University—which in 1919 opened its doors to both female and male students. At first, the university was situated near the Nankai Schools, but with time it became necessary to find new premises. Land was purchased twenty kilometers south of Nankai in an area known as Pai-Li-Tai, and the university relocated there in 1922. The university nevertheless retained the old name Nankai since it had become nationally famous.¹⁹ On Peng Chun Chang’s advice, another school was founded in Chungking in 1935, something we will return to later. After Poling demonstrated his loyalty toward Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the republic, during the war, Nankai University was upgraded to the status of a nationally supported university in 1945. Poling served as its chancellor from 1919 to 1948.

Pupils and students from the Nankai Schools and University went on to develop a strong identity, forming, among other things, alumni associations in different cities around the world. Stanley recalled that when he and his siblings had visited events arranged by the Nankai Association in California, they had been treated almost as royalty by virtue of their belonging to the Chang family. Stanley Chang told the following story as an illustration: “When my sister Ruth went to China in the mid-1980s, she was warmly embraced, almost as a sister, by Mrs Zhou Enlai (Deng Yingchao), who showed her around. Zhou Enlai had attended the Nankai School when my father taught there, and people assumed that he had been a pupil of my father’s. According to my father, however, Zhou Enlai had never been one of his pupils or students but had merely occasionally listened to some of his lectures.” However, Zhou assisted Peng Chun Chang in his drama program at Nankai and was influenced by Chang’s introduction of Western plays in China.²⁰ The above story from Stanley provides revealing glimpses of how Peng Chun Chang and his family were regarded in certain Communist circles in China in the 1980s. Although Chang had represented the republic and voiced his support for political ideals far removed from those of the Communist regime, there was nonetheless a positive aura around the Chang family in consequence of their creation of the Nankai Schools and Nankai University. This reputation was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the beloved politician Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) attended them both the Nankai school and the university. Today, Nankai University is also one of China’s most reputable, according to Stanley Chang. Advertising for the university also makes much of its having been Zhou’s alma mater. Another famous alumnus of Nankai is Sun Yu (1900–1990), one of China’s most famous film directors. Wen Jiaboa, the prime minister from 2000 to 2012, also attended the Nankai School.²¹

Since the founding of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights Studies at Nankai University in 2005, Peng Chun Chang’s name has become more recognized in the university, which commissioned a statue of him. The unveiling ceremony of the statue took place during the summer of 2007 (8 June) at the new campus of the Nankai University (Jinnan). Stanley Chang’s account contains the fascinating detail that Nankai University was one of a rather small number of universities permitted to keep its name after Mao Zedong took power; another was Sun Yat-sen University, founded in Canton in the early 1920s.²² Stanley’s theory is that Nankai University was allowed to keep its name because Zhou Enlai was a former student. According to Stanley, Nankai University was the national, with a capital N, university when it was founded, something that Zhou Enlai would no doubt have relayed to Mao if the latter was not already aware of it.

Chang’s daughter Ruth recalls that Zhou Enlai acted as a so-called student secretary to her father, together with two other students, who would also go on to have brilliant careers: Zheng Taoru and Duan Maolan.²³ Another of Zhou Enlai’s college friends was K. C. Wu, who became mayor of Shanghai in the 1940s. Zhou Enlai was also very active in the Nankai School’s theater group, Chang’s pet interest. In 1917, Zhou Enlai graduated with distinction from the Nankai School.

Zhou Enlai was for several decades Mao Zedong’s right-hand man. He is widely regarded as a deeply educated and diplomatic man who exerted a moderating influence on Mao. Trained in classical Chinese philosophy, he studied in Tientsin and at the Nankai School between 1913 and 1917 and at Nankai University as well as spending time at schools and universities in Japan and France. Zhou Enlai participated in Nankai extracurricular dramatic and debating activities and was inspired by Poling’s motto for the school—the principles of gong, the commitment to sacrifice oneself for public interests, and neng, the ability to fulfil this commitment. When Peng Chun Chang returned to Nankai in 1916 after his studies at Clark University, Zhou assisted him in directing both Chinese and Western plays.²⁴ After the Communist take-over at the beginning of the 1950s, Zhou protected Poling because Poling was closely associated with the Kuomintang regime. When Chang Poling died in 1951, Zhou Enlai flew to Tientsin to pay his respects. In China, Poling was viewed as an important figure, as evinced by the way that both nationalists and, at times, Communists sought to claim him as one of their own.²⁵

For Chang and his family, Nankai was also a crucial shaping force in their lives. It says much about how Chang viewed the Nankai Schools that as late as 1956, a year before his death, he gave a lecture on their origins at an alumni meeting hosted by New York’s China Institute.²⁶ In the lecture, Chang also underscored his brother’s very great importance for Nankai. In nostalgic but also insightful fashion, Chang described his student years in the first Nankai School as a period that fostered self-confidence and faith in the future.²⁷ As Stanley Chang explained:

Nankai and my father were very closely intertwined. When in the 1920s my father returned to China from his studies in the United States in order to begin teaching, he wanted to break away from his brother Poling and Nankai. He therefore accepted a new job as dean at a rival university—Tsinghua. That’s what he told me, at least. But in the end, we still wound up at the Nankai campus in Tientsin in 1927, so clearly he had chosen to return to his alma mater to teach. On the subject of building the Nankai School in Chungking (Chongqing), my father said that he had persuaded Uncle Poling to open a new school in the city. The reason he gave was that he expected China to go to war with Japan imminently and so the best option was to open a school far inland. Later, he was proud of having predicted correctly. Uncle Poling also happened to be in Chungking, away from Tientsin, during the Japanese bombing raids of 1937, leaving my father as his representative at Nankai University. For this reason my father found himself in grave danger and, when the Japanese invaded, he was forced to flee from Tientsin in the middle of the night dressed as a woman.

The Boxer Indemnity Reparation Fund and Chang’s First Period of Study in the United States

After the Boxer Rebellion ended in 1901, the European powers and Japan demanded economic compensation from China on the grounds that their property and interests in China had been specially targeted. The United States instead chose to request that compensation take the form of a grant-giving foundation for talented Chinese students who wished to study at American universities, something that would help promote the United States’ reputation in China.²⁸ The fund that gave scholarships between 1909 and 1929 included more than 1300 students from China. Chang passed the selection test and received a scholarship from the American Boxer Indemnity Reparation Fund and a place at Clark University, a renowned university located in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1913, after three years’ study, Chang received his bachelor’s degree in pedagogy and philosophy.

Founded in 1887, Clark University was one of the first graduate colleges in the United States to offer master’s degrees in pedagogy and psychology. In 1900, the university also started to confer doctoral degrees on both men and women. The university’s first president, G. Stanley Hall, was also a distinguished professor of psychology and pedagogy who established the American Psychological Association. Sigmund Freud’s only lecture series in the United States, at which he introduced psychoanalysis to the American public, was given at Clark University in 1909. The university was well known for having an ethnically diverse student body, including many students from Japan, as well as for its socially progressive profile.

That Chang formed part of an extraordinary cohort of Chinese scholarship students was to become clear in hindsight. Perhaps the most famous of his pals in the group was Hu Shi. After completing his studies, Hu Shi went on to become one of China’s most liberal philosophers and literary historians; like Chang, he was powerfully inspired by the ideas of the American philosopher and educationalist John Dewey. A graduate of Cornell and Columbia, Hu Shi emerged as a leading spokesperson for China’s New Culture Movement, which sought in various ways to liberalize Chinese society and institute language reform.²⁹ Hu Shi and Peng Chun Chang were holders of scholarships from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programme, and they came to the United States on the same ship as young students. Both of them endorsed the proposal from the New Culture Movement to replace the difficult classical language (guwen) with a written form of the oral vernacular language (baihua).³⁰

Other members of Chang’s cohort, which arrived in the United States in 1910 (on the second boat), were Zhu Kezhen, subsequently a Harvard-educated meteorologist, and Zhao Yuanren (Y. R. Chao), also a future Harvard alumnus. Y. R. Chao (1892–1982) was a pioneering linguist whose textbooks are still used in university courses today. He went on to become a professor of oriental languages at the University of California, Berkeley. Chao also composed music that became widely known in China. He became Chang’s best friend and was the only outsider to regularly visit him and his family during the last years of Chang’s life. According to Stanley, his father described Chao as a genius. (Stanley also said that Chao once surprised his audience during a lecture by speaking English backward without a “flaw.”) On the ranking list for scholarships to the United States, Chao was number two, and Chang, number seven. The scholarship program included many excellent scholars who went on to have successful careers, such as the Nobel laureate in physics Chen Ning Yang, the educator Kuo Ping-Wen, and the rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-shen. The educator Chen Heqin, who studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, through the Boxer Indemnity Fund between 1917 and 1918 would later be the first modern Chinese theoretician of early childhood education.³¹

Chang was, as was said before, part of a unique cohort that had been schooled in both the old Confucian ways and the educational traditions of the West. Several members of this cohort became multilingual and viewed the preservation of the core defining features of Chinese culture as an urgent task even as they sought to convey valuable insights gleaned from their experiences in the West, especially the achievements of modern science and the liberal political worldview.³² This cohort formed a network in which most of the scholarship recipients were acquainted with each other.

During his time at Clark University, Chang wrote prolifically, including for its newspaper the Chinese Student Monthly. There he published essays on Chinese nationalism and the effects of colonialism on the international legal system and China, essays that show him to have been deeply engaged with international politics and the political problems in China from an early stage.³³ These early works also reveal his close involvement in the problems of politics and national-identity formation in his native country. Later writings from Chang would show a pattern of connecting with important political problems of the day that specifically affected China and its identity in a volatile world.³⁴

In “National Ideals,” Chang’s first published essay, which won second prize in a lecture competition in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he discussed what he understood by real patriotism and the prerequisites for a democratic republic. The essay was undoubtedly inspired by political events in China, which included the overthrow of the imperial order and the creation of a new republic in 1912. In the essay, Chang set out his national ideals and his vision of a “healthy republic” in terms of patriotism, an unswerving and productive life, and a public morality capable of counteracting the selfishness and political conflicts of society. As regards patriotism, Chang did not consider citizenship of the world—or a world state—as realistic options; the focus must instead be on a nationalism capable both of counteracting narrow local interests in China and of utilizing the Chinese people’s shared frames of cultural reference. A democratic republic, Chang argued, also presupposed an educated citizenry, a condition that was essential for being able to claim that the republic was government by, of, and for the people.³⁵ It is worth noting that by this point Chang was already meditating upon the meaning, potential, and desirability of a kind of global organization and global citizenship. As noted above, later in life Chang would play a part in defining the shape and direction of the UN and, with it, a way of thinking specific to citizens of the world.

In another article by Chang from 1912, titled “China’s Real Situation” and also published in the Chinese Student Monthly, he reflected upon what he called the external and the internal problems of China. On the one hand, the Chinese Republic faced the challenge of confronting the colonial powers (Japan, France, Great Britain, Russia, Germany) and their ambitions to curtail China’s independence and freedom. According to Chang, China was bound by protocols, conventions, treaties, and contracts that had annulled her powers as a free agent. On the other hand, the internal problems consisted of severe poverty in many provinces. In addition to these internal problems, China also had to confront serious problems such as famine and flood. Chang also stressed that the Manchu dynasty had not left a well-organized department of administration. For example, there had not been any definite, uniform system of taxation in China. A common currency and a well-functioning educational system were also lacking, as well as a developed railroad system. Additionally, the country had no dialect in common, and its written language was so hard to learn that the common people were unable to read an ordinary newspaper. A simplification of the written language was urgently needed. At the end of the article, Chang stressed that the group to which he belonged—the chosen few who had been privileged to receive a university education overseas—had an important duty to help the self-sacrificing populace at home to modernize China and fulfill the goal of making China an independent, prosperous, and free country.³⁶ He was to follow this precedent himself when, after completing his studies in the United States, he returned to China and worked intensively to modernize Chinese society through education.

In another early essay, published in 1913, “A Brief Survey of Extraterritoriality, or Consular Jurisdiction in Non-Christian Lands,” Chang discussed the phenomenon of having different laws for foreign citizens and natives. In this article, Chang presented a historical overview of how individual-based law emerged as an entity distinct from simple territorial legislation, focusing in particular on conditions in China and in Muslim countries. In the latter, such as Ottoman Turkey, extraterritoriality was based on custom and early treaties. These traditions, treaties, and practices would later on serve as “role models” for the treaties and extraterritorial laws that were established in the Far East.³⁷ Chang’s hope in this essay was that the advent of the new Chinese republic in 1912 would steadily eliminate the rights and influence of foreign powers in China. In the case of states in which religion and legislation were closely intertwined, as with Muslim states, Chang argued that there were grounds—from both perspectives—for having separate legislative codes.³⁸ From the perspective of the Western countries, there was also the concern that the citizens of their countries would not be treated in courts in a safe and fair manner according to their legal principles if no extraterritorial laws existed.³⁹

Chang was very active in various student organizations during his time at Clark, including associations for Christian Chinese students and the Congregational Church of China. This kind of engagement in the college environment was typical for many of the students in the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programme. Chang also attended Christian student conferences during his tenure as secretary of the Chinese Students’ Christian Association, even giving an address to the conference of the association, a large convention held in Missouri in 1914. He organized bible classes at various American universities.⁴⁰ The Christian circles in which he moved at this time were evangelical and heavily involved in missionary work overseas, particularly in China. During this time, Chang also published three confessional essays on Christianity.⁴¹

Where did this Christian involvement spring from? Poling had become a Christian a few years previously as a result of his contact with the YMCA and other organizations. In seeking to account for Chang’s own interest in religion, it is easy to speculate about his brother’s influence. In 1908, Poling visited the United States and Britain for the first time and pursued studies at several educational institutions. During these visits he also came into contact with a number of Christian networks and, upon returning home to China in 1909, chose to be baptized; he was then thirty-three years old.

The Americans had hoped that their scholarship program, among other things, would result in the Chinese students becoming drawn into the Christian culture of the United States. In the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, however, and in contrast to his brother, Chang’s interest in Christianity appears to have flagged, something we will return to in due course. Poling’s Christian faith seems not to have affected the character or image of his schools, which were established with the intention of being a nonconfessional alternative to the Chinese mission schools. In the 1910s, P. C. Chang’s intellectual environment in the 1910s was deeply influenced by the efforts of Christian missionaries to allow Christianity to take root in China on the country’s own terms and by means of the Chinese themselves.⁴²

In the republic’s early years, religious freedom also increased in China, with thousands of missionaries from different societies travelling around the country. Chang’s view was that only by taking indigenous traditions as its starting point could Christianity acquire real momentum and influence in Chinese society. He opposed the notion that Christianity was, as a religion, alien to China. The Good News should be spread, in other words, by utilizing what was best in the Chinese traditions. In this way, Christianity would realize, rather than destroy, China’s distinct identity. At this time Chang was convinced that spreading Christianity throughout Chinese society could remedy many of the fundamental problems with which China was wrestling, including widespread egoism and an inadequate sense of social community.⁴³

This question of how best to achieve a reasonable balance between a culture’s unique characteristics and cultural influences from without was to become a continual theme of Chang’s writing. Chang addressed this subject in the contexts of religion, ethics, social life, politics, science, technology, theater, and art more generally. He engaged with the issue at an early stage, as can be seen from the essays that he published in student newspapers during his time in the United States. In an early article titled “China’s Desire to Retain the Best in Her Own Tradition” and published in 1914, Chang identified the great challenge facing China as one of how to steer between the Scylla of narrow-minded self-sufficiency, and the Charybdis of superficial copying of other traditions and neglect of that in Chinese traditions which deserved preservation.

When describing this kind of hasty cultural emulation, Chang was fond of using the metaphor of bad digestion that resulted from trying to ingest as much as possible of a foreign diet.⁴⁴ This metaphor was to recur repeatedly in later life when he reflected on and criticized different cultural influences. Japan’s use of technology and science, for example, seemed to Chang a sign of how cultural imports from the West could become degenerate. Chang argued that Japan’s rapid but superficial absorption of modern technology and science could well be described as a nightmare caused by bad digestion, especially with reference to the use of technology in the military sphere. Chang and others in his generational cohort maintained an attitude about the West that was sometimes characterized by an ambivalence toward what was culturally indigenous vis-à-vis what would need to be imported.

As well as being highly active in Christian student groups at Clark University, Chang was also the head of the debate club at the university. This club took home victories in various competitions on the American university circuit and provided Chang with valuable training in rhetorical and argumentative techniques, skills that he would later put to good use in his career, particularly in various UN contexts. According to his son Stanley, Chang was very proud of his argumentative prowess. Stanley relates that his father knew the best way to prepare for a highly charged debate. Having thoroughly prepared himself on a particular subject, read up on and made an inventory of possible arguments and counterarguments, and, finally, participated in the debate itself, he would move quickly to studying a new subject area. Chang was ever impatient to satisfy his boundless curiosity for unresearched fields.

Chang often took great pains to identify conceptual distinctions and clarifying principles, regardless of the subject he was occupied with. Whether writing confessional articles, scientific papers, essays on poetry, theater, or art, or political opinions, Chang sought, usually successfully, to adhere to his ideals of clarity, simplicity, thoroughness, and cogency. According to Stanley, he brought this same attitude and basic strategy to an array of projects. Be it for an academic article, a political opinion, an artistic project, or a hobby (such as his record collecting), Chang attacked issues as if he were writing a doctoral dissertation. His colleague on the UN Commission on Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John P. Humphrey, recorded the following observation about Chang’s interest in music and record collecting in his diary entry for 1 November 1950: “I took P.C. Chang for lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Great Neck. He talked about music and the theatre; says he now has a collection of about a hundred long-playing records chosen as a result of study over nearly three years.”⁴⁵ Stanley Chang also remarked upon his father’s record collecting and love of music:

He collected LPs in a way that resembled a systematic study of music appreciation in general. His collection contained everything from Gregorian chants to twentieth-century music. It seemed to me that the more unlistenable the music, the more he wanted to listen to it. He started with Beethoven’s Fifth and worked his way back in time to just before Bach and then forwards again up to the strangeness of twelve tone. When he played his records, I usually locked myself in my room. He wasn’t looking for particular composers but rather investigating different musical forms. He bought his records mainly at Sam Goody’s in New York City. Being a regular customer he obtained special treatment. He could buy any record and return it if he did not wish to keep it. Sometimes we sat together and listened to the records he had brought home.

Chang’s time at Clark University was evidently very important for him. During these years he sought to immerse himself in Western cultural traditions and developed interests that he was to sustain for the rest of his life—with the exception of his religious involvement, which dwindled thereafter. Chang graduated from Clark University with a bachelor of arts in 1913, three years after matriculating. He then moved to New York, where he continued his studies at Columbia University, where he took two master’s degrees, one in comparative literature and one in pedagogy, in 1915. Columbia was well known for its large Chinese student groups, and it would later on be closely connected to the China Institute, which was founded 1926 in New York City. Several distinguished Chinese graduate students at Columbia such as Wellington Koo and T. V. Soong would later on make successful careers in the Chinese Foreign Office.⁴⁶

Chang’s Theatrical Interests

During his time as a student in New York, Chang’s interest in theater became increasingly manifest, including in his writing of articles for various student newspapers.⁴⁷ These articles show Chang as eager to criticize what he felt were common misunderstandings about Chinese themes and characteristics in Western plays about China. In a 1914 article titled “Chinese Themes on the Stage—A Comment on ‘Mr. Wu,’” Chang wrote:

If we believe that struggle of the human will is the central support of the structure of the drama, as it is, then perhaps, there is no other country where this struggle in the political and social realm is so marked and inevitable as in China today. She is undergoing a great transition … and dramas of all descriptions are being acted out in real life every day. That this is a ready and prolific field for dramatic themes, every student of the history of the drama can easily discern. But it is a sad fact that so far, on the western stage, these legitimate and truly dramatic stories have scarcely been touched.⁴⁸

Chang emphasized that there needed to be more plays that did not reiterate common misconceptions about the Chinese people and prejudice about their characteristics, such as deviousness in business (a theme of the play Mr. Wu). Chang cited Aristotle’s dictum that “a work of art must be full of beauty, agreeable, desirable, and morally worthy.” According to Chang, no prejudice, however cleverly dramatized, could ever form the substance of a work of art, “for it is neither beautiful, nor agreeable, nor desirable—the present war ought to convince us of this. And certainly not morally worthy if we believe in any Golden rule other than the Golden rule that the only Golden rule is that there is no Golden rule” (Chang apologized for the reiteration!).⁴⁹ Chang here touched upon issues that would later form the focus of the “Orientalism debate” initiated by the Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said in his famous book Orientalism (1978), which examines misperceptions and misrepresentations of Asia by the Europeans, particularly European scholars.

In his early years in New York, Chang also wrote plays—The Intruder, The Man in Grey, and The Awakening—that reflected topical political and social problems in China, where some of these problems had been caused by the conflicts with Japan and the deep divisions in the country.⁵⁰ All three plays were subsequently staged at the Nankai School in both Chinese and English. The Intruder was also performed in New York in 1915. The Awakening proved very popular in China, where it was the first English-language play to premiere before a Chinese audience. Since Chang’s political involvement often overlapped with his artistic endeavors, the plots of his plays warrant brief summaries here.

The Intruder takes as its theme the significance of social virtues, such as family togetherness, diligence, courage, and the importance of contributing to the common good. The play centers upon the threat posed to a family by greedy creditors in a hardening social atmosphere. The family has fallen into debt because several of the sons have borrowed money from an unscrupulous creditor, with devastating consequences for the family. The play ends, however, with the situation being partly resolved by the return of the hardworking and conscientious son. He keeps the loan shark at bay and, with his sister’s help, saves the family from shame and ruin.

The Man in Grey is a tale of war and peace whose main protagonists are evoked allegorically as “the red man” (war), “the white man” (peace), “the yellow woman” (love), and “the grey man” (the people). The play takes the form of a dialogue in which peace and love try to convince the people to love their neighbor. Love, the yellow woman, appeals to the people (the grey man) to cooperate with their neighbors instead of waging war against them as the red man (war) has been urging. Only through cooperation can the barriers to making life more acceptable be removed. According to love, these barriers comprise poverty, ignorance, selfishness, prejudice, injustice, and hypocrisy. The struggle against these negative qualities was also to be a guiding principle of Chang’s political project within the framework of the UN.

The Awakening is about a scholarship student who has just returned to China from his studies in the United States and is now looking for work. He meets an old friend and his sister. They discuss the societal problems of the day, including the rise in selfishness and short-sightedness. The trio also discuss how the returning student ought to approach his native land in light of his experiences overseas, an issue with which Chang himself wrestled intensely after his own return from studying in the United States. In the play, the student’s friend is investigating a sprawling network of corruption in the railways, and the drama ends with him falling victim to one of the subjects of his investigation.⁵¹ After his friend is murdered, the scholarship student promises the sister of the friend that he will try to help to realize the ideals articulated by his deceased friend in their conversations. Chang makes a thinly concealed gesture toward his brother Poling’s Nankai School by having his protagonist harbor the ambition of opening a small school that might help create a new social order free from corruption and greed.

Chang also wrote another play in 1915, The New Order Cometh, which deals with the tension between loyalty to the old family traditions in China and the “new values” that the Chinese students encountered in the US in the form of individual freedom. The play was staged in New Haven and New York and had a cast of Chinese students from Yale and Columbia. The play was reviewed in very positive terms in the newspapers. It grappled with the theme of romantic love as the foundation of marriage. Two students fall in love during their time of study in the US. The boy tries to end his previous engagement with a Chinese girl in China. Her father, who represents “the old order,” refuses to accept the break up because the engagement has been decided by both the boy’s and the girl’s families. According to the girl’s father, because the boy’s father no longer lives, the engagement should continue, unless the boy can bring his father back to life again and ask him for permission to disengage. However, the girl in China solves the stalemate, and, with a surprising act of generosity, she accepts the breakup. As a “reward,” at the end of the play she meets another man with whom she falls in love.⁵²

China in the 1910s

During Chang’s early years of study in the US, China underwent dramatic political changes. Between 1907 and 1911, disaffection with Qing dynasty rule became increasingly apparent, resulting in riots in several cities across China. By 1911, the situation for certain religious groups, among them Christians, was becoming precarious as a consequence of the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, which the imperial regime regarded as a religious uprising. Following the revolution, the Republic of China was created in 1912, forcing the abdication of the last of the Qing dynasty emperors, six-year-old Puyi. This marked the end of more than two thousand years of imperial rule.⁵³ China became a nation-state with leaders by election instead of being an imperial state having leaders by inheritance. Following the dissolution of the empire, the situation for religious groups was also improved by greater religious freedom. Many Christian missionaries from the West came to China in these years, with intense and successful missions from a number of churches during the 1920s in particular.⁵⁴

In 1912, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), an intellectual anti-Manchu leader who was also a converted Christian, became the first president of the republic. That year also saw the founding of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese nationalist party. Sun Yat-sen’s first term of office was cut short, however, when a general from the late Qing dynasty, Yuan Shikai, seized power. Sun Yat-sen was driven into exile in Japan, while his challenger sought to restore the monarchy and appointed generals as administrative commanders of China’s provinces. (In July 1913, seven of those provinces rose up against Shikai’s rule.) In 1915, during Shikai’s rule, China became a signatory to the Twenty-One Demands, which resulted in Japan gaining considerable jurisdiction over Manchuria and the Shandong Province as well as special protectorate-like rights. These concessions led, four years later, to protests in the form of the May Fourth Movement.

After Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, China became fragmented as a national entity, with local warlords assuming control of the provinces.⁵⁵ The period directly following the revolution of 1911 was thus a great disappointment for all who had hoped that it would usher in a new, modernized, and unified China. Nonetheless, the one great consequence of the revolution was that the empire was dissolved and the ideological debate over China’s future social development became more intense.

In 1917, Sun Yat-sen returned to a fragmented country that had become the object of foreign control in several key aspects, such as the extraterritorial laws that stipulated separate judicial codes for Chinese and foreign citizens. The customs system was also divided. Sun Yat-sen waged a propaganda campaign with three principal objectives for the new republic: (1) national independence; (2) constitutional democracy; and (3) economic freedom and self-sufficiency. The creation of national unity was, of course, a central objective. Sun Yat-sen’s principles were adopted by his successor Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1920s. For both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, it was essential to remove foreign influence in China and to put a stop to the fragmentation that had defined the warlord period.

The so-called warlord period refers specifically to the years 1916–1928, when warlords mobilized private armies in order to take control of different territorial areas. Some of these warlords were supported by foreign powers and engaged in a series of wars and minor conflicts with each other, many of which had their origins in ideological disagreements. Some warlords, such as Zhang Xun, were deeply conservative and wanted to restore the empire, whereas others, such as Yan Xishan, advocated what for its time was a highly progressive social policy in Shanxi Province. Opinions are divided as to how to understand this period. Although some commentators have characterized it as an early attempt at substantive modernization and the balancing of power, the majority of Chinese tend to view it as a period of confusion and internal struggle.⁵⁶

Brief Return to China and the May Fourth Movement

In 1916, at the age of twenty-four and after almost six years in the United States, Chang returned to China to teach in his brother’s Nankai School, where he also became vice principal and director of the school’s new theater group. The plays mentioned earlier were performed at the school after Chang’s return and served to establish him as the school’s artistic leading light. During his early years as a teacher and school administrator in China, Chang also evinced a deep interest in subjects far removed from theater and literature. For example, he became involved in the struggle to retain agricultural and forestry programs at Gingling University, Nanking. The following year, 1917, Chang stepped in as a temporary replacement for his brother Poling as school principal. He was to serve in that position for the two years that Poling studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, under the supervision of John Dewey. When the school was hit by major flooding in autumn 1917, Chang helped to save several pupils from the floodwaters and even managed to maintain the teaching schedule despite extensive damage to the school buildings. In summer 1918, the school moved back into its old premises.

After the school had got under way properly, Chang put on a new play, Xin Cun Zheng (The New Village Head), in which he introduced modern, Western directorial methods. For Chang, this meant that everyone involved in a dramatic production should follow an agreed-upon script and that the director should play a central role in rehearsals. In so doing, he broke with the improvisation-based theatrical tradition in China, which was largely centered on so-called star performers. Chang instead advocated a system in which every actor had a principal part under the director’s strict guidance. Chang admired the theater traditions in the Western countries, which had their origin in ancient Greece, and he was eager to introduce these traditions to China. He thought that many people in the Western countries saw theater not mainly as “entertainment,” as in China, but as something unique and important on its own, so-called pure theater. In Chinese theater, there was a combination of speech, singing, dancing, and pantomime to different extents. Theater and theater actors also had a higher social status in Western countries than in China, according to Chang.

The play The New Village Head would in time come to be seen as an early intellectual forerunner of the May Fourth Movement, which emerged in 1919 against the backdrop of Japan’s expanding geopolitical ambitions in China. What exactly did the May Fourth Movement stand for, and what was its origin? The movement was a protest against the fact that Japan’s demand to assume control of Shandong Province had been largely accepted by the delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. In contrast to the new states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, China as a whole was not accorded any real independence. Most Chinese had hoped that China’s participation on the French and British side against Germany during the First World War—in the form of 200,000 relief workers at the front—would result in the return to China of German-occupied territories such as Shandong Province. Instead, these territories were placed under Japan’s control. In so doing, the Versailles Peace Treaty left deep wounds in China that were to form the basis for the May Fourth Movement. Allied with that movement were various modernization campaigns between 1915 and 1921 that emphasized the value of science, simplification of the language, greater democracy, and less hierarchical family norms. Their rallying cries were “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”⁵⁷ Key figures in this New Culture Movement included Lu Xun, the author of “A Madman’s Diary” (a short story written in vernacular Chinese), and Chen Duxiu, a dean at Peking University and editor of the New Youth Magazine. Other well-known members were the linguist Qian Xuantong and the politician Li Dazhao. These persons were pivotal in creating the Communist Party (CCP) 1921 in Shanghai. As mentioned earlier, the philosopher Hu Shi, a key member of the May Fourth Movement, also worked intensely to replace Classical Chinese with Vernacular Chinese as the standard written language. This language reform was effected in the 1920s. The new literary style was based upon the syntax of the national dialect “kuo yu.” The classical style was, according to Chang, very condensed and abstract and full of literary allusions that concealed the meaning of the words for the layman.⁵⁸

On 4 May 1919, three thousand students from a number of universities, including Peking University, began processing toward Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Imperial Palace, where the foreign legations were situated. After being driven away from this area, the students instead marched toward the residence of the communications minister, Cao Rulin, which they set on fire. Cao Rulin’s house was singled out because Rulin had previously negotiated a very large loan from Japan, which protestors regarded as excessively compromising.⁵⁹ Cao Rulin (1877–1966), a politician friendly toward Japan, had also been a signatory to the infamous Twenty-One Demands of 1915, drafted during the brief regime of Yuan Shikai, which gave Japan greater influence over China. Rulin had also been a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at which German-occupied areas of China were ceded to Japan. Following clashes with police, thirty-two students were arrested and one died in the hospital. The demonstrations spread to other cities in China, including Shanghai. The overall purpose of the May Fourth Movement was to struggle for China’s national sovereignty and fight against the people who were regarded as traitors at home. Throughout June, popular involvement grew, with demonstrations attracting not only students but also businessmen and workers, and a boycott of Japanese goods was called for. It should be noted that, according to official histories, even Zhou Enlai was active in the May Fourth Movement.

Chang paid close attention to the student activities within both the May Fourth Movement and more generally the New Culture Movement during his time as a graduate student in the US. He gave a lecture that dealt explicitly with the origin and main purpose of the May Fourth Movement at the Third World’s Christian Citizenship Conference in November 1919 in Pittsburgh. This lecture was later published as an article—“The Rising Consciousness of Civic Responsibility Among the Students of China.”⁶⁰

In his article, Chang praised the students’ mobilization against the Shantung Settlement in Paris 1919. He regarded these students—from universities, colleges, and secondary schools in China—as an avant-garde group that inspired other groups in society, such as the merchants, the gentry, and trade guilds, to fight against the unjust settlement. Because learning had always been highly respected in China, the influence of students could be strongly felt in all spheres of society, according to Chang. Many of the present students had also acquired a new socially relevant education after the fall of the old empire. In other words, the students were vitally interested in the real problems of their environment, and they had cultivated a civic responsibility that took into account the concerns of several interest groups in society. They had also allied themselves with liberal movements the world over who endorsed freedom, justice, and peace. The students quickly organized themselves into a student’s national union with headquarters in Shanghai. They called for strikes from 4 May to 12 June and managed to effect the resignation of the three “traitors” from the Peking government (Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu).

According to Chang, what was remarkable about the student mobilization was that the students rose to fight not for Shantung alone, and not only for China, but also for democracy and democratic principles in the world as a whole. Chang said:

The far-sighted all over the world are aware of the fact that if a militaristic nation should be allowed ultimately to dominate China—the largest, yet undeveloped, field of natural resources and of manpower in the world—thee will develop the greatest military power that has existed on earth; and that the world will have a far more powerful and dangerous Prussia to face in the next world war. While fighting for an independent, democratic China, the students believed that even as a policy—not to mention the supreme justice of the case—the safest course for the world, and particularly for the security and development of democratic institutions, is a free, peaceful China.⁶¹

Chang revealed in this article that he had a very clear idea about the dangers that the Japanese militarists presented for China and the rest of the world. The main danger consisted in using China as a tool for a war on democracy on a global scale. Unfortunately, he was right in his pessimistic prediction of a new world war and the destructive role Japan would play in that forthcoming war during the 1940s.

In his article Chang expressed his beliefs in the national importance of the educational efforts that had taken place in China after the establishment of the republic in 1912. Chang was an advocate of a multifaceted education that had relevance for solving urgent problems in society. According to his friend the educator Tao Xingzhi (T’ao Hsing-chih), who also had studied at Columbia University, Chang was critical of “the book worm”—a person who emphasized book reading as the main path to real knowledge. Chang coined the term “scholar ghost” to designate this kind of personality.⁶² Chang stressed in a later article published in 1933—“Redirecting Educational Effort in China”—that:

In the old days the wisdom of the race could be garnered from books and a faith in the written word was to that extent justifiable. This old regard for books and book knowledge as carried over by the “scholar-ideology” is making for sad results among the students in the modern schools. Although the subjects they study are nominally modern, the extent to which they trust the written word is sometimes piteous. Instead of memorizing classics, many students today are memorizing school texts—sometimes even texts in geometry and in chemistry. This form of mental exercise obviously does not fit one to face concrete problems. It is also often noted that students are apt to consider a thing accomplished as soon as it is written on paper and announced. “A ghost from the past” threatens calamity for the present and the future!⁶³

Chang hoped that “the New Student … will not be bookish, as he will have contact with, and control of, the material changes in his environment. He will have moral self-reliance; he will not need to crowd ‘the gates of the powerful and the rich’ in order to eke out a livelihood. He will be able to increase the wealth of the community. And, not the least important, he will be in close sympathy and understanding with the toiling masses. That is the type of educated leadership that the China in transformation urgently calls for.”⁶⁴ Hence, for Chang it was important to emphasize practical skills among the students and also vocational training. According to him there was no innate obstacle to the development of technology in China. The Chinese mind has never been blighted by any thoroughgoing mysticism, and in the making of material things, the Chinese have not been deficient in skill and inventiveness.⁶⁵ One could guess that Chang had (in addition to the student mobilization in the May Fourth Movement) his own Nankai School in mind as a role model for ideal educational efforts as Nankai mixed activities in workshops with activities in the classrooms for the pupils.⁶⁶ The Confucian ideal of learning also stressed that one should strive for a comprehensive learning that included social understanding and moral education and, hence, not only book reading.⁶⁷

In 1921, Chang also wrote a commentary on the student protests that had sought to prevent the ceding of Shandong Province to Japan. China, he claimed, had gained greater respect, not least in the eyes of the United States, by withholding its approval of the Japanese takeover. According to Chang, the lesson to be learned from the Shandong affair was that the eyes of the Chinese people had been opened. Although ancient Chinese cultural traditions had made many of its citizens into gentlemen, these traditions clearly had another aspect: they had failed to inculcate in its population an ability to counter the threat of war from without. During the most recent war, the Chinese people had been sleeping on a beautiful golden bed covered with fine promises of peace. The Shandong affair had thus been a wake-up call for greater knowledge and realism; it was, he wrote, the antidote to a debilitating dose of morphine.⁶⁸

Nationalist sentiments found expression in further riots on 30 May 1925 in Shanghai, which resembled the demonstrations organized in 1919 by the May Fourth Movement. These protesting students and workers were to become known as the May Thirtieth Movement. Their protests had been sparked by the shooting of striking workers by police officers under foreign control. The political rhetoric of the May Thirtieth Movement subsequently became highly influential within the domestic debate in China. For the May Thirtieth Movement, the frog became a symbol for everything that a good Chinese ought to avoid, namely dutifully adapting him- or herself to be an American, a Japanese, and a consumer of foreign products, as the context dictated. The movement’s activities also strengthened the position of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party.⁶⁹

While Chang was not directly involved in either the May Fourth Movement or the May Thirtieth Movement, he was nonetheless active in other organizational contexts.⁷⁰ In the 1920s, he had contacts with the Crescent Moon Society (Xinyue), a Chinese cultural organization created in 1923 by the poet Xu Zhimo (1897–1931). The society, which lasted until 1931, published a culture magazine that commented on the cultural and political situation in China. The magazine took its name from a poem by the Indian Nobel Prize–winner Rabindranath Tagore. Zhimo was a pioneering advocate of modern Chinese poetry and had himself been strongly inspired by the English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He had also studied at the same universities as Chang—Clark and Columbia. The famous Chinese intellectual Hu Shi was also a member of the society, which later became part of the larger New Culture Movement.⁷¹

Second Period of Study in the United States—Doctoral Studies and Marriage

Chang’s stay in China became rather brief as he decided to continue his graduate studies in New York. In 1919, Chang returned to the United States to complete his doctoral studies at Columbia, during which period he gave lectures as a way to support himself financially. In 1920, he and several other educationalists also made a study trip to several American universities, including Vassar College, which had invited him to give an address. Titled “The Problems of the Pacific,” his lecture had an obvious political content. When Chang visited Vassar, he was received by a female Chinese student named Ts’a Sieu-Tsu (Sieu-Tsu Ts’a). Since Chang was from northern China and Ts’a from the south, they did not understand each other’s mother tongue; Chang spoke Mandarin and she spoke Cantonese and “Shanghai” Chinese. As a result, they had to speak English with each other. During his visit to Vassar, Chang and Ts’a fell in love; they were married on 24 May 1921 at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Stanley said the following about his parents’ ways of communicating with each other: “My mother spoke ‘Shanghai’ Chinese or Wu which was used in ‘the half—way south’ or Shanghai region. My mother and father spoke English to each other until they returned to China and then my mother learned Mandarin. I myself can partially understand ‘Shanghai’ Chinese from hearing her speaking to her friend Mrs Chiang (who was from the same region and who lived in New York at the same time as my family).”

Ts’a was born in Soochow (now Suzhou) in January 1898, the third of nine children (six girls and three boys). Her father, Shi-Zhi, encouraged her in her studies, in which she showed tremendous potential from an early age. She was sent to Haygood School for Girls before she had turned six, and, like Chang, after graduating in China was given the opportunity to go to the United States with support from the Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Reparation Fund. She placed first in the fund’s scholarship examination (as already mentioned, Peng was number seven) and arrived in the United States by boat in 1916. While Peng arrived with the second boatload of fifty students in 1910, Ts’a came on the last boat in 1916. She spent a year at Delaware College before moving to Vassar College in 1917, where she took her bachelor’s degree in 1920 with the highest grade in every subject but one (in which she got the second-highest grade). As magna cum laude, she was able to continue her studies at Columbia University, where she completed a master’s degree in chemistry in one year. A recurrent motif in Stanley’s recollections of his mother is his deep admiration for her prodigious talents. She managed to keep the family together under dramatic circumstances while their father was away traveling for long periods. She also devoted a great deal of time to the children’s upbringing and education and was an expert manager of the family’s finances. Despite her obvious intelligence and considerable scientific abilities, she was often overshadowed by her husband, as Stanley recalled. He related the following about his mother’s dramatic upbringing:

My mother’s father was a Methodist pastor. She told us that the family had to hide from the authorities during the Republican revolution against the Qing dynasty. For a while during the 1911 revolution they lived on a boat in very straitened circumstances. Christian groups were viewed with suspicion at that time as a result of the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion. She was the third of six daughters and also had three brothers. Because boys are especially valued in China and the family had three, they gave away their youngest boy to another family. I only learned of his existence after my mother died in 1986 and I was sending out notices of her death to all the people in her address book. His surname was Cheng, not my mother’s maiden name Tsai, and he lived in Houston, Texas. This was thirty years ago.

Mu Lan, Public Lectures, and PhD Studies

In the same year as he got married, Chang tried to raise money for famine victims in China by writing a play, Mu Lan, which was based on a sixth-century Chinese folktale. The play was staged at the Cort Theater on Broadway, where it was directed by Hung Shen.⁷² The play was about a Chinese Joan of Arc who saved China from a Hun invasion. The heroine, a young woman named Mu Lan, dressed up as a male soldier in order to save her ailing father from being drafted into the Chinese army. The play was very warmly reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.⁷³ In 1998, the story of Mu Lan was adapted as the blockbuster animated Disney film Mulan.

In 1921, Chang was also active in educational policy circles, representing his home town of Tientsin at a conference in Washington DC. He gave several public lectures during his time in the United States, alternating politically oriented lectures with talks on art, poetry, literature, and theater at a range of venues across the country. These lectures were well received as the following review revealed: “Mr Chang has a charming personality, a fine delivery, and held his audience from the moment he started to speak until he had finished the last word.”⁷⁴ At the Poetry Foundation’s annual dinner at New York’s Hotel Astor in 1922, for example, he appeared on a panel of speakers that included Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. Chang spoke about poetry’s potential to counteract the mechanizing tendencies of modern industrial society and its capacity to make people see what is essential in their world rather than slavishly seeking material gain. To illustrate his thoughts on the importance of poetry, he declared: “Poetry is like the sound of the rhythm in the void, is like the color in phenomena, is like the moon in the water, the image in the mirror. There is an end in words but the meaning will waft on forever.”⁷⁵

A year after his marriage to Ts’a Sieu-Tsu, Chang completed his doctoral degree at Columbia University. His dissertation was titled “Education for Modernization in China” and was published as a book the following year.⁷⁶ The overarching aim of Chang’s monograph was to analyze educational reforms in the particular context of China’s modernization. In his view, this modernization should be premised on the need to preserve the inner core of China’s traditional culture. Chang’s wide-ranging analysis of Chinese civilization focused on the factors that had enabled the West to achieve a much higher degree of technological development and material growth than China during the previous two centuries. Science, individuality, and democracy have been the authentic voices of the modern age, according to Chang. The sudden and extensive expansion of the European peoples following the discovery of America conditioned the striking progress of modern Europe. Curiosity, imagination, exploration, and the will to make comparison were encouraged during these times of expansion. In a so-called frontier society equality, community and individual initiatives were also encouraged.⁷⁷

Chang argued that only by means of modernization’s processes, not its products, could the special character of a national culture be revitalized and adapted to entirely new circumstances. His analysis also examined what he regarded as the dark sides of economic and technological growth in the West. His dissertation criticized the spirit of competition and the materialism in Western societies, which had resulted in crassness, insensitivity, and cruelty. Chang was concerned that a powerful desire for modernization would lead China to develop into just one more superficial, materialistic nation. His own study urged students to remain always mindful of those intrinsic human values that can counter the impulse to imitate Western trends blindly.

It is interesting that Chang’s dissertation contained normative statements about the potentials and limitations of cultural change. Chang’s view of knowledge evidently allowed for an academic study to contain more than simply empirical descriptions, explanations, interpretations, and logical analyses. For him, an academic study could also contain arguments about normative issues relating to what we might call adequate civic education and constructive cultural exchange. This was not an uncommon perspective at the time: many academic monographs in the humanities and social sciences shared the same theoretical premises regarding knowledge.

It is interesting, too, to note that this motif—attending to what is central in Chinese culture as it encounters other cultures—is also present in Chang’s earlier writings on how a Christian mission ought to profile itself with regard to Chinese traditions. The same rhetorical figures also recur in Chang’s later writings on politics, art, and cultural change.⁷⁸ For Chang, the central elements of the Chinese philosophical tradition seem to have constituted the historical core, which he believed should be respected. These elements, he repeatedly underscored, were humanistic traditions that took into consideration the needs and dignity of individuals and their responsibilities toward their fellow human beings. In later writings, Chang also emphasized that the spirit in Chinese philosophy was surprisingly humanistic and “modern” even two thousand years ago.⁷⁹ (The focus upon the human being was something that Confucian thought shared with “the philosophy of the UN Declaration.”)

Chang’s dissertation received uniformly positive reviews. One reviewer saw it as an ingenious application to China’s situation of the ideas of John Dewey.⁸⁰ Another reviewer described it as an interesting illustration of how members of a traditional civilization could incorporate an educational program that had been created in a context shaped by quite different social, economic, and philosophical traditions. The issues addressed by Chang in his dissertation, including the school as a forum for fostering democracy and the role of education in social modernization, still have great relevance to Chinese society. (Chang also stressed in the context of his work on the Universal Declaration later on that schools were very important arenas for fulfilling human rights in society.⁸¹) Yet the reviewer also emphasized that Chang’s warnings about the dangers of modern industrial society, such as consumerist materialism and the spirit of consumption, needed to be weighed against the ignorance, poverty, and economic inefficiency of traditional society. If China chose the path of modernization, its citizens would have to be prepared for things like individual competition and materialism to become evident in society.⁸² These observations are thought-provoking insofar as they problematize Chang’s ideas about reconciling modernization from “without” and the traditional forms of Chinese culture.

Peng Chun Chang and John Dewey

Chang’s thesis was strongly inspired by the educator John Dewey (1859–1952). Both men underscored the importance of knowledge, individuality, individual rights and freedoms, and democratic processes when seeking to resolve the common problems of society. These lines of reasoning were to establish a frame of reference for Chang in his later writing of the UN Declaration. Chang shared Dewey’s view that education is the decisive method for achieving constructive societal change. Although Dewey evidently played a major role in Chang’s intellectual development, Chang’s son Stanley recalled that he later in life only seldom spoke about Dewey and his writings. Chang’s friend and former fellow student Hu Shi recalled Chang being clearly surprised at Shi having sufficient peace of mind to listen to a lecture on Dewey’s logic at Columbia’s Philosophical Club in 1937.⁸³ By this Chang seems to have meant that abstract philosophical thinking about logic was hardly an urgent priority at a time when China was experiencing dramatic historic events during its war with Japan. But more broadly, Chang’s political views and philosophy harmonized well with Dewey’s ideas.

Having studied pedagogy as a master’s student at Columbia University, Chang had been naturally drawn to Dewey. Yet Chang seems not to have been personally supervised by Dewey to any significant degree, perhaps largely because Dewey was traveling for much of the time while Chang wrote his dissertation.⁸⁴ Dewey began a sabbatical at roughly the same time as Chang began his doctoral studies, making several trips overseas, including to China. In his dissertation, Chang makes acknowledgement to Dewey but also to William Heard Kilpatrick, Paul Monroe, and Isaac Kandel from Columbia, who had been involved in supervising him. All were famous educationalists, nationally and internationally.

Paul Monroe had a particular interest in China, which he visited several times during the 1920s and 1930s. He was also active in the China Institute of New York, one of whose purposes was to enable cultural contacts between the United States and China. The institute had ties to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, partly through financing and partly through visits to the institute by program scholars. Meng Chih, the institute’s head from 1930 to 1967, was also a Nankai School alumnus and had contacts with Chang’s brother Poling. For his part, Isaac Kandel was well known in the field for his research on comparative international pedagogy. William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965) and Helen Parkhurst (1887–1959) were both actively engaged in the pedagogical implementation of Dewey’s more abstract pedagogical-philosophical ideas. They would later become highly influential in American educational debates. Kilpatrick was also an active liberal who went on to move in liberal political circles that included Eleanor Roosevelt, while Parkhurst’s Dalton School was a pioneering institution that sought to find a balance between the individual needs of its pupils and the interests of society.

From the 1920s, debates in China over education were increasingly influenced by the work of John Dewey. Considerable numbers of teachers and school principals in China had read the writings of a thinker who had become a kind of apostle for the new American ideas about educational policy, which had begun to reach countries undergoing radical social transformation. One of the most well-known educators during the period of the Chinese republic was Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946), who had also studied under John Dewey. Tao Xingzhi developed an original pedagogical method for rural teacher education, and he rewrote Dewey’s dictum “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself” as “Life is education.” In the 1920s, Dewey travelled to a range of countries, including Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union and made study trips to China and Japan in 1919–1921, during which he was especially struck by China’s special forms of social community.⁸⁵ Several other leading intellectuals from the West also visited China in this period. One of the most prominent was the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose writings Chang was subsequently to find extremely useful. Russell’s translator during his visit to China in 1920 was Chang’s good friend Y. R. Chao. Chang cited with approval Russell’s assertion that Western civilization’s particular contribution to the world had been the scientific method, while China’s had been insights as to the purpose and value of life.⁸⁶

Chang’s brother, Poling, had been similarly impressed by Dewey’s ideas when organizing his system of Nankai Schools. Dewey and the educational progressives emphasized the value not only of theoretical studies but also the value of aesthetic and practical attainments and of inculcating democratic thinking. These precepts were to become guiding principles for teaching in the Nankai Schools.⁸⁷

How exactly was Chang affected by Dewey’s ideas? For Chang, like Dewey, it was important to recreate the circumstances and factors that had resulted in the pioneering spirit and delight in discovery that had been defining features of the “frontier mentality” of American society and the journeys of discovery by previous generations, something we touched upon earlier. These journeys had led to the clear technological, cultural, and material development of “the West.” The purpose of a school was thus not only to create a challenging environment—one that encouraged a combination of thought and action, discipline, and responsibility toward matters of common concern—but also to foster a spirit of eager, critical discovery.

At the Nankai School, Chang had also introduced a school council with representatives from the school’s sports clubs and musical associations in order to promote democratic participation in the running of the school. Chang shared Dewey’s opinion that it was vital to preserve the valuable elements of the old culture while seeking to implement new and creative curricular reforms. In this Chang parted company with several members of the New Culture Movement, who wanted more radical changes in Chinese customs, language, and habits of thought.⁸⁸ Chang seems to have been unwilling to tone down the Confucian legacy, which was to become increasingly pronounced for him with the passage of time. In the 1920s, China’s growing economy led to the emergence of major urban centers, such as Shanghai, whose increasingly Westernized cultures were being criticized by intellectuals, Chang among them, for being materialistic and fashion-obsessed.⁸⁹

There are other striking similarities between John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and Chang’s anti-metaphysical view of human rights: both emphasized the importance of finding agreement on practical ethical questions and of not becoming embroiled in abstract philosophical considerations that lacked practical relevance.⁹⁰ Ideals and precepts must be “lived” by the students in order for them to gain knowledge.

Chang and Dewey also shared the view that Communism represented a too-hurried and too-radical strategy for societal transformation. The path to modernization of China should instead be gradual and focused upon educational means.⁹¹ There is, then, a direct line from Chang’s doctoral dissertation to his activities as an author of the UN Declaration. Chang’s dissertation makes clear that he had thought deeply about the rights and freedoms of the individual, a theme to which he would return several times in his later writings. Several of the issues on which Chang focused in his dissertation—the importance of a basic education for all, the value of consuming and producing culture, respect for the individual’s particular needs and conditions—would once again come to the fore in his work on the UN Declaration. Chang also shared Dewey’s and Kilpatrick’s rejection of authoritarianism in schools (as well as their rejection of political theories of authoritarianism). Even though Dewey did not talk much in terms of human rights he was a strong supporter of academic freedom and free speech.⁹² Dewey as well as Chang was also eager to emphasize community values. In other words, Dewey did not accept a “self-centered individualism” but endorsed instead a “social liberalism.”⁹³

Both Chang and Dewey were profoundly influenced by the dramatic societal changes that their respective countries were undergoing. Dewey grew up in a nineteenth-century agricultural society that by the turn of the last century had rapidly transformed into an increasingly urbanized industrial society. While not experiencing the same rapid pace of change as the United States, China in the first decades of the twentieth century was nonetheless characterized by increasingly rapid industrialization and urbanization. According to Chang, China was also experiencing growing emancipation and individualization among its citizens, particularly after the breakthrough of modernism and urbanism, with the result that its citizens were increasingly acting in accordance with their own conscience and following laws that they themselves had played a part in creating.

Dewey and Chang also shared a broadly congruent conception of democracy. According to Dewey, democracy should be understood as “communicated experience.” What a democratic society should strive for, he argued, was for its citizens to be able to freely share their experiences on the principle of freedom of thought and expression, without the restrictions imposed by cartel-like formations.⁹⁴ While this democratization process might entail a liberalization of and liberation from oppressive customs, Chang argued, these wide-ranging social changes nonetheless contained the seeds of egoism and a failure of social community.⁹⁵ In this emphasis upon the individual’s duties toward the rest of society, the Confucian legacy in Chang’s thinking revealed itself most clearly.