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CHAPTER 2

Raising a Family, Theatrical Activities, University and Diplomatic Careers

For Chang, much of the 1920s and 1930s were taken up with raising a family, pursuing a career, and continued involvement in the dramatic arts. He began traveling between the United States and China with greater frequency. In addition to becoming a professor at the newly founded Nankai University at the end of the 1920s, he was a guest professor at various universities around the world and was also intensely active in matters of educational policy. In the mid-1930s, he also became increasingly involved in foreign policy issues, due in part to the serious conflicts that erupted between China and Japan. Because Nankai University wielded considerable political influence in China and was strongly engaged with issues at a national level, Chang and his brother Poling found themselves drawn into these political conflicts. Thanks to his successful campaigns in Europe and the United States to argue China’s case with regard to Japan, Chang had by the early 1940s qualified himself for diplomatic postings in Turkey and Chile.

Raising a Family, Return to China and Tsinghua University

In June 1922, Chang and his wife had their first child, Ming-Ming. On the invitation of the Chinese Education Advancement Organization, Chang made a trip home to China that summer. He had been studying the educational systems of an array of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Denmark. His journey home from New York to Tianjin (Tientsin) took him through Europe and the Indian Ocean, via the Suez Canal, and lasted several months. Chang’s wife Ts’a was seasick for much of the journey, leaving her unable to look after her newborn daughter. When they arrived in China, one of her sisters remarked, “This child is not well.” During the long journey, Ming-Ming had contracted meningitis, which damaged the left half of her brain. The consequent disability left her with considerable learning difficulties that resulted in her being unable to look after herself or be fully independent for the rest of her life. She finished school to the sixth grade, showing an ability for elementary mathematics, and she learned English from watching television. According to Stanley, she was well aware of her limitations, including in logical thought, but despite these challenges showed great patience.

It has already been mentioned that P. C. Chang tried in a number of ways to shake off the influence of his elder brother Poling and to find sources of income other than the Nankai School. In September 1923, Chang accordingly began working as vice-dean at the Tsinghua School, an institution that was supported by the US Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Fund. Before Chang’s engagement in Tsinghua, his mother, Yang Shi, passed away in January. During his short engagement at this school, he reorganized it into a college and reformed its curriculum with more liberal education. One of his aims in doing so was to enable students from Tsinghua School to move directly after graduation to a graduate college in the United States. The older teachers at the school opposed this idea, however, and Chang encountered major difficulties in realizing the project. During his years at Tsinghua, Chang also kept a diary (Richeng cao’an) in which he made notes on school “politics” and his own desire after studying in the United States to reconnect with the classical Chinese tradition. Indeed, he explic itly stated in his diary that his understanding of classical Chinese philosophy was greatly inferior to that of his colleagues. One of them whom Chang admired in this respect was the literary scholar and educator Wu Mi, who had also studied in the US almost at the same time as Chang.¹ During the end of his graduate studies there, Chang had also showed a keener interest in Chinese philosophy; for example, he gave a lecture titled “The Teachings of Confucius” at the Albany Institute and Historical and Art Society in 1921.²

In November 1923, another daughter was born: Hsin-Yueh (Ruth), whose name means “new moon.” Ruth was to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a chemist. She studied chemistry at Vassar College, her mother’s alma mater, before taking a doctoral degree in the same subject at the University of Wisconsin. At around the time of Ruth’s birth, Chang had become active in the Crescent Moon Society, a literary group whose number included Hu Shi and which shared the same name as Chang’s second daughter. As was mentioned earlier, the name Crescent Moon Society came from a poem by Tagore. Xu Zhimo, the founder of the society, helped Chang in 1929 to buy poems and scripts for the library at Nankai University. Xu Zhimo and Huiyn Lin (1904–1955) served as guides and translators for Tagore when he visited Tsinghua and Beijing in 1925 upon Chang’s invitation. In his lectures in China, Tagore warned against importing materialistic values from the West into Chinese society.³ Huyin Lin would later become a famous architect and poet in China. After a brief love affair with Xu Zhimo, she married Sicheng Liang (1901–1972), who would also become a famous architect in China. Sicheng Liang was the son of Qichao Liang (1873–1929), whom Chang also invited to Tsinghua.⁴ Sicheng Liang was a famous journalist and reformist who was involved in the Hundred Days Reform, a modernization reform from 1898. He was the mentor of Xu Zhimo. Later on, Huiyin Lin and her husband helped Chang with stage design in 1934 when Chang staged the play The New Village Head, with the famous actor Cao Yu.

It is a remarkable fact that Chang was so well connected with some of the most distinguished people in the cultural life of China during the 1920s. All these people also knew each other in different ways. These kinds of networks would later be a constant presence in Chang’s life in addition to the networks that Chang developed through his Nankai connections and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Fund. In other words, it is fascinating to see how Chang’s life interleaved with those of numerous other Chinese intellectuals, particularly during his years as a student in the United States and through the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. The network that he acquired during his student years in America were to prove decisive in a number of ways, including for his activities in the worlds of literature and the arts and in politics and diplomacy.

Because of the resistance to his changes that Chang encountered from some teachers and administrators at Tsinghua College, he resigned from the college in 1926 and returned to the Nankai School where he was made principal. He also began teaching at Nankai University and served as a professor of philosophy from 1926 to 1937. He remained passionately interested in theater and continued to stage plays by various foreign dramatists. Perhaps the Western dramatist whom Chang most admired was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Chang was strongly inspired by Ibsen, not least because of his plays’ sociopolitical themes and his dramatic technique. Chang subsequently sought to write plays of his own in the same vein. In 1927 he staged An Enemy of the People and the following year he directed the Nankai School’s new drama group in A Doll’s House as part of the school’s anniversary celebrations. Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People gave voice to a special form of individualism, according to Chang, and it later transpired that the title of the play had prompted the city’s military authorities to seek to prevent it being performed. After the second act, Chang received a phone call from the authorities in which he was instructed to bring the play to a halt. The following spring in 1928, Chang nonetheless staged the play again; this time it bore the title The Stubborn Doctor and there were no difficulties with the authorities.⁵ The reason for restaging the play was to celebrate Ibsen’s one-hundredth birthday.

Between 1926 and 1929, Chang translated several Western plays with sociopolitical themes that he adapted to the situation in China. In an article written in 1933, Chang mentioned that he had personally collected and read dramas by over forty different authors, including Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, Schiller, Sheridan, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Wilde, Shaw, Galsworthy, Rostand, Brieux, Tolstoy, Chekov, Andreyev, Lunacharsky, and Pirandello. The names on his list are impressive and attest to Chang’s passion and methodicalness once he had embarked upon a project—here, introducing foreign drama to China. Chang seems to have abandoned collecting books in a systematic fashion later in life, according to Stanley, unlike his good friend Y. R. Chao. When I asked Stanley about his father’s library in the family home in Nutley, he replied that his father did not have a particularly large collection. One of the books from his father’s collection that Stanley later read was Arnold Toynbee’s study of Western civilization, A Study of History. Like his son, Chang had a very good memory and did not need to consult books once he had read them. (Chang had, however, a large collection of records that the two sons divided between themselves after his death.)

During his drama training, Chang had been considerably impressed by several directors from the West, including the German director Max Reinhardt and the English director Gordon Craig. Chang also visited Russia twice and got to know the director and theorist Konstantin Stanislavski. Moreover, when Chang had come to the United States as a student, the Little Theatre Movement had begun to make itself felt in theatrical circles across the country, above all in its hometown through Chicago’s Little Theatre. This theatrical form, which had also been inspired by Max Reinhardt, advocated small-scale productions and intimacy between the stage and auditorium and aimed to stage plays of major social relevance.⁶

In his capacity as director of Nankai’s new drama group, Chang developed a close collaboration with actor Cao Yu, who in 1928 played the lead role in Chang’s production of A Doll’s House. The figure of Nora in A Doll’s House became an important role model for many Chinese women in their efforts to achieve emancipation, with Chang’s advocacy of Ibsen’s plays undoubtedly playing a major part. In traditional Chinese theater, female roles had regularly been played by men, but from the 1930s, it became increasingly common for women to perform women’s roles in theatrical productions. In 1929, Chang staged John Galsworthy’s play Strife, which was the first occasion when female actors performed alongside males. Chang also directed the play Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Chang’s life, in addition to theatrical activities, was characterized by administration, teaching, and educational development work. For example, he and his brother met with Chinese political leaders and foreign guests from American universities in order to discuss potential ways to reform China’s educational system. Chang’s family also continued to grow. A son, Chen Chung, was born in October 1927, and another son, Yuan-Feng (today, Stanley) in October 1928. Both of them went on to become academics. Chen Chung became a professor of mathematics at the University of California, achieving fame in the fields of logic and model theory (his PhD supervisor was the famous logician Alfred Tarski); Yuan-Feng became a professor of applied physics, holding posts at a number of institutions, including the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

The Twentieth Century’s Second Chinese Revolution and Chiang Kai-shek

How was China developing politically during the 1920s and 1930s? The Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in spring 1925 and thus did not live to see the temporary union of an array of different provinces under the so-called Northern Expedition, a coalition between Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist Kuomintang party and the Communists. In 1926–1927, this Soviet-trained army forced the divided regions, including the Shanghai region, to accept national rule. Peking was captured by the National Revolutionary Army in June 1928. During the fighting, one soldier distinguished himself, “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek, who subsequently turned on his Communist former allies, killing several of them once Shanghai had fallen. The new regime was thus initiated in 1927 with a domestic bloodbath in Shanghai. The Kuomintang and the Communists would henceforth be mortal enemies.⁷

Chiang Kai-shek succeeded Sun Yat-sen after the latter’s death, ushering in a period of Chinese history known as the Nanking period (1928–1937). In 1928, a new Chinese government was announced in Nanking, which lent its name to what has come to be called China’s second revolution of the twentieth century (the first being the revolution of 1911 against the emperor, and the third being the Communist revolution of 1949).

Nanking thus became the country’s new capital and there began a period of attempted modernization, including educational reforms, industrial investments, and new infrastructure. The position of women was improved during this period. In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek also began promoting the New Life Movement as an ideological alternative to communism.

Chiang Kai-shek converted to Christianity in 1931 partly because of the influence of his wife at the time, Soong May Ling. His new philosophy was an attempt to modernize China by emphasizing Confucian norms such as diligence, loyalty, and a modest, healthy way of life.⁸ This philosophy had minimal impact in the Chinese republic, to judge from the rising levels of materialism and corruption. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek strove to underscore the importance of science and modern technology for the development of society, and he fought against a variety of superstitions. He stressed the importance of the family and harmony and order in society, and he was completely against the Communist creed of class warfare.

Despite their ideological differences, the Kuomintang and the Communists had a number of points in common. Both parties stressed the value of frugality, and they wanted to unite China and liberate it from foreign influence.⁹ They also sought to implement modernization and liberation from traditional mythologies and religious attitudes. The Kuomintang’s supporters and the Communists also shared the Leninist perspective of the party as the primary political entity in society. A national collectivism and solidarity was also emphasized. During the Nanking period, however, the Japanese encroached upon China in a growing number of ways, and the Kuomintang regime became increasingly drawn into conflicts with the various Communist groups. The end result was an undermining of the republic’s capacity to create the modern and unified China that had been Sun Yat-sen’s great vision. Chiang Kai-shek shared this vision, too, and wanted to unite China with the Kuomintang as its ruling party. Chiang’s attitude toward the Communists found expression in his famous aphorism that the Japanese were a disease of the skin but the Communists, a disease of the heart.¹⁰

Opinions on Chiang Kai-shek have changed throughout history. What stands out are his authoritarian tendencies as well as his inability to prevent the spread of corruption during the final years of the republic. He was also accused of having been capitalism’s errand boy. This latter accusation is debatable, however, given that Chiang Kai-shek initiated state industrial projects, in the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal, during the global depression that prevailed throughout the 1930s. What is more, he also worked closely with the League of Nations to counteract and mitigate the effects of natural disasters, such as that which resulted from the Yangtze River’s flooding in 1931.¹¹ His famous retort was also uttered in the context of his failure to prevent the Communist seizure of power in 1949. At the same time, a number of commentators regard the failings of his early career as having been partly compensated for by his subsequent career as the co-creator of the modern and economically successful republic of Taiwan following the Communist seizure of power on the mainland.¹²

How did Peng Chun Chang view Chiang Kai-shek and the political changes that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century? Stanley Chang relates the following:

My father had a lot to say about the political upheavals in China. He characterized the political changes in China as being like a child experiencing a succession of diseases of childhood: mumps, chicken pox, etc. The original toppling of the Qing dynasty in 1911 took place when my father was at Clark University, so he was not involved in it. Sun Yat-sen became leader of the new republic. He died shortly after in 1925. In the power struggle after his death, General Chiang Kai-shek assumed the leadership role. His wife Soong May Ling (Song Meiling) had been educated at Wellesley College in the United States, so my father knew her well. However, my father had an extremely low opinion of the General, as emerged from various asides which he made in my presence.

Stanley Chang’s recollections are illuminating, not least in light of his father’s poor relations with the Chinese delegation to the United Nations at the end of the 1940s. That Chang did not rate Chiang Kai-shek highly undoubtedly proved to be a handicap for him later in life, even if it was perhaps cushioned by Chang’s friendship with Chiang’s wife and by the fact that Chiang held his brother Poling in high esteem. In official settings during his time as representative of the Chinese government, however, Chang clearly articulated a loyalty to the regime for a long time and, above all, Chiang Kai-shek.¹³ He was positive about certain things that Chiang Kai-shek did during the 1930s. In an article published in 1938, Chang said the following about the political leader:

At the end of 1935, General Chiang Kai-shek went to Nanking and assumed the Premiership; he formed his Cabinet containing intellectuals and experienced businessmen, as well as party members. Now that was a widening of the basis of the government; it began to assume something of a true national character. He started, first of all, the currency reform—at the end of 1935. That is very significant. Before that time the currency was not uniform; after that time currency all over the country become to be uniform…. Through 1935, various constructive efforts took place, the increase of trade, the improvement of the international situation, the building of the railroads.¹⁴

The fact that Chang managed to secure prominent posts in the 1930s and 1940s was a good indication that Chiang and his closest circle viewed Chang approvingly for at least part of his professional life.

It should be mentioned that Chiang Kai-shek did not enjoy broad popular support among liberally inclined circles in China, because of, among other things, the widespread corruption in society and the unsatisfactory progress of the campaigns against Japan and the Communists. As a leader he also showed strong intolerance for people who disagreed with him.¹⁵ The alternatives were few, however. In the 1930s, one could either join the Communists, who were practically a guerrilla group that had no substantial territories under their control, or Japan, which was unthinkable for most people. The liberal-democratic discussions that were conducted in liberal circles similarly lacked any politically powerful mouthpiece.¹⁶

Chang and Mei Lanfang

Despite Chang’s many commitments to family and university life, his aesthetic interests did not slacken. As we have seen, he was not only interested in introducing Western plays to Chinese audiences, he was also eager to introduce Chinese culture to American and European audiences. In 1930, Chang met the famous Chinese opera singer Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) at the Chinese Embassy while on a trip to Washington DC for the purposes of fundraising for Nankai University. Mei Lanfang, who was the most famous performing artist in China for many years during the twentieth century, played female roles (the dan roles) in the performances, and he took the Peking Opera outside China and made it famous for the first time.¹⁷ Chang then accompanied Mei Lanfang on his six-month tour of the United States, during which Chang was invited to act as master of ceremonies. Chang had told Mei not to try to change his performance style for Western audiences but to act on stage just as he had in China. He also advised Mei on which dramas were particularly well suited for performance before a Western audience, such as Slaying the Tiger, the story of which was easily comprehensible even to those with no knowledge of Chinese. An opera that also was performed was The Fisherman’s Revenge. Chang was eager to initiate a press campaign before Mei performed on Broadway. He urged him to hire a professional producer who knew the American theatre and opera world (F. C. Kapakas). Before Mei Lanfang started his performances in the US Chang had given lectures on Chinese culture in various clubs in New York to prepare the visit.¹⁸ Chang even managed to see to it that the University of California conferred an honorary doctorate upon Mei Lanfang in connection with the tour.

At the award ceremony, Mei Lanfang read out a thank you message that Chang had penned:

We are here to exert what little strength we have to promote peace, which is eagerly hoped for by civilized people. History shows that real peace cannot be obtained by force. People hope to obtain peace but not quietness after turbulence. Real peace should promote people’s development and growth—mentally, rationally, and materially. To maintain real peace in the world, people need to learn to know, to understand, and to show sympathy for each other, instead of fighting each other. The peace in the hearts of these two great peoples, the Chinese and the American, accords with the norms of international trust and sincerity. To reach this goal, all peoples should conduct active research in the arts and the sciences so as to understand each other’s ways of life, historical background, and problems and difficulties.¹⁹

Chang’s declaration has clear relevance for the work he would later do for the United Nations as the latter sought to formulate a way to articulate the conditions for sustainable peace. Chang’s wife and his daughter Ruth also accompanied him on the tour. It was a triumph for Mei Lanfang, who played to sold-out houses in New York and other cities, and his performances received generally very positive reviews.²⁰ At first, Chang was clearly surprised that Chinese opera and Mei Lanfang received such a rapturous reception in view of how greatly its musical form differed from Western opera.

Chang also contributed to the writing of a short book about Mei Lanfang, which was published in 1935. Titled Mei Lanfang in America: Reviews and Criticism, it contained a foreword by Chang.²¹ During his American tour, Mei Lanfang met a number of celebrities, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. Mei Lanfang went on to become a global superstar, the most recognized face of Chinese opera in the rest of the world. Many people around the world were evidently impressed by his special falsetto singing style, body language, and costumes.

Like other Chinese opera stars before him, Mei played women’s roles. In 1935, touring took him and Peng Chun Chang to the Soviet Union, where they met notable stage personalities such as Konstantin Stanislavski, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Alexander Tairov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Bertolt Brecht happened to be in Moscow at the same time and was deeply impressed by Mei Lanfang’s appearances.²² Gordon Craig also met Mei Lanfang in Moscow during his tour in 1935.²³

Several commentators have argued that Brecht’s notion of a “distancing” or “alienation” effect in the audience originated in his observation of Mei Lanfang’s performances. That effect describes when listeners or spectators cease to identify with what is taking place on stage and instead begin to reflect upon the events being portrayed.

Mei Lanfang had also greatly impressed the Japanese during his performances in Japan, and they were keen for him to perform during the Japanese occupation of China. Mei Lanfang refused to comply, however, and instead lived in obscurity and poverty until Japan’s capitulation in 1945. After Mao Zedong seized power in 1949, Mei Lanfang resumed his career and played to similarly enthusiastic audiences in Communist China.

Chang was involved in Chinese theater and opera for much of his life, an involvement which expressed itself in a number of ways. His son Stanley has a peculiar memory of a particular opera performance at the China Institute in New York. Stanley’s father had been presented with tickets to this opera because it was his sixtieth birthday. As already noted, all Chinese opera is sung in falsetto. Midway through the performance, one of the girls lost control of her voice and began to sing in a normal tonal range. Chang immediately stood up and shouted “Disaster!” which Stanley found very amusing. Such attentiveness to Chinese etiquette and the proper forms of expression was clearly something that permeated Chang’s life in several ways. Stanley also remarked that the family went to the China Institute very rarely. One occasion when Peng visited the institute was when his brother Poling came to New York in 1946. Toward the end of the 1920s, however, Chang seems to have had more contact with the institute, which served as a meeting place for Chinese students at Columbia University and scholars, as well as for Americans with an interest in China.

Chicago, Honolulu, and Nankai

In 1931, after touring with Mei Lanfang in the United States, Chang was invited to take up a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, and during the year he taught philosophy and art history both there and at the Chicago Art Institute. That same year, he also taught at Columbia University, touring Europe in the summer and spending the autumn at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as a guest professor in Chicago, Chang’s two sons and his daughter Ming-Ming stayed behind on the Nankai campus in China, as they had while he toured with Mei Lanfang.

In the early 1930s, Chang was also active on the American lecture circuit, speaking about China and topical problems in cities such as St Louis and New York. In a talk given to a women’s society in Scarsdale, New York, in autumn 1931, he warned about a scenario in which China would be forced to go down a military path in response to Japan’s aggressive colonial policy in Manchuria. Chang argued that ever since the founding of the republic, China had sought to follow the path of modernization by learning all it could from modern science and technology. While China was not yet a modern society, noted Chang, its enormous efforts to attain this goal should not be underestimated. He also argued that China was a more modern society than Japan in one vital respect: it had long abandoned the notions that the emperor was divine and that the army and navy should be under feudal control. “China may be slow in her adjustments,” said Chang, “but at least she long ago discarded these absurd beliefs that properly belong in the museum.”²⁴

In late 1931, Peng Chun Chang was offered a tenured professor position at the University of Chicago. He declined, however, because of the grave political situation in China, which had worsened after dramatic events near the city of Mukden. On 18 September 1931, a bomb had exploded near the city on a railway line controlled by Japan. Japan accused Chinese groups of responsibility for the attack, which it took as a pretext for invading Manchuria. After the invasion, Japan created a new tributary, Manchukuo in Manchuria, and installed the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on the throne even as it retained actual control itself. Manchukuo remained in existence from 1932 to 1945. The only state to acknowledge Japan’s tributary (apart from Japan itself) was El Salvador.²⁵ Chang said that the Japanese invasion caused a wildfire that spread to other parts of the world. After Manchuria followed Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, and Poland.

Japan had been a signatory to the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922. This treaty was intended to guarantee China’s territorial integrity, which had now been violated by Japan. Unlike other colonial powers such as France and Britain, who were more interested in trade and control of the ports—as well as certain major cities, such as Shanghai—Japan had clear geopolitical interests and wanted to have complete control over large swaths of China, including Manchuria.

In its summary of a speech that Chang gave in Chicago to the Convention of the League of Women Voters, the Milwaukee Journal described Chang’s understanding of the situation in China.²⁶ According to Chang, the grave situation in Manchuria—or in the three northeastern provinces—was the fault of the Japanese military, a military that was responsible to none but the emperor. Chang urged the League of Nations to do something to rectify the critical situation. He argued that although Japan was invoking its right to the southern Manchurian railway because it fought with Russia over it, the Japanese were bandits in this instance in exactly the same way as the Russians had been before them.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact (after the secretary of state Frank Kellogg and the French foreign secretary Aristide Briand) had also stressed that aggressive war and the conquest of territory was no longer acceptable as a national policy for a country. It emphasized instead the peaceful settlements of conflicts and disputes. The multilateral pact had been signed by Japan and many other countries in August 1928 in Paris and was an attempt to eliminate war. Hence, several countries, including the US, did not recognize the Japanese conquest in 1931. The Lytton Report of 1932 recommended that the League of Nations seek to compel Japan to return Manchuria to China. Japan refused, however, and the following year it quit the League of Nations.²⁷

The Chinese republic was deeply engaged with the League of Nations during this period. China was anxious to sign several of the league’s conventions and also sought to use the organization for various political purposes, above all, counteracting Japan’s colonial policy. And yet, as the Lytton Report well illustrated, the League of Nations showed itself to be incapable of bringing to an end the conflicts between China and Japan.²⁸

In early 1932, Chang returned to China with some members of his family. They traveled by ship from Vancouver since at that time it was not possible to make the journey from Los Angeles. They reached Tientsin only after nearly two months of grueling traveling; the train connection from Shanghai had been interrupted once the city became a war zone. The Japanese presence meant that there was widespread fear in northern China of new attacks. Chang therefore advised his brother Poling to send out feelers to investigate the possibility of building a new Nankai School in the city of Chungking in Szechwan Province, in western China.

The domestic political situation and the state of war with Japan nonetheless did not deter Chang from his usual professional activities. In summer 1933, he represented China at the International Conference of Pacific Nations in Banff, Canada. During the next few years, far from easing up on travel, he embarked on even longer journeys, including to Hawaii (a research and teaching visit) and Russia (a tour with Mei Lanfang).²⁹

In 1933 and 1934, Chang was a guest professor at the University of Hawaii, where he taught Chinese art, philosophy, and literature. This was the first American university to offer regular courses in Chinese philosophy. Chang also took part in teaching at the Summer School of Pacific and Oriental Affairs in Honolulu. The purpose of this school was to study the cultures of countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. During his time in Hawaii, Chang also wrote a textbook on Chinese history, China: Whence and Whither?, which he later expanded into a history book, China at the Crossroads, intended for a wider audience.³⁰ Chang’s wife and two sons eventually joined him in Hawaii.

The Chinese author and philosopher Hu Shi, who had been on the same boat to the United States as Chang and the other scholarship students, met up with him again while Chang was in Hawaii. In October 1933, he wrote to his girlfriend, Clifford Williams, about his meeting with Chang: “P. C. Chang is now teaching at the University of Hawaii, his wife and children have not yet joined him there. His family life has not been quite happy, it seems that he feels more at home in foreign academic centres than in China…. P. C. gave me a copy of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, which fits in the picture of the gloomy world as I see it from the ship.”³¹ The contents of Hu Shi’s letter accord well with Stanley Chang’s reflections upon his father’s many trips and even his radical changes in occupation. The latter—his involvement in very different activities—can also be accounted for by Peng Chung Chang’s being driven by impatience and curiosity, something mentioned earlier by his son Stanley. Once his father had immersed himself in an activity and excelled at it, it was time for the next challenge. Nonetheless, he remained faithful to some of these activities as far as possible. He strove to sustain his deep interest in theater and opera for much of the 1930s despite intensifying his foreign policy activities, as he did for his wide involvement in teaching and research. Stanley recalled:

Like all brilliant people, my father was a profoundly multifaceted person with several different areas of expertise. My guess is that he travelled so much because he wanted to get away from my uncle Poling. Because of their sixteen-year age difference, the brothers’ relationship was more like that of a parent and child. Uncle Poling physically beat my father in order to make him study. It always seemed to me as though my father was looking for approval from uncle Poling. During the short period of time when we lived in Chungking on the Nankai campus, I once got into a quarrel with one of my uncle’s grandchildren. It was just an ordinary quarrel between two children (I was eleven years old). My father’s reaction surprised me. He immediately went to uncle Poling and apologized. What was there to apologize for?!

That Chang was highly valued as a lecturer was doubtless also a contributing factor to his journeying from one university to another. His tenure as a guest professor at the University of Hawaii in 1933 and 1934 was warmly appreciated, and students were clearly deeply affected by his lectures.³² Additionally, as was his habit, Chang gave several public lectures while at Hawaii. Reviewing one such lecture, Norman C. Schenck had the following to say about Chang’s performance: “There is something magnetic about this great man from China. He is tall and powerful. His appearance instils confidence. His speech and gestures are charming. He seems to be entirely at home with the English language … a voice with beautiful intonation, one that by turns can sound like a powerful organ and a gentle flute.”³³ In another article published in the newspaper KA Leo o Hawaii, the writer expresses the following impressions of Chang: “Dr Peng-Chun Chang, noted Chinese educator who was visiting professor here last year, was honoured last Friday at a tea party in the Honolulu Academy of Arts by the Oriental Institute. He stopped for one day in Honolulu on his way from China to England where he is to lecture at leading colleges. Dr Chang is remembered here for his brilliant lectures on Chinese art, philosophy and history which he delivered at the University last year. His feminine admirers still speak about his “gentle and graceful hands and just perfect diction.”³⁴

That Chang felt at home and ease in different university towns is revealed in a poem (“New Year in Princeton”) that he wrote after visiting Princeton when he was a graduate student in the US. Chang wrote:

Princeton, all beauty and repose!

Why hurry? What’s the care?

Ah Monster City that sucks human blood and brain!

Here is life self-knowing, leisure inviolate.

The Tower—the Gothic Tower—

In sunlight, in moonlight,

And in dark and cloudy night

Watch it at a distance, it draws you near …

Its firm upward lines dart with this mystic power.

You aspire higher and higher at hither your wavering steps …

And when close by, your hope penetrates heaven!³⁵

For Chang, 1935 was another year defined by theater and opera. He accompanied Mei Lanfang on a tour of the Soviet Union, as was mentioned before, and found time to stage Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser) in China, giving the play a topical spin by making its focus the widespread corruption in Chinese society. One purpose of the play was to collect money for needy children.³⁶

Research and Lectures in England

In 1936, Chang was given an opportunity to go to Cambridge University on a one-year visiting professorship. During his time in England, he finished writing his book China at the Crossroads.³⁷

While Chang’s doctoral dissertation had introduced Western educational concepts to a Chinese context, this book aimed to do the opposite: to introduce China to Western readers in order to give them as accurate a picture as possible of the country’s history and social development. In this book, Chang examined in detail how China had historically been regarded by the West. He also highlighted all of the ways in which China had contributed materially to the West, such as the manufacture of paper, porcelain, the compass, gunpowder, and the sedan chair. Silk had existed in China several thousand years before Christ. Printing was also invented in China, five hundred years before it came to Europe. Chang emphasized the intellectual inspiration given by China to Europe and its political consequences, such as the struggle against feudalism and absolute monarchy. These latter notions of “political cultural exchange” were to recur in Chang’s reflections on the history of human rights and how Western philosophers during the Enlightenment had drawn inspiration from Chinese traditions.

The West’s negative perception of China, which had deepened during the nineteenth century, ultimately derived from the fact that China during that century had fallen behind in the fields of scientific discovery and industrial innovation. The Chinese army’s inability to hold its own against Western armies, Chang argued, served to further confirm the impression that China was an underdeveloped country. Nor was it a coincidence that these negative assessments became more entrenched in tandem with Europe’s creeping expansion eastward.

In his book, Chang sought to situate these negative conceptions of China within a corrective historical framework by highlighting the ways in which the situation had been radically different prior to the nineteenth century. In this period, China and Chinese traditions were the object of widespread admiration in Europe and the West, with Chinese culture making an especially powerful impression.³⁸ During its three- to four-thousand-year history, Chang contended, China had developed a humanistically oriented philosophy that emphasized the importance of prosperity for every member of society. It had been commonly understood in China that emperors and political leaders were authorized to rule only if they treated their peoples well. This notion accorded closely to the social ideals espoused by the classical Chinese philosopher Mencius (Meng Tse) (372–289 BC).³⁹ (Similar ideas would later be included in the preamble of the UN Declaration: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”) According to Chang, it was also striking that China had never been a military feudal state for over two thousand years.⁴⁰ However, Japan had the experience of being this for a long time.

Chang was eager to analyze the historical relationship between China and Japan in order to understand the actual conflicts between the two countries. Chang laid out the historical circumstances in the following way in the article “Civilization and Social Philosophies,” which he published for the American journal Progressive Education in 1938:

Japan, a smaller country with a centralized control, also had the readiness to learn foreign things quicker (than China). Japan’s modernization has proved quicker. China’s larger, more loosely knit organization, and also China’s stupid attitude of having itself achieved a valuable civilization made the process of modernization slower. You have heard that the cultural relation between China and Japan is often said to be about the same cultural relationship as between Greece and Rome. You have heard that, but I don’t think you can say it is true. For one thing, Rome took over things from Greece, and then after that, creativeness in Greece died. Another thing: Rome overran Greece. In this respect, Japan learned from China, and the Chinese culture continued and Japan continued to learn from China—from roughly speaking, around the fifth or sixth centuries—and then new movements reached Japan from China even down to the eighteenth century. You should trace it in art, philosophy, court matters, and in literature. Furthermore, Japan never overran China. So it is not at all the same type of relationship; it is rather a matter of relative speed in modernization. That is one reason for the conflict today—it is the speed of modernization. Another reason is the nineteenth century attitude toward expansion in that area. Gradually all the people who have interests in the Pacific are giving up that attitude, and I hope gradually, even suddenly, our neighbour will give up the idea that China cannot modernize herself.⁴¹

In a speech at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in 1936, Chang noted that there was a general impression abroad that Chinese civilization and culture were not merely ancient but also static and backward. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perceptions had been very different. The French philosopher Voltaire, for example, regarded the Chinese social and political organizations as humanistic in comparison with its European counterparts, which had been founded on religious thought. Chinese culture was not in fact spiritual, despite there being a common misapprehension that Eastern culture was spiritual and Western materialistic. That view, Chang argued, was wrong. It was indisputable that the Chinese had been more worldly than Westerners because religion in China had never grown into a significant force. Right up to the nineteenth century, China had continued to provide the world with material things. Tea, ceramics, paper, printing, and gunpowder—all originated in China. The country, it was true, still lagged behind as regards the production of railways, motorcars, and manufactured goods as well as in its capital accumulation. However, Chang argued, there were no intrinsic obstacles to modernization. The real difficulty came from the impatient and persistent pressure from the territories that happened to have already modernized. In the past ten years, and particularly during the past four, there had emerged in China a new movement, one which could be characterized as a critical adjustment, according to Chang. No longer would there be a blind imitation of cultural trends and political institutions, but, instead, Chang hoped, from this movement would emerge something that would make real improvements possible.⁴²

Chang’s assertions about China’s past and the positive appreciation of China from European scholars are nonetheless vulnerable to the charge of being overly idealizing and generalized. There were also Enlightenment philosophers in Europe during the eighteenth century who were more critical of China’s political system and traditions. Baron de Montesquieu, for example, regarded the government of China as a despotic system that created a social and political order through repression and fear.⁴³ Some Enlightenment philosophers in Europe may also have idealized Chinese history and culture for political reasons. They were eager to criticize the role of the state churches in their countries, and they looked favorably upon the more secular character of Confucian ethics.⁴⁴

Chang’s talk of China and its millennia-long history in his writings was also a modified version of the facts. In an interview I conducted with the sinologist Willard Peterson in 2015, he noted that, while the term “Middle Kingdom”—Chung-kuo, or Zhongguo—is more than two thousand years old, the idea of a homogenous Chinese nation is a relatively late invention. When scholars and politicians refer to a Chinese history that stretches back three to four thousand years, they do not have in mind a Chinese nationstate as part of an international system. This notion of the nation-state only took hold at the time of the establishment of the republic in 1912, being further consolidated with the founding of the new People’s Republic in 1949. Chinese history prior to this point had been a succession of different political entities, often called dynasties, and a dominant social group, the Han people. Yet these entities did not collectively form a nation-state in the current sense of the word. To describe China as having a three-thousand-year history is thus to project a modern, twentieth-century notion backward onto the past. For Chang’s ideas about China’s millennia-long history to have validity, it is therefore important to acknowledge that the word “China” denotes a long line of dynasties that emerged as a nation-state only in the twentieth century. It should also be noted that Chang subsequently qualified his account of China’s long history precisely by referring to the separate histories of those territories that today compose the state of China. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, China was no longer seen by many citizens as an empire, representing a world civilization. It was perceived more as a state among other states in an international system.⁴⁵

Chang’s book China at the Crossroads was nevertheless well received, and the reviewers were evidently surprised by the amount of factual information and reflections that he had managed to compress into a work of under 200 pages.⁴⁶ It was often remarked that Chang had a particular talent for condensing texts and finding more concise formulations. This ability would serve him well during his work on the UN Declaration, when he would distinguish himself by presenting alternative formulations for the articles that were short and elucidative.

During his time in England, Chang was also in demand as a speaker on political and cultural issues in a range of settings. Chinese culture such as fine art or horticulture, Chang argued, was relatively accessible for those from a Western cultural setting. Philosophy and poetry had also become available thanks to translations. By contrast, Chang noted, Western audiences still found it extremely difficult to understand and appreciate Chinese music, although the enthusiastic reception of Mei Lanfang in the West had shown that this was changing.⁴⁷

Chang also wrote an article during his time in England that compared the different university systems in the UK and in China.⁴⁸ In this article, Chang spoke favorably about the tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge. This system created a personal relationship between the tutor and the student, according to Chang. It also encouraged the students to be humble and creative in their pursuit of knowledge through critical engagement with the opposing views of the tutor. In the Chinese universities, teaching was based more on lectures, which was a less costly system than the tutorial system but more “mechanical” in nature. The Chinese universities suffered also from a lack of a critical and personal/communal atmosphere in the academic environment. Chang pointed out critically, however, that the Oxbridge system had a close connection to the state church, a connection that curtailed freedom of religion for the students who did not belong to this church.

Chang emphasized in his article that the Chinese university education should not be involved in the “lazy” enterprise of copying Western universities. One should instead utilize one’s own experiences and look carefully at what the most crucial problems are at the moment. This was a well-known theme from the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Similar thoughts about the problems of an uncritical imitation would also appear later in Chang’s work on the Universal Declaration. Chang meant in this context that the declaration should not be an imitation of earlier rights documents.⁴⁹

The Second Chinese-Japanese War, Escape, and the Family Divided

What had been happening in China during Chang’s visit to Britain? The years 1935 and 1936 witnessed dramatic events in China, above all in the form of the Communists’ Long March. After Chiang Kai-shek’s troops surrounded the Communists in Jiangxi Province in 1934, the Communists tried to break through their lines and find a safe haven. They were forced to make a long march to Shanxi Province in the northwest.

Of the eighty thousand who set out, only four thousand reached their “final destination.” Thereafter, fortune favored the Communists, who, with the help of Manchuria’s military leader, Zhang Xueliang, succeeded in kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek, in the so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936. Zhang opposed the idea of fighting the Communists before defeating the Japanese. The condition for Chiang’s release was therefore that the Communists and the Kuomintang would begin to collaborate again in order to present a united front against Japan. During this period, Mao Zedong increasingly emerged as the self-evident leader of the Communists, a charismatic revolutionary who wanted to transform Chinese society, starting with its peasant farmer class.⁵⁰

The economic and political problems faced by Chiang Kai-shek’s republic in the 1930s and 1940s, which resulted in the Communists seizing power, are customarily explained in relation to two phenomena.⁵¹ One key reason why the republic had encountered such difficulties in its attempts at modernization was that it had focused on the populations of the major cities and failed to recognize that peasant farmers constituted China’s real core. These latter were to become Mao Zedong’s primary focus. The second principal reason for the weakening of the republic was the Second Chinese-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945, in which the Kuomintang and the Communists’ Eighth Route Army fought against the Japanese invasion. This was triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937. A Japanese soldier was assumed to have deserted to the fortress city of Wanping, southwest of Peking. The Japanese army asked for permission to enter Wanping in order to arrest the soldier. When the Chinese refused, the Japanese attacked, taking control of the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge). Although they were at first driven back by the Chinese army, the incident became a prelude to Japan’s escalating assault on China.

After the bombing of the Marco Polo Bridge and, that same month, Nankai University and the city of Tientsin, many members of the Chang family fled from the Nankai campus in order to avoid further Japanese attacks. Nankai University and the Nankai School were regarded as hostile to Japan because of their nationalistic stance and because of criticisms of Japan’s presence in China by its teachers and students.

The Polish-Jewish-Chinese journalist Israel Epstein recalled in his memoirs the dramatic events of July 1937:

The invaders were dive bombing Nankai University, particularly concentrating on its library: books, along with patriotic students seemed the main object of their hate. I long kept the record I made of a press conference at the Japanese headquarters. We foreign newsmen asked, “Why bomb the university?” “Because, gentlemen, the outrageous Chinese are keeping troops there.” The “outrageous Chinese” was the official stereotype used by Japanese spokesmen to designate, in English, all Chinese opposed to them. “I saw no troops there,” said one correspondent. “But the buildings are very strong. The Chinese would use them.” “How do you know?” “If I were the Chinese commander, I would use them.” Is this any reason to bomb a world famous educational institution?” “Gentlemen, Nankai University is an anti-Japanese base. We must destroy all anti-Japanese bases. Nankai students are anti-Japanese and Communistic. Always making trouble for us.”⁵²

Peng Chun Chang also found himself in the firing line by virtue of his high profile at the university as well as by his criticisms of Japan in his plays and speeches. Several of the university’s buildings were destroyed in the Japanese attacks. After the bombings, Chiang Kai-shek made the following remark to Poling Chang: “Nankai has been sacrificed for China but so long as China exists, so will Nankai.”⁵³ The statement reflects the exceptional standing of Nankai University and the Nankai Schools in the Chinese national consciousness. After the Japanese attacks, Poling himself declared: “Nankai has the honour of being the first and the most severely devastated university in China.” Chang Poling suffered a further catastrophe shortly after the destruction of Nankai University by the Japanese. His beloved son Xihu, a pilot, was killed in a flying accident when his plane crashed in the Kiangsi Mountains.⁵⁴

Stanley Chang remembers the bombing of Nankai clearly, having himself been in the vicinity of the university. He describes his recollections of the dramatic events and the events after as follows:

My education was delayed partly because of a hospital admission (TB in my legs) and partly because of the war between China and Japan. The Japanese bombed the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. That month, they also bombed Nankai University, where my father was teaching. The University was an obvious target for the Japanese because it was famous for its credo of self-reliance, self-esteem, and nationalism. Teachers and students at the University had long expressed fiercely anti-colonial and anti-Japanese sentiments. For these reasons, the Japanese attacked the University and the city of Tientsin, and sought out prominent lecturers.⁵⁵ My father, who was one of the most voluble and well-known faculty members and who was serving as university chancellor—because Uncle Poling was in Chungking—was forced to flee in the night. My mother helped him to disguise himself as a woman, after which he fled to the harbour and managed to get on board a boat. He escaped from Tientsin to another harbour, Wei Hai Wei, on the Shandong peninsula, and from there to the capital city of Nanking. There he was commissioned by the government to relate the facts of Japan’s attacks on China to the West. He therefore travelled to Europe and the United States after his escape from Nankai, giving lectures and organizing events to raise funds for the Chinese government and its resistance to Japan’s attacks. My father was absent from China for more than three years.

After the Japanese attack on Nankai, my mother and the rest of our family fled to the British zone, where we lived in a compound for several months. During this time, my Uncle Poling continued to pay out my father’s salary so that my mother was more or less provided for while on the run. Prior to the attacks on Tientsin, Uncle Poling had moved all his family to Chungking, where a new Nankai school [Nankai Middle School] had been established. After a while, it became clear that my mother and our family would also head inland in order to avoid the Japanese attacks as best they could. In early 1938, she took the whole family by ship, all the way around China, via Hong Kong, to Haiphon and Hanoi in Vietnam. The first stage of the journey was to Shanghai, where we visited mother’s brothers and sisters. During the boat journey we shared two and a half hammocks, in which we were fortunate, seeing as how most people had to sleep in the deck. I often slept beside my mother in a hammock. My sisters slept together and my elder brother Chen had to share a hammock with a stranger.

While we were in Vietnam, my mother was robbed of all her money in Haiphon by a pursesnatcher. She was a very short woman, barely 152 cm tall. (My father was 180 cm tall.) Somehow she managed to borrow money in order to continue to the city of Kunming (she met passengers on the boat who knew of the Nankai Schools and were willing to lend her money). After reaching Vietnam by boat, we continued by train for another three days, travelling north through the mountains to Kunming, which lies three hundred miles south of Chungking, the country’s temporary capital since the attacks on Nanking. At night, we slept in boxes because the trains did not run at night. My mother was travelling with a nine-year-old boy, a ten-year-old boy, a fourteen-year-old girl, and a brain-damaged fifteen-year-old girl. Kunming was a temporary haven for Nankai University, which had joined with several other universities to form the Southwest Associated University. The weather in Kunming was often cloudy, which meant that the Japanese could not bomb it easily as they had the city of Chungking; even so, Kunming suffered many bombings. After we arrived in Kunming, my sister Ruth travelled on to Uncle Poling’s school in Chungking. My mother was far too proud to go with her and live on the Nankai campus in Chungking.

Instead, my mother rented three rooms in Kunming, cooking food on a tiny charcoal stove on the ground. I shared a room with her, and my brother and Ming-Ming slept in the room opposite. We slept on thin mattresses laid on wooden boards. Flies and lice were our constant companions. The toilet was a deep hole in a room to the side of the house. It was emptied once a week. When the man came to collect the latrine bucket, the smell was appalling.

One night my mother did not come home. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I went to my brother and told him that our mother had not come home. He said that I should go back to bed. In the morning, to my enormous relief my mother came back. She never said what had happened and I never asked. (A similar incident occurred many years later. One day, in the summer of 1948, my mother disappeared. At that time we were living in Peter Cooper Village in New York—my father, me, my brother, and Ming-Ming. Ruth had gone to graduate school in Wisconsin. I had taken over the kitchen duties. After several weeks, Ruth wrote to us to say that our mother was in New York City, to judge from the stamp on the letter which she had sent to Ruth. After a few more weeks, my mother came back, to my father’s great joy. On that occasion, too, I did not ask where she had been or why she had disappeared.)

When words reached us that my father would be coming to Chungking in April 1940, we travelled by car from Kunming to Chungking. It was a new car that needed to be driven to Chungking from Vietnam and so the driver was earning a little extra cash by taking some passengers from Kunming. I sat in the front passenger seat, while my mother, brother and sister sat in the back. How my mother survived those three years without my father continues to amaze me.

In this moving account, Stanley relates the hardships that the family had to endure in the 1930s. His mother revealed her tremendous strength of personality in bringing the family safely from Tientsin to Kunming and Chungking. The sacrifices that she had to make for the family can only be glimpsed between the lines. The entire story would serve as the basis for a dramatic film. Stanley’s brother Chen Chung also developed asthma in the damp tunnel shelters that were used when the Japanese attacked Chungking; he would be afflicted by this asthma for the rest of his life. Stanley’s account of his mother’s escape with her children also highlights how distant Peng Chun Chang was from his family for several years. In many respects, they lived parallel lives. While Chang moved in the world of high politics, his wife was fighting to keep their family together and to enable them to survive in wartorn China.

After attacking Tientsin, the Japanese turned their attention to Nanking, which was devastated with great brutality between December 1937 and January 1938. According to Chinese sources, more than three hundred thousand Chinese died during the Japanese attacks. In addition, more than twenty thousand Chinese women were raped by Japanese soldiers while parts of the city were being destroyed. The Nanking (Nani-jing) Massacre is one of the most fraught events in modern Chinese history and continues to be a major obstacle to Japanese-Chinese relations.⁵⁶ Chiang Kai-shek’s army was cut in half by the Japanese attacks, thereby becoming discredited in the popular view. Wuhan, the new capital, was also attacked in autumn 1938, and a new capital accordingly established in western China: Chungking.

Chang’s “Propaganda Trips”

P. C. Chang was thus traveling as an official representative of China’s Department of Foreign Affairs in the wake of the Japanese attacks in 1937. The purpose of his trips was to inform the world about Japan’s brutal military assault on China and to secure aid and sanctions against Japan. P. C. Chang remembers his journey in the following way: