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Introduction

The significance of some historical figures becomes increasingly apparent with the passing of time. This book is about one such person: the Chinese diplomat and philosopher Peng Chun Chang (or Zhang Peng Chun) (1892–1957), who for many years remained largely unknown to the general public.¹

Why write a book about a virtually unknown Chinese philosopher and diplomat who died, disappointed, in a small town outside New York City? By the time he came to spend his twilight years in modest circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, Peng Chun Chang had seen many of his dreams and visions come to nothing. His life story, whose finest hour was a key role in determining the shape of one of history’s most important documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ended in bitterness, frustration, and hardship.²

Peng Chun Chang lived his final years in the shadow of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s vicious campaign against communists, supposed as well as actual. Toward the end of his life, Chang drifted out of view from the world, eventually dying disappointed and alone. A diary kept by his colleague Charles Malik, a Lebanese philosopher on the UN Commission on Human Rights, records that during a lunch in autumn 1949 Chang expressed particular bitterness toward the US, complaining about its almighty dollar, its business culture, and its materialism. It was, he declared, a country utterly lacking in morals.³ Interestingly, Chang had expressed a similar attitude while an undergraduate in the United States, something which reveals that certain ideals were a more or less constant presence in his life. In one of his early articles, titled “Shakespeare in China” (1915), Chang observed: “I come from the East—from the land of the Religion of Responsibility. But the lands of the Religion of Greed are fast encroaching upon us.”⁴ In these remarks Chang referred to what he called the commercial lands of twentieth-century Europe and America. In an article from 1931 Chang also claimed: “A common task is facing all people of the world today. In the seething cauldron of greedy contentions, we must attempt to build, and build together, a paradise for poets out of the paradise for profiteers.”⁵

By way of answer to the question of why we should care about Chang’s life, the following study will start from the fact that he was the coauthor of one of the most important documents in history. His particular contribution to that document has also taken on a special relevance for the present moment as a consequence of China’s current situation and probably future direction. Not least, a study of Chang’s life and work promises to deepen our understanding of the contents and significance of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, a document in whose drafting he played so decisive a role.

Almost seventy years have passed since the declaration was adopted, and sixty since Peng Chun Chang’s death. With the disappearance of the last generation to have lived through the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the aggression unleashed by the Axis powers, it has never been more important to keep our historical consciousness alive. The drafting of the UN Declaration of Human Rights was one of the earliest and most forceful global reactions to the Holocaust, fascism, and the horrors of the Second World War. In the space of just a few years—years that were characterized by growing ideological polarization—a group of individuals who had themselves experienced the cruelty of war succeeded in hammering out a broad bill of rights.

The issues on which Chang focused have also moved to center stage in recent public debate and world politics. When certain issues become increasingly urgent, politically and ethically, the result can be that particular ideas and responses take on an even greater significance than when they were first formulated. Multiculturalism, intercultural dialogue, globalization, the religious neutrality of states, and the boundaries of religious tolerance—all are claiming an ever more central role in contemporary public and academic debate. And Chang was intensely engaged with these questions. Indeed, pluralistic tolerance was one of his guiding concepts, especially in connection with his writing of the UN Declaration. He also emphasized that human rights are important not only for the regulation of the relationship between the state and its citizens, they are also important for interpersonal relations in social settings such as the family, the school, and the local neighborhood. This view has also become more widespread in recent ethical debates.⁶ Further, Chang stressed the limits of law and the limits of coercion, complaints, and punishment in fulfilling the respect for human rights more generally. He also wanted to include positive measures, such as educational efforts. In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in political-theoretical debates, Chang has once again become our contemporary.

Closer examination of Chang’s ideological interventions in connection with the drafting of the UN Declaration reveals that his focus was on the key issues, including the declaration’s function and nature, its justification and realization, and its principal articles, notably Article 1. Chang was one of the authors who bore perhaps the greatest responsibility for what we now consider the most significant characteristics of the declaration, especially when the latter is compared with earlier bills of rights. These include the declaration’s claims to religious neutrality and universalism as well as its focus on the individual and its ambition to be an instrument for the advancement of humanity’s moral maturity or stature. The British writer and diplomat Brian Urquhart has aptly claimed that Chang was the one among the key drafters who gave the strongest sense of universalism to the work with the Universal Declaration.⁷ The Universal Declaration has been criticized (according to some, unfairly) for its Western orientation. However, Chang did much to make the document all-inclusive and, hence, contributed to its global legitimacy.⁸ Pivotal in this process was Chang’s intercultural perspective on ethics, his emphasis on religious neutrality, and his ability to reach constructive compromises.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC), who interested Chang greatly, is currently enjoying a renaissance in China, where his philosophy is often invoked in support of the political order. Chang, however, tried to reconcile and support human rights thinking through references to Confucian thought, such as the individual’s duties to one’s society, welfare rights, the emphasis on moral education, and the concept of sympathy for others. Chang also interpreted Confucius as a philosopher who did not engage in metaphysical queries. According to Chang, Confucius was more interested in the concrete world that we live in and in ethical questions that concern with our daily challenges. Chang also stated that Confucius taught that an ideal government was founded not on laws primarily but on ideals of personal conduct.⁹ This principle of government by “prestige,” or virtue, would later be an important theme in Chang’s writings and statements in the UN context. Several themes that were pivotal for Confucian ethics would also influence the UN Declaration of Human Rights through the work of P. C. Chang. One could, for example, mention the strong emphasis upon education for the fulfilment of central moral principles, such as human rights, and the creed to act in a spirit of brotherhood. Chang also stated that stress should be laid upon the human aspect of human rights. A human being had to be constantly conscious of other men in whose society he lived.

Now an ever-growing superpower that has endorsed globalization, China also suffers from human rights failings and restrictions to fundamental freedoms such as freedom of speech. As one of China’s first pioneers in human rights on the world stage, the importance of Peng Chun Chang will undoubtedly become more widely acknowledged, not least in Chinese history books. In the Chinese context too, then, Chang has once again become our contemporary.

Chang’s life was fascinating and dramatic. A true cosmopolitan, he was at home in several cultures. He experienced firsthand some of the tensest and most violent phases of twentieth-century world history, including the Second World War, even as China itself underwent major social transformation, civil war, and political revolution.

That Chang was an anxious globetrotter will be emphasized in this study. He shuttled between continents and countries, seeking to understand their cultural similarities and differences. Chang also saw it as his mission to disseminate not only knowledge of China to the rest of the world but also ideas from the West to China. During his lifetime he devoted himself to a startling range of activities. Before beginning his career as a diplomat in China, Chile, Turkey, and at the UN, he worked variously as teacher, school principal, professor, playwright, and theater director. Toward the end of his UN career, he became a “diplomatic maverick,” acting with a high degree of independence when his regime in China was on the brink of ruin, an attitude that became even more pronounced when the regime relocated to Formosa (Taiwan).

A study of Chang and his contributions to the UN Declaration is especially timely at a moment that is witnessing the rise of brutality on an almost unprecedented scale. With ideological polarization, religious and ethnic discrimination and crass power politics on the rise, there is a particular urgency in turning the spotlight back onto that engaged and talented group of individuals who assumed primary responsibility for the UN Declaration and who fought stubbornly to ensure that the brutality of fascism and the Second World War would never be repeated. The principal members were Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, John Humphrey, Hernán Santa Cruz, Hansa Mehta, and—a central figure in the group—Peng Chun Chang.

A colleague of Chang’s in the writing group, the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, once remarked that it would be an interesting project to identify all of the fundamental positions that underpinned Chang’s comments on the UN Declaration. Chang was not a communist, according to Malik, and at the time the UN Declaration was being drafted, Mao Zedong had not yet assumed supreme control of China. Malik hypothesized that Chang’s ideas instead originated primarily in classical Chinese traditions which were independent of Western Marxism.¹⁰

Another of Peng Chun Chang’s colleagues, John Humphrey, a Canadian law professor and the secretary of the writing group, made the following statement about Chang during a long-haul flight from Chile to Panama in March 1951: “I sat next to P. C. Chang on the plane. He told me the story of his life and also of the life of his elder brother, who died in China about a month ago. It is a fascinating story indeed and will someday, I hope, be the subject of a book.”¹¹ I offer the following study as fulfillment of Humphrey’s wish, sixty-five years after he and Chang took that flight from Chile to Panama.

A number of themes running through Chang’s life culminated very visibly in his work on the UN Declaration. Information provided by his son Stanley has allowed me to shed new light on Chang’s interactions with several of his coauthors as well as on his position within both the UN and the Chinese delegation. What is more, Stanley’s accounts of his father’s complicated and dramatic life, political engagements, and wide range of interests have made possible a new understanding of Peng Chun Chang’s life and work and his unique contribution to the UN Declaration.

While in several respects distinctly nationalistic, Chang was deeply cosmopolitan, a trait that emerges very clearly in his son’s recollections. For all his emphasis upon universalism and pluralism during the writing of the UN Declaration, he was also clearly keen that the document be influenced by Chinese philosophical traditions. This approach evidently created tensions with other delegates in the writing group. The way that Chang prepared for and conducted himself in UN debates likewise followed a pattern that was discernable in many other aspects of his life, such as his habit of drawing up systematic and near-comprehensive inventories of possible opinions and counterarguments before sitting down to formulate his own view. His repeated references in UN discussions to humanity’s dual nature—part benign and empathetic, part brutal, malign, and destructive—can perhaps even be seen as a reflection of his own existential doubts, which are amply documented in Stanley’s account of his father. Chang’s fondness for metaphors and figurative language was also a recurrent feature of his writing and commentaries.

Biographers of human rights advocates from the past are often guilty of a tendency toward hagiography. In the literature on the UN Declaration, this tendency is further reinforced by the tacit assumption that so perfect a document must have been authored by almost perfect individuals. Such is the case with several of the more distinguished monographs about the authors of the UN Declaration, such as Mary Ann Glendon’s A World Made New, which mainly focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Charles Malik’s importance for the declaration, or Jay Winters and Antoine Prost’s biography of René Cassin, René Cassin and Human Rights.¹² My hope is that the following study can offer the most truthful and nuanced account possible of an extraordinarily fascinating life without indulging in embellishment or undue faultfinding.