P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth
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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