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