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