P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth
Читать онлайн книгу.
with the situation being partly resolved by the return of the hardworking and conscientious son. He keeps the loan shark at bay and, with his sister’s help, saves the family from shame and ruin.
The Man in Grey is a tale of war and peace whose main protagonists are evoked allegorically as “the red man” (war), “the white man” (peace), “the yellow woman” (love), and “the grey man” (the people). The play takes the form of a dialogue in which peace and love try to convince the people to love their neighbor. Love, the yellow woman, appeals to the people (the grey man) to cooperate with their neighbors instead of waging war against them as the red man (war) has been urging. Only through cooperation can the barriers to making life more acceptable be removed. According to love, these barriers comprise poverty, ignorance, selfishness, prejudice, injustice, and hypocrisy. The struggle against these negative qualities was also to be a guiding principle of Chang’s political project within the framework of the UN.
The Awakening is about a scholarship student who has just returned to China from his studies in the United States and is now looking for work. He meets an old friend and his sister. They discuss the societal problems of the day, including the rise in selfishness and short-sightedness. The trio also discuss how the returning student ought to approach his native land in light of his experiences overseas, an issue with which Chang himself wrestled intensely after his own return from studying in the United States. In the play, the student’s friend is investigating a sprawling network of corruption in the railways, and the drama ends with him falling victim to one of the subjects of his investigation.51 After his friend is murdered, the scholarship student promises the sister of the friend that he will try to help to realize the ideals articulated by his deceased friend in their conversations. Chang makes a thinly concealed gesture toward his brother Poling’s Nankai School by having his protagonist harbor the ambition of opening a small school that might help create a new social order free from corruption and greed.
Chang also wrote another play in 1915, The New Order Cometh, which deals with the tension between loyalty to the old family traditions in China and the “new values” that the Chinese students encountered in the US in the form of individual freedom. The play was staged in New Haven and New York and had a cast of Chinese students from Yale and Columbia. The play was reviewed in very positive terms in the newspapers. It grappled with the theme of romantic love as the foundation of marriage. Two students fall in love during their time of study in the US. The boy tries to end his previous engagement with a Chinese girl in China. Her father, who represents “the old order,” refuses to accept the break up because the engagement has been decided by both the boy’s and the girl’s families. According to the girl’s father, because the boy’s father no longer lives, the engagement should continue, unless the boy can bring his father back to life again and ask him for permission to disengage. However, the girl in China solves the stalemate, and, with a surprising act of generosity, she accepts the breakup. As a “reward,” at the end of the play she meets another man with whom she falls in love.52
China in the 1910s
During Chang’s early years of study in the US, China underwent dramatic political changes. Between 1907 and 1911, disaffection with Qing dynasty rule became increasingly apparent, resulting in riots in several cities across China. By 1911, the situation for certain religious groups, among them Christians, was becoming precarious as a consequence of the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, which the imperial regime regarded as a religious uprising. Following the revolution, the Republic of China was created in 1912, forcing the abdication of the last of the Qing dynasty emperors, six-year-old Puyi. This marked the end of more than two thousand years of imperial rule.53 China became a nation-state with leaders by election instead of being an imperial state having leaders by inheritance. Following the dissolution of the empire, the situation for religious groups was also improved by greater religious freedom. Many Christian missionaries from the West came to China in these years, with intense and successful missions from a number of churches during the 1920s in particular.54
In 1912, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), an intellectual anti-Manchu leader who was also a converted Christian, became the first president of the republic. That year also saw the founding of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese nationalist party. Sun Yat-sen’s first term of office was cut short, however, when a general from the late Qing dynasty, Yuan Shikai, seized power. Sun Yat-sen was driven into exile in Japan, while his challenger sought to restore the monarchy and appointed generals as administrative commanders of China’s provinces. (In July 1913, seven of those provinces rose up against Shikai’s rule.) In 1915, during Shikai’s rule, China became a signatory to the Twenty-One Demands, which resulted in Japan gaining considerable jurisdiction over Manchuria and the Shandong Province as well as special protectorate-like rights. These concessions led, four years later, to protests in the form of the May Fourth Movement.
After Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, China became fragmented as a national entity, with local warlords assuming control of the provinces.55 The period directly following the revolution of 1911 was thus a great disappointment for all who had hoped that it would usher in a new, modernized, and unified China. Nonetheless, the one great consequence of the revolution was that the empire was dissolved and the ideological debate over China’s future social development became more intense.
In 1917, Sun Yat-sen returned to a fragmented country that had become the object of foreign control in several key aspects, such as the extraterritorial laws that stipulated separate judicial codes for Chinese and foreign citizens. The customs system was also divided. Sun Yat-sen waged a propaganda campaign with three principal objectives for the new republic: (1) national independence; (2) constitutional democracy; and (3) economic freedom and self-sufficiency. The creation of national unity was, of course, a central objective. Sun Yat-sen’s principles were adopted by his successor Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1920s. For both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, it was essential to remove foreign influence in China and to put a stop to the fragmentation that had defined the warlord period.
The so-called warlord period refers specifically to the years 1916–1928, when warlords mobilized private armies in order to take control of different territorial areas. Some of these warlords were supported by foreign powers and engaged in a series of wars and minor conflicts with each other, many of which had their origins in ideological disagreements. Some warlords, such as Zhang Xun, were deeply conservative and wanted to restore the empire, whereas others, such as Yan Xishan, advocated what for its time was a highly progressive social policy in Shanxi Province. Opinions are divided as to how to understand this period. Although some commentators have characterized it as an early attempt at substantive modernization and the balancing of power, the majority of Chinese tend to view it as a period of confusion and internal struggle.56
Brief Return to China and the May Fourth Movement
In 1916, at the age of twenty-four and after almost six years in the United States, Chang returned to China to teach in his brother’s Nankai School, where he also became vice principal and director of the school’s new theater group. The plays mentioned earlier were performed at the school after Chang’s return and served to establish him as the school’s artistic leading light. During his early years as a teacher and school administrator in China, Chang also evinced a deep interest in subjects far removed from theater and literature. For example, he became involved in the struggle to retain agricultural and forestry programs at Gingling University, Nanking. The following year, 1917, Chang stepped in as a temporary replacement for his brother Poling as school principal. He was to serve in that position for the two years that Poling studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, under the supervision of John Dewey. When the school was hit by major flooding in autumn 1917, Chang helped to save several pupils from the floodwaters and even managed to maintain the teaching schedule despite extensive damage to the school buildings. In summer 1918, the school moved back into its old premises.
After the school had got under way properly, Chang put on a new play, Xin Cun Zheng (The New Village Head), in which he introduced modern, Western directorial methods. For Chang, this meant that everyone involved in a dramatic production should follow an agreed-upon script and that the director should play a central role in rehearsals. In so doing, he broke with