At the award ceremony, Mei Lanfang read out a thank you message that Chang had penned:
We are here to exert what little strength we have to promote peace, which is eagerly hoped for by civilized people. History shows that real peace cannot be obtained by force. People hope to obtain peace but not quietness after turbulence. Real peace should promote people’s development and growth—mentally, rationally, and materially. To maintain real peace in the world, people need to learn to know, to understand, and to show sympathy for each other, instead of fighting each other. The peace in the hearts of these two great peoples, the Chinese and the American, accords with the norms of international trust and sincerity. To reach this goal, all peoples should conduct active research in the arts and the sciences so as to understand each other’s ways of life, historical background, and problems and difficulties.19
Chang’s declaration has clear relevance for the work he would later do for the United Nations as the latter sought to formulate a way to articulate the conditions for sustainable peace. Chang’s wife and his daughter Ruth also accompanied him on the tour. It was a triumph for Mei Lanfang, who played to sold-out houses in New York and other cities, and his performances received generally very positive reviews.20 At first, Chang was clearly surprised that Chinese opera and Mei Lanfang received such a rapturous reception in view of how greatly its musical form differed from Western opera.
Chang also contributed to the writing of a short book about Mei Lanfang, which was published in 1935. Titled Mei Lanfang in America: Reviews and Criticism, it contained a foreword by Chang.21 During his American tour, Mei Lanfang met a number of celebrities, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. Mei Lanfang went on to become a global superstar, the most recognized face of Chinese opera in the rest of the world. Many people around the world were evidently impressed by his special falsetto singing style, body language, and costumes.
Like other Chinese opera stars before him, Mei played women’s roles. In 1935, touring took him and Peng Chun Chang to the Soviet Union, where they met notable stage personalities such as Konstantin Stanislavski, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Alexander Tairov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Bertolt Brecht happened to be in Moscow at the same time and was deeply impressed by Mei Lanfang’s appearances.22 Gordon Craig also met Mei Lanfang in Moscow during his tour in 1935.23
Several commentators have argued that Brecht’s notion of a “distancing” or “alienation” effect in the audience originated in his observation of Mei Lanfang’s performances. That effect describes when listeners or spectators cease to identify with what is taking place on stage and instead begin to reflect upon the events being portrayed.
Mei Lanfang had also greatly impressed the Japanese during his performances in Japan, and they were keen for him to perform during the Japanese occupation of China. Mei Lanfang refused to comply, however, and instead lived in obscurity and poverty until Japan’s capitulation in 1945. After Mao Zedong seized power in 1949, Mei Lanfang resumed his career and played to similarly enthusiastic audiences in Communist China.
Chang was involved in Chinese theater and opera for much of his life, an involvement which expressed itself in a number of ways. His son Stanley has a peculiar memory of a particular opera performance at the China Institute in New York. Stanley’s father had been presented with tickets to this opera because it was his sixtieth birthday. As already noted, all Chinese opera is sung in falsetto. Midway through the performance, one of the girls lost control of her voice and began to sing in a normal tonal range. Chang immediately stood up and shouted “Disaster!” which Stanley found very amusing. Such attentiveness to Chinese etiquette and the proper forms of expression was clearly something that permeated Chang’s life in several ways. Stanley also remarked that the family went to the China Institute very rarely. One occasion when Peng visited the institute was when his brother Poling came to New York in 1946. Toward the end of the 1920s, however, Chang seems to have had more contact with the institute, which served as a meeting place for Chinese students at Columbia University and scholars, as well as for Americans with an interest in China.
Chicago, Honolulu, and Nankai
In 1931, after touring with Mei Lanfang in the United States, Chang was invited to take up a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, and during the year he taught philosophy and art history both there and at the Chicago Art Institute. That same year, he also taught at Columbia University, touring Europe in the summer and spending the autumn at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as a guest professor in Chicago, Chang’s two sons and his daughter Ming-Ming stayed behind on the Nankai campus in China, as they had while he toured with Mei Lanfang.
In the early 1930s, Chang was also active on the American lecture circuit, speaking about China and topical problems in cities such as St Louis and New York. In a talk given to a women’s society in Scarsdale, New York, in autumn 1931, he warned about a scenario in which China would be forced to go down a military path in response to Japan’s aggressive colonial policy in Manchuria. Chang argued that ever since the founding of the republic, China had sought to follow the path of modernization by learning all it could from modern science and technology. While China was not yet a modern society, noted Chang, its enormous efforts to attain this goal should not be underestimated. He also argued that China was a more modern society than Japan in one vital respect: it had long abandoned the notions that the emperor was divine and that the army and navy should be under feudal control. “China may be slow in her adjustments,” said Chang, “but at least she long ago discarded these absurd beliefs that properly belong in the museum.”24
In late 1931, Peng Chun Chang was offered a tenured professor position at the University of Chicago. He declined, however, because of the grave political situation in China, which had worsened after dramatic events near the city of Mukden. On 18 September 1931, a bomb had exploded near the city on a railway line controlled by Japan. Japan accused Chinese groups of responsibility for the attack, which it took as a pretext for invading Manchuria. After the invasion, Japan created a new tributary, Manchukuo in Manchuria, and installed the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on the throne even as it retained actual control itself. Manchukuo remained in existence from 1932 to 1945. The only state to acknowledge Japan’s tributary (apart from Japan itself) was El Salvador.25 Chang said that the Japanese invasion caused a wildfire that spread to other parts of the world. After Manchuria followed Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, and Poland.
Japan had been a signatory to the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922. This treaty was intended to guarantee China’s territorial integrity, which had now been violated by Japan. Unlike other colonial powers such as France and Britain, who were more interested in trade and control of the ports—as well as certain major cities, such as Shanghai—Japan had clear geopolitical interests and wanted to have complete control over large swaths of China, including Manchuria.
In its summary of a speech that Chang gave in Chicago to the Convention of the League of Women Voters, the Milwaukee Journal described Chang’s understanding of the situation in China.26 According to Chang, the grave situation in Manchuria—or in the three northeastern provinces—was the fault of the Japanese military, a military that was responsible to none but the emperor. Chang urged the League of Nations to do something to rectify the critical situation. He argued that although Japan was invoking its right to the southern Manchurian railway because it fought with Russia over it, the Japanese were bandits in this instance in exactly the same way as the Russians had been before them.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact (after the secretary of state Frank Kellogg and the French foreign secretary Aristide Briand) had also stressed that aggressive war and the conquest of territory was no longer acceptable as a national policy for a country. It emphasized instead the peaceful settlements of conflicts and disputes. The multilateral pact had been signed by Japan and many other countries in August 1928 in Paris and was an attempt to eliminate war. Hence, several countries, including the US, did not recognize the Japanese conquest in 1931. The Lytton Report of 1932 recommended that the League of Nations seek to compel Japan to return Manchuria to China. Japan refused, however, and the following year it quit the League of Nations.27
The Chinese