Chang emphasized in his article that the Chinese university education should not be involved in the “lazy” enterprise of copying Western universities. One should instead utilize one’s own experiences and look carefully at what the most crucial problems are at the moment. This was a well-known theme from the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Similar thoughts about the problems of an uncritical imitation would also appear later in Chang’s work on the Universal Declaration. Chang meant in this context that the declaration should not be an imitation of earlier rights documents.49
The Second Chinese-Japanese War, Escape, and the Family Divided
What had been happening in China during Chang’s visit to Britain? The years 1935 and 1936 witnessed dramatic events in China, above all in the form of the Communists’ Long March. After Chiang Kai-shek’s troops surrounded the Communists in Jiangxi Province in 1934, the Communists tried to break through their lines and find a safe haven. They were forced to make a long march to Shanxi Province in the northwest.
Of the eighty thousand who set out, only four thousand reached their “final destination.” Thereafter, fortune favored the Communists, who, with the help of Manchuria’s military leader, Zhang Xueliang, succeeded in kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek, in the so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936. Zhang opposed the idea of fighting the Communists before defeating the Japanese. The condition for Chiang’s release was therefore that the Communists and the Kuomintang would begin to collaborate again in order to present a united front against Japan. During this period, Mao Zedong increasingly emerged as the self-evident leader of the Communists, a charismatic revolutionary who wanted to transform Chinese society, starting with its peasant farmer class.50
The economic and political problems faced by Chiang Kai-shek’s republic in the 1930s and 1940s, which resulted in the Communists seizing power, are customarily explained in relation to two phenomena.51 One key reason why the republic had encountered such difficulties in its attempts at modernization was that it had focused on the populations of the major cities and failed to recognize that peasant farmers constituted China’s real core. These latter were to become Mao Zedong’s primary focus. The second principal reason for the weakening of the republic was the Second Chinese-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945, in which the Kuomintang and the Communists’ Eighth Route Army fought against the Japanese invasion. This was triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937. A Japanese soldier was assumed to have deserted to the fortress city of Wanping, southwest of Peking. The Japanese army asked for permission to enter Wanping in order to arrest the soldier. When the Chinese refused, the Japanese attacked, taking control of the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge). Although they were at first driven back by the Chinese army, the incident became a prelude to Japan’s escalating assault on China.
After the bombing of the Marco Polo Bridge and, that same month, Nankai University and the city of Tientsin, many members of the Chang family fled from the Nankai campus in order to avoid further Japanese attacks. Nankai University and the Nankai School were regarded as hostile to Japan because of their nationalistic stance and because of criticisms of Japan’s presence in China by its teachers and students.
The Polish-Jewish-Chinese journalist Israel Epstein recalled in his memoirs the dramatic events of July 1937:
The invaders were dive bombing Nankai University, particularly concentrating on its library: books, along with patriotic students seemed the main object of their hate. I long kept the record I made of a press conference at the Japanese headquarters. We foreign newsmen asked, “Why bomb the university?” “Because, gentlemen, the outrageous Chinese are keeping troops there.” The “outrageous Chinese” was the official stereotype used by Japanese spokesmen to designate, in English, all Chinese opposed to them. “I saw no troops there,” said one correspondent. “But the buildings are very strong. The Chinese would use them.” “How do you know?” “If I were the Chinese commander, I would use them.” Is this any reason to bomb a world famous educational institution?” “Gentlemen, Nankai University is an anti-Japanese base. We must destroy all anti-Japanese bases. Nankai students are anti-Japanese and Communistic. Always making trouble for us.”52
Peng Chun Chang also found himself in the firing line by virtue of his high profile at the university as well as by his criticisms of Japan in his plays and speeches. Several of the university’s buildings were destroyed in the Japanese attacks. After the bombings, Chiang Kai-shek made the following remark to Poling Chang: “Nankai has been sacrificed for China but so long as China exists, so will Nankai.”53 The statement reflects the exceptional standing of Nankai University and the Nankai Schools in the Chinese national consciousness. After the Japanese attacks, Poling himself declared: “Nankai has the honour of being the first and the most severely devastated university in China.” Chang Poling suffered a further catastrophe shortly after the destruction of Nankai University by the Japanese. His beloved son Xihu, a pilot, was killed in a flying accident when his plane crashed in the Kiangsi Mountains.54
Stanley Chang remembers the bombing of Nankai clearly, having himself been in the vicinity of the university. He describes his recollections of the dramatic events and the events after as follows:
My education was delayed partly because of a hospital admission (TB in my legs) and partly because of the war between China and Japan. The Japanese bombed the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. That month, they also bombed Nankai University, where my father was teaching. The University was an obvious target for the Japanese because it was famous for its credo of self-reliance, self-esteem, and nationalism. Teachers and students at the University had long expressed fiercely anti-colonial and anti-Japanese sentiments. For these reasons, the Japanese attacked the University and the city of Tientsin, and sought out prominent lecturers.55 My father, who was one of the most voluble and well-known faculty members and who was serving as university chancellor—because Uncle Poling was in Chungking—was forced to flee in the night. My mother helped him to disguise himself as a woman, after which he fled to the harbour and managed to get on board a boat. He escaped from Tientsin to another harbour, Wei Hai Wei, on the Shandong peninsula, and from there to the capital city of Nanking. There he was commissioned by the government to relate the facts of Japan’s attacks on China to the West. He therefore travelled to Europe and the United States after his escape from Nankai, giving lectures and organizing events to raise funds for the Chinese government and its resistance to Japan’s attacks. My father was absent from China for more than three years.
After the Japanese attack on Nankai, my mother and the rest of our family fled to the British zone, where we lived in a compound for several months. During this time, my Uncle Poling continued to pay out my father’s salary so that my mother was more or less provided for while on the run. Prior to the attacks on Tientsin, Uncle Poling had moved all his family to Chungking, where a new Nankai school [Nankai Middle School] had been established. After a while, it became clear that my mother and our family would also head inland in order to avoid the Japanese attacks as best they could. In early 1938, she took the whole family by ship, all the way around China, via Hong Kong, to Haiphon and Hanoi in Vietnam. The first stage of the journey was to Shanghai, where we visited mother’s brothers and sisters. During the boat journey we shared two and a half hammocks, in which we were fortunate, seeing as how most people had to sleep in the deck. I often slept beside my mother in a hammock. My sisters slept together and my elder brother Chen had to share a hammock with a stranger.
While we were in Vietnam, my mother was robbed of all her money in Haiphon by a pursesnatcher. She was a very short woman, barely 152 cm tall. (My father was 180 cm tall.) Somehow she managed to borrow money in order to continue to the city of Kunming (she met passengers on the boat who knew of the Nankai Schools and were willing to lend her money). After reaching Vietnam by boat, we continued by train for another three days, travelling north through the mountains to Kunming, which lies three hundred miles south of Chungking, the country’s temporary capital since the attacks on Nanking. At night, we slept in boxes because the trains did not run at night. My mother was travelling with a nine-year-old boy,