Now an ever-growing superpower that has endorsed globalization, China also suffers from human rights failings and restrictions to fundamental freedoms such as freedom of speech. As one of China’s first pioneers in human rights on the world stage, the importance of Peng Chun Chang will undoubtedly become more widely acknowledged, not least in Chinese history books. In the Chinese context too, then, Chang has once again become our contemporary.
Chang’s life was fascinating and dramatic. A true cosmopolitan, he was at home in several cultures. He experienced firsthand some of the tensest and most violent phases of twentieth-century world history, including the Second World War, even as China itself underwent major social transformation, civil war, and political revolution.
That Chang was an anxious globetrotter will be emphasized in this study. He shuttled between continents and countries, seeking to understand their cultural similarities and differences. Chang also saw it as his mission to disseminate not only knowledge of China to the rest of the world but also ideas from the West to China. During his lifetime he devoted himself to a startling range of activities. Before beginning his career as a diplomat in China, Chile, Turkey, and at the UN, he worked variously as teacher, school principal, professor, playwright, and theater director. Toward the end of his UN career, he became a “diplomatic maverick,” acting with a high degree of independence when his regime in China was on the brink of ruin, an attitude that became even more pronounced when the regime relocated to Formosa (Taiwan).
A study of Chang and his contributions to the UN Declaration is especially timely at a moment that is witnessing the rise of brutality on an almost unprecedented scale. With ideological polarization, religious and ethnic discrimination and crass power politics on the rise, there is a particular urgency in turning the spotlight back onto that engaged and talented group of individuals who assumed primary responsibility for the UN Declaration and who fought stubbornly to ensure that the brutality of fascism and the Second World War would never be repeated. The principal members were Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, John Humphrey, Hernán Santa Cruz, Hansa Mehta, and—a central figure in the group—Peng Chun Chang.
A colleague of Chang’s in the writing group, the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, once remarked that it would be an interesting project to identify all of the fundamental positions that underpinned Chang’s comments on the UN Declaration. Chang was not a communist, according to Malik, and at the time the UN Declaration was being drafted, Mao Zedong had not yet assumed supreme control of China. Malik hypothesized that Chang’s ideas instead originated primarily in classical Chinese traditions which were independent of Western Marxism.10
Another of Peng Chun Chang’s colleagues, John Humphrey, a Canadian law professor and the secretary of the writing group, made the following statement about Chang during a long-haul flight from Chile to Panama in March 1951: “I sat next to P. C. Chang on the plane. He told me the story of his life and also of the life of his elder brother, who died in China about a month ago. It is a fascinating story indeed and will someday, I hope, be the subject of a book.”11 I offer the following study as fulfillment of Humphrey’s wish, sixty-five years after he and Chang took that flight from Chile to Panama.
A number of themes running through Chang’s life culminated very visibly in his work on the UN Declaration. Information provided by his son Stanley has allowed me to shed new light on Chang’s interactions with several of his coauthors as well as on his position within both the UN and the Chinese delegation. What is more, Stanley’s accounts of his father’s complicated and dramatic life, political engagements, and wide range of interests have made possible a new understanding of Peng Chun Chang’s life and work and his unique contribution to the UN Declaration.
While in several respects distinctly nationalistic, Chang was deeply cosmopolitan, a trait that emerges very clearly in his son’s recollections. For all his emphasis upon universalism and pluralism during the writing of the UN Declaration, he was also clearly keen that the document be influenced by Chinese philosophical traditions. This approach evidently created tensions with other delegates in the writing group. The way that Chang prepared for and conducted himself in UN debates likewise followed a pattern that was discernable in many other aspects of his life, such as his habit of drawing up systematic and near-comprehensive inventories of possible opinions and counterarguments before sitting down to formulate his own view. His repeated references in UN discussions to humanity’s dual nature—part benign and empathetic, part brutal, malign, and destructive—can perhaps even be seen as a reflection of his own existential doubts, which are amply documented in Stanley’s account of his father. Chang’s fondness for metaphors and figurative language was also a recurrent feature of his writing and commentaries.
Biographers of human rights advocates from the past are often guilty of a tendency toward hagiography. In the literature on the UN Declaration, this tendency is further reinforced by the tacit assumption that so perfect a document must have been authored by almost perfect individuals. Such is the case with several of the more distinguished monographs about the authors of the UN Declaration, such as Mary Ann Glendon’s A World Made New, which mainly focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Charles Malik’s importance for the declaration, or Jay Winters and Antoine Prost’s biography of René Cassin, René Cassin and Human Rights.12 My hope is that the following study can offer the most truthful and nuanced account possible of an extraordinarily fascinating life without indulging in embellishment or undue faultfinding.
PART I
LIFE AND TIMES
CHAPTER 1
Peng Chun Chang’s Early Life in China and Studies in the United States
Peng Chun Chang (1892–1957), or Zhong-Shu as he often called himself, grew up during a dramatic era of China’s history. He was part of a special generation that experienced the rule of the last emperor, the foundation of the new republic in 1912, and, starting in 1949, Communist rule under Mao Zedong. Other members of his generational cohort included Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), long-time president of the Republic of China, and Mao Zedong (1893–1976) himself, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China. Another famous member of this special generation was the philosopher and diplomat Hu Shi (1891–1962), who was an advocate of Chinese liberalism and language reform. Both Chang and Shi belonged to an exceptional generation of men who were schooled both in Confucian/Asian and Western traditions. As the historian Diana Lary has stated, they were multilingual, often bicultural. Many of them were committed both to China’s land and culture and to “Western” scientific method and liberal traditions.1
This generation experienced many dramatic events, including the Boxer Rebellion (1898–1901) and the brutal reprisals that it provoked from Japan and the Western states concerned. Unlike the earlier Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Boxer Rebellion was not directed against the imperial dynasty; indeed, in its final phases, it enjoyed the support of the regime. Instead, its aggression was aimed at foreign interests, whether commercial, military, or religious in nature. The rebellion, which originated in the disaster-hit Shandong Province, was led by a secret society called