Chang was born on December 28, 1893. Semi-official Communist directories list his place of birth as Wu-chin (Ch’ang-chou), a city on the Grand Canal in Kiangsu Province. Other sources, however, claim that he was born in Chefoo (Yen-t’ai) in Shantung. According to Japanese reports, Chang has also been known by the name Chang Chi-lung.
He graduated from Futan University in Shanghai in 1915 and then proceeded to the United States for further education. He studied at the University of California (1916— 1917) and spent two semesters in 1919 at Columbia University studying law.
Following his return to China, Chang embarked on a legal career of considerable distinction as a practicing lawyer, a professor of law, and as an editor of journals dealing with international problems. For many years he taught law at Futan University, ultimately serving as Dean of the Futan Law School from 1945 to 1947. He was also a lecturer at National Central University in Nanking and at a branch of Tung-wu University in Shanghai. During the thirties and forties, in both Shanghai and Chungking (during the war years), he participated in editing Wen-t’i (Problems), Kuo-min chou-k’an (National weekly), Wen-chai (Digest), and Hsien-cheng yueh-k’an (Constitution monthly), all magazines dealing with national and international problems. His work with these magazines brought him into contact with such prominent Chinese political leaders as Chin Chung-hua, Sha Ch’ien-li, and Miss Shih Liang, each of whom cooperated with the Communist regime after 1949 (though not necessarily as members of the CCP). Chang gained national fame in 1936-1937 when he served as a legal counselor for several persons arrested and imprisoned for their persistent demands that the Nationalist Government exert greater efforts to resist the steady encroachments of the Japanese in the mid-thirties. Those imprisoned came to be known as the “seven gentlemen,” and their imprisonment remained a cause célèbre until their release in July 1937 shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (see under Shih Liang).
Like so many other intellectuals from the coastal cities, Chang fled to the wartime capital at Chungking during the war against Japan. There he became associated with the China Democratic League, a political party that continues to exist under the Communist government as one of the eight ostensibly democratic (non-Communist) political parties. After the war Chang returned to Shanghai where, as already noted, he was again associated with his alma mater, Futan University. Fearing arrest in early 1949 for his leftist tendencies, he went to Hong Kong, but after only a brief time there he went by sea to north China. He was in Peking in time (June 1949) to serve as a member of the Preparatory Committee of the CPPCC. This Committee, chaired by Mao Tse-tung, had several subcommittees that worked throughout the summer of 1949 on special questions that were to be discussed when the CPPCC met in plenary session in September 1949 to establish the central government. As a person with legal training, Chang was logically assigned to serve on the committee charged with the task of drafting the Organic Law of the soon-to-be-established central government, one of the key documents that was eventually ratified in September 1949. Chang attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC as a representative of China’s social scientists. And, when the central government was staffed in October 1949, he received three appointments, each related to the legal field. Under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet), he was named to membership on the Law Commission and the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. He was also named as a vice-president of the Supreme People’s Court. When the constitutional government was inaugurated in 1954 at the First NPC, both the Law Commission and the Political and Legal Affairs Committee were abolished. However, he was reappointed to the Supreme Court and, as of the mid-1960’s, is the only man at the presidential or vice-presidential level who has served on China’s highest court continuously from 1949. He served on the First NPC (1954— 1959) as a deputy from Kiangsu; he was re-elected for the term of the Second NPC (1959-1964) and again for the Third NPC that opened in December 1964.
As a Supreme Court vice-president, Chang has on occasions made official reports before govern-ment bodies. He gave a report, for example, in September 1951 before a meeting of the Government Administration Council and was one of the speakers at the government-sponsored Second National Judicial Conference in April 1953. He has also been a participant in several of the many professional and “mass” organizations established by the Communists. The most prominent of these in Chang’s field is the Political Science and Law Association of China (PSLAC). From 1951 to 1953 he served as a member of the PSLAC Preparatory Committee, and he has been a vice-chairman since the organization was permanently established in April 1953. He was also a member of the PSLAC’s Secretariat from August 1958 until October 1964.
As a Western-trained lawyer, Chang has also been utilized by the Communists as an appropriate person to deal with the many non-Communist parliamentarians and lawyers who have visited China; similarly, he has served as the leader of delegations sent abroad to attend legal meetings. In January 1955 he led a group of Chinese lawyers to Calcutta for the Conference of Asian Lawyers, and in May of the next year he led another jurists’ delegation to Brussels to attend the sixth congress of the Communist- dominated International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Also, in March-April 1961, Chang was in Japan as head of a delegation of lawyers attending the preparatory meeting of the Afro-Asian Lawyers’ Conference.
Like many Chinese personalities having regular contact with foreigners, Chang belongs to organi-zations related to one or another aspect of international relations. He has been a National Committee member of the China Peace Committee since 1950, a member of the Asian Solidarity Committee from its formation in February 1956 (known as the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee since May 1958), a Council member of the China-Egypt Friendship Association from November 1956 (known as the China-United Arab Republic Friendship Association following the merger in early 1958 of Egypt and Syria), and the president of the China-Ceylon Friendship Association since its formation in September 1962. Chang has also been a Council member of the Asia-Africa Society of China since April 1962 when the society was established with the avowed purpose of advancing the level of Chinese research on both Asia and Africa.
As a vice-president of the Supreme, Court, Chang has obviously been in close contact with some of China’s top leaders, particularly those who have specialized in legal affairs most notably Tung Pi-wu, Hsieh Chueh-tsai (both former presidents of the Supreme Court), and Wu Te-feng, the most prominent figure in the Political Science and Law Association of China since the mid-fifties. However, because he is not a Party member, it is most unlikely that Chang exerts any significant political authority. It should also be noted that the field of law in China suffered a sharp setback in the wake of the 1957-1958 “rectification” campaign, until that time the legal profession was making slow but discernible progress, but since then it appears to have had low priority. Nonetheless, Chang serves as a living example of the Party’s continuing policy of maintaining the united front in the legal field.
