Background
Chang was born about 1889 in eastern Shensi in the small town of Ch’ao-i, a few miles from the Yellow River.
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Chang Hsi-jo
Edit ProfileEducation
Nothing is known of his early life and education, but when he was 19 (about 1908) he joined Sun Yat-sen’s T’ung-meng hui and participated in the 1911 Revolution against the Manchus. When the T’ung-meng hui was reorganized into the KMT in 1912, Chang became a member of the KMT’s Shensi branch; however, he dropped his membership a year later when he left for the United States to further his education. He did graduate work at both Columbia University and the London School of Economics. During his days in England he studied under Harold Laski, the famed intellectual of the British left-wing. Chang is said to have studied the writings of Jean Bodin, a French political writer of the 16th century. Japanese sources claim that he also attended universities in Berlin and Paris; in any case, he is known to have toured Europe,3 presumably in his student days. As a result of his education abroad, Chang is fluent in English and competent in French.
Career
Following his return to China he taught political science at the Peking College of Law and Politics and at China University, also in Peking. These two professorships were a prelude to a long teaching career in the major universities of China that lasted into the early days of the Communist regime. He did most of his teaching at Peking’s Tsinghua University. Although Chang was not affiliated with the Nationalist government for long, he did serve in 1927-1928 as head of the Department of Higher Education, and from 1942 to 1947 he was officially a member of the Third and Fourth Nationalist-sponsored People’s Political Councils, although he did not attend the sessions after 1942, reportedly because he believed them to be too partisan. Chang’s disillusionment with the KMT became apparent during the war years. He spent these years in Kunming, where Tsinghua, Peking, and Nankai Universities had been merged as a wartime measure into the National Southwest Associated University. During these years in Kunming (where he headed the university’s Political Science Department), Chang was a leader in liberal circles and, as such, was an outspoken critic of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. After the war he returned to Peking where he headed Tsinghua’s Political Science Department and also continued his criticism of the KMT as well as the policy of the American government to aid Chiang.
When the Communists took power in Peking in January 1949 Chang was still holding the chairmanship of the Political Science Department at Tsinghua University, although by the fall of that year he was reported to be teaching in the Social Sciences Department at Peking University.5 His first assignment under the Communists was as a delegate to the Communist-front World Peace Congress held in Prague in April 1949. In the following month he was named as a vicechairman of the Committee for Higher Education under the North China People’s Government (NCPG), an assignment that lasted until the NCPG was absorbed by the central government in the fall of 1949 when the PRC was officially established.
It was also in the summer of 1949 that Chang took part in the preliminary work of the CPPCC, the organization that formally brought the PRC into existence in the fall. As was befitting his role as a well-known and respected professor, Chang attended the First CPPCC (September 1949) as a representative of “non-partisan democratic personages,” a category that included such famed intellectuals as Kuo Mo-jo and economist Ma Yin-ch’u. He served on the Pre sidium (steering committee) for the September sessions and at the close of the meetings was named to the Standing Committee of the CPPCC; when the Second, Third, and Fourth CPPCC’s were formed in 1954, 1959, and 1965, he was reappointed to the Standing Committee, the governing body when the National Committee is not in session.
More important, however, was his membership on the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC), the supreme organ of governmental authority in the PRC until 1954; the CPGC was headed by Mao Tse-tung and invested with broad legislative, executive, and judicial functions. Utilizing his background as a prominent political scientist, the Communists also appointed Chang to a vice-chairmanship of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the Government Administration Council (the cabinet), of which Chou En-lai was the premier. In the same month that the government was formed he was also named to the Standing Committee of the China Peace Committee, another position he continues to hold. Two months later (Decemer 1949), the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs was established under the presidency of Chang. The purpose of this institute is to promote a wider understanding of foreign affairs and to engage in research. In fact, it has been most frequently used as a semiofficial organ of government, through which the PRC has maintained wide contacts abroad. Its status as a semi-official body is well-illustrated by the fact that Chou En-lai serves as the honorary chairman. Of the many posts that Chang holds, this is probably the one to which he devotes most of his time. It has kept him constantly in the news, particularly when foreign visitors are in Peking.
During a governmental reorganization in November 1952, some of the functions of the Ministry of Education were placed under a new Ministry of Higher Education. Chang was named at this time as minister of Education, but when the ministries were merged in February 1958, he relinquished his position. In 1953, in preparation for the elections to the First NPC, he was named to the Committee for Drafting the Election Law. When the elections were held the following year he was elected as a deputy from Peking to the First NPC and was subsequently re-elected to the Second and Third NPC’s, which opened in April 1959 and in December 1964. In May 1954 he was named to the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, another position that he still retains. Four years later (February 1958), at the same time that he relinquished the ministership of Education, the Communists formed the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries under the State Council. In broad terms, the “people’s” association deals principally with countries not having diplomatic relations with Communist China, whereas the Commission works mainly with nations that do have diplomatic ties with Peking. Aside from his major post in the Institute of Foreign Affairs, Chang devotes most of his time to work of the Commission. For example, in the period from 1958 through 1964 he negotiated and signed 14 cultural cooperation agreements or protocols with 13 different nations. Although he has been the chairman of the Commission since its establishment in 1958, two former employees of the Commission claim that the real authority is vested in two senior Party members who are nominally subordinate to Chang, Commission Vice-chairmen Chang Chih-hsiang and Ch’en Chung-ching.
Unlike some of his fellow non-CCP intellectuals, Chang seems to have avoided political difficulties, even though he proved to be a sharp critic of the Party during the “hundred flowers” period in the spring of 1957. Speaking on May 13 at a forum called by the Party’s United Front Work Department, Chang charged that the CCP had been guilty of subjectivism, bureaucratism, sectarianism, and doctrinairism; he bluntly stated that many Party members had a very “low level” of knowledge and that many of them acted as though they were the “first people on earth” because they had won the revolution. Two days later he continued his criticisms of the Party, maintaining that it had been guilty of four “deviations”: a proclivity for bigness and a fondness for achievement; undue haste for results; contempt for the past; and a blind belief in the future. Although many other non-Party personalities lived to regret similar criticisms, Chang was apparently never held to task for these sharp comments.
A fine vignette of Chang has been drawn by Edgar Faure, the former French premier who visited China in 1956. Faure was clearly impressed by Chang, whom he described as a “cultivated and discreet” man with a “fine wit.” “His very appearance, his dress and his manners show him to be a statesman in the western sense.” Well aware that Chang was not a Party member, Faure described him as “far from being a puppet personality chosen for reasons of window-dressing from the gallery of complaisant fellow-travellers of the old regime.” Faure also visited Chang’s private residence in Peking, where he found that everything was “discreet luxury and order.”
Career
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1958
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1949