Chang instead advocated a system in which every actor had a principal part under the director’s strict guidance. Chang admired the theater traditions in the Western countries, which had their origin in ancient Greece, and he was eager to introduce these traditions to China. He thought that many people in the Western countries saw theater not mainly as “entertainment,” as in China, but as something unique and important on its own, so-called pure theater. In Chinese theater, there was a combination of speech, singing, dancing, and pantomime to different extents. Theater and theater actors also had a higher social status in Western countries than in China, according to Chang.
The play The New Village Head would in time come to be seen as an early intellectual forerunner of the May Fourth Movement, which emerged in 1919 against the backdrop of Japan’s expanding geopolitical ambitions in China. What exactly did the May Fourth Movement stand for, and what was its origin? The movement was a protest against the fact that Japan’s demand to assume control of Shandong Province had been largely accepted by the delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. In contrast to the new states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, China as a whole was not accorded any real independence. Most Chinese had hoped that China’s participation on the French and British side against Germany during the First World War—in the form of 200,000 relief workers at the front—would result in the return to China of German-occupied territories such as Shandong Province. Instead, these territories were placed under Japan’s control. In so doing, the Versailles Peace Treaty left deep wounds in China that were to form the basis for the May Fourth Movement. Allied with that movement were various modernization campaigns between 1915 and 1921 that emphasized the value of science, simplification of the language, greater democracy, and less hierarchical family norms. Their rallying cries were “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”57 Key figures in this New Culture Movement included Lu Xun, the author of “A Madman’s Diary” (a short story written in vernacular Chinese), and Chen Duxiu, a dean at Peking University and editor of the New Youth Magazine. Other well-known members were the linguist Qian Xuantong and the politician Li Dazhao. These persons were pivotal in creating the Communist Party (CCP) 1921 in Shanghai. As mentioned earlier, the philosopher Hu Shi, a key member of the May Fourth Movement, also worked intensely to replace Classical Chinese with Vernacular Chinese as the standard written language. This language reform was effected in the 1920s. The new literary style was based upon the syntax of the national dialect “kuo yu.” The classical style was, according to Chang, very condensed and abstract and full of literary allusions that concealed the meaning of the words for the layman.58
On 4 May 1919, three thousand students from a number of universities, including Peking University, began processing toward Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Imperial Palace, where the foreign legations were situated. After being driven away from this area, the students instead marched toward the residence of the communications minister, Cao Rulin, which they set on fire. Cao Rulin’s house was singled out because Rulin had previously negotiated a very large loan from Japan, which protestors regarded as excessively compromising.59 Cao Rulin (1877–1966), a politician friendly toward Japan, had also been a signatory to the infamous Twenty-One Demands of 1915, drafted during the brief regime of Yuan Shikai, which gave Japan greater influence over China. Rulin had also been a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at which German-occupied areas of China were ceded to Japan. Following clashes with police, thirty-two students were arrested and one died in the hospital. The demonstrations spread to other cities in China, including Shanghai. The overall purpose of the May Fourth Movement was to struggle for China’s national sovereignty and fight against the people who were regarded as traitors at home. Throughout June, popular involvement grew, with demonstrations attracting not only students but also businessmen and workers, and a boycott of Japanese goods was called for. It should be noted that, according to official histories, even Zhou Enlai was active in the May Fourth Movement.
Chang paid close attention to the student activities within both the May Fourth Movement and more generally the New Culture Movement during his time as a graduate student in the US. He gave a lecture that dealt explicitly with the origin and main purpose of the May Fourth Movement at the Third World’s Christian Citizenship Conference in November 1919 in Pittsburgh. This lecture was later published as an article—“The Rising Consciousness of Civic Responsibility Among the Students of China.”60
In his article, Chang praised the students’ mobilization against the Shantung Settlement in Paris 1919. He regarded these students—from universities, colleges, and secondary schools in China—as an avant-garde group that inspired other groups in society, such as the merchants, the gentry, and trade guilds, to fight against the unjust settlement. Because learning had always been highly respected in China, the influence of students could be strongly felt in all spheres of society, according to Chang. Many of the present students had also acquired a new socially relevant education after the fall of the old empire. In other words, the students were vitally interested in the real problems of their environment, and they had cultivated a civic responsibility that took into account the concerns of several interest groups in society. They had also allied themselves with liberal movements the world over who endorsed freedom, justice, and peace. The students quickly organized themselves into a student’s national union with headquarters in Shanghai. They called for strikes from 4 May to 12 June and managed to effect the resignation of the three “traitors” from the Peking government (Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu).
According to Chang, what was remarkable about the student mobilization was that the students rose to fight not for Shantung alone, and not only for China, but also for democracy and democratic principles in the world as a whole. Chang said:
The far-sighted all over the world are aware of the fact that if a militaristic nation should be allowed ultimately to dominate China—the largest, yet undeveloped, field of natural resources and of manpower in the world—thee will develop the greatest military power that has existed on earth; and that the world will have a far more powerful and dangerous Prussia to face in the next world war. While fighting for an independent, democratic China, the students believed that even as a policy—not to mention the supreme justice of the case—the safest course for the world, and particularly for the security and development of democratic institutions, is a free, peaceful China.61
Chang revealed in this article that he had a very clear idea about the dangers that the Japanese militarists presented for China and the rest of the world. The main danger consisted in using China as a tool for a war on democracy on a global scale. Unfortunately, he was right in his pessimistic prediction of a new world war and the destructive role Japan would play in that forthcoming war during the 1940s.
In his article Chang expressed his beliefs in the national importance of the educational efforts that had taken place in China after the establishment of the republic in 1912. Chang was an advocate of a multifaceted education that had relevance for solving urgent problems in society. According to his friend the educator Tao Xingzhi (T’ao Hsing-chih), who also had studied at Columbia University, Chang was critical of “the book worm”—a person who emphasized book reading as the main path to real knowledge. Chang coined the term “scholar ghost” to designate this kind of personality.62 Chang stressed in a later article published in 1933—“Redirecting Educational Effort in China”—that:
In the old days the wisdom of the race could be garnered from books and a faith in the written word was to that extent justifiable. This old regard for books and book knowledge as carried over by the “scholar-ideology” is making for sad results among the students in the modern schools. Although the subjects they study are nominally modern, the extent to which they trust the written word is sometimes piteous. Instead of memorizing classics, many students today are memorizing school texts—sometimes even texts in geometry and in chemistry. This form of mental exercise obviously does not fit one to face concrete problems. It is also often noted that students are apt to consider a thing accomplished as soon as it is written on paper and announced. “A ghost from the past” threatens calamity for the present and the future!63
Chang hoped that “the New Student … will not be bookish, as he will have contact with, and control of, the material changes in his environment. He will have moral self-reliance; he will not need to crowd ‘the gates of the powerful