had visited events arranged by the Nankai Association in California, they had been treated almost as royalty by virtue of their belonging to the Chang family. Stanley Chang told the following story as an illustration: “When my sister Ruth went to China in the mid-1980s, she was warmly embraced, almost as a sister, by Mrs Zhou Enlai (Deng Yingchao), who showed her around. Zhou Enlai had attended the Nankai School when my father taught there, and people assumed that he had been a pupil of my father’s. According to my father, however, Zhou Enlai had never been one of his pupils or students but had merely occasionally listened to some of his lectures.” However, Zhou assisted Peng Chun Chang in his drama program at Nankai and was influenced by Chang’s introduction of Western plays in China.20 The above story from Stanley provides revealing glimpses of how Peng Chun Chang and his family were regarded in certain Communist circles in China in the 1980s. Although Chang had represented the republic and voiced his support for political ideals far removed from those of the Communist regime, there was nonetheless a positive aura around the Chang family in consequence of their creation of the Nankai Schools and Nankai University. This reputation was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the beloved politician Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) attended them both the Nankai school and the university. Today, Nankai University is also one of China’s most reputable, according to Stanley Chang. Advertising for the university also makes much of its having been Zhou’s alma mater. Another famous alumnus of Nankai is Sun Yu (1900–1990), one of China’s most famous film directors. Wen Jiaboa, the prime minister from 2000 to 2012, also attended the Nankai School.21
Since the founding of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights Studies at Nankai University in 2005, Peng Chun Chang’s name has become more recognized in the university, which commissioned a statue of him. The unveiling ceremony of the statue took place during the summer of 2007 (8 June) at the new campus of the Nankai University (Jinnan). Stanley Chang’s account contains the fascinating detail that Nankai University was one of a rather small number of universities permitted to keep its name after Mao Zedong took power; another was Sun Yat-sen University, founded in Canton in the early 1920s.22 Stanley’s theory is that Nankai University was allowed to keep its name because Zhou Enlai was a former student. According to Stanley, Nankai University was the national, with a capital N, university when it was founded, something that Zhou Enlai would no doubt have relayed to Mao if the latter was not already aware of it.
Chang’s daughter Ruth recalls that Zhou Enlai acted as a so-called student secretary to her father, together with two other students, who would also go on to have brilliant careers: Zheng Taoru and Duan Maolan.23 Another of Zhou Enlai’s college friends was K. C. Wu, who became mayor of Shanghai in the 1940s. Zhou Enlai was also very active in the Nankai School’s theater group, Chang’s pet interest. In 1917, Zhou Enlai graduated with distinction from the Nankai School.
Zhou Enlai was for several decades Mao Zedong’s right-hand man. He is widely regarded as a deeply educated and diplomatic man who exerted a moderating influence on Mao. Trained in classical Chinese philosophy, he studied in Tientsin and at the Nankai School between 1913 and 1917 and at Nankai University as well as spending time at schools and universities in Japan and France. Zhou Enlai participated in Nankai extracurricular dramatic and debating activities and was inspired by Poling’s motto for the school—the principles of gong, the commitment to sacrifice oneself for public interests, and neng, the ability to fulfil this commitment. When Peng Chun Chang returned to Nankai in 1916 after his studies at Clark University, Zhou assisted him in directing both Chinese and Western plays.24 After the Communist take-over at the beginning of the 1950s, Zhou protected Poling because Poling was closely associated with the Kuomintang regime. When Chang Poling died in 1951, Zhou Enlai flew to Tientsin to pay his respects. In China, Poling was viewed as an important figure, as evinced by the way that both nationalists and, at times, Communists sought to claim him as one of their own.25
For Chang and his family, Nankai was also a crucial shaping force in their lives. It says much about how Chang viewed the Nankai Schools that as late as 1956, a year before his death, he gave a lecture on their origins at an alumni meeting hosted by New York’s China Institute.26 In the lecture, Chang also underscored his brother’s very great importance for Nankai. In nostalgic but also insightful fashion, Chang described his student years in the first Nankai School as a period that fostered self-confidence and faith in the future.27 As Stanley Chang explained:
Nankai and my father were very closely intertwined. When in the 1920s my father returned to China from his studies in the United States in order to begin teaching, he wanted to break away from his brother Poling and Nankai. He therefore accepted a new job as dean at a rival university—Tsinghua. That’s what he told me, at least. But in the end, we still wound up at the Nankai campus in Tientsin in 1927, so clearly he had chosen to return to his alma mater to teach. On the subject of building the Nankai School in Chungking (Chongqing), my father said that he had persuaded Uncle Poling to open a new school in the city. The reason he gave was that he expected China to go to war with Japan imminently and so the best option was to open a school far inland. Later, he was proud of having predicted correctly. Uncle Poling also happened to be in Chungking, away from Tientsin, during the Japanese bombing raids of 1937, leaving my father as his representative at Nankai University. For this reason my father found himself in grave danger and, when the Japanese invaded, he was forced to flee from Tientsin in the middle of the night dressed as a woman.
The Boxer Indemnity Reparation Fund and Chang’s First Period of Study in the United States
After the Boxer Rebellion ended in 1901, the European powers and Japan demanded economic compensation from China on the grounds that their property and interests in China had been specially targeted. The United States instead chose to request that compensation take the form of a grant-giving foundation for talented Chinese students who wished to study at American universities, something that would help promote the United States’ reputation in China.28 The fund that gave scholarships between 1909 and 1929 included more than 1300 students from China. Chang passed the selection test and received a scholarship from the American Boxer Indemnity Reparation Fund and a place at Clark University, a renowned university located in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1913, after three years’ study, Chang received his bachelor’s degree in pedagogy and philosophy.
Founded in 1887, Clark University was one of the first graduate colleges in the United States to offer master’s degrees in pedagogy and psychology. In 1900, the university also started to confer doctoral degrees on both men and women. The university’s first president, G. Stanley Hall, was also a distinguished professor of psychology and pedagogy who established the American Psychological Association. Sigmund Freud’s only lecture series in the United States, at which he introduced psychoanalysis to the American public, was given at Clark University in 1909. The university was well known for having an ethnically diverse student body, including many students from Japan, as well as for its socially progressive profile.
That Chang formed part of an extraordinary cohort of Chinese scholarship students was to become clear in hindsight. Perhaps the most famous of his pals in the group was Hu Shi. After completing his studies, Hu Shi went on to become one of China’s most liberal philosophers and literary historians; like Chang, he was powerfully inspired by the ideas of the American philosopher and educationalist John Dewey. A graduate of Cornell and Columbia, Hu Shi emerged as a leading spokesperson for China’s New Culture Movement, which sought in various ways to liberalize Chinese society and institute language reform.29 Hu Shi and Peng Chun Chang were holders of scholarships from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programme, and they came to the United States on the same ship as young students. Both of them endorsed the proposal from the New Culture Movement to replace the difficult classical language (guwen) with a written form of the oral vernacular language (baihua).30
Other members of Chang’s cohort, which arrived in the United States in 1910 (on the second boat), were Zhu Kezhen, subsequently a Harvard-educated meteorologist, and Zhao Yuanren (Y. R. Chao), also a future Harvard alumnus. Y. R. Chao (1892–1982) was a pioneering linguist whose textbooks are still used in university courses today. He went on to become a professor of oriental languages at the University of California, Berkeley. Chao also composed music that became widely known in China. He became