The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) turned seventy in 2018 and is widely regarded as the most important human rights document in the history of mankind. Over the last decades, a lot of research has been dedicated to its history, content, and philosophy.
Hans Ingvar Roth, a professor of human rights at Stockholm University, leads us with his book to a better understanding of the drafting process and the philosophy of the UDHR by telling the story of one of the most influential, and at the same time lesser-known, contributors to the UDHR: Peng Chun Chang (1892–1957). Chang was the Chinese delegate and vice chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission during the drafting process of the UDHR. He is usually mentioned as one of the most active and influential contributors to the declaration together with the chairwoman Eleanor Roosevelt, the Lebanese and French delegates Charles Malik and René Cassin, and the first director of the UN Human Rights Division, the Canadian John Humphrey.
Chang was both a professor at renowned Chinese and American universities and a diplomat for the Republic of China, serving as ambassador to Turkey, Chile, and ultimately the United Nations. Chang was influenced and guided in his thinking by both Chinese and Western philosophy, in particular Confucianism and John Dewey's ideas about democracy and education. He was a PhD student at Columbia University when Dewey was a professor there.
Roth's book consists of two main parts: Peng Chun Chang's biography and his work on the UDHR. The latter part describes Chang's interventions at the UN, the philosophy behind his ideas, and his relationship with other delegates, such as Malik and Cassin.
As Roth shows comprehensively in his work, “Chang was involved in practically all of its [UDHR's] central articles and their defining attributes” (227). “Universality, religious neutrality, a broad conception of rights [civil and political as well as social, economic, and cultural rights], a balance between individual rights and duties and an instructive style—Chang helped to ensure that all these characteristics became part of the document” (227). Clarity and a logical structure designed to ensure that the UDHR could be understood by all human beings were also among its core objectives, as was keeping the declaration brief and concise. Furthermore, Chang wanted the declaration to become a document of “pluralistic tolerance” (173) with which different philosophies and cultures could easily identify and relate. To achieve this objective, he served as a bridge builder between the personalities and their different philosophies in the UN bodies, a “master of compromise” (221).
While Chang often succeeded in incorporating his ideas in the UDHR, some of his proposals were voted down by his fellow delegates. For example, he would have liked to include a right to petition and a right to employment in the civil service by means of examination (228).
Owing to the preoccupation of the government of the Republic of China with the Chinese civil war in the second half of the 1940s, Chang probably had the most freedom and negotiating space of all delegates working on the UDHR (119). Knowing more about Chang's life and the guiding principles of his philosophy is thus even more important, as his interventions at the UN were mostly based on his own opinions and ideas and were not guided by instructions from the Chinese government. Roth's book provides this background knowledge by giving a detailed account of Chang's life and his work at the United Nations.
The key points of departure for Chang in his interventions at the UN were the Chinese tradition, in particular Confucius and Mencius, China's political experience of war in the 1930s and 1940s, and China's social and economic problems (101). Following the Confucian tradition, “the focus of rights discussions should … be the humanizing of human beings and raising awareness of the individual's duties and natural sympathy toward his or her fellow human beings” (244).
Chang was also opposed to superficial characterizations of cultures and possible contradictions between them: “there were in fact many Easts and Wests. There could be common denominators between a Western grouping and an Eastern, just as other groups could be riven by conflicts. Chang thought that wide terms as ‘East’ and ‘West’ usually are good hiding places for all sorts of prejudices” (188–89). Chang forcefully argued for the universality of human rights. In his opinion, “this so-called Eurocentric view of civilization, whose imperialistic logic and ethnocentrism he underscored, represented the principal obstacle to universal application of human rights” (172).
Finally, Chang saw no contradiction between democracy and human rights and Chinese philosophy and culture. On the contrary, he was convinced that both could be perfectly combined. As a result, he took a critical stance toward political authoritarian approaches: “the two main ideological alternatives in China [Communism and Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarianism] were, for Chang, non-alternatives” (101).
However, according to Stanley Chang, Peng Chun Chang's youngest son, “he believed that China as a country was the centre of the world” (185). His father upheld Chinese traditional views in his private life and was for example opposed to the marriage of his oldest son to an American wife (233). These accounts reveal some contradictions between Chang's public and private lives and Roth deserves credit for giving us such a comprehensive view of the man. In this respect it contrasts with another recent book, Pinghua Sun's Historic Achievement of a Common Standard: Pengchun Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Springer Nature, 2018), which also contains a detailed and rich account of Chang's life and work but which fails to mention any mistakes or flaws of the Chinese delegate, evinces a nationalistic perspective by constantly emphasizing Chang's Chinese descent and praising Chinese wisdom, and occasionally connects Chang to current human rights concepts of the People's Republic of China.
The first part of Roth's book, which devotes over a hundred pages to Chang's life, provides most of the new insights about him. A few publications have already analyzed most of Chang's contributions to the UDHR; these include Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, 2001); Frédéric Krumbein, “P. C. Chang: The Chinese Father of Human Rights,” Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 3 (2015): 332–52; Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Pierre-Étienne Will, “La Contribution chinoise à la déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme,” in La Chine et la démocratie: Tradition, droit, institutions, ed. Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Étienne Will (Fayard, 2007).
The book relies to a great extent on the reminiscences of Chang's youngest son Stanley (109). This is a strength, in that it offers the reader a new source. At the same time, it is a potential weakness as the chapters on Chang's life reflect sometimes only Stanley Chang's views of his father, as the author is well aware (254).
