Ch'ien Tuan-sheng (25 February 1900-), political scientist, wrote major works on Chinese constitutional theory and government, notably The Government and Politics of China. Harvardtrained, Ch'ien was an independent intellectual as well as influential educator and dean of the law school of National Peking University. He opposed Kuomintang policies and in 1949 welcomed the Communist regime, but later came under Communist censure as a rightist. Born in Shanghai, Ch'ien Tuan-sheng spent his childhood there, attending the Nanyang Middle School from 1912 to 1917. After his preparatory education, he studied for two years, from 1917 to 1919, at Tsinghua University in Peking. He then departed for the United States in the summer of 1919. He first studied at the University of North Dakota for one year, receiving his B.A. from that institution in 1920. After a summer at the University of Michigan, Ch'ien entered the graduate school of Harvard University. He spent the next four years at Harvard and received both the M.A. degree (February 1922) and the Ph.D. (February 1924) in political science. As was the fashion among many Chinese, Ch'ien assumed a Western given name while abroad, becoming Thomson S. Chien in the United States. He did not use that name after his return to China.

An early indication of Ch'ien's intellectual orientation was his Ph.D. dissertation: Parliamentary Committees: A Study in Comparative Government. The thesis reveals a strong commitment to representative government and parliamentary democracy. Ch'ien modified his approach to the study of government over the next 25 years, during which he taught political science in China's leading universities. These modifications came not from accepting new analytical propositions or systems of interpretation, but from abandoning certain axioms of political science. The most important of the ideas which he discarded was the belief, current in the 1920's, that national or international law existed on a plane remote from politics and that Chinese problems could be alleviated in any satisfactory way merely by the enactment of legislation. As a result, Ch'ien's written works show a long-range trend toward increased emphasis upon purely descriptive analysis and toward the study of public administration. When Ch'ien Tuan-sheng returned to China in 1924, however, international and constitutional law were still very important both to him and to China. Some of the most controversial issues in the developing Nationalist revolution of that period were extraterritoriality and the status of the foreign concessions in China issues which traditionally had been treated in a legalistic manner. As a lecturer at National Peking University and National Peking College of Education, Ch'ien published articles and reviews in the influential She-hui k'o-hsueh chik'an [social science quarterly], which was edited at National Peking University. His writings at this time reveal the institutional and administrative bent of his interests. In 1925 he published a long article entitled "The Relation between the Legislature and Executive in Some Recent Constitutions" in She-hui k'o-hsueh chi-k'an, as well as reviews of books such as Malbone Graham's New Governments of Central Europe, Julius Hatschek's Deutsches und Preussisches Staatsrecht, and Leon Duguit's Traite de Droit Constitutionnel. Ch'ien was not, however, merely an academic observer. As a strong supporter of the Kuomintang's efforts to end the period of foreign-abetted warlord anarchy in China, Ch'ien championed China's national interests according to international law. In 1927 he contributed two articles to a liberal journal of opinion, the Hsien-tai p'ing-lun [contemporary review], concerning the status of the Shanghai concessions and the China policy of the United States. In these articles, he advocated the return of all foreign concessions to China and argued that foreign powers should support the Nationalist revolution. At National Peking University, Ch'ien Tuansheng associated himself with the circle of liberal intellectuals around Wang Shih-chieh (q.v.), then a judge of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Friendship with Wang Shih-chieh was to prove of great importance to Ch'ien's career, both academically and politically, in later years. In 1936 and again in 1942, Ch'ien revised and brought up to date Wang's major work, Pi-chiao hsien-fa [comparative constitutional law]. During the early 1930's Ch'ien Tuan-sheng moved to National Central University at Nanking, where he became assistant professor of political science in its college of law. In that period Ch'ien published a study entitled Fa-kuo ti cheng-fu [the government of France] and was active in Kuomintang affairs. Just prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, he completed the two-volume history which is his most important work in Chinese. The comprehensive Min-kuo cheng-chih shih [history of political institutions under the republic] was written under Ch'ien's direction by a committee of scholars of the public administration research institute of Central University's law department. The work is a detailed, factual survey of the shifts in government that had taken place after the 1911 revolution, and it remains today the major political history of the republican period in Chinese. The first volume is devoted to a study of the central government; the second deals with provincial, hsien, and urban affairs. The authors were aided by the party history compilation committee of the Kuomintang, and their long section on the Nanking government is one of the first objective studies of Kuomintang history based on official records. Published by the Commercial Press, Min-kuo cheng-chih shih went through three printings (Changsha, 1939; Chungking, 1945; and Shanghai, 1945). One indication of its usefulness is the fact that a subsidized translation was prepared and published in Japan in the midst of the Sino-Japanese war.

Ch'ien moved west with the universities as the Japanese occupation spread. Instead of remaining with Central University, which went to Szechwan, Ch'ien joined the faculty of Southwest Associated University at Kunming, the wartime amalgamation of Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai universities. During the Japanese war, Ch'ien wrote many articles for such journals as Hsin ching-chi [new economics] and began to devote more of his time to practical politics. Ch'ien was named a member of the People's Political Council, which had been established in Hankow in 1938.

Between 1937 and 1949, Ch'ien visited the United States four times and made several significant contributions in English to the study of Chinese politics. The first of these four visits took place in 1937, when Ch'ien accompanied Hu Shih (q.v.) in an effort to obtain both official and unofficial American assistance for China's war effort. Ch'ien next went as a participant in the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R.) study meeting held at Virginia Beach, Virginia, from 18 November to 2 December 1939. He presented a paper to the conference entitled "China's National Unification: Some Political and Administrative Aspects." Six years later, Ch'ien was again a member of the China Committee attending an I.P.R. meeting, the ninth conference of that organization, held at Hot Springs, Virginia, from 6 to 1 7 January 1945. He was joined by such well-known figures as Chiang Mon-lin, Carsun Chang, and Chohming Li. On his fourth trip to the United States, Ch'ien went as a visiting scholar to Harvard. He arrived in the United States in December 1947 and returned to China at the end of 1948. Ch'ien's writings in English during the 1940's are equal in importance to his Chinese works. He published several articles in Pacific Affairs which established his reputation among foreign scholars. In 1943, Ch'ien wrote on "Wartime Local Government in China," a valuable analysis of the restoration of the pao-chia system of local control. In 1948, however, he published a polemical article, "The Role of the Military in Chinese Government," which was actually an attack upon Chiang Kai-shek. This article typified Ch'ien's final appraisal of the Kuomintang before the Communist victory. "The nearest approach to a powerful check on military power in China since the Revolution of 1911 was the reorganized Kuomintang in its early years. But when Chiang Kai-shek acquired a position of leadership in the Kuomintang without at the same time outgrowing his military mentality, the party ceased to be such a restraining influence." In 1950, after Ch'ien had left the United States to return to China, the Harvard University Press published Ch'ien's most important work, The Government and Politics of China (reprinted 1961). That book, building upon the work which Ch'ien had already done in compiling the Min-kuo cheng-chih shih, presents a detailed treatment of the evolution and status of political institutions and parties in China up to the late 1940's. It differs from Ch'ien's earlier work in that, by 1948, he was able to offer critical judgments of such basic Kuomintang concepts as the Three People's Principles of Sun Yat-sen, the three-stage revolution, the theory of political tutelage, and one-party rule, all of which he viewed as being theoretically sound. In acknowledging the obvious failure of the "Kuomintang Government," he placed particular blame upon Chiang Kai-shek. In his preface, written at Harvard in September 1948, Ch'ien referred to the obvious shortcomings of his book in the following statement: "The next few years will witness the most fundamental and truly great transformation in a long period of change, begun about a century ago. But the Kuomintang Government is still in control of the greater portion of China. I cannot treat in any detail the way in which other parts of China are governed nor can I elaborate on what is in store for the future. This can only be done at a more opportune moment." The unquestioned value of Ch'ien Tuansheng's The Government and Politics of China is not compromised by the observation that personal ambition affected and reinforced his conclusions. By the late years of the Sino-Japanese war, Ch'ien had been much interested in a political career, and he secured the recommendation of Wang Shih-chieh for the positions of vice minister of education in the National Government and ambassador to Australia. In both instances, however, Chiang Kai-shek personally rejected Ch'ien's appointment. Between 1945 and 1949, Ch'ien returned to his academic career as dean of the law school at Peking University, but he did not abandon his desire to participate directly in politics. Since he had no voice in Kuomintang affairs, his decision to return to the mainland in late 1948 was doubtless influenced by the hope of playing a larger part in the future political life of his country. Ch'ien was offered a position in one of America's leading universities, but he rejected the offer. Ch'ien Tuan-sheng's experiences under the People's Republic offer an illuminating example of the dilemma encountered by liberal intellectuals during a period of revolutionary change directed by the Communist party. Despite the fact that Ch'ien publicly supported the new Chinese government and its policies, he, along with many other non-party intellectuals with similar views, was compelled to undergo thought reform during the 1951-52 period. He performed that rigorous drill with apparent candor and realism, disavowing his capitalist education and bourgeois past and expressing his loyalty to the Chinese Communist party and its leader. Ch'ien emerged from the ordeal with his fortunes improved: in 1952 he was named president of the new Peking College of Political Science and Law, and he began to participate in many of the institutions of the Communist state. Besides serving as a member of the editorial board of the English-language propaganda journal China Reconstructs, Ch'ien was elected a deputy to the National People's Congress and to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He also became a member of the central committee of the China Democratic League, one of the so-called political parties tolerated by the Communists as part of their united front program. He also devoted much time to such Communist front activities as the Chinese People's Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, and the World Peace Congress, in all of which Ch'ien was either a director or a vice president.

Nevertheless, Ch'ien did not receive a position of authority in the People's Republic commensurate with his own, self-appraised talents and interests. Dissatisfaction with his position led him, in the years after 1952, to associate with other non-Communist intellectuals who also felt themselves to be ignored or politically underemployed. Given this situation, the relaxation of the Communist policy of discrimination against intellectuals which occurred in 1956 and early 1957 prompted Ch'ien and others to agitate openly for a greater voice in policy formulation. The activities of Ch'ien and his associates—notably, Chang Po-chün, Fei Hsiaot'ung, Lo Lung-chi, and P'an Kuang-tan—in the period between the Hungarian outburst of 1956 and the Hundred Flowers campaign were hardly counterrevolutionary. Rather, these activities were designed to take advantage of the Communist party's public offer to enlarge the scope of political participation by men who were not members of the Communist party. However, after the unexpected surge of anti-Communist sentiment from many quarters during the Hundred Flowers period, the Communist party elite made scapegoats of non-Communist intellectuals in order to preserve its political and doctrinal authority. Ch'ien Tuan-sheng and his associates, identified as the Lo Lung-chi-Chang Po-chun clique, were accused of engineering an anti-party plot and of being rightists. Ch'ien was relieved of his academic and political posts, though he was not imprisoned. When the socalled Great Leap Forward encountered major setbacks during the late 1950's, the Chinese Communist party moved to reinstate some of the intellectuals whose services were required in the tasks of socialist construction. In December 1961 Ch'ien's name was included in a list of 370 rightists of the Hundred Flowers period from whom the Communist authorities had decided to relieve that designation. However, he did not regain a position of public prominence.