Ch'en Heng-che 陳恆哲 Ch'en Heng-che (12 July 1890-), China's first female professor, taught Western history at National Peking and National Southeastern universities. An early associate of Hu Shih, she wrote short stories and poems in the vernacular. In addition to writing essays for many magazines, she founded the Tu-li p'ing-lun [independent critic] . She married H. C. Zen (Jen Hung-chun, q.v.). After 1949, they lived in Shanghai. Although her family had originally come from Hengshan, Hunan, Ch'en Heng-che was born in Ch'angchou, Kiangsu. Her grandfather, Ch'en Chung-ying (T. Huai-t'ing), and her father, Ch'en Tao (T. Chih-lueh), both were magistrates and well-known scholars and poets. Ch'en Tao's mother and his wife, Chuang Yaofu (T. Ts'ai-shih), were both accomplished painters. Ch'en Heng-che thus grew up in an atmosphere of scholarship and culture. She had two brothers and five sisters.

Ch'en Heng-che left home for the first time in 1903 at the age of 13 and received her basic Chinese education during the next eleven years. Her maternal uncle, Chuang Ssu-chien, exerted great influence on her. The Chuang family, one of the four prominent families of Ch'angchou, had a long tradition of scholarship and public service. Chuang Ssu-chien was well versed in Chinese classical studies, and his inquiring mind led him to explore aspects of Western science and culture, which he greatly admired. He held up as examples to his niece the educated and independent Western women who left their homelands for service in China, in contrast to subservient Chinese women. One of Chuang Ssu-chien's theories was that there are three types of people: those who create their own future, those who are content with what fate has given them, and those who are resentful of their lot, but helpless. He predicted that Ch'en Heng-che would be among those in the first category, but he also told her that to be a free agent one required knowledge, not only knowledge handed down from China's past but also Western knowledge to be gained from going to modern schools. The younger generation, he emphasized, should strive to know more about the world than its elders had known. From listening to her uncle, Ch'en Heng-che developed a desire for learning and independence. When her father was appointed to an official post in southwest China before 1911, her parents, knowing of Ch'en Heng-che's ambition to gain a modern education, agreed to let her live with Chuang Ssu-chien's family at Canton. Unfortunately she was too young to enter the only modern school open to women, a medical college. Her uncle then undertook to teach her himself with the help of newspapers, magazines, and modern textbooks; and he engaged a tutor to teach her arithmetic. She also learned much from her uncle's conversations, which covered a wide range of topics from science to moral precepts. Chuang Ssu-chien was later transferred to Lienchou in southern Kwangtung as an officer of the New Army. Although he was busy, he never neglected his niece's lessons. Home instruction, however, could be only a temporary expedient. Therefore, when Chuang's wife returned home to visit her parents in Kiangsu, she took Ch'en Heng-che along to enroll her at a school at Shanghai. The school they had selected was the Ai-kuo hsueh-she, founded by Chuang's friend Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei (q.v.). Unfortunately Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei was no longer in Shanghai, and the school, a pioneer institution in the development of women's education, was closed. Ch'en Heng-che entered another newly opened school for girls at Shanghai and studied there for three years. The school proved to be mediocre, however; she learned some English, but little else. Ch'en Heng-che had reached the age at which it was customary for a girl to be married, and her father had chosen a young man for her. After receiving the news, she went through a great personal crisis. Her thirst for knowledge and for an independent life clashed painfully with her sense of duty to her father. She finally obtained her father's consent for withdrawal from the marriage agreement. In 1912, while she was still unhappy about her act of rebellion against her father, financial difficulties and dissatisfaction with her schooling in Shanghai prompted her to leave that city to stay with her eldest paternal aunt in a small town near Soochow. Her aunt, older than Ch'en Hengche's father by some 20 years, was a remarkable woman. Sturdy and energetic, she studied at night, after a full day of housework, until three o'clock in the morning and arose at six to serve her parents-in-law. She was a good calligrapher, an efficient manager of a large household, an excellent cook, and was well versed in Chinese poetry, history, and traditional medicine. Her family life was made unhappy, however, by a husband and sons who smoked opium. Ch'en Heng-che was her favorite, and her strength sustained her niece during a period of despondency. In the spring of 1914, she obtained a teaching position for Ch'en Heng-che in the family school of one of her friends. In the summer of 1914 Tsinghua College, then a preparatory school for students who were going to the United States for higher education on government grants provided by the Boxer Indemnity Fund, held an examination in Shanghai. For the first time women candidates were permitted to compete. With the encouragement of her aunt, Ch'en Heng-che took and passed the examination. Chuang Ssu-chien, who was then in Peking, saw the announcement in the newspapers and was so delighted that he wrote her a congratulatory letter expressing his confidence and pride before she had time to write him. Ch'en Heng-che sailed from China for the United States in 1914. That year she studied at Putnam Hall, a girls school at Poughkeepsie, New York, preparing to enter Vassar College. In the autumn of 1915 she entered the freshman class at Vassar under the name Sophia Hung-che Chen ; she was one of two Chinese girls admitted that year. Adjusting happily and well to college life, she made rapid progress in her studies. She soon decided to major in history and studied under the able guidance of Lucy M. Salmon, chairman of the history department, and of Eloise Ellery, professor of European history. In the summer of 1916 she spent her vacation at Ithaca, New York. There she first met her future husband, H. C. Zen (Jen Hung-chun, q.v.), who had just graduated from Cornell University and was about to begin graduate study in chemistry at Columbia. After that meeting, the two corresponded frequently. H. C. Zen and Hu Shih (q.v.), another Chinese student, were then editing the Chinese Students Quarterly (Liu-Mei hsueh-sheng chi-pao) , and Ch'en Heng-che was asked to be a contributor. In letters the three frequently discussed Hu Shih's idea of using vernacular Chinese as a medium of literary expression. Ch'en Heng-che was sympathetic to the idea, and her first attempt at fiction, a lively account of college life entitled "One Day," was written in semi-vernacular prose and was published in the Quarterly. Thereafter she wrote a number of short stories and poems in pai-hua [the vernacular] for Hsin ch'ing-nien [new youth], the journal which was advocating the modernization of Chinese literature. In 1919, the year of her graduation, Ch'en Heng-che was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded a Vassar Fellowship for graduate study at the University of Chicago. There she received her M.A. degree in 1920. She was, however, critical of Chicago for emphasizing classroom lectures rather than independent research.

Ch'en returned to China in the autumn of 1920 and was offered a professorship in Western history at National Peking University, where Hu Shih was then professor of philosophy. She was the first woman in the history of modern Chinese education to be so honored. It was a heady period for the Chinese intellectuals: the May Fourth Movement of 1919 had shaken many old ways of thinking, and a rising flood of periodicals was introducing Chinese readers to new social, political, and literary theories from the West. Ch'en Heng-che wrote for such magazines as Hsin ch'ing-nien, Nu-li chou-pao [endeavor], Tung-fang tsa-chih [the eastern miscellany], Hsiao-shuo yueh-pao [short story magazine], and Hsien-tai p'ing-lun [contemporary review], as well as for the literary supplements of leading newspapers.

In 1920 she married H. C. Zen. Two years later she resigned from Peking University to move with her husband to Shanghai, where he had joined the editorial staff of the Commercial Press. From 1924 to 1925 she taught Western history at National Southeastern University in Nanking, where Zen had been appointed vice chancellor. After that she gave up teaching to devote herself to her family and to her writing, although she did return to Peking University in 1930 to teach Western history for one year.

Prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Ch'en Hung-che was anxious about the manifold social and political problems that were left unsolved by the National Government. She commented incisively and often angrily on such topics as education, youth, and the position of women. Her essays appeared frequently in Tu-li p'ing-lun [independent critic], a highly regarded magazine of liberal opinion of which she was a co-founder and editor. She also wrote a book on Western history for Chinese readers and another on the Renaissance. Reviewers praised her ability to recreate the story of Western civilization in terms meaningful to her people. Her Hsi-yang shih [Western history] was published in 1926, and a new edition appeared in 1932; both went through several printings.

Ch'en Heng-che also proved to be an able interpreter of China to the Western world. On behalf of the China Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R.), she attended several international conferences of the I.P.R. at Honolulu, Hawaü, in 1927, at Kyoto, Japan, in 1929, at Hangchow in 1931, and at Banff, Canada, in 1933. During the 1929 I.P.R. conference in Japan the Chinese delegates made plans to publish a book designed to promote better understanding of contemporary Chinese culture in the West. The Symposium on Chinese Culture was edited by Ch'en Heng-che and was published at Shanghai in 1931 by the China Council of the I.P.R. In the chapter which she wrote for the volume, Ch'en Heng-che advocated a rational and selective approach to the modernization of Chinese culture. Although she recognized the imperative need for basic political, social, and economic reform in China, she hoped that these changes would be effected through intelligent and responsible leadership which would minimize the social cost involved. After the Canada conference of the I.P.R. in 1933, she revisited the United States for the first time since 1920. She was touched by the welcome which both faculty and students at Vassar extended to her, and she was astonished by the changes in American life which had been wrought by the advent of the automobile age. Altogether, she spent three months in Canada and the United States, returning to China at the end of October.

In 1935 H. C. Zen was appointed president of National Szechwan University. The family arrived at Chengtu in December of that year, with the exception of the eldest daughter, who was attending school in Peking. It was a dismal winter. The weather was chilly and damp, and the house was drafty. Ch'en Heng-che became ill. She was shocked by the poverty and social backwardness of Szechwan, which had been under the domination of local warlords since the establishment of the republic. In a series of articles written for Tu-li p'ing-lun she made devastating, though well-intentioned, criticisms of the local political and social situation. These articles aroused a storm of personal attacks upon her by the provincial press. In July 1936 she left the inhospitable atmosphere of Chengtu for Peiping, which had been her home for many years, leaving her husband in Szechwan. Although her decision to go had been made prior to the outburst of journalistic indignation, the timing of her departure might have been influenced by it.

After returning to Peiping in 1936, she remained there until the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese war in the following summer. In July 1937 she took her children out of Japanese occupied territory to Shanghai, where her husband joined them. From 1939 to 1941 she resided in Kunming, where H. C. Zen was secretary general of the Academia Sinica. In November 1941 Ch'en Heng-che took their two younger children to Hong Kong, where she planned to put them in school. Hong Kong was attacked in December by the Japanese, and she was cut off from her husband in Chungking and from her eldest daughter, who had gone to the United States to study. Not until June 1942 was she able to escape from Hong Kong with her other children and make her way overland to west China. She spent the remaining years of the war at Chungking. She was dismayed and angered by the widespread financial corruption, speculation, and hoarding that she saw among the officials and merchants in the areas under the control of the National Government. Her alienation from the Nationalist regime increased during the difficult post- 1945 period and culminated in the decision to remain in Shanghai after the Communist victory on the mainland in 1949.

The educated women of Ch'en Heng-che's generation witnessed the drastic changes in China which accompanied the transition from empire to republic and the change in the status of women from a subordinate social position to a larger role of active participation in the social, intellectual, and political life of the nation. She was an outstanding representative of those Chinese women whose achievements enriched the intellectual life of the period. Like most of her contemporaries, she was a nationalist who felt humiliated by China's weakness in the modern world. Her nationalism, however, was tempered by knowledge of world history, which enabled her to view national and international problems with perspective and to suggest rational solutions to these problems. Living in a period of social change and unrest, she welcomed changes which would free the Chinese people from the bonds of poverty, ignorance, and authoritarian political and social controls. Together with other liberal intellectuals, she warned the Kuomintang authorities that basic reforms were imperative if violent revolution were to be avoided in China. When her efforts failed and when wartime and postwar experiences convinced her that China required a fundamental break with its traditional social patterns, she accepted the post- 1949 order, but thereafter made no public statements. Ch'en Heng-che wrote little that was neither political nor historical. However, a collection of her short stories entitled Hsiao yü-tien [little raindrops] was published in 1928, and a volume of essays, Heng-che san-wen chi [the prose writings of Heng-che], appeared in 1938. Her stories reveal a rationalistic and humanitarian approach to life, but are limited by her lack of acquaintance with Chinese life outside of academic circles. Although her natural sympathies are with the poor and weak, her fiction lacks that strength which comes from intimate observation and personal experience. Of the early generation of modern women writers, however, she was unique in that she transcended the confines of autobiographical material to view Chinese society in a larger perspective. And, as an early associate of Hu Shih, she must be considered one of the pioneers of the new literature movement.