Chang Po-ling (1876-1951), prominent Christian educator, founded the Nankai Schools and established Nankai University at Tientsin in 1919, serving as its president until 1948. Deputy speaker of the People's Political Council during the Sino-Japanese war, he served as president of the Examination Yuan at Nanking in 1948. He retired in 1949 to live in Tientsin. Born in Tientsin, Chang Po-ling was the first son of a talented and scholarly family of that area. His father, a bon vivant as well as a scholar, had dissipated the family fortune through his propensity for good living. He was reduced to earning a living by tutoring. Considering his own life a failure, he determined to give his son both an education and discipline. Thanks to his father's training and supervision, Chang Po-ling successfully passed the matriculation examination for the Peiyang Naval Academy when he was but 13.

An industrious lad who combined a sturdy physique with a good mind, Chang climbed to the top of his class during his five-year period of study at the academy. Among his teachers were such versatile scholars as Yen Fu (q.v.) and Wu Kuang-ch'ien, who later gained renown for their efforts in introducing Western ideas to China. Chang's final year as a cadet at the Peiyang Naval Academy was the year of the first Sino-Japanese war, in which the Chinese navy was disastrously defeated by the Japanese navy. Since the entire Peiyang fleet was virtually destroyed, Chang had to wait for a year after graduation before he could join his training ship, the Tung-chi. This ship was ordered to participate in the transfer of the important port of Wei-hai-wei in Shantung province from Japanese occupation to British control. That transfer took place in July 1898, when China was forced to lease Wei-hai-wei to Great Britain as a naval base. Depressed by the humiliation of his country, Chang Po-ling resigned his naval commission and returned to Tientsin. He determined to devote his energies to the field of modern education as a means of reforming China and of checking her decline. Chang began his career as an educator by teaching in a private school which held its classes in the home of Yen Hsiu, a prominent Tientsin scholar and public-spirited citizen. Known as the Yen-kuan, or Yen's school, it offered a small laboratory for experimentation in modern educational methods. In addition to English, mathematics, and the elements of natural science, Chang Po-ling taught physical education. He designed and had a local carpenter produce wooden Indian clubs and dumbbells such as he had used as a naval academy cadet. He also followed the practice, almost unheard of in China at that time, of playing games with his students. His interest in science and physical education and his emphasis on a freely democratic association between teacher and pupils were unmistakable marks of one of the founders of modern education in China. Three years later, in 1 90 1 , Chang also began to conduct classes at another private school, the Wang-kuan, held in the home of Wang Kuei-ch'ang, another prominent and prosperous Tientsin citizen.

From these modest beginnings the educational enterprise associated with the name of Nankai gradually developed. An important element in the founding of the Nankai schools was the close friendship between Chang Po-ling and Yen Hsiu. Scholar, bibliophile, and patriot, Yen Hsiu viewed the new Western learning with an open mind and a receptive spirit. He had great personal prestige in Tientsin and throughout north China and was an unfailing financial patron. Chang Po-ling, in turn, had youth, administrative ability, and dedication. In 1903 the two men traveled together to Japan to study the educational system in that country. In 1904, they decided to expand the Yen Hsiu private school at Tientsin into a modern middle school. The new venture, which began with an enrollment of some 70 pupils, was called the First Private Middle School. Two years later, when friends donated about two acres of land, the school moved to a site in an area known as Nankai and changed its name to the Nankai Middle School. To acquaint himself with modern Western educational concepts and methods, Chang Po-ling made a trip to the United States and Europe in 1908.

The Nankai objective was "to reform old habits of life and to train youth for the salvation of the country." The credo summarized China's major shortcomings: physical weakness and poor health; superstition and lack of scientific knowledge; poverty; deplorable lack of social conscience and social reform; and selfishness. To correct these national defects, Chang Po-ling proposed and implemented a five-point program of educational reform: (1) to improve physical fitness, (2) to train youth in the methods and achievements of modern science, (3) to organize students to participate in group activity and team work, (4) to give them moral training, and (5) to cultivate in students both the will and the capacity to work for China. Chang Po-ling's early career as an educator was influenced by his interest and activity in the work of the Young Men's Christian Association in north China. When Chang was still a student at the Peiyang Naval Academy, an American YMCA secretary, D. Willard Lyon, had organized the first Chinese municipal YMCA at Tientsin in 1895. By the time Chang established his first school, he was already acquainted with several American YMCA secretaries, including two outstanding athletes who were then serving in north China : Robert Gailey, an Ail-American football center from Princeton, and C. H. Robertson, a high jumper from Purdue. Robertson, who conducted a weekly Bible class in Tientsin, had a direct personal influence on Chang Po-ling by introducing him to Christianity as a force for social reform. Through his association with these and other American YMCA representatives, including Roscoe M. Hersey, the father of John Hersey, and through his own observations, during his trip abroad in 1908, of social and civil programs which were religiously motivated, Chang developed sufficient personal interest to become a Christian in 1909. Because he was one of the very few intellectuals in China to make such a commitment at that time, Chang attracted notice by making this decision. Partly through his YMCA connections, Chang Po-ling soon gained a reputation as an active promoter of amateur athletics and physical education programs. In 1909 the first north China track and field meet was held, with Chang Po-ling's assistance, on the campus of the Nankai Middle School. In the absence of other sponsors, the national association of the YMCA in China, at Chang's urging, took the lead in organizing China's first national athletic meet in October 1910, in connection with a national industrial exposition. In later years, Chang, who was known for his emphasis on good sportsmanship and on the highest standards of amateur athletic competition, was continually in demand to serve as an official at regional and national tournaments. And, at a very early date, Nankai was outstanding among the non-missionary schools in China for producing winning teams and individuals in athletic competition.

Chang had long cherished the ambition of establishing a model private university on his campus. To prepare for this task, he visited the United States in 1917 and attended courses at Teachers College, Columbia University. Chang's dream was realized in 1919, when Nankai University was inaugurated at Tientsin. It had three colleges: liberal arts, science, and business. In 1 920, a college of mining was added. Chang Po-ling's contributions to Chinese education were recognized in 1919, when St. John's University at Shanghai awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. A more unusual token of respect for his work was that of Li Ch'un, a prominent Peiyang general of the Chihli faction and a native of Tientsin : when he committed suicide in October 1920, Li Ch'un bequeathed to Nankai a substantial amount of money, which did much to underwrite the continued progress of Chang Po-ling's work. The Nankai establishment expanded steadily. In 1923 a middle school for girls was established, and in 1928 an experimental primary school was set up. To provide post-graduate work, the Nankai Institute of Economics was founded in 1931, and the next year the Nankai Institute of Chemistry came into being. Although a relative newcomer in the field of higher education in north China, Nankai under Chang Poling's direction soon established itself as a leading private university.

Part of Chang Po-ling's success as an educator was due to his administrative ability. He was able to find leading younger scholars to staff academic posts at Nankai and to trust them implicitly once they had been employed. With such men on its faculty as Hsu Mo (q.v.), who was to achieve fame as a jurist, and T. F. Tsiang (Chiang T'ing-fu, q.v.), then an active historian, Nankai's liberal arts college became one of the best in north China. Since Tientsin was a leading industrial city, the establishment of an economic research center was a natural step in the service of both academic and community interests. Under the direction of such economists as Franklin L. Ho (Ho Lien) and H. D. Fong (Fang Hsien-t'ing), the Nankai Institute of Economic Research undertook pioneering work in compiling cost-of-living indices, studying factory conditions, and investigating foreign trade returns. The institute gradually came to be recognized as a center of authoritative research on the Chinese economy, and its publications became known throughout the world. As Nankai developed and expanded, Chang Po-ling was able to secure financial support not only from government and private institutions in China but also from educational and philanthropic bodies outside the country. These included the China Foundation, the Sino-British Boxer Indemnity Commission, and the Rockefeller Foundation. During the 1920's and 1930's, Nankai acquired more than 200 acres of land and built an impressive campus to house a student body numbering some 3,000. As part of his program for moral and civic education at Nankai, Chang Po-ling held convocations of the entire school each Wednesday, at which he would discuss problems of student life as well as broader issues of national and international affairs. He knew many of the Nankai students by name and devoted much time to personal counseling. Chang also took a leading part in establishing in Tientsin a nonsectarian Protestant church, independent of all missionary bodies, which became a model for similar congregations in other major cities of China. Since he believed the YMCA to be the most indigenous Christian group in China, he devoted a significant part of his time and energies to its work. He became a member of the board of directors of the Tientsin YMCA and served as its president for many years. Even when the financing of Nankai presented problems, Chang worked unstintingly to raise funds for the Tientsin YMCA.

Years earlier, when he had been a naval cadet at the time of the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, Chang Po-ling had become aware of the threat to China posed by Japanese expansion. In 1927 he made a trip to Manchuria, and on his return to Tientsin he enjoined both faculty and students at Nankai to hold a special forum to study the problems of the Northeastern provinces. After the Mukden Incident of September 1931, Japanese military influence came to bear directly on the Tientsin area of north China, where Nankai was located. In the recurrent student demonstrations directed against Japanese imperialism the Nankai students played a key role, thus antagonizing the Japanese military commanders in north China. Since the Nankai campus lay very near the barracks of the Japanese garrison, Chang Poling had no alternative but to live with a potentially explosive situation. Shortly after the Japanese attack in north China on 7 July 1937, low-flying Japanese bombers struck Nankai on two consecutive days (29-30 July) and reduced the campus to rubble.

Chang Po-ling was at Nanking when the news of the disaster reached him. When he reported to Chiang Kai-shek that his schools had been destroyed by the enemy, Chiang, noting that Nankai had been sacrificed for China, pledged that "as long as China lives, Nankai will live." Never active in politics, Chang Po-ling had not been close to Chiang Kai-shek during the Nationalist decade from 1928 to 1937. However, they had appeared together in 1934 at the graduation exercises held at the Central Aviation Academy on the outskirts of Hangchow. Chiang Kai-shek was there as titular president of the institution; Chang Po-ling attended because his fourth son, Chang Hsi-hu, was being graduated. Both men made fervent addresses to the cadets on that occasion. Shortly after the destruction of the Nankai campus in 1937, Chang Po-ling suffered another tragedy: his son's plane crashed during a bombing mission. As the tempo of Japanese aggression had increased during the mid-1930's, Chang Po-ling had visited Szechwan province with the intention of finding a suitable site to establish a school in the interior. On the eve of the Sino- Japanese war in 1937, he had been successful in obtaining land near Chungking and in establishing the Nanyu Middle School. In 1938, pursuant to a decision by the Nankai Alumni Association, the school was renamed the Nankai Middle School in Chungking. During the war years, it served as an important educational institution in west China, maintaining the high standards and traditions of its forerunners in Tientsin.

When north China was engulfed by the war, Nankai University was forced to move to safety. It first was merged with Peking and Tsinghua universities to form a provisional university at Changsha, Hunan, in 1938, and later moved with them to Kunming in Yunnan province to form Southwest Associated University. An executive committee of three senior educational administrators supervised the refugee institution. Chang Po-ling represented Nankai, Mei Yi-ch'i (q.v.) represented Tsinghua, and Chiang Monlin (Chiang Meng-lin, q.v.) represented Peking University. Chang Po-ling, however, spent most of his time in the wartime capital of Chungking, where his political duties in connection with the People's Political Council absorbed much of his attention and energy.

Although Chang Po-ling had been offered senior government posts during his educational career, he was not drafted for active service until the war years. When the People's Political Council was formed in 1938, Chang was named its deputy speaker. A quasi-democratic body, the People's Political Council included representatives of diverse political parties and groups; it was designed to serve as a forum for public opinion. Chang Po-ling discharged his duties faithfully and discreetly. He was consistently loyal to Chiang Kai-shek because he saw Chiang as the symbol of Chinese national resistance to Japanese invasion. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Chang Po-ling began preparations to return Nankai to its former campus, which had been decimated by the war. The National Government, in order to fulfill Chiang Kai-shek's 1937 promise that Nankai would survive, issued a mandate to make it a national university as of 1946 and appointed Chang Po-ling to continue as its president. The change of status was a welcome relief to the elderly educator, since the soliciting of funds to keep the Nankai enterprise going had been a difficult and onerous task. J. Leighton Stuart, the president of Yenching University at Peking, also a private institution, commended Chang Po-ling for his long service to higher education in China. Stuart observed that while Chang had always had "a potential constituency in the United States, which was accustomed to responding to educational and religious appeals," he had been a notable pioneer in China, where education traditionally had been a matter for the state.

In 1946 Chang Po-ling was honored by Columbia University, which conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. Chang made his third and final visit to the United States to be present at that ceremony. The citation, read by Frank M. Fackenthal of Columbia, lauded Chang as "educator; founder and president of Nankai University; of nationwide influence and world-wide recognition as builder of educational institutions and builder of men; a personality dedicated through nearly fifty years of unshatterable faith and unwavering devotion to the regeneration of China through the education of her youth ; a symbol of national confidence." To commemorate Chang Po-ling's halfcentury of service to the cause of modern Chinese education, some of his many Chinese and American friends contributed articles to a book entitled There Is Another China. The allusion was to the fact that behind the tumultuous political and military events there was another China, humane and progressive, that was vital and significant. Interwoven through the essays in the book are the biography of Chang Po-ling, his major accomplishments, and related aspects of modern Chinese history. The essays were written by Hu Shih, J. Leighton Stuart, Arthur W. Hummel, and others.

Although Chang Po-ling had been nonpartisan throughout most of his public career, he joined the Kuomintang after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 and gained membership on the Central Supervisory Committee at the Sixth National Congress in 1945. Although over 70, he consented to serve as president of the Examination Yuan after the promulgation of the new constitution in 1948. When the Chinese Communist forces occupied Tientsin in the winter of 1948, Chang remained in that city. He died there of apoplexy on 23 February 1951, at the age of 76 sui. A tall northern Chinese, Chang Po-ling towered over most of his compatriots. He was fond of strenuous exercise and participated in many of the games that his students played. An eloquent and persuasive public speaker, he was a master in the art of charging simple moral truths with dynamic emotion. Always generous in spending for his schools, he nevertheless demonstrated an exemplary frugality in his personal life. He laid great emphasis on the position of the YMCA as an interpreter of applied Christianity and did much to enhance the prestige of the YMCA as an agency of cooperation between Christian and non-Christian groups in promoting the moral soundness of Chinese society. Recognizing the dangers of imported sectarianism, Chang encouraged forms of Protestant organization that reflected Chinese thought and practice.

Chang was survived by several children and by his younger brother, P. C. Chang (Chang P'eng-ch'un). His eldest son, Chang Hsi-lu, studied mathematics at the University of Chicago and later became a professor in China. P. C. Chang, after studying literature and drama in the United States at Columbia University, returned to Tientsin to assist Chang Po-ling and to direct the theater program at Nankai. He was particularly interested in the dramatic arts and attracted considerable notice in China for his excellent staging at Nankai of some of the well-known plays of the Western theater. He was also keenly interested in the traditional Chinese theater. When Mei Lan-fang (q.v.) made his trip to the United States in 1930, P. C. Chang voluntarily served as impresario and press agent to assist in explaining the productions of Mei's troupe to American audiences, who were completely unfamiliar with Chinese stage traditions and techniques. P. C. Chang later entered the diplomatic service and served as Chinese minister to Chile and Cuba. He retired in the United States, where he made his home in Nutley, New Jersey. He died of a heart ailment on 19 July 1957, at the age of 65.