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| Representation of America and the National Awareness: Chang Chi-Yun's Records of Observations in the United States |
| Zhang Muchu1,2, Tian Zhengping1 |
1.College of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
2.Faculty of Education, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China |
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Abstract Chang Chi-Yun was not only a prominent Chinese intellectual in geographical and historical research, but also an active educator, administrator and participant in the ideas shaping higher education institutions in China, dedicating the best years of his life to Zhejiang University. From his work in historical education and research, to his formative visits to the United States and his final years as an academic and politician in Chinese Taiwan, all his life he continued to explore the role of academic development in shaping nation-state ethics.Scholarship surrounding Chang Chi-Yun rightly discusses his achievements in the context of his academic career, focusing on three broadly historical phases: （1） his early academic work in geography and history and its relationships to his personal academic network and later political positions; （2） his work as one of a group of core authors in the “post-Xueheng period” expounding on the identity and construction of nation-state ethics; and (3) his representation of the Nanjing Higher Normal School and the history of Chinese nationalities and historiography. However, there is notably little discussion of his two years in the United States in the 1940s, and this paper will show, that this was not only a critical moment in his career, but also a critical node in which Chinese society, educational and national thought underwent a great transition.In February 1943, the Cultural Exchange Office of the U.S. Department of State, through the U.S. Embassy, invited six experts and professors from several famous Chinese universities to visit and lecture in the United States, and Chang Chi-Yun, representing Zhejiang University, was one of them.The travelogue will first show the diversity and richness of his activities in the United States, giving lectures and making speeches, introducing the situation in wartime China to the American people, actively seeking the support and sympathy of international public opinion, but also how these experiences were synthesized into an idealised representation of America from which his thinking on the future of the new Chinese nation-state was built. Like all visiting scholars at that time, he never lost focus on this mission to apply these learnings to shape the fate of his own country. His writing on these study visits was compiled and published by the Commercial Press in 1946 under the name of “Records of Observations in the United States”. Wartime Chinese intellectuals almost universally had a strong sense of urgency and mission in these times of national peril, to take China’s problems to the United States to investigate and study in order to seek a good remedy for saving the country, and often concluded to mix the reality of the United States they see, hear, and visit, with Daoist ideals of a mythical, beautiful country, filtered and reorganized through the experience, perception and understanding of the “contact zone” of limited time and space, and hope to recreate a vision of an ongoing Chinese civilization.Chang Chi-Yun’s mission was especially clear. As a geographer, he combined academic visits with spiritual explorations through the American landscape and its originating philosophers and founding fathers, such as Washington and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through the analysis of the problems of Western industry and science, observations on the personality and social common will of young Americans, and the talents and culture in the American university model, he clearly made a profound sensory depiction of his experience of studying in the United States, trying to combine academic research with the basic fate of the country and the nation, and answering questions from reality, thus giving birth to the possibility of combining self-academic research with the experience of academic visits in the United States.The image of the United States produced in his writings, the civic structure, and the reproduction of industrialization, profoundly contain endless propositions connecting self-perception, place and landscape, national and collective imagination, educational models and cultural conflicts. We can clearly see that the image of the United States he shows to the readers, combining the fields of industry, water conservancy, aviation, national character, generalist education, while all deeply observed in all dimensions, are nonetheless idealised as a dreamy mythical country, to be practically praised and even envied for its powerful industrial economy and cultural status. What this paper concludes is that this view constitutes an almost blind obedience to the US model and a lack of appropriate calibrations for China’s specific situations. It does not critically analyze the political, economic, cultural, and national defense construction of the United States from a deeper level, but only from a perceptual evaluation after comparing the incompetence of the Chinese National Government with the organic operations of American society. It is thus difficult for his writings to provide feasible and authoritative opinions on China’s national construction project. Of course it is impossible to reproduce the complete true image of the United States, it is an imaginary object that has been extracted and filtered by the author, an “other” being that is “idealized”, “selected”, and “reconstructed”. This highlights the ongoing dilemma of intellectual learning from overseas study visits and the importance of transcending the background of the times.
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Received: 06 April 2021
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2022, Vol. 52 
