CHANG PING-LIN

born Dec. 25, 1868, Yhang, Chekiang Province, China died June 14, 1936, Soochow Pinyin Zhang Binglin Nationalist revolutionary leader and one of the most prominent Confucian scholars in early 20th-century China. Chang received a traditional education during which he was influenced by Ming dynasty (13681644) loyalist writers who had refused to serve the foreign Ch'ing dynasty (16441911/12) established by the Manchu tribes of Manchuria. As a newspaper editor, Chang expressed his belief that China's problems resulted from Manchu rule. Arrested in 1903 for his anti-Manchu views, he was released from prison three years later and then went to Japan, where he became one of the chief polemicists for the T'ung-meng hui (Alliance Society), the revolutionary group organized in Tokyo the year before by the Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen. After the Republican Revolution of 1911, however, Chang was one of the first to sever his connection with the T'ung-meng hui. Yan Shih-k'ai, president of the Chinese Republic, feared that Chang was stirring up opposition to his regime, and he placed Chang under house arrest. Yan's death in 1916 brought about Chang's release, and a year later he joined Sun Yat-sen's new revolutionary government at Canton in South China. After 1918, however, he retired from politics. Chang was better known for his scholarly works than for his revolutionary activity. As a staunch defender of his country's ethical and cultural heritage, he was one of the major opponents of the movement to replace China's highly stylized 2,000-year-old literary language with a written language that more closely approximated the spoken, or vernacular, tongue. Chang's own prose and poetic writings are considered among the finest examples of the classical form.