Sidney H. Chang

Together with Leonard H.D. Gordon of Purdue University he produced a comprehensive study of China's enigmatic revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen, who helped lead the Chinese Revolution of 1911, known as the Xinhai Revolution.

He used rare documents from the Kuomintang Archives in Taipei, reports of witnesses and correspondents as well as U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office documents to write his doctoral thesis on the Kuomintang's Foreign Policy, 1925–1928.

The range of topics covered the Chinese war lords, Peking government, Nationalist government, Russian advisors, and British policies.

Chang and Gordon compiled a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources relevant to the revolutionary activities of Sun Yat-sen from the inception of his thought to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of a republic, from his eighteenth year in April 1885, until his death on March 12, 1925.

The authors consulted over thirty library catalogs and visited research collections in major Asian libraries and archives in the United States, Europe, and East Asia.

Sidney Hsu-Hsin Chang (January 1, 1934 – October 3, 2016) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in the history of China, modern Far East, and East Asian civilizations.

For nearly half a century he was a professor at California State University, Fresno.

He was a visiting professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan.

In 1945, he was attending Yali High School, also known as Yale-in-China, in Changsha, Hunan.

The school was part of the Yale Mission College founded to bring "Western learning to the heart of China."

Chang got his professor's recommendation to join a graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism, where Shieh had graduated in 1945.

When the Chinese Communist revolution began to gain momentum and the Nationalist government started to fail, he was separated from his family and fled alone to Hong Kong as a refugee in 1948.

He was eventually reunited with his family in Macau and helped lead six of his younger siblings to Taiwan, where the family settled in 1950.

That year, the University of Missouri hosted the Press Congress of the World for three days, beginning on March 2, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the School of Journalism.

Among forty delegates from thirty-five countries was Milton J. T. Shieh.

Chang wrote an article for the Columbia Missourian based on his interview with his mentor.

Chang served in the Republic of China Armed Forces and graduated from National Taiwan University as a history major in 1955.

Next year he enrolled in a graduate program to study journalism at National Chengchi University, the only journalism school on Taiwan at the time, and worked as a news reporter for the Central Daily News.

The school's dean, Milton J. T. Shieh, was also his major professor.

Chang moved to America in August 1957 via a cargo ship that docked in Portland, Oregon.

Two years later, he received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1959.

In 1961, he earned a master's degree in library science from Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he met his future wife of fifty-two years, Elaine Grace Pardue, whom he married on September 15, 1962.

The couple raised their two sons on university campuses where they happened to live and work.

Chang obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian History in January 1967, from University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His minor fields included Indian Studies and Art History.

Chang conducted post-doctoral research at Harvard University East Asian Research Center and Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History in 1969 and 1970.

Among his mentors at Harvard were prominent academicians John K. Fairbank and Henry Kissinger, who was then director of the Harvard International Seminar.

At Harvard, Chang met two top Soviet Sinologists, Mikhail I. Sladkovsky, the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Boris N. Zanegin, a Chinese-speaking senior research member of its Institute of the United States and Canada.

Chang co-wrote and co-edited five books.

On behalf of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Chang served as an attaché at the Far East Trade Service Center in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany (1984-1985) and as a cultural attaché in Russia (1997-1999), while on sabbatical from teaching.

He was a member of the Republican Presidential Task Force and the Republican National Committee.

Born in Wuchang, Hubei Province, in southeast China, Chang spent much of his childhood in the adjacent Hunan Province.

Wuchang is the place of China's first modern revolution, ignited by an accidental explosion that led to the rapid demise of the Manchu Qing dynasty and the development of the Republic of China.

Sidney was the oldest of fourteen children, including five who did not survive infancy.

His mother, Wen-jane Hwang, was a kindergarten teacher, and his father, Chung-ning Chang, was an official in the Chinese Nationalist government, a delegate to the National Assembly, and dean of students at the National Taiwan Normal University.

The study, entitled All Under Heaven: Sun Yat-sen and His Revolutionary Thought, was published by the Stanford University's Hoover Institution Press in 1991.

The title came from the Chinese Taoist teaching: "When the Great Way prevails, all under heaven will work for the people."

The primary focus of the authors was on San Min Chu I, or Three People's Principles, the ideological doctrine that set force measures to bring about a new political and economic framework for China.

The authors detailed the evolution of Sun's views and the intellectual challenges he faced in integrating such often conflicting strands as traditional Chinese thought, communist theory, and revolutionary strategy and objectives.

By undertaking a fresh scrutiny of Sun's writings, ranging from books and formal speeches to telegrams and personal correspondence, the authors gave a compelling portrait of a man who as both a visionary and a pragmatist laid the foundation of modern Chinese state.