On March 29, 2024, from 12:20 pm - 1:20 pm, Jedidiah Kroncke, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong, will present the paper Thomas Jefferson, Carsun Chang and A Lost Era of U.S.-China Constitutional Engagement in 308 Morgan Meeting Room of Austin Hall, at the Harvard Law School.
A boxed lunch will be provided. East Asian Legal Studies is sponsoring the event.Professor Kroncke’s study recovers a lost era of Sino-American constitutional imagination surrounding the drafting of the 1946 Republic of China Constitution. It examines the transnational dynamics that led the Constitution’s initial drafter, Carsun Chang, to travel to the U.S. in 1945 to ostensibly study the ideas of Thomas Jefferson then ascendant in New Deal constitutional rhetoric.
This study recontextualizes Chang’s life as one of China’s new generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals moving between its contentious post-dynastic politics and the institutions of the post-World War II international legal order. Chang’s invitation by the Roosevelt Administration involved many little known but determinative turns, including the role of a subset of Truman Administration officials actively enamored with Jefferson’s own study of Confucianism.
Transnationalizing our understanding of the 1946 Constitution helps reveal how the geopolitics of the Chinese Civil War intersected with the presumed projection of American constitutional values increasingly embedded in American internationalism. The fallout from the drafting process also illuminates the transition of America from a global symbol of constitutional revolution to a symbol of global racial empire. Recapturing this era has implications for originalist-styled constitutional arguments made in contemporary Taiwan, as well as evaluating the international dimensions of Jefferson’s deeply problematic domestic legacy.
--Dan Ernst
