Tsung-Tung Chang

Tsung-Tung Chang ( Chinese  張聰東 , Pinyin Zhāng Cōngdōng ; * 1930 in Taiwan , † 2000 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Taiwanese-German economist and sinologist.

Life

Chang came from a village near Taichung in Taiwan. The island had been under Japanese rule since 1895 , so that he completed a Japanese school education until 1945. He then obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the Taiwanese National University, which emerged from the former Taihoku Imperial University .

In 1956 he moved to Frankfurt am Main , where in February 1961 he completed an economics thesis as a Dr. rer. pol received her doctorate. The revised dissertation appeared in two separate publications in 1961 and 1965. He then worked as an employee at the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden . During this time he was naturalized as a German citizen.

In 1967 Otto Karow , the holder of the Chair for East Asian Philology and Cultural Studies at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University , hired him as a Chinese lecturer . Here Chang began studying the Chinese oracle bone inscriptions , which he submitted to Karow as a dissertation in 1970 . This was the first major work in a Western language on this subject. When, as part of the reorganization of the university, the professorship for Sinology was re-established in 1973, Chang was appointed professor.

Chang conducted research in the fields of Chinese palaeography and classical philosophy, and since the 1980s he has been conducting intensive Sino-Indo-European lexical studies. Under his leadership, the China Institute , which perished in World War II, was re -established as a registered association . With a series of lectures, exhibitions and concerts, he succeeded in building on the legacy of his predecessors Richard Wilhelm and Erwin Rousselle . Chang retired in 1999 and passed away a little later.

Works

• Tsung-Tung Chang: The Chinese Economy: Basics - Organization - Planning. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1965
• Tsung-Tung Chang: The Chinese Government's Perspective on Developing Mainland Agriculture. West German Publishing House, 1961
• Tsung-Tung Chang: The cult of the Shang dynasty as reflected in the oracle inscriptions: a paleographic study of religion in archaic China. Harrassowitz, 1970
• Tsung-Tung Chang: Metaphysics, Knowledge and Practical Philosophy in Chuang-Tzu  : for the re-interpretation and systematic presentation of classical Chinese philosophy. Klostermann, 1982
• Tsung-Tung Chang: Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese: A New Thesis on the Emergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the Late Neolithic Age . In: Sino-Platonic Papers . No. January 7 , 1988 (English, pdf ).

literature

• Wolfgang Behr: Paleolinguistics and hyperdiffusion with Carl Hentze (1883–1975) and Tsung-tung Chang (1931–2000): on the context of some ideas of Frankfurt ancient sinology. Digitized
• Heiner Roetz : On the death of Professor Chang Tsung-tung. In: Asia, No. 77, October 2000, pp. 157-59
• Heiner Roetz: Chang Tsung-tung's activity at the University of Frankfurt and his interpretation of the philosophical classics of China. In: Georg Ebertshäuser / Dorothea Wippermann: Paths and crossings of the Chinese customer at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. IKO Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2007, pp. 239–248