Dr. Chang’s cooperation with scientists from mainland China started in 1972 and continued long after his retirement from Catholic University in 1977. However, most Chinese sources remember him not as a leading scientist but as a star alumnus of the Northeastern University in China. Using his connections in mainland China and Taiwan, he dedicated his first decade after retirement to two interrelated causes: the release of a controversial political prisoner in Taiwan and the restoration of his alma mater, whose departments and faculty had disintegrated and merged with other universities in the 1940s and 1950s. The political prisoner, Zhang Xueliang, was the son of Northeastern University’s founder and its second president. By 1993, Dr. Chang managed to help deliver both.

In his final years, Dr. Chang donated fifty thousand dollars to his alma mater. As late as 2016, the money funds a scholarship named after him. He passed away in 2004 and was buried in the Memorial Oaks Cemetery in Houston, Texas. His family still lives in the United States.

Dr. Chang witnessed the vicissitudes of US-China relations as a scientist and a Chinese American. His career and life choices carried him far away from his home village in Manchuria and transformed him into a prominent member of the American academia, but his personal ties to China persisted to shape his ethnic and academic identity. This trans-Pacific life sheds light on what we may call "an academic Chinese-Americanness," a phenomenon that continues to play a key role in US-China relations today.

Many of Dr. Chang's friends went back to China after 1949, but there were also many like him who chose to stick around and flourished in America. The latter group's contribution, despite their national origin, was profoundly American. In Dr. Chang's case, his love for the land and people of China did not seem to have contradicted with his political identity as an American citizen. On the contrary, this love added to the goodwill between the two peoples at key historical turning points. 

This photo shows Zhang Xueliang receiving the letter of appointment from Dr. Chang in his Taipei apartment, to become the honorary president of the newly restored Northeastern University of China in 1993. Courtesy of the Northeastern University of China.