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. 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. Early life and education 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. 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." 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. 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 got his professor's recommendation to join a graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism, where Shieh had graduated