Chang Min-chih was from Shandong and after the war served as principal of the Yantai Joint Middle School. As the civil war pushed south from 1948, teachers and students of eight Shandong joint schools retreated with their schools — from Qingdao, through Guangzhou, thousands of kilometres — and in the summer of 1949 were settled on Penghu. He was one of the principals who led them.

The terms the schools had won from the government were that students would keep studying and only adults would serve. On 13 July 1949 the Penghu Defence Command assembled the students on a parade ground in Magong and announced that every boy above a certain height would be drafted, whatever his age. Students objected; soldiers came forward, and bayonets drew blood. Chang and another principal, Tsou Chien, argued on the spot, to no effect.

It could have ended there. But they kept petitioning after July, up the chain, all the way to Taipei. Soon the two principals and a group of students were arrested as communist spies. On 11 December 1949 Chang, Tsou and five students — Liu Yung-hsiang, Chang Shih-neng, Tan Mao-chi, Ming Tung-le and Wang Kuang-yao — were shot at Machangding in Taipei.

In 2011 a monument went up in Magong, Penghu, carved with those seven names.