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Gertrude Atherton - "Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend, by Sir"

Count Leo Tolstoy - "Resurrection"

Plato - "Parmenides"

Daniel Defoe - "From London to Land's End"

New Forces in Old China

A >> ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN >> New Forces in Old China




The unpretentious shop-fronts often beckon to mysteries that
are well worth penetrating--tobacco factories where coolies
stamp the leaves with bare feet; tea, gold, dye and embroidery
shops where designs of exquisite delicacy are exhibited; silk-
weaving factories where fine fabrics are made on the simplest of
looms; feather shops where breastpins and other ornaments
are made of tiny bits of feathers on a silver base--a work
requiring almost incredible nicety of vision and such strain upon
the eyes that the operators often become blind by forty. Another
curiosity is a shop where crickets are reared for fighting
as the Filipino fights cocks and the Anglo-Saxon fights dogs.
The Chinese gamble on the result and a good fighting cricket is
sometimes sold for $100. The attendant put a couple in a jar
for our alleged amusement and they began fighting fiercely.
But I promptly stopped the melee as I did not enjoy such sport.

The river is one of the sights of China. It is crowded with
boats of all sizes. The owner of each lives on it with his
family, the babies having ropes tied to them so that if they
tumble into the water, they can be pulled out.

Altogether, it is a remarkable city. Viewed from the famous
Five-Story Pagoda, on a high part of the old city wall, it is a
swarming hive of humanity. As one looks out on those myriads
of toiling, struggling, sorrowing men and women, he is
conscious of a new sense of the pathos and the tragedy of human
life. If I may adapt the words of the Rev. Dr. Richard S.
Storrs on the heights above Naples, at the Church of San Mar-
tino, on the way to St. Elmo--I suppose that every one who
has ever stood on the balcony of that lofty pagoda ``has
noticed, as I remember to have noticed, that all the sounds
coming up from that populous city, as they reached the upper
air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the voices
of traffic, and the voices of command, the voices of affection
and the voices of rebuke, the shouts of sailors, and the cries of
itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the laugh
of childhood; but they all came up into this incessant moan in
the air. That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where
there are spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the world for
help.''[3]

[3] ``Address on Foreign Missions,'' pp. 178, 179.



II

DO WE RIGHTLY VIEW THE CHINESE

TOO much has been made of the peculiarities of the
Chinese, ignoring the fact that many customs and
traits that appear peculiar to us are simply the differences
developed by environment. Eliza Scidmore affirms that
``no one knows or ever really will know the Chinese, the most
comprehensible, inscrutable, contradictory, logical, illogical
people on earth.'' But a Chinese gentleman, who was
educated in the United States, justly retorts: ``Behold the
American as he is, as I honestly found him--great, small, good, bad,
self-glorious, egotistical, intellectual, supercilious, ignorant,
superstitious, vain and bombastic. In truth,'' he adds, ``so
very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found
the American that I hesitate.''[4]


[4] ``As a Chinaman Saw Us,'' pp. 1, 2.


The Chinese are, indeed, very different from western peoples
in some of their customs.


``They mount a horse on the right side instead of the left. The old
men play marbles and fly kites, while children look gravely on. They
shake hands with themselves instead of with each other. What we call
the surname is written first and the other name afterwards. A coffin is a
very acceptable present to a rich parent in good health. In the north
they sail and pull their wheelbarrows in place of merely pushing them.

China is a country where the roads have no carriages and the
ships have no keels; where the needle points to the south, the place of
honour is on the left hand, and the seat of intellect is supposed to lie in the
stomach; where it is rude to take off your hat, and to wear white clothes
is to go into mourning. Can one be astonished to find a literature without
an alphabet and a language without a grammar?''[5]


[5] Temple Bar, quoted in Smith's ``Rex Christus,'' p. 115.

It would never occur to us to commit suicide in order to
spite another. But in China such suicides occur every day,
because it is believed that a death on the premises is a lasting
curse to the owner. And so the Chinese drowns himself in his
enemy's well or takes poison on his foe's door-step. Only a
few months ago, a rich Chinese murdered an employee in a
British colony, and knowing that inexorable British law would
not be satisfied until some one was punished, he hired a poor
Chinese named Sack Chum to confess to having committed the
murder and to permit himself to be hung, the real murderer
promising to give him a good funeral and to care for his family.
An Englishman who thought this an incredible story wrote a
letter of inquiry to an intelligent Chinese merchant of his
acquaintance and received the following reply:


``Nothing strange to Chinamen. Sack Chum, old man, no money, soon
die. Every day in China such thing. Chinaman not like white man--
not afraid to die. Suppose some one pay his funeral, take care his family.
`I die,' he say. Chinaman know Sack Chum, we suppose, sell himself to
men who kill Ah Chee. Somebody must die for them. Sack Chum say
he do it. All right. Police got him. What for they want more?''


These things appear odd from our view-point and there are
many other peculiarities that are equally strange to us. But it
may be wholesome for us to remember that some of our customs
impress the Chinese no less oddly. The Frankfurter Zeitung,
Germany, prints the following from a Chinese who had seen
much of the Europeans and Americans in Shanghai:


``We are always told that the countries of the foreign devils are grand
and rich; but that cannot be true, else what do they all come here for?
It is here that they grow rich. They jump around and kick balls as if
they were paid to do it. Again you will find them making long tramps
into the country; but that is probably a religious duty, for when they
tramp they wave sticks in the air, nobody knows why. They have no
sense of dignity, for they may be found walking with women. Yet the
women are to be pitied, too. On festive occasions they are dragged
around a room to the accompaniment of the most hellish music.''


A Chinese resident in America wrote to his friends at home
a letter from which the following extract is taken:


``What is queerer still, men will stroll out in company with their wives
in broad daylight without a blush. And will you believe that men and
women take hold of each other's hands by way of salutation? Oh, I have
seen it myself more than once. After all, what can you expect of folk
who have been brought up in barbarous countries on the very verge of
the world? They have not been taught the maxims of our sages; they
never heard of the Rites; how can they know what good manners mean?
We often think them rude and insolent when I'm sure they don't mean it
they're ignorant, that's all.''[6]

[6] Smith, ``Rex Christus,'' p. 116.


A call that I made upon a high official in an interior city
developed a curious interest. He was a pale, thin man,
apparently an opium smoker and a mandarin of the old school.
But he was intelligent enough to ask me not only about ``the
twenty-story buildings of New York,'' but ``the differences
between the various Protestant sects,'' and in particular about
``the Mormons and their strength!'' Who could have
imagined that the Latter Day Saints of Utah could be known to a
Chinese nobleman of Chih-li? Verily, our own idiosyncrasies
are known afar.

It will thus be seen that mutual recriminations regarding
national peculiarities are not likely to be convincing to either
party. Human nature is much the same the world over. From
this view-point at least we may discreetly remember that

``There is so much bad in the best of us,
And so much good in the worst of us,
That it hardly behoves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.''


I do not mean to give an exaggerated impression of the
virtues of the Chinese or what Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop calls
``a milk-and-water idea'' of heathenism. Undoubtedly, they
have grave defects. Official corruption is well-nigh universal.
A correspondent of the North China Herald reports a well-
informed Chinese gentleman of the Province of Chih-li as
expressing the conviction that one-half the land tax never reaches
the Government. ``But that is not all,'' said he.


``There are other sources of income for the hsien official. Thus here
in this county, thirty-five or forty years ago, the Government imposed an
extra tax for the purpose of putting down the Tai-ping rebellion, and the
officials have continued to collect that tax ever since. Of course if the
literati should move in the matter and report to Paoting-fu, the magistrate
would be bounced at once; but they are not likely to do so. The tax is a
small one, my own share not being more than five dollars or so.''


China's whole public service is rotten with corruption.
Offices with merely nominal salaries or none at all are usually
bought by the payment of a heavy bribe and held for a term of
three years, during which the incumbent seeks not only to
recoup himself but to make as large an additional sum as
possible. As the weakness of the Government and the absence of
an outspoken public press leave them free from restraint, China
is the very paradise of embezzlers. ``Any man who has had the
least occasion to deal with Chinese courts knows that `every
man has his price,' that not only every underling can be
bought, but that 999 out of every 1,000 officials, high or low,
will favour the man who offers the most money.''[7] Dishonesty
is not, as with the white race, simply the recourse in emergency
of the unscrupulous man. It is the habitual practice, the rule
of intercourse of all classes. The Chinese apparently have no
conscience on the subject, but appear to deem it quite praise-
worthy to deceive you if they can.


[7] Rev. Dr. C. H. Fenn, Peking.


Gambling is openly, shamelessly indulged in by all classes.
As for immorality, the Rev. Dr. J. Campbell Gibson of Swatow
says that ``while the Chinese are not a moral people, vice has
never in China as in India, been made a branch of religion.''
But the Rev. Dr. C. H. Fenn, of Peking, declares ``that every
village and town and city--it would not be a very serious ex-
aggeration to say every home,--fairly reeks with impurity.''
The Chinese are, indeed, less openly immoral than the Japanese,
while their venerated books abound with the praises of virtue.
But medical missionaries could tell a dark story of the extent
to which immorality eats into the very warp and woof of
Chinese society. The five hundred monks in the Lama
Temple in Peking are notorious not only for turbulence and
robbery, but for vice. The temple is in a spacious park and
includes many imposing buildings. The statue of Buddha is
said to be the largest in China--a gilded figure about sixty feet
high--colossal and rather awe-inspiring in ``the dim religious
light.'' But in one of the temple buildings, where the two
monks who accompanied us said that daily prayers were
chanted, I saw representations in brass and gilt that were as
filthily obscene as anything that I saw in India. There is
immorality in lands that are called Christian, but it is disavowed
by Christianity, ostracized by decent people and under the ban
of the civil law. But Buddhism puts immorality in its temples
and the Government supports it. This particular temple has
the yellow tiled roofs that are only allowed on buildings
associated with the Imperial Court or that are under special
Imperial protection. Mr. E. H. Parker, after twenty years'
experience in China, writes,


``The Chinese are undoubtedly a libidinous people, with a decided
inclination to be nasty about it. . . . Rich mandarins are the most
profligate class. . . . Next come the wealthy merchants. . . . The
crapulous leisured classes of Peking openly flaunt the worst of vices.

Still, amongst all classes and ranks the moral sense is decidedly
weak. . . . Offenses which with us are regarded as almost capital--
in any case as infamous crimes--do not count for as much as petty
misdemeanours in China.[8]


[8] ``China,'' pp. 272, 273


More patent to the superficial observer is a cruelty which
appears to be callously indifferent to suffering. This manifests
itself not only in most barbarous punishments but in a thou-
sand incidents of daily life. The day I entered China at
Chefoo, I saw a dying man lying beside the road. Hundreds
of Chinese were passing and repassing on the crowded
thoroughfare. But none stopped to help or to pity and the sufferer
passed through his last agony absolutely uncared for and lay
with glazing eyes and stiffening form all unheeded by the
careless throng. Twenty-four hours afterwards, he was still lying
there with his dead face upturned to the silent sky, while the
world jostled by, buying, laughing, quarrelling, heedless of the
tragedy of human life so near. And when in Ching-chou-fu, I
stopped to see if I could not give some relief to a woman who
was writhing in the street, I was hastily warned that if I
touched her unasked, the populace might hold me responsible
in the event of her death and perhaps demand heavy damages,
if, indeed, it did not mob me on the spot. Undoubtedly the
Chinese are often deterred from aiding a sufferer because they
fear that if death occurs ``bad luck'' will follow them, a horde of
real or fictitious relatives will clamour for damages, and perhaps a
rapacious magistrate will take advantage of the opportunity to
make a criminal charge which can be removed only by a heavy
bribe. And so the sick and poor are often left to die uncared
for in crowded streets, and drowning children are allowed to
sink within a few yards of boats which might have rescued
them. But everywhere in China, little attention is paid to
suffering and many customs seem utterly heartless.

In spite, too, of the agnostic teachings of Confucius and
their own practical temperament, the Chinese are a very
superstitious people and live in constant terror of evil spirits. The
grossest superstitions prevail among them, while beyond any
other people known to us they are stagnant, spiritually dead,
densely ignorant of those higher levels of thought and life to
which Christianity has raised whole classes in Europe and
America.

Some people who are ignorant of the real situation in China
are being misled by an anonymous little book entitled ``Letters
From a Chinese Official.'' The author insists that Anglo-Saxon
institutions are far inferior to the institutions of China. He
declares that ``our religion (Chinese) is more rational than
yours, our morality higher and our institutions more perfect,''
and that there is less real happiness in Europe and America
than in China. As for Christianity, he regards it as quite
impracticable. He holds that Confucianism is feasible and that
Christianity is not, and much more to the same effect. There
is strong internal evidence that the author is not a Chinese at all,
but a cynical European. At any rate, the book is an ex parte
statement of the most glaring kind, omitting the good in
Europe and America and the bad in China. One who has
visited the Celestial Empire gasps when he reads that the
Chinese houses are ``cheerful and clean,'' that the Chinese live the
life of the mind and the spirit to a far higher degree than the
Christian peoples of the West, and that Chinese life has a
dignity and peace and beauty which Europe cannot equal. ``Such
silence! Such sounds! Such perfume! Such colour!''
the author rhapsodizes. Bishop Graves, of Shanghai, who has
spent a quarter of a century in China and who is therefore
presumably competent to speak, declares:


``Far be it from me to belittle the beauty of the Chinese landscape;
but why did he not leave out that about the perfume? Why, you can
smell China out at sea! However, it is just as easy to imagine the
perfume as the rest of it, while you are writing. . . . Exaggeration is
the most conspicuous note of these `Letters.' Any one who has not
seen China can test whether this book is true to fact by comparing it with
any narrative of sober travel, and if he happens to live in China, his own
nose and eyes are a sufficient witness. . . . The writer takes the
worst of our morals, the weakest of our religion, the most debasing of our
industrial conditions, the most pernicious of our vices, and against them
he sets not the best that China can show, but an exaggerated picture
which is false to fact. This is not argument but trickery, because it
presumes on the fact that one's readers will know no better.''


Indeed, the Rev. Dr. C. H. Fenn, who has resided in
Peking for ten years, writes that he cannot believe that the
author of ``Letters from a Chinese Official'' is a sincere man.
He continues:


``I would be almost willing to assert that it is impossible for a man,
brought up in China, then spending many years abroad, to return to China
and write such a book in honesty and sincerity of heart. He could not
possibly help knowing that nine-tenths of what he was writing about
China was absolutely untrue, that her political, legal, social, domestic and
personal life are rotten to the core, and that only in a few exceptional
cases is any pretence even made of living according to the ethics of
Confucius. It might be possible for an educated man, whose surroundings
had always been of an exceptionally good character, and who had never
gone outside of his own province or studied foreign books, to write with
some enthusiasm of the beauties of Chinese life, but not for any one else.''


Still, at a time when the Chinese are being vociferously
abused, it is only fair that we should give them credit for the
good qualities which they do possess. I ask with Dr. William
Elliott Griffis: ``In talking of our brother men, what shall
be our general principle, detraction or fair play? Because
lackadaisical writers picture the Christless nations as in the
innocence of Eden, shall we, at the antipodes of fact and
truth, proceed to blacken their characters? Shall we compare
the worst in Canton, Benares or Zululand, with the best in London,
Berlin or Philadelphia? Surely God cannot look with
complacency or hear with delight much of the practical slander
spoken among white folks and Anglo-Saxons of His children
and our brothers.''

There has been too much of a disposition to think of the
Chinese as a mass, almost as we would regard immense herds
of cattle or shoals of fish. Why not rather think of the
Chinese as an individual, as a man of like passions with
ourselves? Physically, mentally, and morally he differs from us
only in degree, not in kind. He has essentially the same hopes
and fears, the same joys and sorrows, the same susceptibility to
pain and the same capacity for happiness. Are we not told
that God ``hath made of one blood all nations of men''?
We complacently imagine that we are superior to the Chinese.
But discussing the question as to what constitutes superiority
and inferiority of race, Benjamin Kidd declares that ``we shall
have to set aside many of our old ideas on the subject. Neither
in respect alone of colour, nor of descent, nor even of the
possession of high intellectual capacity, can science give us any
warrant for speaking of one race as superior to another.'' Real
superiority is the result, not so much of anything inherent in
one race as distinguished from another, as of the operation
upon a race and within it of certain uplifting forces. Any
superiority that we now possess is due to the action upon us of
these forces. But they can be brought to bear upon the
Chinese as well as upon us. We should avoid the popular
mistake of looking at the Chinese ``as if they were merely
animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man's
face.''[9] ``There is nothing,'' says Stopford Brooke, ``that needs
so much patience as just judgment of a man. We ought to
know his education, the circumstances of his life, the friends
he has made or lost, his temperament, his daily work, the
motives which filled the act, the health he had at the time--we
ought to have the knowledge of God to judge him justly.''


[9] George Eliot.


We need in this study a truer idea of the worth and dignity
of man as man, a realization that back of almond eyes and under
a yellow skin are all the faculties and the possibilities of a
human soul, to grasp the great thought that the Chinese is not
only a man, but our brother man, made like ourselves in the
image of God. Let us have the charity which sees beneath all
external peculiarities our common humanity, which leads us to
respect a man because he is a man; which, no matter what
complexion he may have, no matter where he lives, no matter
to what degradation he has fallen, will take him by the hand
and endeavour to elevate him to a higher plane of life. For
him we need an enthusiasm for humanity which shall not be a
sentimental rhetoric, but a catholic, throbbing love, remembering
that he is

``Heir of the same inheritance,
Child of the self-same God,
He hath but stumbled in the path
We have in weakness trod.''


Ruskin reminds us that the filthy mud from the street of a
manufacturing town is composed of clay, sand, soot and water;
that the clay may be purified into the radiance of the sapphire;
that the sand may be developed into the beauty of the opal; that
the soot may be crystallized into the glory of the diamond and
that the water may be changed into a star of snow. So man in
Asia as well as in America may, by the transforming power of
God's Spirit, be ennobled into the kingly dignity of divine
sonship. We shall get along best with the Chinese if we remember
that he is a human being like ourselves, responsive to kindness,
appreciative of justice and capable of moral transformation
under the influence of the Gospel. He differs from us not
in the fundamental things that make for manhood, but only in
the superficial things that are the result of environment. From
this view-point, we can say with Shakespeare:--

``There is some sort of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out.''


Those who are wont to refer so contemptuously to the Chinese
might profitably recall that when, in Dickens' ``Christmas
Carol,'' the misanthropic Scrooge says of the poor and suffering:
``If he be like to die, he had better do it and decrease
the surplus population,''--the Ghost sternly replies:--

``Man, if man you be at heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant
until you have discovered what the surplus is and where it is. Will you
decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the
sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions
like this poor man's child. Ah, God! to hear the insect on the leaf
pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!''



III

ATTITUDE TOWARDS FOREIGNERS--CHARACTER
AND ACHIEVEMENTS

TO understand China's attitude towards foreigners, the
following considerations must be borne in mind:--

First, the conservative temperament of the Chinese.
It is true but misleading, to say that they have ``no word or
written character for patriotism, but 150 ways of writing the
characters for good luck and longlife.'' For while the Chinese
may have little love for country, they have an intense
devotion to their own customs. For nearly 5,000 years, while
other empires have risen, flourished and fallen, they have lived
apart, sufficient unto themselves, cherishing their own ideals,
plodding along their well-worn paths, ignorant of or indifferent
to the progress of the Western world, mechanically memorizing
dead classics, and standing still comparatively amid the
tremendous onrush of modern civilization. I say comparatively
still, for if we carefully study Chinese history, we shall find
that this vast nation has not been so inert as we have long
supposed. The very revolutions and internal commotions of all
kinds through which China has passed would have prevented
mere inertia. But when we compare these movements and the
changes that they have wrought with the kaleidoscopic
transformations in Europe and America, China appears the most
stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than
western peoples have in decades. The restless Anglo-Saxon is
alternately irritated and awed by this massive solidity, not to
say stolidity. There is, after all, something impressive about
it, the impressiveness of a mighty glacier which moves, indeed,
but so slowly and majestically that the duration of an ordinary
nation's life appears insignificant as compared with the almost
timeless majesty of the Chinese Empire.

Second, the vastness of China. Her territory and population
are so enormous that her people found sufficient scope for
their energies within their own borders. They therefore felt
independent of outsiders. The typical European nation is so
limited in area and is so near to equally civilized and powerful
peoples that it could not if it would live unto itself. The
situation of most nations forces them into relations with others.
But China had a third of the human race and a tenth of the
habitable globe entirely to herself, with no neighbours who had
anything that she really cared for. It was inevitable, therefore,
that a naturally conservative people should become a self-
centred and self-satisfied people.

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