Chapter XI: The New China: Awake and at Work

Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution (she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would indorse.

And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treating of it these last five years.

Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exaggerate when he declares that in a European sense China has made greater progress these last ten years than in the preceding ten centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too rapidly.

Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader {103} undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for six months after his return he is the most respected authority in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have English officials embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the beginnings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which gives especial attention to English and other modern branches--by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come from all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to house China's first national parliament--unless the parliament comes before this building can be made ready.

And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance.

The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were {104} promised within nine years. At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parliament has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly: "Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be presented to Us; Our mind is made up."

Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon viceroys and compelled these high officials to petition for a reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well," they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the {107} living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood.

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The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is
shown here in the lap of his father. Prince Chun, the Regent.

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Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing
success of China's crusade to free her people from the opium curse
may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in
history--a challenge to our Western world.

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At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the dominating figure--the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys, was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It is evident that the government is to have a docile and submissive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3. Reuter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of the Assembly's labors.

And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial Assemblies!

From the very beginning the course of this National Assembly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has reminded me of the old States-General in France in the days just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great masterpiece is the most popular work of historical literature ever translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of restraint as well as of aggressiveness!

Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred government members standing up against the imperious pressure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly {108} unanimously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of constitutional government. The day this petition was presented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalterableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parliament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I write this.

It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parliament will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practically established the rule of the people centuries before any European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, governors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept in check. Thus centuries of practical self-government in local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise.

Parliamentary government is the one great accomplishment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.

Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success {109} in enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."'

China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present condition, not with that of other nations, but with her own condition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!

Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would have been hopelessly balked.

The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Trimetrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical statements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed the powers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineering or mining."

A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day--without an alphabet--separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the average student's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance of the next twenty years.

The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an education and became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, if the son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111} village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has been held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: the power which only an educated common people can give.

China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better have no son than one who is a soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to 200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the army is said to be the most honestly administered department of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the empire (the Shanghai _National Review_) protesting that interest in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to pander to this militarist spirit."

It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior {112} equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for example, this description by an eye-witness:

"Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk
banner, but few were armed with modern weapons. Those who had rifles
and modern weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of
twenty different sorts and sizes were huddled together without any
attempt at classification, and in one open space all sorts were
heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fitting them to their
arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit the
weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap."

No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could have atoned for such criminal indifference to equipment on the part of the officers. It seems to be the opinion of the military authorities with whom I have talked that the Chinese army is now better manned than officered. "Wherever there has been a breach of discipline, I have found it the officers' fault," an American soldier told me.

The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan, and that country's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria have doubtless quickened China's desire for military strength. Moreover, she wishes to grow strong enough to denounce the treaties by which opium is even now forced upon her against her will, and by which she is forced to keep her tariff duty on foreign goods averaging 5 per cent., alike on luxuries and necessities.

The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing of her Augean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else than the abolition of the system of "squeeze," or graft, on the part of her officials. In fact, no other reform can be complete until this is accomplished. The bulk of every officer's receipts comes not from his salary, which is as a rule absurdly small, but from "squeezes"--fees which every man who has dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, these fees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but their acceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High {113} offices are auctioned off. When I was in Manchuria it was currently reported that the Governor of Kirin had paid one hundred thousand taels for his office. When I was in New-chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had just enriched himself to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit to that port. The men who had had favors from him or had favors to ask left "presents" of a rather substantial character when they called. I learn from an excellent authority that when an electric lighting contract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a short time ago the officials provided a squeeze for themselves of 10 per cent., but that the Nanking officials, in arranging for electric lights there, didn't even seem to care whether the plant worked at all or not: they were anxious only to make a contract which would net them 35 per cent, of the gross amount! Under such circumstances it is not surprising to learn that many an office involving the handling of government revenues has its price as definitely known as the price of stocks or bonds.

In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty which almost any other nation might envy. With their quickened spirit of patriotism they will doubtless see to it that their public business is relieved of the shameless disgrace that the "squeeze system" now attaches to it.

These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened China is addressing herself. Of course, the continued development of her railways is no less important than any other matter I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded as one of China's really new tasks. For years she has been alive to the importance of uniting the people of the different provinces by means of more railways, more telegraph lines, and better postal service. The increase in number of pieces of mail handled from 20,000,000 pieces in 1902 to 306,000,000 in the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the progress of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the people. By telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now make their wishes known to the Son of Heaven and the {114} Tzucheng Yuan; it was by telephone that this Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly, requested the Grand Council of the Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my first visit. The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from Mongolia to Peking--I have seen them wind their serpentine length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doing for centuries past--but no longer do they bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi. Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes an undaunted telegraph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of the earth."

It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability of a new China; the question now is as to how the new China is going to affect the United States and the rest of the world. From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and vastly nearer in fact than any map has ever indicated. Even New York City is now nearer to Shanghai and Hong Kong, in point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a century ago. How Japan's awakening has increased that country's foreign trade all the world knows--and China has eight times the population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, with almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet untouched! Some one has said that to raise the Chinese standard of living to that of our own people would be (from the standpoint of markets) equivalent to the creation of four Americas. The importance of bringing about closer commercial relations between the United States and the Middle Kingdom can hardly be overestimated.

It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate China's friendship we shall not go to the length of changing our policy of excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thoughtful student it must be plain that in the end such a change would lead only to disastrous reaction. At the same time we might well effect a change in our methods of enforcing that policy. There is nothing else on land or sea that the Celestial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated, and it {115} is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy rather than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in the way of thorough cordial relations with America. You wouldn't so much object to having the servant at the door report his master not at home to visitors, but you would object to having the door slammed in your face; and John Chinaman is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own friendliness for John should lead us to adopt the more courteous of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusion law, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and provide that there shall be admitted into America any year only so many Chinese laborers as there were American laborers admitted into China the preceding year?

Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening of China is a matter far more profound than any statistics of exports or imports or railway lines or industrial development. The Dragon Empire cannot become (as she will) one of the mightiest Powers of the earth, her four hundred million people cannot be brought (as they will be brought) into the full current of the world's activities, without profoundly influencing all future civilization. For its own sake Christendom should seize quickly the opportunity offered by the present period of flux and change to help mold the new force that it must henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow peril, whatever that may be," as Mr. Roosevelt said while President, "is not the repression of life, but the cultivation and direction of life." The school, the mission, the newspaper--these are the agencies that should be used. Japan has thousands of teachers in China and scores of newspapers, but no other nation is adequately active. The present kindly feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial reception for American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those who feel the call to lands other than their own cannot find a more promising field than China.

Peking, China.

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