Chapter XIV: Sidelights on Chinese Character and Industry

Having mentioned some of the good points of John Chinaman (and he has many excellent points), it is also necessary to point out some of his shortcomings. The trouble with John is that he had some tiptop ancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking backward at them so continuously that he has failed, in recent centuries, to make any further progress. He had a civilization and a literature when our white ancestors were wearing skins; but there he stopped, so that we have not only caught up with him, but have passed him almost immeasurably. The result is that now China is waking up to find that a great number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life, must be sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy modern nation.

Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium I have already written at length. But this is only a beginning.

With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other dragons to slay--if I may use the term dragon in an evil sense in a country whose national emblem is the dragon. For one thing, slavery still exists in China. A friend of mine in Peking told me of an acquaintance, an educated Chinaman, who bought a young girl two years ago for two hundred taels (about $120 gold), and says now he would not take one thousand two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigorous sentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has {133} developed over the empire. About six months ago an imperial edict was issued prohibiting slave trading, decreeing that child-slaves should become free on reaching the age of twenty-five, and opening ways for older slaves to buy their freedom. The peons or slaves of the Manchu princes were, however, excepted from the terms of this edict.

Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil. Formerly every respectable Chinese father bound the feet of all his girls. Fathers who did not were either degraded men, reckless of public opinion, or so bitterly poor as to require the services of their daughters in unremitting manual labor. Consequently, a natural foot on a woman became a badge of social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominence wouldn't marry her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-class Chinamen in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unbound feet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle and lower classes generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees such a barbaric practice, will also abandon it.

The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid as could be wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a husband for his daughter even though she has natural feet, but ambitious fathers among the common people fear to take such risks. An American lady whose home I visited has a servant who asked for two or three weeks' leave of absence last summer, explaining that he wished to bind the feet of his baby daughter. My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, and having a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries with which the poor little creatures protest for weeks against their suffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone. But to no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty," he said, and went home unconvinced.

"The feet," according to the brief statement of ex-Minister Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The {134} parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girl and woman must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see a Chinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old pictures of Pan, the imaginary Greek god with the body of a man and the feet of a goat. The resemblance to goat's feet is remarkably striking. As the women are unable to take proper exercise--except with great pain--there is little doubt that their physical strength has been seriously impaired by this custom, and that the stamina of the whole race as well has suffered in consequence.

Whenever a foreigner--it is the white man who is "the foreigner" over here--begins a comparison or contrast between the Chinese and the Japanese, he is sure to mention among the first two or three things the vast difference in moral standards with regard to family life. The cleanness of the family life in China, he will tell you, is one of the great moral assets of the race, while the contrary conditions largely prevailing in Japan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to the people.

As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no very definite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more than one wife. In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals but of expense. It is one of the privileges of the Chinaman who can afford it, and the No. 1 wife is often glad for her husband to take a No. 2 and a No. 3 wife, because the secondary wives are somewhat under her authority and relieve her of much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman in Hankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit him to work for some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1, Wife No. 3, and the much-worried husband all joined in a protest against the household's losing so capable a woman.

All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and {135} in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly, of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmentionable foulness of them often smells to heaven.

Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman is content to live only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs are more common in a village of Chinamen than dogs in a village of negroes; and, in some cases, almost equally at home in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman in Kiukiang feeding a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrow streets around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lying contentedly asleep in the sunshine by the canal bank. In fact, the ancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of two characters--"pig" and "shelter"--a home being thus represented as a pig under a shelter!

Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge, and leprosy in evidence here and there. Quite recently a couple of mission teachers of my denomination have died of smallpox: they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai, as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare. There were one or two deaths from the plague among the Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots. The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should find the city in a state of bloody civil war, but fortunately the trouble seems now to have blown over.

Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more faith in patent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than they do in approved sanitary measures. It is interesting to find that American patent medicines discredited at home by {136} the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the religious papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent, just as too many of our church papers at home are doing.

In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in Chinese and issued by the Christian Literature Society, and asked what was the advertisement on the back. "Dr. Williams's Pink Pills for Pale People," was the answer.

One of the most peculiar things about China is the existence of almost unlimited official corruption side by side with high standards of honesty and morality in ordinary business or private life. I have already referred to the system of "squeeze" or graft by which almost every official gets the bulk of his earnings. In Shanghai it is said that the Taotai, or chief official there, paid $50,000 (gold) for an office for which the salary is only $1500 (gold) a year.

Against this concrete evidence of official corruption place this evidence of a high sense of honor in private life. A young Chinaman, employed in a position of trust in Hankow, embezzled some money. The company, knowing that his family was one of some standing, notified the father. He and his sons, brothers of the thief, went after the young fellow and killed him with an ax. The community as a whole approved the action, because in no other way could the father free his family from the disgrace and ostracism it would have incurred by having an embezzler in it.

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{138}

This is the upper part of a scroll kindly written for the author by
Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh (or Alfred E. Kung as he signs himself in
English). Mr. Kung is a descendant of Confucius (Kung Fut-zu) of the
seventy-fifth generation, and the complete quotation of which the
scroll is a reproduction in Chinese characters reads as follows:

"Ssu-ma Niu asked for a definition of the princely man."

"The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief
nor fear.' 'Absence of grief and fear?' said Niu, 'Is this the mark
of a princely man?' The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart
and find no guilt there, why should he grieve? Or of what should he
be afraid?'"

{136 continued}

The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, mentioned in my last letter, I found very interesting. We were three days going the 600 miles. The Yangtze is the third largest river in the world and navigable 400 miles beyond Hankow, or 1000 miles in all. It would be navigable much farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's blue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139} it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety looking little native canoe called a "sampan," with tattered sails, bobbing up and down like a cork, finally landed me safely across the three or four miles of sea-like waves. All the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters all sorts of Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. In many cases they look like the primitive Greek and Roman boats of which one sees pictures in the ancient histories. The Chinese are excellent sailors and manage their boats very skilfully. The greatest canal that the world knows was begun by them in the time of Nebuchadnezzar and finished thirteen centuries ago.

Until very recently, however, the Chinese have not wanted railways. Coming from Hankow to Shanghai I passed in sight of the site of the old Woosung-Shanghai Railway, the first one built in China; but before it got well started the people tore it up and threw it into the river.

In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly Minister to the United States, and he told me of his troubles in building, under Li Hung Chang's directions, what turned out to be the first permanent railway in China. This was less than twenty-five years ago. Li Hung Chang said to Mr. Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build a railway, they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibility myself. The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is to let the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think it is." Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to work on the Tongshan Railway. He built first ten miles, then twenty more. Then as the road was working well, and its usefulness demonstrated, he and Li Hung Chang thought they might get permission from the Throne to construct a line from Tientsin to Peking. Successful in this effort, they went ahead with the survey and {140} imported from America the materials for building the line--and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The matter had been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and 80 per cent, of them had opposed building the line!

Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is calling for railroads in almost every non-railroad section, and the railroads already built are paying handsome dividends. Everybody seems to travel. Besides the first-class and second-class coaches, most trains carry box-cars, very much like cattle-cars and without seats of any kind, for third-class passengers. And I don't recall having seen one yet that wasn't chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of Americans would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the line between Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200-mile trip in five hours which formerly took him nineteen days. Before the railway came he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten miles a day, his luggage on one side the wheel, and himself on the other. Thousands of these wheelbarrows, doing freight and passenger business, are in use in Shanghai and the regions roundabout. A frame about three feet wide and four feet long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie will carry as much as half a ton on one of them.

Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is grown, and I went out into some of the fields in the neighborhood of Shanghai. The stalks were dead, of course, and in some cases women were pulling them up for fuel, but I could see that the Chinese is a poorer variety than our American cotton, and is cultivated more poorly. Instead of planting in rows as we do, the peasants about Shanghai broadcast in "lands" eight or ten feet wide, as we sow wheat and oats. About Shanghai they do not use the heavier two and three horse plows I found about Peking; consequently the land is poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or variety breeding has ever been attempted. No wonder that {141} the stalks are small, the bolls small and few in number, and the staple also very short.

From my observation I should say that with better varieties and better cultivation China could easily double her yields without increasing her acreage. There is likely to be some increase in acreage, too, however, because farmers who have had to give up poppy culture are in search of a new money crop, and in most cases will take up cotton.

As I have said before, the coolie class wear padded clothes all winter, and as they have no fire in their houses, they naturally have to wear several suits even of the padded sort. I remember a speech Congressman Richmond P. Hobson made several years ago in which he spoke of having seen Chinamen with clothes piled on, one suit on top of another, until they looked like walking cotton bales. Some of his hearers may have thought this an exaggeration, but if so, I wish to give him the support of my own observation and that of a preacher. As a Chinaman came in the street-car in Shanghai Friday my missionary host remarked: "That fellow has on four or five suits already, and he'll put on more as the weather gets colder."

Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International Cotton Mills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory that the Chinese men and women he employs average about 12 cents a day (American money), but that from his experience in England he would say that English labor at 80 cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'd have more for your money at the week's end. One white girl will look after four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, as you see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine; the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two overseers would be enough for this room, while here we must have seven."

Hong Kong.

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