WHAT OF THE EAST?

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18912, 29 January 1927, Page 17

WHAT OF THE EAST?

- T,_CHINA. "" " The Pulse of Asls. i ' ' „ wan to coagulate into th« Persian Guii ' :lnd /WP? W ' the intermittent ' took fonn 5n tl,is of the East? Tl.o Saoff ai'7 danger that might the negroid South, 'io rtlsorth for many thousand-, of ycnn '' he Feorn. wer« scattered to advance .outa'n mass It was not till the Roman to rot at the heart, that tribe. Wed to ißOve across ft BhiD. and the seamen ox -e A • StioeoMt. mad, raids into the M.u, L>e«>,* thP octa, all fear of any peoples or cm!j° e , that might lie beyond it. Iu Erf the steppes that ay between desert and again pastures or c.iplains,there •.asevera,-.uneasy ' , • 0 f the invasive ambitions Luit •vfltr-ttk bevond them. Though •' not reach outward to the Still about the secoid century beZLta era, there was evident m tue tc yond a consciousness or its as a great empire that uugut Star great ambitions m it grew in or -advanced » arts ana ■ 7jfoTthose very steppes that lowed Itirrier between Eas': and West we ; li intermittent source of danger tj all organisation. During; the irS pluvial periods they were not drew iu even trom 'West EC,mad pastorales, 1 also ilidustrious farmers who irri- > iSa'tbe hitherto barren plams from - '&raise4. levels of the lakes. But the rainy period passed the steppe Strides had to ,icako for the ncur- ' S fertile or irrigablo region; to tnc M «i t he Himalayan and otner mosnffianges fenced ihem m unless t.iej ' l»rs organised, and arjned, and coultt . onil to 'ho north J.c io.es.s \i She increasing cold of Siberia bar- \ Jj the ;way for most of them; t.iei i l ies were cast and west. Hfti.ee " r» ds ffom tho east !/ iw copies of Europe adrift and troublea i ¥otfMised peoples around tne Pers Si Golf and, the Mediterranean fai into historical times. axL Obina holds one fourth of ManAfflM and tho Pacific came to be available routo was the into the • rich plains that SlSfereat rivers, .the Boangho and ®|i!Wgtse,.ha<l been laying down in. shallow waters of:the western KMSc. and are still pushing out into Iff great ocean. Kansu, and Shensi, m'toi Shansi, the most north-westerly W'Wvinces of China, are also its richest account of the great accumulations f tf Joess, or blown humus, that form tfo many of their hills. : Hither natur- '' ally flocked the. bulk 'of the peoples that had collected on the Steppes-of ' Central Asia during the pluvial- and v irrigable period as the aridity increased *nd drove them out. The great Yellow . River .had beeri carrying down its burden of rich soil and manuring the plains to the west of .the Yellow Sea lor millioris of years. . And in the cheese-like' Jiills of, Joess- those immigrants could cut shelters for themiV.'so(rea, oj*jftaths and roads to travel on, '.js. it jronder that China has collected, within its borders one : fourth),of mankind? As new entered, many 4of' the former were n driven further j south mid east, . 'the . milder climate ; helping to driiw-them on, doubtless, to .findthe landalreadv somewhat occupied jftby peoples' from - the (south. And tho .floods, tl/at' the' great" rivers |Unnn4lly: auffer&l ; fjoni'at 'the -melting snows oht tho at their added force to the southward !i f iwenient of the: peoples. Crowding ''the coasts; lfenny /of the i |,;*ould be forced, to. take to tho islands What lay .■nearest, .and. gradually push farther and farther into j-tliei great ocean. [n; this stampede «r»?rota the Central Asian Steppes "before increasing aridity iwe have a true and V-J," ura l ■catlse-for tho immfensO populaastern, feheres of the pacific Ocean, and the'peopling ,of the scattered so'''widely, over its the southern coasts, j! Asia supply no such impetus to mariadventure; and iii the early hisOf man it was nne of his strong- ? T0 'd the dangers and ihdS&ftyl - 0 Bea ' nn d to shrink into the unknown. Populations of preISSv ay ? tter ® were plenty of without resorting to Fann ' Natural a ® taple 1 °^ aerva tions thai a of the world human empire, and hisI®;"®? 11 on, the estuaries .of great t man -abandons his §SuwTv? 0t Junting existenco for a ? nv ? r is h 5 .8 teacher in a3 it brings down not only M ° S n Beeds which, as tho ®THn. «?> 9 v°°d recedes, germinate. iffilfiittii 18 doubly true, inasmuch fHrfwini t avers have been maki 8114 80win S them with the time when Asia as T a conltaelf into the' Pacific; it »&:?**> a colossal farm, the largest imt- L mad e teady' for. tho hand of We was prepared by X~e_East, the basis for the me!?. 0 ? "fliSanfr social system that WKtti ir^ a -'? ere ca P a ble of; and sMEV«f'-™Peml hand was laid on it MtfSu T b '" u " i t0 be moro cnthe empires of conquest'P^^w!vJ! inety per cent of its most conservative i lollß ' tho cultivation of their , chief desire is to 0 the best with tlleir only government they that will keep Sa'H^l ?88ness a "d injustice, pro!»rasS #r . theni libert y to follow w " and make their livlts Elch Northern , ia its History. , la ®d and such a comChina has always been, * nto tbe t ' mes °f history thousands of years mistake the ~~ a .® 0 , \ s the assumption that eL* / v n S® om Pi r e it was to be known in the West; we time of Confucius, four ?: » Ma ° ar era ' il; was still eonl» A n Provinces, the land . 7 the Yellow River. And T ? n g dynasty (from lb v , n,nt b century of our » n^ Undanes reach soutlih« . - limits 5 then did it Inj F ovui ceg south of the *V}°* north of the Yellow l^rt>.^ rea ' ■ As ifc Pushed 1 BU bjected races that Wo. those of the ori- - o#el j 1(> aad the only thing that lljjiJ Was R strong Gorern.i. army. The I ™ed it began to fall into

piercs. only fo be soldered together again by a strong hand which was capr.blc of i'ouiiding a now dynasty. Many types of People in China, though tho Mongoloid predominates. Tito illusion that has haunted the mind of the West ;md led to iiinumcijibit- mistakes is that its lingo territory bus always been a unity. This is to ignore the fact that, thoiidi the Mongoloid pliysiojie predominates, many raves hsive cone to 'the making of the Chinese; not more than onefourth of tho Chinese have the oblique eye-slit to look through; you can see I'aees among them that belong to themain divisions of mankind, even the negroid, though the hroacl-cheeklwned and scanty-haired fare is must in evidence. In tho North, especially in Shantung and Manchuria, one fre(iiiciitly encounters very tall, hroadsiio'ildered men, and amidst the prevailing lank, black hair, I have not infrequently come across there men whoso hair was so wavy ihat it was with diflicuitv c.-mlinod ] n the pigtail. Kvcn in the valley of tho Yalung, to the south of Yangtsc, n:c;i arc met who could he takt-i! t'or aristocratic Europeans, with tall figures, oval, fine-featured face, and nlent-y of facehair. it t-tand.s to rea'son that if through thousands of vears rcople from tho West as vvcl! as from the Jjnst wore drawn into the steppes of Central Asia during pluvial periods, and when arid periods followed were sprayed eastwards, especially over the Northern Provinces of China, there should appear in the great Eastern Empire representatives of at! the races of the Old World, nvai from as far a:i the iiorth-west of Europß. Nor is it li/ioxpected that a tall, wavy-haired type should appear more frequently in the North than farther South, or that the people of the South should ho of lessor stature and more Mongoloid, where the aborigines were of tho Mongol race, as were great- numbers of the immigrants from, the North. Many languages in China; though the script unifies tho educated, it obstructs wide education. One conclusion can be drawn with certainty, that China, instead of having one race, is a conglomeration of races. It is the same with the- language; it is generally assumed that there is but one, a mistake due to the ise of one script,, or series of written characters, each of which stands for a single idea, so that men of different provinces, whose languages aio mutually unintelligible, efin make themselves understood to each other if they kr.ow the script. Again and again in wandering in different parts of China I found my guides from one province conversing" with men tf another province in pidgin English. Each province has a dominating language; and the Mandarin language is supposed to dominate tho others as being the radical from which they all diverged; but this is one of the most recent of the languages instead of the most ancient; it is the language of tho Court and the Governors, and carries ono little farther amongst tho people than any ono of the common provincial districts. Of course, the ideographic script enables the educated and scholars to converse iu writing, even when thev cannot- orally. But it is also this script that blocks the way to universal education: each idea or thing has its own character, and this means that there are tens of thousands to commit to memory; the minimum for any intercourse is two thousand, and for an educated man ten thousand; hut for a man to be" a scholar and know all the ancient" classics he must be familiar with seven or eight times as many; he would have passed the four series of examinations arid risen to the highest degree, worthy to belong to the Hanlin College, in Peking The Examination System Unified the Empire by Making Education a Passion. The elaborate system of examinations that was the cement of' the Imperial structure did not begin its full course till-the beginning of -the seventh ceutdry of our era, when the great Tang dynasty started its career of extending the Empire to its fullest hunts, and unifying it. Chinese education .had beiiuii. long before to tram the exceptional intellects; tho , script to which had slowly developed out ot the original ' hundred pictographs made some'education of the leaders, a necessity. But not till the'reform of the civil service- examinations by the Tang dynasty did it become the highest and most passionate pursuit of the nation; to produce a scholar to whom were open tho highest offices of State became the ambition of every family, every village, evfjry province, although it left all the rest practically uneducated. In every town and city there was an examination hall with cells for tho isolation of the candidates; those selected in these' were then pitted against each other in the province, and the few that survived this more severe examination were then tested in Peking in competition with those that survived the tests in the other- provinces, and the highest on'the list after two special'examinations before tho Emperor was proclaimed the Laureate. One can imagine the glory of this position if one were to think of a Senior Wrangler of tho whole British Empire, including India, chosen out- of all those who should survive the severest sifting of talent in every Dominion, and,if the name of the successful candidate were •broadcast to every corner of the Empire. It Democratised China and drew talent into the service of the Nation. Tho training it led to was thoroughly unpractical, as unpractical as trie defence of a thesis in our medieval universities or the making of; Greek and Latin verso that for centuries was the preparation in our English universities for the career not only ot scholars, but of statesmen. But it selected and brought to the front the talent of the Empire. Its mam test was to write an essay and;a poem m the language of the classics, as iinlike the language the candidates spoke as Latin and Greek are like modern English; and so it directed all education into lines that had little relationship to life. But it differentiated ability, and brought the best into the service of the Empire. It assigned offices to the most capable instead of to those only who were well born or who had most influential friends at court. It took the Government out of the hands of the feudal aristocracy who ruled and quarrelled and warred in the earlier periods of Chinese history. It thus democratised China, and cave a state career to those who might otherwise have been stirring rebellion and setting up rival governments amongst the various races that made up the empire. The Republic established in 1912 is no Republic, having no means of organising public opinion. \ Without this agglutinating factor, directing all the ambition and explosive talent into the service of the State, China would long ago havo gone- to pieces*; it would have dissolved into its constituent racial or linguistic units. And this was what occurred when tho republic was established in 1912, and wiped out the examination system and all that it meant. It* was not a real republic, and never could be so, as long as the ideographic script with its tens of thousands of characters remained the only medium of education and intercourse. A republic is a farce that is not based on a well-organised public opinion, and that can never exist without a widespread journalism or means of daily inter-communication of news and views. There is no democracy unless the people forms through the Press a nation-wide debating society. And l how can a Press come into existence in a community in which it has been calculated, not more than one-tenth of the men, and few or none, of the wo-

men, can read? It is true that Mr James Yen', who lias just sent me a Christmas card from Peking, is confident of soon instructing, by means of his volunteer teachers, all tho four hundred million of his fellow countrymen in the use of his abridged script; he has reduced the tens of thousands of characters to about a thousand; the least one can wish him is Godspeed in the realisation of his line ideal; but the knowledge of the failure of the many attempts to spread a universal language makes one reserve judgment till the experiment has gone further. Peking, the Mongol Capital, lias lost grip of the South. Peking, made by the Mongols iu the thirteenth century tho centre of the original China, lias lost hold of the central and southern provinces; its government is only strong enough to make claims and demands from the foreigners, who have lent China large sums, and have ventured fo trade within its borders, without being able to afford them any protection. The old empire when fully organised and furnished with an army that seemed able to enforce its orders was, quite incapable of suppressing corruption iu its provincial governments and law courts, and it bluffed the world till it was so easily defeated by Japan. The republic has lost the leverage of the examination .system, and all hold on tho armed forces; how can it possibly guarantee incorrupt justice to the foreigners, or pure government to the various . provinces. The mountain-bred and sea-bred people of the South have been ever difficult to subdue. / The south has ever beeu a source of rebellion and a hotbed of anarchy, even under the most highly organised government, and the most powerful emperor. i"or the provinces there were the last to be incorporated in the empire. Their mountainous character makes their people harder to subdue; for mountaineers are great champions of liberty; and so too are the seafaring .people of the great estuary; there arc few ages of the past iu which its bays and islands were not the haunts of pirates, nor has China ever had a navy powerful and mobilo enough to keep them down. The people of tho south differ wholly from those of the centre and north; tho fertile plains make the latter a fanning community, whose chief desire is to be let alone to follow their natural pursuit, and to be protected from lawlessness by a strong government; security is more their ideal than freedom. Canton the Natural Centre of Agitation and Rebellion all Through History. Canton was, therefore, the first recipient of foreign commerce and foreign ideas; it was here the Arabs first came with their goods and their new religion; it was her© the Portuguese, and after them the Dutch and the English, first found footing. And to a hermit Empire that seems to have sealed all its points of vantage against the enemy a foreign intrusion causes profound disturbance., Whenever anything has disturbed China the cry arises "Out with the foreigner" and spreads widely; it has echoed through its whole history. And where only a small minority is educated, the people become a mob under the influence ot a widespread cry; neither reason nor justice is likely to, influence them; they are at the mercy of the agitator and tho demagogue. As tho Empire weakened and the old system of education and examination was distrusted and ultimately dissolved, there was a rush of the student class to foreign universities; seventeen years ago it was reported that there were sixteen thousand Chinese students m Tokio. Some had begun a generation before to seek new knowledge in the Enghsh and American Universities; and when America devoted its share ot the Boxer ■indemnity to scholarships for Chinese at its universities the tide turned to them; and now that the students return in large numbers and find no employment for their acquisitions, they are naturallv discontented and become agitators. They have brought back wtth them the new post helium slogans of self-determination and national independence and have identified them with tho old one ot "Out with the foreigner." Even in 1909, in the ast days of the Empress, I heard them erfioed all round the coasts, though the? had not.penetrated far inland; the peaceful conservatism ot the farmer was still in the ascendant there. 'IVy had brought with them, too the new methods of Western' .labour, the strike, and the terrorism of picketing. And these took deep root; Stff coincided with the ancient Sineseretaliatory method of the boycott. Seventeen years ago the latter was in full swing againstlhe^ Japanese and against the Germans, and with it went occasionally the new method of the strike. Even if the republic .has lost the unifying system °f tion there has remained to it the sttu more powerful system of secret societies which, when the anti-foreign cry arises, come into combination to njake it effective. The Taiping rebellion began with 'the Aborigines of the South. Up till recent times it was the south that most indulged in these outbursts of coalescing anarchy at the instigation Of returning students with their foreign ideas and influences. On my voyage across the Pacific to Japan I came across one or two young Cantonese who had been at American universities, anu they were quite certain that Canton and its armies would unify China. This southern advance on the north has occurred more than once in the past; but it was'always arrested before it dismembered the country. The most successful was the Taiping rebellion ot the fifties and sixties of last century; its leader was a Hakka from the mountains to the east of Canton, and he set out with high ideals; the word Taiping means "Great Peace"; in the minds of his followers it was the intention to set on the throne a descendant, of the Ming dynasty, native rulers who had been ousted by the Manchus from the north early in the seventeenth century ; for the Hakkas in the high country of Fokien the province to the north-east of Canton, had never been reconciled to the new government and had resisted the Manchu fashion of wearing their hair in a pigtail, as they had resisted the still older fashion of binding the feet of their women. They had been driven out of North China by persecution, and their name (Hakka) in its meaning "Stranger" shows that they were not always welcome in the south; they have crowded as workmen and workwomen into Cantou and the country to the west of it where the aboriginals, the Miao and the Lolo, remain only half-subdued by the Chinese empire. They form a considerable percentage of the southern Chinese who emigrate to the countries in and around the Pacific. And it was natffral that this, restless element should form the main'part of the army of "the Great Peace." They marched and conquered, during the ten years that their movement continued, to within seventy miles of Peking; and had the Manchu dynasty not called in the Tartar Cavalry from the north and General Gordon to organise and train an army to oppose them, it would have fallen in the nineteenth century and :; Hakka dynasty taken its place. The Boxer movement of the last years of the century was on a different footing: it was nnti-foreign and intended to support the Manchu dynasty. Not long after the south was again in rebellion against Peking, and in 1909 a Japanese steamer was captured near Macao gun running to the rebels, and one of the mistakes of the Japanese Government was to compel the Chinese to let it go; , the result was a long boycott of Japan-

ese trade throughout China, and an intensification of Chinese hatred ot tJ.c Japanese that had been roused by war between the two nations, and mat smoulders even more deeply now. The Republic unreal unless prepared for by Generations of Education. Jt. was tho most natural thing that when ea.lv in 101-J the IVlanchu dynasty lost its power on the death ot tho Kmp.es*, the demand for a republic should come Horn tho south, and especially fro... Canton, bunyatson, tho foreign-trained rebel, led tho movement, and, though conceding to i uanshikai the Presidency of the new republic-, stirred the south against liih imperialist ambitions, and on tho deain of the president (it is suspected by poison) against the ambition of the north to master the new Government. Before his own death he di.l immeasurable harm to his country by bringing Canton and the south into touch with Moscow. . , , JL is the misfortune of China that hei students who go abroad for their training do not study their own civilisation before they attempt to impose on it that of the West. A ■ moment s thought would have shown how disastrous it would be for a people accustomed to an organised Empire to adapt themselves to the self-govern-ment of a republic without long preparation, and especially for a people who could not read journals even it they had them, to form public opinion, the first and the essential condition of the success of a republic. Even it the script had been abridged mlo a form that would have been easily learned by all the provinces, it would have taken generations, if not centuries, to educate the four hundred million so tar as to understand political idcas x .and to vote intelligently on any question. AVithoitt an educated and organised public opinion based on universal ability to read, and widespread and intelligent journalism, a Government that has to be selected by the votes of the people is nothing but a pretence. The War-Lords can keep their armies together only if financially backed. There is, in fact, no real Government in China at present. That in Peking is not even master of itself or ot the city in which it is set up. In the Treaty ports there is on tho horizon mob-rule unless the foreign Concession can, by volunteers, take some command. The self-constituted war-lords can keep their districts under provided they can raise sufficient funds, by plunder, by taxation, or from backers to pay and feed their army, and remain close enough to tho restive centres to suppress mob-rule. Sunchuanfang has the merchants of Shanghai to supply him with finances, but cannot venture far from his base.- AVupeifu has evidently lost the support of his backers, and having, therefore, no trustworthy aimv, is of little importance in the tussle. Feng, the so-called Christian general, evidently lost the .financial support of his Bolshevik backers, and retired temporarily to Moscow to reorganise. The only two who can keep their armies together are Changtsolin in Manchuria and Chiang Kaishek south of the Yangtso. It is shrewdly suspected that the northern war lord draws' some of the necessary funds and muniments from Japan, and Chiang some of his from Moscow. Plunder and Chaos are the Order of the Day, and there is No Sign of the Strong Government' that has been the Chief Essential of Chinese Unity. Of course every general draws all he can from the region he has mastered, as he draws all the vagabonds and unemployed and brigands with his army. Settlement in a province therefore means constant plunder. And as a rule it is the farmers and traders and merchants that suffer most; they aro the backbone" of the country, and try to secure any surplus cash they may have in one of the banks of the treaty ports or Hong-Kong. The state of thy country can only be described as ehaos. Several Peking officials with whom I travelled on the Japanese railways agreed with mo that the only tiling in its past history that kept it a unity was a strong Imperial Government, and now that the Government is negligible it is bound to go to pieces. In Japan a foreigner can travel anywhere with perfect safety; in China' it is not safo to go far from tho foreign-controlled town; this was the opinion expressed to me by a professor in one of tho Christian colleges in the Canton area, as wc travelled together from Kobe to Hong-Kong. And if tho courts in tho foreign concessions of the treaty ports are done away with, and foreigners have to trust to the/ corrupt Chinese Courts, it will not be long' before foreign commerce must disappear. It will not need the instigation of the students or tho violence of the mob to oust the foreigners; they will go, if only for safety's sake, and leave the great ports and marts they havo developed to return to their primeval mudflats. The best of the old Chinese civilisation will vanish, and only the worst introductions from Occidental civilisation will survive.