CHINESE PACIFISM

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 7, 10 January 1938, Page 7

CHINESE PACIFISM

ROOTS IN THE PEOPLE

THE TRADITIONAL SPIRIT

. In a poem of the Tang Dynasty there is revealed the pacifism of China j says a writer in the "Manchester Guardian"). The story is a pastoral one. A youth, the son of a peasant, iis dismayed' at the thought of being impressed into the army. He ponders how he can avoid conscription, and at length contrives an accident so that his leg is broken. And this boy is made the hero of the poem. Instead of the brave young soldier the simple peasant is exalted, a peasant boy who was afraid to fight. The civil wars of the last fifteen , years rnigbt lead one to believe that the people of the Middle Kingdom are aggressive and war-loving. Yet the pacifism is real and deep-rooted. In the "Odes" written more than a thousand years before Christ (and later edited by Confucius) we find a spirit of peaceful simplicity. . But it ■is- not till the Golden Age of Philosophy, some five hundred years 8.C., that this traditional pacifism becomes crystallised. The philosopher Mo Tze declaimed against war with much the same reasoning as Sir Norman Angell in our generation. War benefits neither of the combatants. Campaigning in winter is too cold and in summer too hot; fighting in spring takes the farmer from the sowing and in autumn from the harvest. Let-us have none of it. His more famous contemporary, Lao Tze, the author of the Taoist religion, was even more of an extremist. For Taoism is 'the religion of naturalism and complete non-resistance. Here if anywhere is the original textbook of all pacifists. Mo Tze hated war because it was destructive and inexpedient. But Lao Tze has a much ■higher authority: not God, but an equally metaphysical concept, that of "Tao," which is the eternal way of Nature and of non-conflict. CONSIDERED A HERETIC. Although Confucius and his dis : ciple Mencius frowned upon Lao Tze. as a heretic, it was hot for Ijis pacifism but for his' lack of concern for the family. Taoism has declined as a formal religion, but much of its spirit has survived, and the imported religion of Buddhism has added to rather than detracted from the Taoist pacifism which today still inspires so many of the Chinese people. They did not praise the soldier in ancient China; on the contrary, he was despised. Society in China was divided into- four classes, which were, in order of importance, scholars, farmers, artisans and labourers, and merchants. Beyond and below those classes were other groups regarded as the lowest of professions, in which were included prostitutes and soldiers. Of course, the soldiers of long ago were rough mercenaries, and it was this that helped to bring the military into such disrepute. Yet the soldier was never admired, and even today, when China's armies are in the field, there is an old proverb still frequently-quoted by. the people: "Just as good iron is not' used for making nails, so a good son does not become a soldier." .1 have walked in the hot streets of Canton and by the lake at Hangchow and haye discussed with middle-aged men the menace of Japan,, and some have • shrugged their shoulders and told me of the past. In the time of the great'\Emperor Chin the Tartars came from the inorlh, and sometimes they conquered. From the west came the Mongols under-Jenghis and Kubla Khan, who conquered'the kingdom and most of the world in the illustrious Yuan Dynasty; but today they are no more. . ■ JAPANESE ALSO. • The Manchus in the seventeenth century swept away the Mings and for more than two hundred and fifty years rilled, and they, too, have perished, the last of the dynasties. China has been conquered and survived all her conquerors,-who live now only in history. And Japan? The tale may be tdld; again and the island people, with all its new energy, may conquer and be.absorbed into China like a. pebble dropped into a great lake. Yet- Republican China has rejected much of the traditional spirit. The scholar is less exalted and the merchant has achieved esteem. It is not often that you hear the derogatory proverbs about the soldier. For a great national army has risen to preserve the State; For a time the army must supersede even the scholar. For the new barbarism may be more effective in its destruction than' the old. It conies with new ideas born of a new method of industry. It is a menace which comes from the West as well as the East. Many European philosophers have preached a doctrine of struggle, just as the modern Fascist States believe in the goodness as well as the inevitability of conflict. Such thinkers could not have sprung from Chinese soil. Chinese pacifism does not claim so much to be an expedient for preventing war as a philosophy of life itself —a philosophy which must always win in the end, though the suffering may be great. "For," in Lao Tze's words; "it is "in' ■ the ■ way of Heaven not to strive, and none the' less to conquer"." ■ ■