THE CHINESE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3444, 12 November 1932, Page 7

THE CHINESE

AN INTERESTING RACE. BOWL OF RICE AND CONTENTMENT. I like the Chinese says Mr. Buck in John O'London's Weekly, as they really are. They are not more truthful than I am, or more moral or more self-controlled, or any of the things we ought all to be and are not. But I am sure that in circumstances, such as theirs, where floods and famines a'nd bandits and an overpoweringignorance and a struggling Government are equally oppressive, I should not do my work better than they do. They have a naive love of a good time and loud chatter; they find pleasure in wine when they can get it, and they enjoy forgetting their troubles in gambling; they take a frank delight in sex and in quarrelling and commotion. They do not, it is true, work hard enough at anything, most of them to "get ahead" But I share with them their feeling that a bowl of rice to starve off hunger, and leisure, and sleep under a tree are worth more than harried striving for any larger material good, especially when bandits and taxes lie ready, like the proverbial worm and moth, to consume all earthly possessions. Nor have the heavens been so kind as to make one hope for kinder gods. Even for the purposes of a so-called "patriotism," I resent the deification of a very simple race. The glory and the strength of the Chinese people are in their humanity. Families rise and fall; their rise is from the land almost without exception, their fall is inevitable in the very nature of their life. The romance of their life is that any man has the chance to rise by luck and skill, in spite of Confucian maxims to the contrary, and if a man has imagination he has the first gift. But whatever they choose to do, they have lived so long as a race that they know from start to finish the failings to which we are all liable and they accept all. They allow for all that is human, and they are not oppressed by any sense of sin. Let the bones of Confucius lie where the common people of China have let them lie these many centuries, cold and dead in his dust, and his spirit between the covers of his books. I like these people as they are, common with the good commonness of everyday things, lusty, hardy, quarrelsome, alive!