letters, though since you call them incoherent there must be some gaps.
I'm sure we never write anything incoherent if you get it all. The
course of events has been a trifle incoherent if you don't sit up and
hold its hands all the time. Since China didn't sign the peace treaty
things have quite settled down here, however, and the lack of excitement
after living on aerated news for a couple of months is quite a letdown.
However, we live in hopes of revolution or a coup d'etat or some other
little incident to liven up the dog days.
You will be pleased to know that the University Chancellor--see letters
of early May--has finally announced that he will return to the
University. It is supposed that the Government has assented to his
conditions, among which is that the police won't interfere with the
students, but will leave discipline to the University authorities. To
resign and run away in order to be coaxed back is an art. It's too bad
Wilson never studied it. The Chinese peace delegates reported back here
that Lloyd George inquired what the twenty-one Demands were, as he had
never heard of them. However, the Chinese hold Balfour as most
responsible. In order to avoid any incoherence I will add that a Chinese
servant informed a small boy in the household of one of our friends here
that the Chinese are much more cleanly than the foreigners, for they
have people come to them to clean their ears and said cleaners go way
down in. This is an unanswerable argument.
I hear your mother downstairs engaged on the fascinating task of trying
to make Chinese tones. I may tell you that there are only four hundred
spoken words in Chinese, all monosyllables. But each one of these is
spoken in a different tone, there being four tones in this part of the
country and increasing as you go south till in Canton there are twelve
or more. In writing there are only 214 radicals, which are then combined
and mixed up in all sorts of ways. My last name here is Du, my given
name is Wei. The Du is made up of two characters, one of which means
tree and the other earth. They are written separately. Then Wei is made
up of some more characters mixed up together, one character for woman
and one for dart, and I don't know what else. Don't ask me how they
decided that earth and tree put together made Du, for I can't tell.
PEKING, July 19.
I met the tutor, the English tutor, of the young Manchu Emperor, the
other day--he has three Chinese tutors besides. He teaches him Math.,
Sciences, etc., besides English, which he has been doing for three
months. It is characteristic of the Chinese that they not only didn't
kill any of the royal family, but they left them one of the palaces in
the Imperial City and an income of four million dollars Mex. a year, and
within this palace the kid who is now thirteen is still Emperor, is
called that, and is waited upon by the eunuch attendants who crawl
before him on their hands and knees. At the same time he is, of course,
practically a prisoner, being allowed to see his father and his younger
brother once a month. Otherwise he has no children to play with at all.
There is some romance left in China after all if you want to let your
imagination play about this scene. The tutors don't kneel, although they
address him as Your Majesty, or whatever it is in Chinese, and they walk
in and he remains standing until the tutor is seated. This is the old
custom, which shows the reverence in which even the old Tartars must
have held education and learning. He has a Chinese garden in which to
walk, but no place to ride or for sports. The tutor is trying to get the
authorities to send him to the country, let him have playmates and
sports, and also abolish the eunuch--but he seems to think they will
more likely abolish him. The kid is quite bright, reads all the
newspapers and is much interested in politics, keeps track of the Paris
Conference, knows about the politicians in all the countries, and in
short knows a good deal more about world politics than most boys of his
age; also he is a good classical Chinese scholar. The Chinese don't seem
to worry at all about the boy's becoming the center of intrigue and
plots, but I imagine they sort of keep him in reserve with the idea that
unless the people want monarchy back he never can do anything, while if
they do let him back it will be the will of heaven.
I am afraid I haven't sufficiently impressed it upon you that this is
the rainy season. It was impressed upon us yesterday afternoon, when the
side street upon which we live was a flowing river a foot and a half
deep. The main street on which the Y. M. C. A. building is situated was
a solid lake from housewall to housewall, though not more than six
inches or so. But the street is considerably wider than Broadway, so it
was something of a sight. Peking has for many hundred years had sewers
big enough for a man to stand up in, but they don't carry fast enough.
Probably about this time you will be reading cables from some part of
China about floods and the number of homeless. The Yellow River is known
as the curse of China, so much damage is done. We were told that when
the missionaries went down to do flood relief work a year or so ago,
they were so busy that they didn't have time to preach, and they did so
much good that when they were through they had to put up the bars to
keep the Chinese from joining the churches en masse. We haven't heard,
however, that they took the hint as to the best way of doing business.
These floods go back largely if not wholly to the policy of the Chinese
in stripping the forests. If you were to see the big coffins they are
buried in and realize the large part of China's scant forests that must
go into coffins you would favor a law that no man could die until he had
planted a tree for his coffin and one extra.
One of our new friends here is quite an important politician, though
quite out of it just now. He told a story last night which tickled the
Chinese greatly. The Japanese minister here haunted the President and
Prime Minister while the peace negotiations were on, and every day on
the strength of what they told him cabled the Tokyo government that the
Chinese delegates were surely going to sign. Now he is in a somewhat
uncomfortable position making explanations to the home government. He
sent a representative after they didn't sign to the above-mentioned
friend to ask him whether the government had been fooling him all the
time. He replied No, but that the Japanese should remember that there
was one power greater than the government, namely, the people, and that
the delegates had obeyed the people. The Japanese will never be able to
make up their minds though whether they were being deliberately deceived
or not. The worst of the whole thing, however, is that even intelligent
Chinese are relying upon war between the United States and Japan, and
when they find out that the United States won't go to war just on
China's account, there will be some kind of a revulsion. But if the
United States had used its power when the war closed to compel
disarmament and get some kind of a just settlement, there would be no
limit to its influence over here. As it is, they infer that the moral is
that Might Controls, and that adds enormously to the moral power of
Japan as against the United States. It is even plainer here than at home
that if the United States wasn't going to see its "ideals" through, it
shouldn't have professed any, but if it did profess them it ought to
have made good on 'em even if we had to fight the whole world. However,
our financial pressure, and the threat of withholding food and raw
materials would have enabled Wilson to put anything over.
Another little incident is connected with the Chancellor of the
University. Although he is not a politician at all, the Militarist party
holds him responsible for their recent trials and the student outbreaks.
So, although it announced that the Chancellor is coming back, the Anfu
Club, the parliamentary organization of the militarists, is still trying
to keep him out. The other night they gave a banquet to some University
students and bribed them to start something. At the end they gave each
one dollar extra for 'ricksha hire the next day, so there would be no
excuse for not going to the meeting at the University. Fifteen turned
up, but the spies on the other side heard something was going on and
they rang the bell, collected about a hundred and locked the bribees in.
Then they kept them in till they confessed the whole story (and put
their names to a written confession) and turned over their resolutions
and mimeographed papers which had been prepared for them in which they
said they were really the majority of the students and did not want the
Chancellor back, and that a noisy minority had imposed on the public,
etc. The next day the Anfu papers told about an awful riot at the
University, and how a certain person had instigated and led it, although
he hadn't been at the University at all that day.
PEKING, July 24.
We expect to go to Manchuria, probably in September, and in October to
Shansi, which is quite celebrated now because they have a civil governor
who properly devotes himself to his job, and they are said to have sixty
per cent or more of the children in school and to be prepared for
compulsory education in 1920. It is the ease with which the Chinese do
these things without any foreign assistance which makes you feel so
hopeful for China on the one hand, and so disgusted on the other that
they put up so patiently with inefficiency and graft most of the time.
There seems to be a general impression that the present situation cannot
continue indefinitely, but must take a turn one way or another. The
student agitation has died down as an active political thing but
continues intellectually. In Tientsin, for example, they publish several
daily newspapers which sell for a copper apiece. A number of students
have been arrested in Shantung lately by the Japanese, so I suppose the
students are actively busy there. I fancy that when vacation began there
was quite an exodus in that direction.
I am told that X----, our Japanese friend, is much disgusted with the
Chinese about the Shantung business--that Japan has promised to return
Shantung, etc., and that Japan can't do it until China gets a stable
government to take care of things, because their present governments are
so weak that China would simply give away her territory to some other
power, and that the Chinese instead of attacking the Japanese ought to
mind their own business and set their own house in order. There is
enough truth in this so that it isn't surprising that so intelligent and
liberal a person as X---- is taken in by it. But what such Japanese as
he cannot realize, because the truth is never told to them, is how
responsible the Japanese government is for fostering a weak and
unrepresentative government here, and what a temptation to it a weak and
divided China will continue to be, for it will serve indefinitely as an
excuse for postponing the return of Shantung--as well as for interfering
elsewhere. Anyone who knows the least thing about not only general
disturbances in China but special causes of friction between China and
Japan, can foresee that there will continue to be a series of plausible
excuses for postponing the return promised--and anyway, as a matter of
fact, what she has actually promised to return compared with the rights
she would keep in her possession amount to little or nothing. Just this
last week there was a clash in Manchuria and fifteen or twenty Japanese
soldiers are reported killed by Chinese--there will always be incidents
of that kind which will have to be settled first. If the other countries
would only surrender their special concessions to the keeping of an
international guarantee, they could force the hand of Japan, but I can't
see Great Britain giving up Hong Kong. On the whole, however, Great
Britain, next to us, and barring the opium business, has been the most
decent of all the great powers in dealing with China. I started out with
a prejudice to the contrary, and have been surprised to learn how little
grabbing England has actually done here. Of course, India is the only
thing she really cares about and her whole policy here is controlled by
that consideration, with such incidental trade advantages as she can
pick up.
(Later) July 27.
I think I wrote a while back about a little kid five years old or so who
walked up the middle aisle at one of my lectures and stood for about
fifteen minutes quite close to me, gazing at me most seriously and also
wholly unembarrassed. Night before last we went to a Chinese restaurant
for dinner, under the guardianship of a friend here. A little boy came
into our coop and began most earnestly addressing me in Chinese. Out
friend found out that he was asking me if I knew his third uncle. He was
the kid of the lecture who had recognized me as the lecturer, and whose
third uncle is now studying at Columbia. If you meet Mr. T----
congratulate him for me on his third nephew. The boy made us several
calls during the evening, all equally serious and unconstrained. At one
he asked me for my card, which he carefully wrapped up in ceremonial
paper. The restaurant is near a lotus pond and they are now in their
fullest bloom. I won't describe them beyond saying that the lotus is the
lotus and advising you to come out next summer and see them.
PEKING, August 4.
I went to Tientsin to an educational conference for two days last week.
It was called by the Commissioner of this Province for all the
principals of the higher schools to discuss the questions connected with
the opening of the schools in the fall. Most of the heads of schools are
very conservative and were much opposed to the students' strikes, and
also to the students' participation in politics. They are very nervous
and timorous about the opening of the schools, for they think that the
students after engaging in politics all summer won't lend themselves
readily to school discipline--their high schools, etc., are all boarding
schools--and will want to run the schools after having run the
government for several months. The liberal minority, while they want the
students to settle down to school work, think that the students'
experiences will have been of great educational value and that they will
come back with a new social viewpoint, and the teaching ought to be
changed--and also the methods of school discipline--to meet the new
situation.
I had a wonderful Chinese lunch at a private high school one day there.
The school was started about fifteen years ago in a private house with
six pupils; now they have twenty acres of land, eleven hundred pupils,
and are putting up a first college building to open a freshman class of
a hundred this fall--it's of high school grade now, all Chinese support
and management, and non-missionary or Christian, although the principal
is an active Christian and thinks Christ's teachings the only salvation
for China. The chief patron is a non-English speaking, non-Christian
scholar of the old type--but with modern ideas. The principal said that
when three of them two years ago went around the world on an educational
trip, this old scholar among them, the United States Government gave
them a special secret service detective from New York to San Francisco,
and this man was so impressed with the old Chinese gentleman that he
said: "What kind of education can produce such a man as that, the finest
gentleman I ever saw. You western educated gentlemen are spoiled in
comparison with him." They certainly have the world beat in courtesy of
manners--as much politeness as the Japanese but with much less manner,
so it seems more natural. However, this type is not very common. I asked
the principal what the effect of the missionary teaching was on the
Chinese passivity and non-resistance. He said it differed very much as
between Americans and English and among Americans between the older and
the younger lot. The latter, especially the Y. M. C. A., have given up
the non-interventionalist point of view and take the ground that
Christianity ought to change social conditions. The Y. M. C. A. is, he
says, a group of social workers rather than of missionaries in the
old-fashioned sense--all of which is quite encouraging. Perhaps the
Chinese will be the ones to rejuvenate Christianity by dropping its rot,
wet and dry, and changing it into a social religion. The principal is a
Teachers College man and one of the most influential educators in China.
He speaks largely in picturesque metaphor, and I'm sorry I can't
remember what he said. Among other things, in speaking of the energy of
the Japanese and the inertia of the Chinese, he said the former were
mercury, affected by every change about them, and the latter cotton wool
that the heat didn't warm and cold didn't freeze. He confirmed my
growing idea, however, that the conservatism of the Chinese was much
more intellectual and deliberate, and less mere routine clinging to
custom, than I used to suppose. Consequently, when their ideas do
change, the people will change more thoroughly, more all the way
through, than the Japanese.
It seems that the present acting Minister of Education was allowed to
take office under three conditions--that he should dissolve the
University, prevent the Chancellor from returning, and dismiss all the
present heads of the higher schools here. He hasn't been able, of
course, to accomplish one, and the Anfu Club is correspondingly sore. He
is said to be a slick politician, and when he has been at dinner with
our liberal friends he tells them how even he is calumniated--people say
that he is a member of the Anfu Club.
I struck another side of China on my way home from Tientsin. I was
introduced to an ex-Minister of Finance as my traveling companion. He is
a Ph.D. in higher math. from America, and is a most intelligent man. But
his theme of conversation was the need of a scientific investigation of
spirits and spirit possession and divination, etc., in order to decide
scientifically the existence of the soul and an overruling mind.
Incidentally he told a fine lot of Chinese ghost stories. Aside from the
coloring of the tales I don't know that there was anything especially
Chinese about them. He certainly is much more intelligent about it than
some of our American spiritualists. But the ghosts were certainly
Chinese all right--spirit possession mostly. I suppose you know that the
walls that stand in front of the better-to-do Chinese houses are there
to keep spirits out--the spirits can't turn a corner, so when the wall
is squarely in front of the location of the front door the house is
safe. Otherwise they come in and take possession of somebody--if they
aren't comfortable as they are. It seems there is quite a group of
ex-politicians in Tientsin who are much interested in psychical
research. Considering that China is the aboriginal home of ghosts, I
can't see why the western investigators don't start their research here.
These educated Chinese aren't credulous, so there is nothing crude about
their ghost stories.
Transcriber's Note
Typographical errors in English were corrected. Spellings of
non-English words were left as found.