CHINESE PRISONERS
THE Chinese people are law-abiding. With those of their own number who
are law-breakers they have but little sympathy, and the Government has
none at all. I like China. I like the Chinese. Moreover, I respect them.
But in two details of their national life they merit unqualified
condemnation. Their hospitals and their prisons are unmitigated national
disgraces. On second thought I withdraw the word unmitigated. The
Chinese hospitals through which I went were almost everything that
hospitals should not be. But the patients themselves would most
strenuously have opposed, most feverishly have resented, any
improvements along the line of their own comfort. The savants of China
are held back by the taut ropes of public opinion, they are enchained by
the general ignorance, as savants are everywhere else.
The deplorable condition of the Chinese prisons is justified in the
national philosophy. To the Chinese mind a law is a thing to be obeyed.
A law concerns millions, and conserves the welfare of millions. It must
be held inviolate by the individual, be his whim, his personal bent,
whatever it may. The Chinaman who disregards any item of the Chinese law
becomes a social leper. Individual tendency, moral ill-health, inherited
traits, they are not taken into account at all. This is cruel? Yes! But
it renders existence possible in the over-density of Chinese population.
A Chinaman is forgiven nothing because of his ancestry; nor does he
suffer for that ancestry. From the moment of his birth, each Chinaman
has, theoretically and, as far as possible, practically, an equal chance
with every other Chinaman. Rank is nowhere more venerated than in China.
Nowhere does it secure to its possessor more benefits, more privileges;
but it is not inherited. It is conferred by the Emperor—conferred for
personal merit or for personal achievement. No Chinaman is “noble”
except through personal fitness. There are but two exceptions to this
rule—two only. The direct descendants of Confucius have a rank of their
own. It is a high rank. It is respected; but it gives them no power of
interference with national affairs. The descendants of an Emperor are
never less than royal; but they have not necessarily any power. In
brief, then, in China “every man is served according to his deserts,”
and it is greatly to the national credit that they who do not “’scape
whipping” are so very few.
A Chinese prison is called a “kamlo.” Its outer door is barred with
bamboo and is guarded by petty soldiers or policemen. The kamlo contains
two rooms and two yards. One room and one yard are for men; the other
room and yard are for women. The space set apart for women is very much
smaller than that for men; but the women’s quarters and the men’s
quarters are alike in being entirely devoid of any provision for
personal comfort or for personal decency.
Chinese prisoners are, by the Government, provided with absolutely
nothing but the space, beyond which they may not pass. If their friends
thrust food to them through the bars of the prison fence the law does
not interpose; otherwise the prisoners may starve; the law does not
interpose.
I have seen a woman feeding her husband while her six children looked on
and laughed. I have seen a boy of nine pushing his hand through the
slats of the fence and dropping rice into the open mouths of his father
and mother!
I used to take food to the Shanghai prison-yards: I was not jeered at. A
Chinese crowd is, I believe, incapable of jeering at a woman. But I was
condemned for it, and a high Chinese official remonstrated with my
husband. I used to buy Chinese food at a cheap chow-chow shop, and, when
I reached a prison fence, hire a coolie to feed the poor starving
wretches. I did not quite care to feed them myself, and it was quite
impossible for them to feed themselves. No Chinese prisoner, of the
class of which I am writing—minor offenders—can reach his own mouth,
for his neck is invariably locked into a board which is about three feet
square. This board is called a “cangue.” It is very heavy and galls the
neck; it blisters or ossifies the shoulders. The “pig-tail” drags
heavily over it, and pulls the poor enlocked head uncomfortably to one
side. It prevents the hands from lifting rice or water to the craving
mouth, and from brushing from the tingling nose one of the myriad
insects that infest the prisons and prison-yards of China.
I bought a long wooden spoon, to the huge amusement of the Shanghai
gamin, and I never found any difficulty in hiring a coolie to dispense
my petty charity, until one day, when I took rice to the women’s fence.
I had been there often before, but on this day I saw a strange sight.
Three women were locked into one long cangue, and the two other women in
the kamlo-yard vied with the crowd in hurling abusive epithets at their
united heads. They had bad faces, but they looked very hungry and
exhausted. I could induce no one to feed them. My amah, who was with me,
caught me by the hand and cried, “Clome holme, clome to you mallie man.”
I saw that there was something very much amiss; even my ’rickshaw
coolies looked ashamed of me, and so I did go home to my “mallie man,”
as the amah called my husband. We learned that the three women were
procuresses. China does not, I believe, decapitate her female criminals;
but the women who assist the downfall of young Chinese womanhood are
looked upon as criminals apart, and as, than all other criminals, more
vile, and are given the excessive punishment of being locked together by
their necks.
Divorce is as facile to a Chinaman as marriage. The concubine of a
mandarin takes precedence of a coolie’s wife; but the woman who is
general in her immorality, is despised and shunned. As for the older
women who trade in the frailty of their own sex, no one in China has the
least mercy for them, except, of course, the missionaries.
The position of woman is not, in China, altogether inferior to that of
man. It is true of the Chinese, as of every other polygamous people I
have known (except perhaps the wretched Mormons), that with them
womanhood is in some ways guarded, protected, and reverenced as it is
not with us who live in the enlightened West.
A great deal of ignorant nonsense is written about China. Can a people
who are so merciless toward crime be largely immoral?
In their treatment of China itself the Chinese have been exemplary. And
what proves more the virtue of a nation than the use they make of their
own country?
To conserve the physical health and productiveness of China, the Chinese
have exercised the most rigid self-sacrifice.
For thousands of years the Chinese have developed the many resources of
their wonderful country. They have had the great wisdom of patience. The
southern part of the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore have
been nearly devastated by the mad over-production of nutmeg trees.
Thousands and tens of thousands of acres of North America are barren or
nearly barren to-day; because the men who owned them, a few years ago,
forced from them larger and more frequent crops than Nature had
capacitated them to give. The Chinese have made no such mistakes. They
have asked no more from their “happy valley of the Seres” than the
surplus of her productiveness. Consequently, China is as full to-day of
mineral, of vegetable, of animal life as when it was virgin to the
husbandry of the first ancestors of the strange yellow people who now
live in and cherish China. Sleek, dappled, big-eyed deer roam as
fearlessly among the pungent forests, and are as plentiful as when the
old Latin writers described the men of Cathay as “great bowmen.” Great
silky hares scurry among the ferns. Golden pheasants nest among the wild
white roses. Snipe and quail thieve fatness from the rice fields. Teal
and pigeons cool their feet in the wet, paddy beds, and wee rice-birds
plume themselves and swing and sway on the swinging, swaying branches of
the purple-flowered wistaria.
Ah, yes, China has grown more beautiful with every passing year, as a
woman grows more beautiful whose home-life is loved and loving! Her
children grow up; her soft hair whitens; but the loveliness of content
and happiness beautifies her features, and she can defy old age, for
love and kindness have kept her young. A happy marriage has made many a
plain woman pretty. China has been very happy in the race that has drawn
its sustenance from her. Her civilisation is one of the oldest extant.
Her architecture is antique. But she, in her own person, is verdant,
fresh, and smiling. She has been loved and cared for tenderly.