ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL
The West cannot either by right or through self-interest ignore the
problem that China has to solve. From being the most conservative
country in the world, she has become a country in which there is rapid
change. The whole civilisation of this vast country of 400,000,000 is
becoming fundamentally altered by the importation into it of ideas and
thoughts which are not native to her, and which have been created by a
system of religion and by a history belonging to nations very different
to herself. The full difficulty does not present itself till after
some thought. The problem is quite different from that which has been
before mankind in other parts of the world. China is trying to accept
Western civilisation, but there is a danger that it will be without
Christianity. I know that many Europeans living in Tientsin and
Shanghai, who give but little thought to the problems before them,
somewhat vaguely hope that in the near future China will become a
European nation; but a little consideration must convince everybody
that this is impossible. We have also already shown that China is
quite determined--in fact, she has no alternative--not to {37} remain
the old conservative country that lives on ancient traditions, that
looks back two thousand years for all teaching in the arts of
government.
If China, therefore, is neither to become Western nor to remain what
she is, of necessity she will have to blend the two civilisations
together and to take a part from each. The Chinese themselves, with a
sanguineness for which they have no warrant, are quite certain that
this is an easy matter. They tell the inquirer that they have
considered it well, and that they see their way completely through it.
They intend to select from Europe only those things that are
advantageous to the race, and they expect to have no difficulty in
weaving these incongruous elements into their own very complete system
of thought. Statesmen seriously say that three or four months' extra
study will enable the educated Chinaman to learn all that is necessary
of Western civilisation, and then those who have acquired this
knowledge can return to China and teach their fellow-countrymen; and it
is impossible to convince the Chinese that the uniting together of two
different webs of thought is a matter of extreme difficulty, and, it
may be added, of extreme risk. The pleasing dream that you can
arbitrarily select the good points of West and East and weave them into
one is the very reverse of the truth. What naturally happens is the
very opposite. There is a tendency to preserve that which is bad and
not that which is good in two different systems of thought when they
are united into one. The reason {38} probably is that as the bad has
its common origin in the wickedness of human nature, it belongs to both
systems of thought, and therefore both the Chinaman and the Western
meet on common ground when they meet in vice or vileness. On the other
hand, the virtues of both are the result of moral cultivation resting
on authorities which are not recognised by either. Therefore the
tendency is to waive all moral obligations as resting on controverted
grounds. Whatever may be the cause, the result is obvious--the
Westernised Oriental, unless a Christian, is as a rule only one shade
better than the Orientalised Western.
While the careless thinker hopes generally that good will come out of
the union of the two, he is as a rule terrified lest there should be
any tendency to mingle Western with Eastern thought in any one of whom
he is fond. A leading man at Tientsin, extolling the healthy climate
of the place, related how he had kept his children there ever since
they were born. His friend from home, ignorant of life in a Chinese
port, said in an appreciative way, "How nice it must be for your
children to be able to speak Chinese; I suppose you encourage them to
learn it?" The dweller in China turned on him in anger and said,
"Thank God, my children do not know one word of Chinese; I would send
them home to-morrow if I caught them learning a single sentence." This
enthusiasm for ignorance of the language of a great nation is
extraordinarily difficult to understand until the danger of the mixture
of Eastern and Western thought {39} is realised. Experience has taught
those who have lived in China that it is only a few that can come
unscathed through the terrible trial of having to live in two moral
atmospheres.
One of the most striking books that has ever been written is
"Indiscreet Letters from Peking." The book is marvellous in the power
it has of bringing before the eyes of its reader those awful scenes
during the siege of Peking, but it is far more wonderful in the
character that it imputes to the hypothetical narrator--a character
typical of a man who is equally at home in England and in China; and in
that character is portrayed a true but curiously unpleasant picture of
the characteristics of both races. The narrator has the courage of a
lion; he is absolutely without any sense of honour. He fires at an
adversary under the flag of truce. He misuses a Manchu woman who in
the horrors of the sack throws herself on his mercy. He connives at
the breaking of a solemnly pledged word of honour by a soldier. The
character is not overdrawn; characters such as these are common in a
mixed world, and it is natural that English people should fear that
their children should grow up so unutterably vile. But if the
Englishman fears for his child, ought he to ignore the welfare of the
country in which he lives, and can we pass over this whole problem as
something that does not concern us; for what he fears for his child
will happen to the whole Chinese nation.
The blending together of the East and the West {40} may be accomplished
with the ease which the Chinaman expects--but not in the way in which
he or anybody else could wish--it may be accomplished by the
eradication of all that is good in either race, on the common ground of
vice and sin and evil and cruelty; unless, indeed, the efforts of those
who are now labouring to weave together that which is good in both
civilisations are supported. The difficulty of preserving the good
points and high qualities of Chinese thought is only equalled by the
difficulty of introducing the splendid traditions of the West and
grafting them on to the Chinese stock. What success has followed the
efforts of those who are thus labouring is rather to be credited to the
intensity of their efforts, to their single-hearted purpose, to their
ready self-denial, than to the ease or simplicity of their task.
No man of any feeling or any conscience could pass indifferently by a
single individual eating the berries of a deadly plant, unconscious
that they were poison. What shall be said, then, if we allow, not only
one individual but a fourth of the population of the world, to eat of a
deadly poison which must deprive them of all happiness and of life,
which must condemn them by millions to the misery of the very blackest
darkness, where the only motives known are selfishness, lust, pride,
and cruelty, for this is what certainly will happen to China if she
accepts the materialism of the West.
Western thought is very powerful. The way it has dominated the forces
of nature gives it a great {41} prestige. As the Chinaman learns about
steam and electricity, about the telephone, the flying machine, radium,
and a thousand more Western inventions, he cannot fail to be impressed,
he must admit that these people have knowledge. Do not for a moment
imagine that, after such an illumination, he will be able to go back to
the works of Confucius and learn again the old maxims, many of which
are antipathetic to Western thought--yes, even more incongruous to
Western than they are to Christian thought. How will he, for instance,
read Confucius' condemnation of war when the Japanese and Germans and
Russians are shouting into his ears, "By war ye shall live and by war
alone."
In an interview I had with that great statesman, Tong-Shao-Yi, he said,
"We respect Confucius because he has never taught any man to err."
Unlike the teaching of Christianity, Confucius preaches that the test
of truth is worldly success, and therefore by that test his preaching
will be tried and found wanting by the materialist. The materialist
will say, if Confucius never taught men to err, how is it that the
Western nations who are ignorant of his teaching have succeeded, and
that China, who outnumbers them greatly, and who after years of
education and training and of following faithfully his teaching, has
failed? How is it, they will ask, that she is so powerless, that were
it not for European jealousies she could not stand a day before the
least warlike of these Western nations? The Confucian {42} will
answer, "He taught us to despise war, and that is why we are weak."
The materialist will certainly retort, "So he has taught you to err."
Confucianism must fall before Western materialism. I do not speak of
Buddhism, for that is falling so quickly that its influence may be said
to be almost gone. China will be left stripped of religion, robbed of
her old ideas, and not clothed with new ones, wandering into all the
misery and humiliation that vice and sin can bring upon mankind, till
the curse of her millions in misery will go out against the harsh
unfeeling West, who could leave her thus blind and helpless without a
guide.
The call is great. Those who have knowledge have no right to keep it
to themselves. The Christian and the Confucian agree in this, as they
do in much else, that all knowledge must be shared. One of the
purposes of this book is to arouse my readers to the importance of
taking some action. Had they had an opportunity of going to China and
seeing things for themselves, I would only have asked them to think;
but as there are many who have not had that opportunity, I would try
and show them the transitional condition through which China is
passing, the danger of that condition ending in disaster, a disaster
wide as the world itself. I hope to show them what is being done at
the present time to lead the Chinese empire into safe paths, and to
illuminate her with the highest knowledge of the West. Many efforts
have been made, and there has been much success. I {43} am glad to
testify publicly to the heroic and self-denying character of the
missions, but those who are most successful are those who frankly say
China can never be led by aliens.
No race loves the alien, and the further away the alien is in blood and
language the less he is loved; therefore the Chinese above all races
are least fitted to be led by the European, as they differ from him in
most racial characteristics. If they are to be led by their own race,
their own race must be fit to lead them. They must have leaders who
understand the whole of Western knowledge, and will be able to take
what is true and leave what is false. A Japanese thinker said the
other day, "Our people have made a great mistake--they have taken the
false and left the true part of Western thought." Let us hope that
China may be preserved from such an error, that she may learn Western
knowledge so thoroughly and so well that she may be able to distinguish
the good from the bad, the beautiful from the vile in our system of
thought.
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