CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS WEAK SIDE
I do not suppose that we can have any conception of the amount of
suffering which goes on at the present time in China. The first time
we were in China I had the honour of meeting a Mr. Ede, who had just
returned from distributing food in a famine-stricken district, and his
description was truly terrible; the young men had walked away and found
work in other districts, but the old people and the children had to
remain. What had caused the famine in this case was characteristic of
unreformed China; "China's sorrow," the river Hoang-ho, had done what
it is ever doing, that is, it had flooded a district. When you pass
over it, it looks most innocuous. It is wholly unable, as a rule, to
fill its own vast bed, which is covered with delightful sands,
reminding one more than anything else of the sea-shore at low tide; but
this sand is what makes it dangerous, for it is not good heavy English
sand, but a light sand which is called "loess," and when the river
comes down in a flood--that is to say, when they have rainy weather in
Thibet or the sun shines unduly on Himalayan snows--this sand is
carried along with the water, {57} and it is asserted indeed that the
river consists more of sand than of water; as the river slackens the
sand is deposited and the bed is filled up, with the result that the
next flood, taking the Chinese unawares, overflows its banks and
reduces a huge district to poverty; they cannot sow their fields
because they cannot see them. Of course the authorities should not be
taken by surprise and the banks should be made up, and canals should be
cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese
engineer assured me he had a scheme for raising the level of huge
districts of China by using this peculiar character of the Hoang-ho and
turning its sand and water flood on to bare places, and he asserted
that the results were most wonderfully successful, and that districts
which were unfertile before, when well washed and covered up with this
loess, became fertile. Still, however beneficial a flood may be to the
land in the end, its immediate result is to starve the population who
are flooded out, for they have no reserves of food.
In the case already referred to, the country was a long time under
water, because a canal which should have drained it away was not kept
clear. The money had been paid, but, as often happens in China, the
work had not been done. The action that the authorities took was
characteristic of Chinese government. China possesses the system of
internal custom-houses--a system which the wildest advocate of Tariff
Reform would hardly like {58} to see introduced into Europe; these
custom-houses are called "Likin," and are a source at once of a great
deal of profit to the provinces and of irritation to all traders. The
Chinese used these custom-houses to engineer a corner in rice by which
the area of scarcity of food was enormously increased and several
officials amassed considerable sums of money; by the law of China it is
illegal to export rice even from one province to another; this law was
put in force, and the rice supply was cut off; at the same time early
in the famine certain rich men bought up rice freely, with the result
that it rose to a very high figure, so that round the area of famine
and desolation there was an area of scarcity and shortage.
A large amount of food from all parts of the world was sent by the
famine funds, but it was very difficult to induce the officials to
allow the food to enter the famine district. They were filled with all
sorts of scruples. They were afraid, for instance, that the steamers
towing the barges full of food on a canal which had not before been
opened for steamers, might excite the hostility of the population; they
were courteous, they were diplomatic, but they were obstructive; and so
it came about that while there was a famine in one district of China,
in the other districts there was a very heavy surplus, of which they
had difficulty in disposing. All this did not create the slightest
surprise in those who knew China. When the story was told {59} us all
the old Chinese hands merely said, "How like China," or "Just like
them." This was our first insight into what the civilisation of China
means, and therefore for the first time we realised the problem that is
before the world--the problem which missionaries, with great devotion,
are trying to solve.
Chinese civilisation is not, as many people imagine it to be, a mere
courtesy title for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism.
Many of my humbler parishioners, for instance, when we left for China,
ranked the Chinese as something very near cannibals, and I do not think
they would have been in the least surprised to hear that we had been
roasted and eaten by the natives. The Chinese have perhaps a greater
right to be called civilised than we have on this side of the world;
their civilisation dates from eras we are accustomed to call Biblical.
Confucius and Ezra represent contemporaneous ideas--ideas that are not
wholly different in thought. While on the other side of the globe
civilisation has been handed from nation to nation, and a civilised
race has become barbarous and a barbarous race civilised, the Chinese,
without making any very great advance, have steadily proceeded along a
path of progress, and at the present time they possess a very carefully
organised system of society. On paper the whole thing is perfect: the
Emperor at the top, the Viceroys over each province, under them the
Prefectures, and so down to the village community {60} in the country
or the trade guild in the town. The system of government is so perfect
that they claim that they are able to discover any individual wanted
among those 400,000,000 of Chinese, unless his disguise is very
perfect. When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking
about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his
life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a
man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was
assured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that
they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they
required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to
escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise.
With this splendid organisation is joined great solidarity. The
Chinese race are essentially one. If it were your duty to look through
reports coming from China, as it has been mine, the first thing that
would strike you would be its essential oneness; you will not find more
difference between different parts of China than there is between
England and Ireland. I do not for a moment mean to say that there are
no differences between the Chinese--that would be untrue; but you will
not find such a difference as one might expect from the diversity of
geographical conditions. The civilisation is essentially similar. It
is a civilisation with great merits. The population is sober,
industrious, and perhaps I might add honest, {61} all lovers of China
will certainly agree; but if you are writing, as I am, to people who
have never been out of England, I think you will have to qualify the
phrase with some such a one as "honest as compared with other
Orientals," or "honest when contrasted with the Japanese."
They are also extremely obedient; their idea of the respect which
should be paid to authority far exceeds that which prevails on this
side of the globe. I think we may add with truth that great numbers of
them are very loyal to their employers. But when this much has been
said, the dark side of their civilisation must be added--it is
essentially corrupt and cruel; the ideas of honour, purity, mercy are
but too little understood. Missionaries assured us that there was no
word for purity that could be applied to a man, while the same word
stands for honesty and stupidity.
Yet this nation is in many ways well fitted for the mechanical age in
which we live. What the owner of the factory wants is an industrious,
sober, and obedient man, and he does not want, or at least does not
realise that he wants, an honourable, pure, and merciful man. The
Chinaman will be in his element in the factory; the long hours of
monotonous toil will not be unpleasant to him; he is always sober--in
fact, he is by nature and culture the ideal factory hand; and yet this
is what constitutes his danger. He will tend to introduce into Europe
the vices which are now desolating his own country, unless, indeed,
{62} the European teacher can help him to eradicate those vices.
I have given you some idea of his corruption by the story told at the
beginning of this chapter, but we heard many others all to the same
effect. We went up the Yangtsze in one of the China Merchants' boats
with an old Swedish captain who liked the Chinese and rather disliked
the missionaries, so his evidence was not biassed by any wish to prove
that our civilisation was more perfect than that of the Chinese. We
asked him why it was that he being a European should be captain of a
ship that was owned by Chinese, and largely used by them. He told us
that the Chinese merchants had once tried to have a Chinese captain,
but the moment the ship reached the first port of the Yangtsze, the
custom officers were on board rummaging here and rummaging there. Very
soon a large amount of contraband was found on the ship, put there with
the knowledge of the captain. The consequence was the ship was fined
and delayed. They tried Chinese captains again and again with the same
result, and so they have been reduced to employ Europeans to secure
honourable officers. He, however, had to confess that the Chinese
distrusted the sobriety of the European officers, and assured us that
the old comprador on board, one of whose duties apparently was to look
after the passengers and take their tickets, was in reality a spy on
them.
Perhaps the best instance of the corruption of the {63} Chinese is
their action with regard to the currency. In the good old days the
currency of China was the silver shoe or ingot, which had no exact
weight, and had therefore to be weighed at every transaction. Below
that was the copper currency, which had no fixed relation to the silver
currency, but only the relation of copper to silver. A copper cash,
therefore, represented only its actual value in copper. It was
naturally a most unwieldy coin. The old books of travel in China give
lamentable pictures of the traveller riding about with huge strings of
copper cash almost crushing him with their weight. When the whites
began to trade in China they introduced the Mexican dollar with its
subsidiary coinage, and this was the common currency in all the ports
until a few years ago; but when the Chinese began to Westernise they
considered it inconsistent with their dignity not to have a coinage of
their own. Led by the Japanese, and assisted by several firms whose
speciality was the erection of mints and mintage machinery, they
started mints all over the country, and they have kept these mints busy
with the most _funeste_ results. To begin with, they coined a dollar
in imitation of the Mexican dollar, but even in this the mints did not
agree. Some dollars are very light, some slightly below value, and
some are nearly true. The first experience of the traveller is that he
possesses in his pocket a set of coins which no one will accept, except
at a great reduction. But the muddle goes further than that. It was
very profitable coining light coins, {64} but it was still more
profitable to do so in the lower denominations. The Chinese thought,
or chose to think, that it did not matter what the intrinsic value of a
10-cent piece was as long as you wrote on it 10 cents. They have no
bank or post-office where you have a legal right to get a dollar for
ten 10-cent pieces, and the result therefore of recklessly coining the
base 10-cent pieces has been not only to depreciate it with regard to
the dollar, but to make it an uncertain value, so that you must go to
the money exchangers almost every morning and ask for the rate of
exchange between the dollar and the small silver pieces.
Of course at every step on this downward path the officials concerned
made a great deal of money; their next step was to deal with the copper
coin in the same way, so now there is no fixed relation between the
copper coinage and the silver coinage, nor between the large copper and
the small, and this is still further confusing, as the provinces having
different mints have dollars of different values. And now I hear that
they have begun to make money by debasing the old silver shoe coinage,
which, though it is sold by weight, used to have a certain standard of
purity, and they have issued cash which have no intrinsic value at all,
and that do not represent the fraction of a coin having any intrinsic
value. The result of this currency "Rake's Progress" has been to
produce what corruption always does produce--widespread poverty.
Everybody cheats. The stationmasters {65} along the line assure the
European superintendents that the fares are always paid in the most
debased coinage, and it is very hard to deny the probability of this.
But of course the stationmasters take care if any coin comes to their
hand which is not debased to do a bit of exchange on their own account.
If Chinese civilisation is corrupt, it is also cruel, not with the wild
tempestuous cruelty of the savage, but with the cruelty of the
civilised man who at once uses human suffering as the best engine for
human government, and never cares to cure it unless he has some
pecuniary object in view. The Chinese are inured to pain, and some
people argue that they do not feel it to the same degree as Western
nations. No doubt the sensation of pain is intensified in people of
highly developed nervous organisation, and the Chinese have a nervous
organisation of a very quiescent kind. I remember, when we first
landed at Hong-Kong, being struck by a Chinaman who had chosen as his
bed for his midday siesta an ordinary piece of granite curbing; and as
you go along in the train every freight car that you pass has some one
sleeping on it to protect it from robbery, and a truck of coals or a
load of stone is obviously regarded as a most comfortable
resting-place. Some of the doctors maintained that this was the case
throughout their nervous system--they were insensitive to pain; others
said that pain, like everything else, is a thing to which you can get
accustomed, and that pain has played so large a part in their lives
that they are {66} accustomed to it, and are not therefore afraid of
it. Take, for instance, the foot-binding of the women; every family in
China must be accustomed to hear the sobs and cries of the little girls
as they are going through the first stages of foot-binding. Or take
again the public flogging; all the working classes of China must be
quite accustomed to the idea that men are flogged for certain offences
till their flesh is of the consistency of a jelly. A doctor,
describing the state in which men are brought into the hospital after
such floggings, said that it was a difficult matter to avoid
mortification setting in, and it was only with very careful treatment
that they could be cured, the whole flesh having to slough away, being
absolutely crushed and battered.
Yet this strange people are so indifferent to these horrors, that even
those who suffer will laugh amidst their sufferings. We were told the
following tale, whether true or not I cannot say. A man was being
bambooed for an offence, and astonished the officials by laughing all
the time; the more he was flogged the harder he laughed, till at last
those who were punishing him stopped to ask him the reason of his
mirth. "You have got the wrong man," he said. It is always a comfort
to have a keen sense of humour.
I do not think there is anything more awful than the descriptions one
has as to the indifference to suffering that is displayed by the
average Chinaman. I remember a story told me by a sailor. As a ship
{67} was being loaded, a man, obviously on the verge of death, came and
asked for work, but failed to get it. Shortly after he was seen
hanging about the ship, and at night they found him lying between some
bales. He was turned out, but he constantly crept back, first to one
place, then to another, till at last the sailor came to know his face
quite well. One day, as the sailor went ashore, he was attracted by a
little crowd looking at something, and this proved to be the poor
fellow in his death struggle, lying in a gutter of water. He called
the attention of a Chinese policeman to him. The Chinese policeman
explained that he would move him when he was dead, as he had orders to
remove all corpses, but that he could not move him while he was alive.
Dr. Macklin of Nanking told us story after story of the way in which
the Chinese would leave people in a dying condition on the road. A
little time ago he had ridden into an old temple, and there he saw a
man apparently asleep, but on looking at him more closely, he saw that
his eyes were wide open and that the flies were walking right across
his eyeballs, showing that he was quite insensitive. He called to one
or two men and asked them to help him to carry this poor sufferer to
some house near, but they could not or would not find a house to keep
him in; and so in the end Dr. Macklin determined to take him straight
back to Nanking, which he did. There he administered a very heavy dose
of quinine hypodermically, with the result that the man soon showed
{68} signs of returning consciousness. It was a case of malignant
malaria, and had he not been found by Dr. Macklin, the man must have
been eaten by wild dogs or have died from the disease; as it was he
recovered, and proved to be a hard-working young farmer who was in
search of work, as his home had been ruined by a local failure of
crops. He had apparently contracted malaria, and owing to his poor and
ill-nourished condition it had gone hardly with him.
[Illustration: CHINESE CIVILISATION: ITS BAD SIDE--AN OLD BEGGAR. ITS
GOOD SIDE--A GARDEN]
But story after story was told us always to the same effect--that the
quality of mercy is not highly esteemed by the Chinese. The appeal the
beggar makes to you as he runs after you is the old Buddhist appeal,
which after all is essentially selfish, as he beseeches you "to acquire
merit" by helping him; we must remember that even this reason for mercy
is despised by the gentry and literati of China as essentially
belonging to Buddhism. Perhaps the most lurid stories that we heard
were up river. One came from the country of the Lolos. The Chinese
were going out to fight the Lolos, and the missionary saw them carrying
a handsome young man bound on a plank so that he could not move--so
bound that his head was thrown back. After certain ceremonies they cut
the man's throat, and scattered the blood on the flags; it was a sort
of human sacrifice. Another story we heard from some devoted
Franciscan Sisters up at Ichang. They assured us that if a mother
found her children {69} weakly, and she lost one or two, she would make
up her mind that the reason they were ill was because an evil spirit
had a grudge against her. She would then take one of her remaining
children, and, in the hope of propitiating the evil spirit, she would
burn that child alive. We could not believe this story was true; but
that evening we saw some hard-working Presbyterian ladies, common-sense
efficient Scotchwomen, and they assured us that it was quite true.
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