CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS GOOD SIDE
It would give a very false idea of the Chinese if great stress were not
laid on the good side of their civilisation. They have many fine
qualities, and in more than one point they are superior to the nominal
Christianity of some Western countries. The first thing perhaps that
strikes a foreigner when he is brought into contact with the Chinese is
their great courtesy; their literati are such gentlefolk. Even the
less cultured people have most refined manners; no one is ever rude;
and one of the things they cannot understand is how we can esteem a
rough, frank, honest man. There is a case when they would not appoint
a certain Englishman to a commercial post, preferring a man of far less
attainments and of much shorter service, because the former was rude.
That was enough. It was no use telling them that his honesty was above
suspicion, that he was a reliable business man, that he was very hard
working, that he had many years of hard service behind him; they
allowed all this freely, but they shrugged their shoulders and said,
"The truth is, he is such a rude fellow, and he will give such very
great offence by his bad manners," so they would not have him.
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When a visitor enters a Yamen, he realises that his manners must be
those of a most polished diplomat. Before him walks a servant, holding
aloft his visiting card. One really ought to have special Chinese
cards printed on beautiful sheets of red paper with queer-looking
characters on them setting forth one's rank and name. However, in
these days of admiration of the West, our poor little white cards are
considered adequate. The Viceroy or official meets the visitor,
enthusiastically shaking his own hands--the Chinese salutation--and
bowing low; the particular door at which he meets his guest marks the
amount of respect he wishes to pay him, and is therefore of some
importance. In my case, when my host was favourable to higher
education, I was received in the outer court. At every door there was
a polite contest as to who should go through it first, and at last we
found ourselves in a room where tea, dessert, champagne, and cigarettes
were offered, although of the two latter I was unworthy. Then began
the conversation. I found less stiffness once I had explained that I
came to gather opinions about a scheme for education. After the
stately interview was over there was an equally ceremonious
leave-taking.
Though the methods of the Chinese in doing business may be exasperating
to a Western whose time is money and who wants them to come to some
immediate decision, they are invariably delightful and courteous in all
their negotiations. This courtesy is all the direct result of
Confucian teaching. Stress is {72} laid there on courteous behaviour,
perhaps even to a degree which may strike the Western traveller as
absurd. This courtesy, I understand, extends even to those of lower
degree. Your servant in speaking to another calls him brother, and
nothing makes the servant despise his master so much as seeing him lose
his temper: it is to his mind a mark of our savagery.
The Chinese have higher virtues than courtesy. They are essentially
industrious. You have only to look at a Chinaman's garden to realise
the extent to which he possesses this quality. I am certain that those
people who are proud of the culture of their kitchen gardens would be
surprised and ashamed if they could compare them with those of a
Chinaman. One passes garden after garden with rows of plants placed at
even distances and every plant exactly the right distance in those
rows, with never a weed to be seen all over the whole plot. Again in
handicraft there is the same industry; you buy Chinese embroidery for a
song in such a place as Changsha. No one will tell you that Chinamen
ever object to length of hours; they are ideal men for work that needs
care and accuracy.
Again they are very patient. A monotonous task is not at all
unpleasing to them. An acute French observer used the word
_routinière_ in describing this characteristic. Even in intellectual
work this liking for monotonous repetition will show itself. One of
the doctors told us that he had the very greatest {73} difficulty in
inducing his pupils not to perpetuate his most casual gestures when he
was demonstrating. For instance, when teaching bacteriology, quite
unconsciously he might from time to time put an instrument down on the
table, and just touch it again. Months after he would find one of his
pupils when doing the same experiment repeating every gesture he had
accidentally made with careful imitation. It was clear that the
student had monotonously continued to practice these gestures for no
other reason but that he had seen his master make them. All those
words which our writers on social subjects are so fond of inditing
against the modern factory system have no meaning to the Chinaman.
Those complaints about long hours at mechanical work rendering the
worker little better than a machine are doubtless true of the white
race, but are quite beside the point as applied to the Chinese. If the
Chinaman is well paid in the factory he will prefer rather than
otherwise that the work should be mechanical; he will not mind if the
hours are long.
Again, he is cheerful and contented under very adverse circumstances.
When we were being rowed in a native boat up the Yangtsze, and the men
were straining every nerve against the current, while they were chilled
by a drizzling rain, there was never a word of discontent; they were
always cheerful and bright, good-tempered and merry.
Their highest quality is obedience, which is the result of their
Confucian culture. The central virtue {74} of that teaching is
obedience to parents, and they hold that doctrine to a degree which to
the Western mind seems exaggerated. One of the grown-up sons of a
Chinese clergyman did something which he considered unbecoming in a
Christian; to the surprise of the missionary, he did not hesitate to
administer a sound thrashing to his son, which the young man took
without the slightest resistance, and in this action the clergyman was
supported by the public opinion of the congregation. This quality
gives to China its great power, and it is one of the points in which
there is the greatest divergence between the teaching of the West and
of the East. Every Chinaman points out to you how little Westerns care
for their parents. I remember a Chinese gentleman explaining in a
patronising way to the other Chinese that, strange though it seemed, he
knew it as a fact that one of the commandments of our religion really
was that we should honour our parents.
Were it not for this principle of obedience which is implanted in the
mind of every Chinaman, the government of China would scarcely endure
for a day; but he is taught from his earliest youth to obey his father,
not as we teach in the West because the child is unable to think and
understand, so that obedience to parents is a virtue which must fall
into disuse as knowledge increases, but as an absolute duty, a duty
equally incumbent on a man of forty as on a child of four. This
principle is extended to that of civil government; the local {75}
official is in their quaint phrase "the father and mother of his
people," and the obedience to parents taught in childhood is therefore
extended to those who govern. No Chinaman has any doubt but that the
first duty of man is obedience to authority. Let us hope these
qualities will ever endure.
What may happen, and, alas, I am afraid, is at the present moment
happening, is that the two civilisations may be so blended together
that the qualities of each may be lost and its peculiar virtues
destroyed while its characteristic vices are preserved. The great
qualities of obedience to parents, of courtesy to strangers, are being
forgotten. The Chinaman educated in the States is rude and abrupt; he
fancies that it is Western and business-like. Every Chinese gentleman
to whom I talked, allowed that one of the worst results of Western
teaching had been that a Westernised Chinaman was less obedient and
respectful to his parents. On the other hand, the Westernised Chinaman
does not acquire the peculiar virtues of the Englishman.
The superficial Chinese thinker wants China to learn only the material
side of our civilisation, to profit by our mechanical excellence
without learning anything of our ethics. His view is that the West is
immoral but wealthy; he regards Europe as the place where there is no
principle excepting money-worship, and therefore he argues that if you
would Westernise China you must despise morality and seek for money.
Chang-Chih-Tung voiced this thought when he said, {76} "Western
education is practical, Chinese education is moral." If you try to
argue with a thoughtless Chinaman who has perhaps never left China, and
whose only experience of Western life is what he has seen in a treaty
port, you will find that it is hard to convince him that Western
education produces a high moral tone. After all we may, to a certain
extent, be to blame for their want of appreciation of the morality of
the West, for too often we show to the Chinese a very degraded side of
our civilisation; and though I do not think that Shanghai at the
present merits the term that was applied to it fifty years ago of being
a "moral sink," yet undoubtedly the treaty ports, both by their
constitution and by their geographical position, collect very
unpleasant specimens of white civilisation. There are a certain number
of men who spend a great part of their existence being deported from
Shanghai to Hong-Kong, and from Hong-Kong to Shanghai.
One of the comedies in the tragedy of the extinction of the
independence of Korea is illustrative of this point. The Emperor of
Korea heard that the Western races were far more trustworthy than those
of the East, and so fearing assassination after the murder of the
Queen, he determined to enrol a corps of Europeans as a body-guard; he
sent over officers to Shanghai with orders to enlist Europeans.
Unfortunately for himself he did not take the precaution of sending
with them any Western to help in the selection of the men. To Korean
eyes all Westerns {77} look alike, and as they were offering good pay,
they soon had their corps complete; they returned to Seoul, and the
corps was installed with suitable uniforms, and, alas, rifles and
ammunition. The moment the corps was paid, the greater bulk of them
got drunk, and for the next few hours Seoul was distinctly an
undesirable place of residence, filled with drunken men of all
nationalities shouting and shrieking and firing loaded rifles
recklessly in every direction. The poor Emperor trembled as he looked
from his palace windows at his body-guard out on the drink, and he made
up his mind that it would be better to take a reasonable chance of
assassination by the Japanese than to risk the danger of being guarded
by this inebriate troop of Westerns. With the help of the Consul the
body-guard when sober were returned to Shanghai, and let us trust the
Chinese heard the story and were convinced that in accepting Western
civilisation they must be careful to avoid accepting the vices of the
West.
At Changsha I heard a similar story, but with a tragic side, which one
felt exonerated the Chinese for being rather incredulous as to the
morality of our civilisation. Changsha, I should explain, is reputed
one of the most bigoted cities in China; even at the present moment
white women are advised not to walk through the streets. The Hunanese
have a bold independent character, which makes them rather hostile to
any foreigner or to foreign ways, and I am afraid that the story I am
going to repeat will have {78} confirmed them in their conviction that
foreigners are undesirable. Two white men belonging to one of the
South European races--Greeks, I think--settled themselves down in
defiance of treaty rights in Changsha, and at once opened a gambling
hell. Very soon they taught the Chinese, who are as a race very
addicted to gambling, new and most pernicious forms of that hateful
vice. The Governor complained to the Consul; the Consul sent his
officer down, accompanied by the police, to arrest the Greeks; the
Private Secretary to the Governor informed the Consul of the tragedy
that followed. The Consular officer warned the Greeks that they must
give up their gambling establishment and go back to Hankow. They said
they would not. He told them that if they refused he would arrest
them, take them to the boat, and send them down by force to Hankow.
They still refused, and he advanced, upon which one of the Greeks shot
the officer dead. The Chinese police after their manner vanished,
while the Governor's Private Secretary, according to his own account,
spent most of the time of the interview under the table. The Greeks,
seeing the coast clear, and realising that vengeance must come, took to
the open country. The Chinese were told to arrest them if they could.
Of course they had no difficulty in finding them, but to arrest them
was a different matter. They mobilised two or three regiments, and
surrounding the house in which the Greeks had taken refuge, they kept
on firing at long range till they judged, from there being no signs of
life, that they {79} must have killed them. They then carried off the
bodies, but thought it better to describe the incident in an official
document as a case of suicide from fear of arrest, lest they should be
held responsible for the death of these murderers. The next Greeks
that came up the river were sent down with a guard of forty men, and so
terrified were the Chinese that they had to put them first-class, as no
Chinese would have dared to have travelled with them.
There were several other stories told at Changsha to the same effect.
The European that the Chinaman sees in that sort of place is too often
one of those worthless men who has found his own country impossible to
live in, and who hopes that his vices and crimes may escape unnoticed
in distant China. Can one wonder that the Chinese are liable to
misunderstand the West, and were it not for the saintly life of many
missionaries, the high character and strict justice of our
Consuls--yes, and the admirable discipline and management of such great
undertakings as that of Butterfield and Swire--the evil would be
incurable; but though there are many specimens of the bad, there are
also not a few men who by their lives have testified before the Chinese
to the greatness of our social and moral traditions and to the religion
by which they are inspired.
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