CHANGING CHINA
China is changing so rapidly, and is becoming so thoroughly Westernized,
especially in the ports where the Chinese come in contact with the
foreigner, that she can scarcely be recognized by her old-time friends.
We all admit that the change is for the better so far as the nation is
concerned, but whether it makes for the individual good is another and
more serious question. China is flooded with foreign adventurers who
want her untouched wealth, and who have cast their greedy eyes upon her
mines of coal and iron and gold. These foreigners from all classes and
grades of society have brought dishonesty and corruption in business
dealings to the merchant of China, whose word in the old time was as
good as his bond. In those days when a Chinaman said, “Can putee book,”
it was known that the contract was settled and that he would live up to
his spoken word, whether it meant loss or profit to him. But when
dealing with the foreigner the Chinese found that there were no old-time
customs to bind the merchant from over the seas, except those of bond
and written agreement. If he had any traditions of honour, he evidently
left them in the homeland, as nothing less than a court of law would
hold him to his contract if it seemed expedient for him to break it.
[Illustration:
RICE-BOATS ON CANAL, CHINA.
To face p. 260.]
For years the word “China” meant to the adventurer of other lands a
place for exploitation, where money was to be obtained easily by the man
with fluent tongue and winning ways. Even foreign officials did not
scruple to use their influence to enter trade. In one of the great
inland cities there was no water nearer than a river several miles away.
A foreign official, boring an artesian well upon his place and finding
pure, clear water, conceived the idea of boring wells throughout the
city and bringing water to the doors of the half-million of people who
resided in its narrow streets. He interested the officials and raised a
sum of money, and to doubly assure the Chinese that their money was safe
he signed the contracts, not only with his name but affixed to them the
great seal of his Government. After a few months’ trip to his homelands,
and a few aimless borings in the earth in search of the water that never
came, he relinquished the project, but not the money, and the officials
could do nothing but gaze sadly into the great holes that had taken
their silver. They learned that wisdom comes with experience and now put
into practice the proverb: “When a man has been burned once with hot
soup, he for ever afterwards blows upon cold rice.”
Another case in which the Chinese officials were duped by clever-tongued
foreigners was in Ningpo. Three Americans visited that city and talked
long and loud of the dark streets, the continual fires caused by the
flickering lamps of oil that were being constantly overturned by the
many children. They showed the officials the benefits of electricity,
that a light upon each corner would make it impossible for robbers and
evildoers to carry on their work, which must be done in darkness. They
promised to turn night into day, to give poor as well as rich the
incandescent lamp at no greater cost than the bean-oil wick. They were
most plausible, and raised thirty thousand dollars as contract money.
They left, ostensibly to buy machinery; the years have passed; they
never have returned. Ningpo still has streets of darkness, men still
walk abroad with lighted lanterns, the lamp is seen within the cottage,
and will continue to be quite likely until the hills shall fade, if
electricity depends upon the officials who once dreamed dreams of a city
lit by a light from Western lands.
This is one of the most serious handicaps of the missionary in trying to
Christianize China. The dissolute white man is in every port,
manifesting a lust, greed, and brutality which the Chinese, who are
accustomed to associate the citizenship of a person with his religion,
attribute to Christianity. It is no wonder that it is hard for the
missionary to make converts among the people who have business dealings
with men from Christian nations.
But there are other questions besides those of business integrity
vitally affecting the Chinese youth to-day. Along with the slight
knowledge which they have obtained of the manners and customs of the
Western world, they have absorbed many of its vices. With their
rose-wine and their samshu the Chinese boy has learned to drink
champagne and brandy. I know the father of five sons who told me that he
would give all that he possessed in the world if he had not brought
those sons to Shanghai.
Change is now the order of the day in China, educationally as well as
politically. We do not hear the children shouting their tasks at the top
of their little voices, nor do they learn by heart the thirteen
classics. The simple schoolroom, with hard benches and earthen floor,
with a faint light striking through the unglazed windows, is no more.
The old-time examinations at Peking have gone, the degrees which have
been the nation’s pride have been abolished, the subjects of study in
the schools have been completely changed. The privileges which were once
given the scholars, the social and political offices which were once
open to the winners of the highest prizes, have been thrown upon the
altar of modernity. The faults of the old system of education lay in the
stress it placed upon the memorizing of the many books whose contents
were not always understood by the young mind, and in the lack of
original ideas that might be expressed by a student, who must give the
usual interpretation of the classics. Now the introduction of free
thought and private opinion has produced an upheaval in the minds of
China’s young men, and they say what they think, even trying to show
that Confucius was at heart a staunch Republican, and that Mencius only
thinly veiled his sentiments of modern philosophy. It is generally
conceded that the newer education leads to the greater individualism
which is now the battle-cry of China.
The Chinese, both men and women, are reaching out eager hands to obtain
for themselves the knowledge that is being brought from other lands. Yet
this thirst for education is not a newly acquired virtue, for in no
country is real learning held in higher esteem than in China. It is the
greatest characteristic of the nation that in every grade of society
education is considered above all else. As a race they have devoted
themselves to the cultivation of literature for a longer period by some
thousands of years than any existing nation. To literature, and to it
alone, they look for the rule to guide them in their conduct. To them
all writing is sacred, and the very symbols and materials used in the
making of the written character have become objects of veneration. Even
the smallest village is provided with a scrap-box, into which every bit
of paper containing printed or written words is carefully placed, to
await a suitable occasion when it may be burned.
The mission schools have been the pioneers in the education of the young
people of China, and if the teaching of Christianity has not as yet made
many converts, the effect has been great in the spread of higher ideals
of education, and much of the credit of the progress of the modern life
of China to-day must be given to the mission schools, which have opened
new pathways in the field of learning and caused the youth of China to
demand a higher system of education throughout the land.
It is said that practically all the officials in the new China are men
who have been educated abroad or who have been in one of the many
mission schools scattered throughout the country. They are the ones who
have taken what they have learned of foreign lands and adapted it to the
needs of their country; but there are others who have been abroad only
long enough to acquire the veneer of Western education, and they are the
young men who become the discontented ones of China.
When Chinese boys go to a foreign land they have many difficulties to
overcome. They must receive their information and instruction in a
language not their mother tongue. They have small chance to finish their
education by practical work in bank or shop or factory. They get a mass
of book knowledge and little opportunity to practise the theories that
they learn, and they are not clever enough to understand that their
textbook knowledge is nearly all foreign to their country and to the
temperament of their race. When they return to their home they often
find that they have grown out of touch with their people’s ways and
customs. They come back looking for employment, for a chance to use
their new-found knowledge; but they feel that they should begin at the
top of the ladder instead of working up slowly rung by rung, as their
fathers did before them. They feel that they are entitled to be masters,
not realizing that even with this wonderful foreign education acquired,
experience is necessary to make them leaders of great enterprises or of
men. It is these boys who are the teashop orators and preach the
Socialistic dogma for which China will not be prepared for many years to
come.
The Chinese boys and girls are going too far and too fast in their
thirst for the broader knowledge and teaching of the Western world. It
is like the clothes that the Chinese girl is wearing, trying to imitate
her sisters of the Occident. She has discarded the soft, clinging silks,
the gay embroideries, the jade and flowers in her black locks, for the
straight, dark skirt, the ugly coats, and the untidy manner of dressing
the hair seen with the European women of the coast towns. These do not
become her, any more than the scientific degrees become the woman who
has been for centuries a woman of the home. We do not condemn education
for the Chinese woman any more than we entirely condemn the change in
the style of clothing; but they should both be adapted to the
individual. This new education seems to be too general, the personality
of the boy or girl being entirely left out. The youth are being made
into a set of jelly-moulds, all looking alike, all trying to be formed
upon the models brought them from England or America.
Three things should be taken into account—who the boy or girl is, where
he is, and where he is going. The mistake should not be made in China
that has been made in India—that is, the turning out of a race of
barristers and clerks from her schools. China needs technical schools
for her boys and common sense applied to the education of her girls. I
have been in a school for the education of the daughters of the better
class of Chinese, where the main accomplishment for which the girl was
applauded was her facility in rendering a piece upon the piano. I should
have said “executing” a piece upon the piano, because that is exactly
what is done when a Chinese girl attempts to interpret foreign music. It
is alien to her in every way, and generations of study will not make the
Chinese maiden a musician in the foreign sense, nor will they really
care for the foreign music. These girls who have wasted so many hours in
the practise of the piano will go to homes where they cannot have a
piano, or if they did have one they would be the only persons in the
family who would appreciate its music. It would be a conglomeration of
bad sounds to father, mother, husband. Many feel that the young girls
would be better employed in learning a musical instrument understood and
appreciated by her people and one that would give pleasure to her
husband at night, and perhaps be a factor in keeping him from the
tea-house, and the singing girls who have a monopoly of the musical
talent of China.
Another thing that causes sorrow to the conservative fathers and mothers
is the fact that as soon as their children receive a smattering of the
Western civilization they immediately begin to scoff at their own modes
of acquiring knowledge and the text-books which have trained their
people’s minds for so many years. They become proud of the fact that
they know nothing of the classics, and they quote Shelley, Byron, Burns,
and Browning instead of their own beautiful poets. But, what is more
serious for the youth of this Eastern land, this worldly knowledge seems
to have freed his intelligence without teaching him self-control, and it
has taken him away from the gods of his fathers without replacing them
with others. He, like his cousin of Japan, is inclined to become
agnostic and say, “There are no gods.”
Whether the religion from the West is the religion best suited for the
Oriental we cannot say, but whatever he receives from us must be adapted
to fit the needs and conditions of his race and country. China must
raise up leaders from her own people, both men and women, as her
regeneration will come from within, not without. More and more the West
must see that the East and the West may meet, but they can never mingle.
Foreigners can never enter the inner door of Chinese thought or feeling.
The door is never wholly opened, the curtain never quite drawn aside
between the two races. They are unlike in almost every characteristic.
The Westerner is much more a materialist than is the cultured man of
China. To him the taste of the tea is not so important as the aroma, and
the acquiring of wealth and honours is not so much to be desired as is
the ability to live the leisured life, the life of thought and
meditation, when he may sit apart from the noise and cares of the
present day.
The rush and worry of the Western world seem to have penetrated even to
the women’s courtyard, and there is no doubt that the new China will be
Westernized in every department of her being. But we who love China hope
that she will not change too rapidly, that she will take what is
necessary for her happiness from the knowledge and the mode of life of
the Occident, but that she will touch it with her own individuality,
making it a real part of her and not simply becoming an imitation of the
alien people by whom she is surrounded.
There is a charm about old China, and there is more than a charm about
the old-time secluded Chinese women, who have been protected and guarded
from life’s worries and battles, until they represent all that is most
beautiful and feminine and demand the chivalry of the men of the world.
Let the West come to China with all its modern inventions and its
politics and educational policies, but let us always be able to find
within its quiet courtyards the quiet, sweet-faced woman of China.