virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway areas and
concessions they have their own government; in the majority of cases
while in Manchuria I found it more convenient to use the Japanese
telegraph or the Japanese postal system than the Chinese; and where I
stopped at the little towns along the line it was a Japanese officer
who came to inquire my name and nationality. When I was in Mukden the
German consul there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for
spying on his movements, only to find that they were acting under the
direction of Japanese officials who claimed immunity for them! The
fact that they have their soldiers back of them, and that they can be
tried only in their own courts, also gives the Japanese unlimited
assurance in bullying the natives. At Mukden the Japanese bellboy
struck my Chinese rickshaw {90} man to get his attention. At Taolu
some weeks ago some Japanese merchants who were there doing business
illegally (for it is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the
result that the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were
preparing a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for
any injury to an unlawful business!
Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach the natives
their place. "If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese bullet," as a
Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the fault is not that of
the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman is to blame for getting in
the way of it!"
VI
Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Manchuria, those
who excuse or sympathize with her evident purpose to make Manchuria
walk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position--the
pitiably abused and threadbare plea that the Japanese have won the
country by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer
to this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty Chinaman
just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed they were fighting
Russia because she was preparing to rob China of Manchuria; now they
themselves out-Russia Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man
down, saying, 'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take
the watch myself!"
The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and the sympathy of
every other American acquaintance of mine as far as I can now recall,
was with Japan in her struggle because of our hot indignation over
Russian aggressiveness. But if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put
Russia out only that I may myself develop every identical policy of
aggrandizement that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with
what different feelings we should have regarded the conflict.
{91}
Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend to the
control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the ablest Englishmen
met on my tour in the Far East pointed out, Japan's purposes in
inaugurating the war were four: (1) to get a preponderating influence
in Korea; (2) to get the control of the Tsushima Straits, which a
preponderating influence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia
from her ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as
she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in
Manchuria.
All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has actual
possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian navy has been swept
away. Again, she has become (with the consent of England) the
commanding naval power in the eastern Pacific; and she has gained an
influence in South Manchuria at least equal to that which Russia had
previous to the war.
And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria her blood
will have been spilt without result! Unless she can do more in the way
of robbing China than she went to war with Russia for doing, she will
not be justified!
Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed the matter
in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion that Japan will never
get out of Manchuria, unless forced to do so by a speedily awakened
China or by the most emphatic and unmistakable attitude on the part of
the Powers. Chinese, English, Americans, Germans--all
nationalities--in Manchuria agree that thus far the way of Manchuria
has been the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances--a
rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve--is needed
for the same end to be reached.
Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting out of
foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the discrimination
of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chinese Empire and foreign
trade rights within it menaced by the added preeminence of Japan, the
people of Europe and America {92} may wake up too late to find out at
last that the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more
general importance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of
government in Portugal.
Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations take
heed in time all this may be prevented. China's waking up may serve
the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether she will develop
sufficient military strength for this. In any case there need be and
should be no war, and in describing conditions as I found them my
purpose is to help the cause of peace and not that of bloodshed. For
if the Powers realize the seriousness of the situation and give
evidence of such feeling to Japan that she will realize the bounds of
safety, there will be no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance,
indifference, or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far
that she cannot retreat without a struggle. Truth is in the interest
of peace.
Mukden, Manchuria.
{93}
X
LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME
I am here in China's ancient capital at one of the most interesting
periods in all the four thousand years that the Son of Heaven has
ruled the Middle Kingdom. The old China is dying--fast dying; a new
China is coming into being so rapidly as to amaze even those who were
most expectant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, that
have since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actual
realization.
Great reforms were then proposed--twelve years ago--and the Emperor
sanctioned edict after edict for their introduction. But their hour
had not yet come.
I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was most potent at
that time: a man whose heart was then aflame with the idea of remaking
China. They dared much, did these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of
high rank and a Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the
great task, with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to
Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed and the Empress
Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and five other leaders were
beheaded.
Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already been
fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand others will rise
up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign has come; the Empress
Dowager, dying, has been succeeded by a mere boy, whose father, the
Prince Regent, holds the imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no
longer all-powerful. {94} For the first time in all the cycles of
Cathay the voice of the people is stronger than the voice of the
Throne. Men do not hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years
ago, they would have paid the penalty with their heads.
There are many things that give one faith in the future of China, but
nothing else which begets such confidence as the success of the
crusade against the opium habit. Four years ago, when the news went
out that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit within
ten years--had started on a ten years' war against opium--there were
many who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quixotic
even for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy but
as being as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's,
while those who expected success to come even in twice ten years
hardly dared express their confidence among well-informed people.
"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese has
taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinaman
will always be a slave to the opium habit." So said a professedly
authoritative American book on China, published only five years ago,
and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory to
common sense. "We white Americans can't get rid of whiskey
intemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization and
all our Christianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant
Chinaman to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, but
to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent
history--China's victory over opium-intemperance already assured and
in great measure completed, not in ten years, but in four--stands out
as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress our own people have made in
their warfare against drink-intemperance.
To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a man is no easy
task. Officials right here in Peking, for example, died as a result of
stopping too suddenly after the {95} edict came out announcing that no
opium victim could remain in the public service. But a member of the
Emperor's cabinet, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the
public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given up the
habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five per cent, may smoke in
secret, but with the constant menace of dismissal hanging like a
Damocles sword over their heads, it may be assumed that even these few
are breaking themselves from the use of the drug.
Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests,
but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Because
they recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of their
people, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because they
regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their
sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an
opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating
dissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's
family, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw a
cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were
held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weakling officials who
had lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. In
short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with
human weaknessess"--and with possibilities, of course, of going
utterly to wreck--has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen.
The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the
great financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sections
where the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy in
some sections was far more profitable than that of any other crop; it
was, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing
the opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in
the profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of old
land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had {96} been
home-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price too
great to pay in the effort to free herself from this form of
intemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did to
me to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping the
whiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we are
stopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should
also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At a
dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to
mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the
occurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have not
yet seen one.
China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial
competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe
that every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the proper
development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the
people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must
go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious
habit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder
tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we
are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we
are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only
by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is
doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now
weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the
brain.
The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which
the people of America may well give attention. The curse of graft
among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one
of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend.
Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make
up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees
and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will
{97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system,
stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict
salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city
officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let
enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have
gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only
has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not
regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for
numberless other abuses.
Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance to
the abolition of "squeeze." There is no national currency here; each
province (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when it
pleases, just as the different American states did two generations
ago. I remember hearing an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to
Alabama about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his
Carolina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China to-day.
You must get your bills of one bank or province changed whenever you
go into another bank or province, paying an outrageous discount, and a
banking corporation will even discount a bill issued by another branch
of the same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar
Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking it to the
Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80 for it.
Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the values
constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands of men make a
living by "changing money," getting a percentage on each transfer.
Take the so-called 20-cent pieces in circulation; they lack a little
of weighing one fifth as much as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it
takes sometimes 110 and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one
dollar! The whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the
government proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is {98}
said that the influence of these money-changers is so great as to make
any reform exceedingly slow and difficult.
And yet let not my readers at home with this statement before them
proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for unprogressiveness.
For my part, as I have thought of this matter of money transfer over
here, the whole question has seemed to me to be on all-fours with our
question of land title transfers at home, and the more I have thought
of it the firmer has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure
to adopt a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning
against light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of
registering land titles. The man who makes a living by changing money
and investigating its value is no more a parasite than the man who
makes a living changing titles or investigating their value; the
hindrance of trade and easy transfer of property is no more excusable
in one case than the other; and the 90 per cent, that China might save
by a better system of money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per
cent, that we might save by a better system of title transfers.
Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of the
people, prevents currency reform in China--yes, that is true. But
before we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-Changing
Lawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, does
not go to our next legislature and stifle any measure for reforming
land-title registration. And in saying this I am not to be understood
as making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or our
American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I know
are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with the
really useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping up
utterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of the
people. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimed
only at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are led
by selfishness to oppose it.
{99}
After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform in
the new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands of
years the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been to
produce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages and
poets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses,
this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on
China five years ago he could say:
"The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history
(outside of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He
knows perfectly well the dynastic history of his own country and he
composes beautiful poems, and these are his only accomplishments."
But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting public
officials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished the
year after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal of
the school is to train men and women for useful living, for practical
things, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education now
has the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages is
made to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin
and soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and continues to
read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasing
his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. In
Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching of
agriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all these
things China is also moving--blunderingly, perhaps, but yet making
progress--toward the most modern educational ideas.
As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten years
of making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japan
have actually moved relatively much farther away from old standards
than we have done, and if they should continue the same rate of
advance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing more
for the efficiency {100} of the people than our American schools are
doing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying
culture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old
standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly
conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am among
those who insist that culture may come from a study of useful things
as well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of the
chemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge of
chemistry that is without practical use; and that a boy may get about
as much cultural value from the knowledge of a language which does put
him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a language
which might put him into touch with ancient life but which he will
probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving and
tradition-cursed China and Japan, as we thought them a generation ago,
have already committed themselves to making education train for actual
life. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to
the idea?
The practical value of this article, I am reminded just here, has to
do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind your
member of the legislature of the parallel between the wasteful and
antiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful and
antiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform your
member of the legislature and your school officials of the advance of
practical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both
your member of the legislature and your congressman of China's
successful crusade against the opium evil as an incentive for more
determined American effort against the drink evil. Let me conclude
this letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prod
your representatives in Washington. (Which reminds me to remark,
parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-day
comes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on their
officials; and this {101} parenthetical observation may be as full of
suggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length.)
The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington
are just these:
First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I
mailed a package by parcels post to another country for about half
what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another
at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called
"heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called
enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?
Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one
of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average
tariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30
per cent. less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per
cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric
dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for
Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip
have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here,
after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy
them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of
buying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; a
missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of
Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats
are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made
in Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world,
and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy
it at the factory gates.
And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given.
How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be held
up in such fashion remains to be seen.
Peking, China.
{102}
XI
THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK
Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution
(she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to
risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would
indorse.
And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the
destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned
supreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter in
the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake.
For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which
but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history.
"China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about the
Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote
of everything treating of it these last five years.