IT was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China
reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration of
the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred. Many other plans
of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and postponed for
the same reason. The world awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for
over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this
very end.
The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development that,
seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole world. The
Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the historians of the time
gravely noted it down that that event marked the entrance of Japan into
the comity of nations. What it really did mark was the awakening of
China. This awakening, long expected, had finally been given up. The
Western nations had tried to arouse China, and they had failed. Out of
their native optimism and race-egotism they had therefore concluded that
the task was impossible, that China would never awaken.
What they had failed to take into account was this: _that between them
and China was no common psychological speech_. Their thought-processes
were radically dissimilar. There was no intimate vocabulary. The
Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it
found itself in a fathomless maze. The Chinese mind penetrated the
Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against a
blank, incomprehensible wall. It was all a matter of language. There
was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind. China
remained asleep. The material achievement and progress of the West was a
closed book to her; nor could the West open the book. Back and deep down
on the tie-ribs of consciousness, in the mind, say, of the
English-speaking race, was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words;
back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind
was a capacity to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind
could not thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking
mind thrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of their minds were woven from
totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens. And so it was that
Western material achievement and progress made no dent on the rounded
sleep of China.
Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japanese race
was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In some strange way
Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer. Japan swiftly
assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and so capably applied
them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied, a world-power. There
is no explaining this peculiar openness of Japan to the alien culture of
the West. As well might be explained any biological sport in the animal
kingdom.
Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly set
about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself. Korea she had
made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine diplomacy
gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japan was not satisfied. She
turned her eyes upon China. There lay a vast territory, and in that
territory were the hugest deposits in the world of iron and coal—the
backbone of industrial civilization. Given natural resources, the other
great factor in industry is labour. In that territory was a population
of 400,000,000 souls—one quarter of the then total population of the
earth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their
fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization
constituted them splendid soldiers—if they were properly managed.
Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish that management.
But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was a kindred
race. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to the West was no
baffling enigma to the Japanese. The Japanese understood as we could
never school ourselves or hope to understand. Their mental processes
were the same. The Japanese thought with the same thought-symbols as did
the Chinese, and they thought in the same peculiar grooves. Into the
Chinese mind the Japanese went on where we were balked by the obstacle of
incomprehension. They took the turning which we could not perceive,
twisted around the obstacle, and were out of sight in the ramifications
of the Chinese mind where we could not follow. They were brothers. Long
ago one had borrowed the other’s written language, and, untold
generations before that, they had diverged from the common Mongol stock.
There had been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse
conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their
beings, twisted into the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a
sameness in kind that time had not obliterated.
And so Japan took upon herself the management of China. In the years
immediately following the war with Russia, her agents swarmed over the
Chinese Empire. A thousand miles beyond the last mission station toiled
her engineers and spies, clad as coolies, under the guise of itinerant
merchants or proselytizing Buddhist priests, noting down the horse-power
of every waterfall, the likely sites for factories, the heights of
mountains and passes, the strategic advantages and weaknesses, the wealth
of the farming valleys, the number of bullocks in a district or the
number of labourers that could be collected by forced levies. Never was
there such a census, and it could have been taken by no other people than
the dogged, patient, patriotic Japanese.
But in a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan’s officers
reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the mediæval
warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed to all the
modern machinery of war and with a higher average of marksmanship than
the soldiers of any Western nation. The engineers of Japan deepened and
widened the intricate system of canals, built factories and foundries,
netted the empire with telegraphs and telephones, and inaugurated the era
of railroad-building. It was these same protagonists of
machine-civilization that discovered the great oil deposits of Chunsan,
the iron mountains of Whang-Sing, the copper ranges of Chinchi, and they
sank the gas wells of Wow-Wee, that most marvellous reservoir of natural
gas in all the world.
In China’s councils of empire were the Japanese emissaries. In the ears
of the statesmen whispered the Japanese statesmen. The political
reconstruction of the Empire was due to them. They evicted the scholar
class, which was violently reactionary, and put into office progressive
officials. And in every town and city of the Empire newspapers were
started. Of course, Japanese editors ran the policy of these papers,
which policy they got direct from Tokio. It was these papers that
educated and made progressive the great mass of the population.
China was at last awake. Where the West had failed, Japan succeeded.
She had transmuted Western culture and achievement into terms that were
intelligible to the Chinese understanding. Japan herself, when she so
suddenly awakened, had astounded the world. But at the time she was only
forty millions strong. China’s awakening, with her four hundred millions
and the scientific advance of the world, was frightfully astounding. She
was the colossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in no
uncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations. Japan egged
her on, and the proud Western peoples listened with respectful ears.
China’s swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than to anything
else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The Chinese was the
perfect type of industry. He had always been that. For sheer ability to
work no worker in the world could compare with him. Work was the breath
of his nostrils. It was to him what wandering and fighting in far lands
and spiritual adventure had been to other peoples. Liberty, to him,
epitomized itself in access to the means of toil. To till the soil and
labour interminably was all he asked of life and the powers that be. And
the awakening of China had given its vast population not merely free and
unlimited access to the means of toil, but access to the highest and most
scientific machine-means of toil.
China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant. She discovered
a new pride in herself and a will of her own. She began to chafe under
the guidance of Japan, but she did not chafe long. On Japan’s advice, in
the beginning, she had expelled from the Empire all Western missionaries,
engineers, drill sergeants, merchants, and teachers. She now began to
expel the similar representatives of Japan. The latter’s advisory
statesmen were showered with honours and decorations, and sent home. The
West had awakened Japan, and, as Japan had then requited the West, Japan
was not requited by China. Japan was thanked for her kindly aid and
flung out bag and baggage by her gigantic protégé. The Western nations
chuckled. Japan’s rainbow dream had gone glimmering. She grew angry.
China laughed at her. The blood and the swords of the Samurai would out,
and Japan rashly went to war. This occurred in 1922, and in seven bloody
months Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa were taken away from her and she was
hurled back, bankrupt, to stifle in her tiny, crowded islands. Exit
Japan from the world drama. Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and
her task became to please the world greatly with her creations of wonder
and beauty.
Contrary to expectation, China did not prove warlike. She had no
Napoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts of peace.
After a time of disquiet, the idea was accepted that China was to be
feared, not in war, but in commerce. It will be seen that the real
danger was not apprehended. China went on consummating her
machine-civilization. Instead of a large standing army, she developed an
immensely larger and splendidly efficient militia. Her navy was so small
that it was the laughing stock of the world; nor did she attempt to
strengthen her navy. The treaty ports of the world were never entered by
her visiting battleships.
The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in 1970
that the first cry of alarm was raised. For some time all territories
adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese immigration; but now it
suddenly came home to the world that China’s population was 500,000,000.
She had increased by a hundred millions since her awakening. Burchaldter
called attention to the fact that there were more Chinese in existence
than white-skinned people. He performed a simple sum in arithmetic. He
added together the populations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, South Africa, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria,
European Russia, and all Scandinavia. The result was 495,000,000. And
the population of China overtopped this tremendous total by 5,000,000.
Burchaldter’s figures went round the world, and the world shivered.
For many centuries China’s population had been constant. Her territory
had been saturated with population; that is to say, her territory, with
the primitive method of production, had supported the maximum limit of
population. But when she awoke and inaugurated the machine-civilization,
her productive power had been enormously increased. Thus, on the same
territory, she was able to support a far larger population. At once the
birth rate began to rise and the death rate to fall. Before, when
population pressed against the means of subsistence, the excess
population had been swept away by famine. But now, thanks to the
machine-civilization, China’s means of subsistence had been enormously
extended, and there were no famines; her population followed on the heels
of the increase in the means of subsistence.
During this time of transition and development of power, China had
entertained no dreams of conquest. The Chinese was not an imperial race.
It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving. War was looked upon as an
unpleasant but necessary task that at times must be performed. And so,
while the Western races had squabbled and fought, and world-adventured
against one another, China had calmly gone on working at her machines and
growing. Now she was spilling over the boundaries of her Empire—that was
all, just spilling over into the adjacent territories with all the
certainty and terrifying slow momentum of a glacier.
Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter’s figures, in 1970 France
made a long-threatened stand. French Indo-China had been overrun, filled
up, by Chinese immigrants. France called a halt. The Chinese wave
flowed on. France assembled a force of a hundred thousand on the
boundary between her unfortunate colony and China, and China sent down an
army of militia-soldiers a million strong. Behind came the wives and
sons and daughters and relatives, with their personal household luggage,
in a second army. The French force was brushed aside like a fly. The
Chinese militia-soldiers, along with their families, over five millions
all told, coolly took possession of French Indo-China and settled down to
stay for a few thousand years.
Outraged France was in arms. She hurled fleet after fleet against the
coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort. China had
no navy. She withdrew like a turtle into her shell. For a year the
French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposed towns and
villages. China did not mind. She did not depend upon the rest of the
world for anything. She calmly kept out of range of the French guns and
went on working. France wept and wailed, wrung her impotent hands and
appealed to the dumfounded nations. Then she landed a punitive
expedition to march to Peking. It was two hundred and fifty thousand
strong, and it was the flower of France. It landed without opposition
and marched into the interior. And that was the last ever seen of it.
The line of communication was snapped on the second day. Not a survivor
came back to tell what had happened. It had been swallowed up in China’s
cavernous maw, that was all.
In the five years that followed, China’s expansion, in all land
directions, went on apace. Siam was made part of the Empire, and, in
spite of all that England could do, Burma and the Malay Peninsula were
overrun; while all along the long south boundary of Siberia, Russia was
pressed severely by China’s advancing hordes. The process was simple.
First came the Chinese immigration (or, rather, it was already there,
having come there slowly and insidiously during the previous years).
Next came the clash of arms and the brushing away of all opposition by a
monster army of militia-soldiers, followed by their families and
household baggage. And finally came their settling down as colonists in
the conquered territory. Never was there so strange and effective a
method of world conquest.
Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary of India
pressed against by this fearful tide of life. To the west, Bokhara, and,
even to the south and west, Afghanistan, were swallowed up. Persia,
Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt the pressure of the flood. It was
at this time that Burchaldter revised his figures. He had been mistaken.
China’s population must be seven hundred millions, eight hundred
millions, nobody knew how many millions, but at any rate it would soon be
a billion. There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the
world, Burchaldter announced, and the world trembled. China’s increase
must have begun immediately, in 1904. It was remembered that since that
date there had not been a single famine. At 5,000,000 a year increase,
her total increase in the intervening seventy years must be 350,000,000.
But who was to know? It might be more. Who was to know anything of this
strange new menace of the twentieth century—China, old China,
rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!
The Convention of 1975 was called at Philadelphia. All the Western
nations, and some few of the Eastern, were represented. Nothing was
accomplished. There was talk of all countries putting bounties on
children to increase the birth rate, but it was laughed to scorn by the
arithmeticians, who pointed out that China was too far in the lead in
that direction. No feasible way of coping with China was suggested.
China was appealed to and threatened by the United Powers, and that was
all the Convention of Philadelphia came to; and the Convention and the
Powers were laughed at by China. Li Tang Fwung, the power behind the
Dragon Throne, deigned to reply.
“What does China care for the comity of nations?” said Li Tang Fwung.
“We are the most ancient, honourable, and royal of races. We have our
own destiny to accomplish. It is unpleasant that our destiny does not
tally with the destiny of the rest of the world, but what would you? You
have talked windily about the royal races and the heritage of the earth,
and we can only reply that that remains to be seen. You cannot invade
us. Never mind about your navies. Don’t shout. We know our navy is
small. You see we use it for police purposes. We do not care for the
sea. Our strength is in our population, which will soon be a billion.
Thanks to you, we are equipped with all modern war-machinery. Send your
navies. We will not notice them. Send your punitive expeditions, but
first remember France. To land half a million soldiers on our shores
would strain the resources of any of you. And our thousand millions
would swallow them down in a mouthful. Send a million; send five
millions, and we will swallow them down just as readily. Pouf! A mere
nothing, a meagre morsel. Destroy, as you have threatened, you United
States, the ten million coolies we have forced upon your shores—why, the
amount scarcely equals half of our excess birth rate for a year.”
So spoke Li Tang Fwung. The world was nonplussed, helpless, terrified.
Truly had he spoken. There was no combating China’s amazing birth rate.
If her population was a billion, and was increasing twenty millions a
year, in twenty-five years it would be a billion and a half—equal to the
total population of the world in 1904. And nothing could be done. There
was no way to dam up the over-spilling monstrous flood of life. War was
futile. China laughed at a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed
invasion. In her capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that
could be hurled at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life
poured out and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazines
the learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.
But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on—Jacobus Laningdale.
Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense. Primarily,
Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to that time, a very obscure
scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of the Health Office
of New York City. Jacobus Laningdale’s head was very like any other
head, but in that head was evolved an idea. Also, in that head was the
wisdom to keep that idea secret. He did not write an article for the
magazines. Instead, he asked for a vacation. On September 19, 1975, he
arrived in Washington. It was evening, but he proceeded straight to the
White House, for he had already arranged an audience with the President.
He was closeted with President Moyer for three hours. What passed
between them was not learned by the rest of the world until long after;
in fact, at that time the world was not interested in Jacobus Laningdale.
Next day the President called in his Cabinet. Jacobus Laningdale was
present. The proceedings were kept secret. But that very afternoon
Rufus Cowdery, Secretary of State, left Washington, and early the
following morning sailed for England. The secret that he carried began
to spread, but it spread only among the heads of Governments. Possibly
half-a-dozen men in a nation were entrusted with the idea that had formed
in Jacobus Laningdale’s head. Following the spread of the secret, sprang
up great activity in all the dockyards, arsenals, and navy-yards. The
people of France and Austria became suspicious, but so sincere were their
Governments’ calls for confidence that they acquiesced in the unknown
project that was afoot.
This was the time of the Great Truce. All countries pledged themselves
solemnly not to go to war with any other country. The first definite
action was the gradual mobilization of the armies of Russia, Germany,
Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Then began the eastward movement.
All railroads into Asia were glutted with troop trains. China was the
objective, that was all that was known. A little later began the great
sea movement. Expeditions of warships were launched from all countries.
Fleet followed fleet, and all proceeded to the coast of China. The
nations cleaned out their navy-yards. They sent their revenue cutters
and dispatch boats and lighthouse tenders, and they sent their last
antiquated cruisers and battleships. Not content with this, they
impressed the merchant marine. The statistics show that 58,640 merchant
steamers, equipped with searchlights and rapid-fire guns, were despatched
by the various nations to China.
And China smiled and waited. On her land side, along her boundaries,
were millions of the warriors of Europe. She mobilized five times as
many millions of her militia and awaited the invasion. On her sea coasts
she did the same. But China was puzzled. After all this enormous
preparation, there was no invasion. She could not understand. Along the
great Siberian frontier all was quiet. Along her coasts the towns and
villages were not even shelled. Never, in the history of the world, had
there been so mighty a gathering of war fleets. The fleets of all the
world were there, and day and night millions of tons of battleships
ploughed the brine of her coasts, and nothing happened. Nothing was
attempted. Did they think to make her emerge from her shell? China
smiled. Did they think to tire her out, or starve her out? China smiled
again.
But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking,
with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed a
curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with the chattering
yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant eye turned
skyward. And high up in the blue he would have beheld a tiny dot of
black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would have identified
as an airship. From this airship, as it curved its flight back and forth
over the city, fell missiles—strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile
glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and
house-tops. But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass.
Nothing happened. There were no explosions. It is true, three Chinese
were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from so enormous a
height; but what were three Chinese against an excess birth rate of
twenty millions? One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a
garden and was not broken. It was dragged ashore by the master of the
house. He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and
surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to
the magistrate of the district. The latter was a brave man. With all
eyes upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled
pipe. Nothing happened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought
they saw some mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd set up a
great laugh and dispersed.
As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China. The tiny
airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each, and
over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved, one man
directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass tubes.
Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have
looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few of them he
would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their carcasses
festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and piled high on
the abandoned death-waggons. But for the rest he would have had to seek
along the highways and byways of the Empire. And not all would he have
found fleeing from plague-stricken Peking, for behind them, by hundreds
of thousands of unburied corpses by the wayside, he could have marked
their flight. And as it was with Peking, so it was with all the cities,
towns, and villages of the Empire. The plague smote them all. Nor was
it one plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every
virulent form of infectious death stalked through the land. Too late the
Chinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossal preparations,
the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights of the tin airships, and
the rain of the tubes of glass. The proclamations of the government were
vain. They could not stop the eleven million plague-stricken wretches,
fleeing from the one city of Peking to spread disease through all the
land. The physicians and health officers died at their posts; and death,
the all-conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang
Fwung. It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the second
week, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died in the
fourth week.
Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it. But from a
score of plagues no creature was immune. The man who escaped smallpox
went down before scarlet fever. The man who was immune to yellow fever
was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune to that, too, the
Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him away. For it was
these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the
laboratories of the West, that had come down upon China in the rain of
glass.
All organization vanished. The government crumbled away. Decrees and
proclamations were useless when the men who made them and signed them one
moment were dead the next. Nor could the maddened millions, spurred on
to flight by death, pause to heed anything. They fled from the cities to
infect the country, and wherever they fled they carried the plagues with
them. The hot summer was on—Jacobus Laningdale had selected the time
shrewdly—and the plague festered everywhere. Much is conjectured of what
occurred, and much has been learned from the stories of the few
survivors. The wretched creatures stormed across the Empire in
many-millioned flight. The vast armies China had collected on her
frontiers melted away. The farms were ravaged for food, and no more
crops were planted, while the crops already in were left unattended and
never came to harvest. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the
flights. Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds of the
Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of the West. The
slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries was stupendous. Time and
again the guarding line was drawn back twenty or thirty miles to escape
the contagion of the multitudinous dead.
Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German and Austrian
soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan. Preparations had
been made for such a happening, and though sixty thousand soldiers of
Europe were carried off, the international corps of physicians isolated
the contagion and dammed it back. It was during this struggle that it
was suggested that a new plague-germ had originated, that in some way or
other a sort of hybridization between plague-germs had taken place,
producing a new and frightfully virulent germ. First suspected by
Vomberg, who became infected with it and died, it was later isolated and
studied by Stevens, Hazenfelt, Norman, and Landers.
Such was the unparalleled invasion of China. For that billion of people
there was no hope. Pent in their vast and festering charnel-house, all
organization and cohesion lost, they could do naught but die. They could
not escape. As they were flung back from their land frontiers, so were
they flung back from the sea. Seventy-five thousand vessels patrolled
the coasts. By day their smoking funnels dimmed the sea-rim, and by
night their flashing searchlights ploughed the dark and harrowed it for
the tiniest escaping junk. The attempts of the immense fleets of junks
were pitiful. Not one ever got by the guarding sea-hounds. Modern
war-machinery held back the disorganized mass of China, while the plagues
did the work.
But old War was made a thing of laughter. Naught remained to him but
patrol duty. China had laughed at war, and war she was getting, but it
was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the war of the scientist and
the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale. Hundred-ton guns were
toys compared with the micro-organic projectiles hurled from the
laboratories, the messengers of death, the destroying angels that stalked
through the empire of a billion souls.
During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno. There was
no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the remotest
hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained unburied and
the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last, millions died
daily of starvation. Besides, starvation weakened the victims and
destroyed their natural defences against the plagues. Cannibalism,
murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China.
Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the first
expeditions made. These expeditions were small, composed of scientists
and bodies of troops; but they entered China from every side. In spite
of the most elaborate precautions against infection, numbers of soldiers
and a few of the physicians were stricken. But the exploration went
bravely on. They found China devastated, a howling wilderness through
which wandered bands of wild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived.
All survivors were put to death wherever found. And then began the great
task, the sanitation of China. Five years and hundreds of millions of
treasure were consumed, and then the world moved in—not in zones, as was
the idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, according to the
democratic American programme. It was a vast and happy intermingling of
nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years that
followed—a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-fertilization.
We know to-day the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output that
followed.
It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that the ancient
quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine recrudesced. The
war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April, and on April 17 the
Convention of Copenhagen was called. The representatives of the nations
of the world, being present, all nations solemnly pledged themselves
never to use against one another the laboratory methods of warfare they
had employed in the invasion of China.
—Excerpt from Walt Mervin’s “_Certain Essays in History_.”