II

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN CHINA? DOES THE KUOMINTANG FORESHADOW A NEW

SORT OF GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD?

Where is history being made most abundantly at the present time?

One may doubt whether any of the events of the last twelve months

either in America or in Europe will figure very conspicuously in the

histories of the future. Political futilities and a slow economic

contraction in Great Britain, phases in the process of superabundance

in America, government by rhetoric and outrage in Italy, the sluggish

recognition at Geneva that Germany is after all in the middle of

Europe, and the arrest of the franc at the very moment when its plunge

seemed definitive--these and the steady progressive reconstruction

of a modern-spirited trading and manufacturing life upon the wide

foundations of Russia, mark no turning point in the course of human

affairs. All these things are, so to speak, merely Fate carrying-on.

But when we look to China there seems to be something more than

carrying-on in progress. There seems to be something new there,

something which has at any rate, so far as the Western observer is

concerned, only become credible and important in the last eight or ten

months. It is a change in the rhythm. It is the clear onset of a new

phase, of a new China, like nothing the world has ever seen before, a

challenge, a promise to all mankind.

Let us try to realize in the most general terms the significance of

this new movement in China. It is not an easy thing to do. Our world

is densely ignorant of things Chinese. At school few of us learnt

anything of the slightest importance about China, except that it had

a population so immense that you could kill Chinamen by the hundred

and they scarcely noticed it, that they ate rice, rats, and puppies,

and that they possessed two long rivers that seriously challenged the

records of the Nile and the Mississippi.

We learnt less formally that Chinamen of all ages wore highly

decorative skirts and flew kites, whereas we knew perfectly well that

the only proper amusement for gentlemen is hitting expensive little

balls about golf links until they are lost, and that the only proper

wear for a dominant race is chromatic pullovers and highly-illuminated

plus fours. Moreover, we were given to understand that the Chinese of

all ages and sexes preferred work to any other form of enjoyment, and

found an almost infantile pleasure in living exactly on the margin

of subsistence. And they were cruel, very cruel. Their artistic

productions amused us very greatly; they were so unlike the great

masters, Victorian art and British Academy pictures. Of beauty in the

proper sense of the word they knew nothing. So furnished forth upon

this matter of China, our minds rested and were content.

Right up to the present time we have been as satisfied with the

pre-eminence of our civilization and the worthlessness of theirs as

were the Chinese about their own perfections a hundred years ago. But

since then the Chinese have suffered blow after blow and humiliation

after humiliation, until the need of learning has been forced upon

them. Students came from China to America and Europe, and come in

increasing numbers. Never a Western student, except for some eccentric,

goes to China. Traders go, the European Governments send battleships

to back up their traders, and missionaries are despatched by various

denominations to advise the Chinese of the chief sorts of salvation

practised among us and available for their use. The traders send back

news with an eye to their privileges, and the missionaries with an

eye to their paymasters. A bright young man of position at Oxford or

Harvard would as soon think of leaving his ball games and his “rags”

and all the pleasant procedure that leads to pre-eminence as lawyer and

legislator in our world, for two or three years of study in China, as

get into a shell and be shot off to the moon. So that the Chinese may

even have crept ahead of us in breadth of outlook during the past few

years. Many of them now seem to know most of what we know and to know

also quite a lot about their own country. If one wants to know about

China nowadays, it is best to ask a Chinaman.

And now with a sense of surprise we find ourselves confronted by a

modern self-conscious Chinese nationality, consolidating its power very

rapidly and demanding to speak on equal terms with the American and

European. A living Chinese nation has appeared in the world.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the present Chinese situation

is this, that it is not apparently the work of any single man; the

consolidation and reconstruction of China that has made such rapid

progress in the last twelve months has not gone on under the direction

of some strong-jowled hero of the Diaz or Mussolini type. When the

long-tottering Manchu dynasty fell, and China became a republic and

fell into all the violent diversions and dissensions inevitable after

so extreme a change of régime, we Westerners, with our antiquated

ideas, looked at once for the strong man who was either to foist a new

dynasty on China or restore and bolster up the old--just as we looked

for a Napoleon to emerge in Russia. That marked how far the Western

intelligence had got in these matters. And just as the Western Powers

of Europe, following out dreary foreign policies they ought to have

scrapped ten years ago, muckered away an enormous amount of war gear

and money in supporting crazy “white hopes” against the nascent new

thing in Russia, ugly and queer and incomprehensible to them, so they

have wasted their prestige and resources upon this or that Chinese

brigand and general who was to play the rôle of Diaz in Mexico and make

China safe for the European investor.

No such “hero” has emerged either in Russia or China. It marks

a new age. The days of great adventurers seem to be past in any

country larger than Italy, and even in Italy it is possible to regard

Mussolini less as a leader than as the rather animated effigy of a

juvenile insurrection. What has happened in these wider, greater

lands is something much more remarkable, something new in history,

a phenomenon that calls for our most strenuous attention--namely,

government, effective government, competent military control, and a

consistent, steady, successful policy by an organized association.

This Kuomintang in China in so far as it is an organized association

is curiously parallel to the Communist Party which, standing behind

the quasi-parliamentary Soviets, has now held Russia together,

restrained such dangerous adventurers as Zinovieff, and defended its

frontiers against incessant foreign aggression for nine long years. We

shall be extraordinarily foolish if we do not attempt to realize the

significance of this novel method of controlling government which has

broken out over two of the greatest political areas of the globe. We

have now two governments through organized associations, governments

which are neither limited monarchies, dictatorships, nor parliamentary

republics, on the American and French models--one in Russia, and now

another over the larger half of China, which bid fair to spread over

the entire breadth of Asia until they are in complete contact.

When I say that the Communist Party and the Kuomintang are similar,

I mean only in so far as regards organization. They have profound

differences in origin and aim and profession, and to those I will give

a word later. But first I want to point out the complete novelty of

their method.

Some twenty years or more ago I wrote a fantastic speculation about

government, called “A Modern Utopia,” in which I supposed all

administrative and legislative functions to be monopolized by an

organization called the Samurai, which any one could join by passing

certain fairly exacting tests and obeying the rules of an austere,

disinterested, and responsible life. One was free to leave the

organization and drop power and responsibility when one chose. The

organization ran the world. There were no great heroes and leaders,

and there were no representatives nor parliaments nor elections. Any

one who chose to face the hardships of the job could have a hand in

control, but there was no room in the direction of public affairs

either for the adventurer or for appeals to the oafish crowd.

Now this fantasy seems to have been one of those odd guesses that

hover close to latent possibilities. If the “Modern Utopia” were

published now, everybody would say I had taken a leaf from the book of

the Communist Party or the Kuomintang, or even (though this is rather

a different animal) the Fascisti. But indeed this anticipation sprang

only from an early recognition that modern means of communication,

the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of

rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions

to a great number of co-operating centres, of getting quick replies

and effective discussion, has opened up a new world of political

processes. Ideas can now be given an effectiveness greater than the

effectiveness of any personality, and stronger than any sectional

interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against

perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily

and widely without personal, local, and sectional misunderstandings. So

it is that both New Russia and this New China that has hatched itself

out so astonishingly in the last year are things as new and different

structurally from any preceding political organisms as mammals were

from the great reptiles that came before them.

Directly we turn to their origins we note a wide difference. New

Russia is the creation of the Communist Party, based upon and knit

closely together by the economic dogmas of the Marxists. It was a

cosmopolitan party with more than half a century of insurrectionary

and revolutionary activity behind it before it secured power. It

was a party of antagonism to the current system, it captured Russia

as a war-shattered ruin, and for a time it showed itself very poor

in constructive ideas and economic organization. Its habits were

habits of opposition and sabotage. But from the outset it had immense

political resistance and strength, and it persists and learns, and is

now manifestly building up a new social and economic order tentatively

and experimentally, that is neither communistic nor individualistic

on Western lines. The Kuomintang seems to owe its origins and

inspirations to that valiant man, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who so nearly

escaped decapitation in the Chinese Legation in London a quarter of a

century ago. Its vital element is the student class, and especially

the students fired by Western ideas but by no means overwhelmed by

them. It has come more rapidly to power against suppression. Its centre

of origin is Canton; it is the creation of the South. Perhaps it was

inevitable that the New China should arise far away from the ancient

imperial traditions of Peking, far away from the foreign legations and

the military memories of the North. And while the Russian movement was

primarily social and only secondarily Russian, the Kuomintang started

apparently with the idea of “China for the Chinese” and accepted most

of the established traditions of property.

We remain, I say, still largely ignorant of the true quality of

the Kuomintang. Three-quarters of the information we get from China

is untrustworthy on account of its commercial or antiquated bias.

Obviously the Chinese want to secure a free hand in the control of

their own political and economic life, to levy tariffs according to

their needs, and extinguish the injustice of extra-territorial rights,

and as obviously these simple and reasonable aspirations are deeply

resented by the inadaptable Europeans who have lived in and profited

by the old régime. But in spite of the manifest eagerness of a large

section of the Western press to make capital out of any outrage upon

Europeans in South China, they have had very little to record, and on

the other hand the tale of European violence against the Chinese is a

heavy one. The “fool behind the gun” who has been so busy in recent

years shooting away the links of confidence and good feeling that hold

together the British Empire in Ireland, in India, and elsewhere, seems

to have had a glorious time out of bounds in China. He has blazed away

at unarmed processions of students and shot into crowded towns. The

English illustrated papers have offered us the most damning evidence of

obstructive junks rammed and sunken and of the general high-handedness

of British procedure. Since the Bolshevik Government is still a

useful bogey for American and European scaremongers, the Kuomintang

is declared to be Bolshevist in origin and sympathy. This is just the

common abuse natural in the situation. The Kuomintang seems to be

unencumbered by the Marxist dogmas that still clog the feet of Russian

development. It is probably a decade or so more modern and flexible in

its ideas.

Our illustrated papers have published photographs of Kuomintang

leaders grouped with Borodin and other Bolshevist representatives in

support of the “Red” accusation. But that no more commits China and

Russia to a hand-and-glove alliance than the photographs in circulation

of the poor little Manchu emperor boy with a British “tutor” standing

like a keeper beside him commit Great Britain to a restoration of the

Son of Heaven’s sacrifices in Pekin. There seem to be far more Russians

with the brigand generals of North China than among the Cantonese

armies, but these Pekin Russians are Russians of the “white” persuasion

and useless for the purpose of creating prejudice. I do not hear of any

attempts on the part of the Cantonese Government to expropriate any

one, Chinese or foreigner, or to restrain trading, or to confiscate

or nationalize industry. If anything of the sort did occur, we should

certainly have all the reactionary European press proclaiming it, and

so it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no tendency whatever

in that direction. The social and economic life of China has never

run strictly parallel to ours, and the Kuomintang develops in its own

way--but that is a different story from the establishment of Communism.

And also it is a different story if, under similar necessities, the

new social trading and industrial experiments of the Chinese presently

come to display some sort of similarity to Russian developments, as the

dogmas of the Marxists are shaken off or sterilized as pious sentiments

by the latter people, and as both races settle down to work in the

face of realities. Surely no man in his senses can believe that the

financial, trading, and industrial methods of America and Europe to-day

are the ultimate triumph of human wisdom, and it is as probable that

successful innovations of system may spring from the desolated and

renascent economic life of Russia and China as amidst the jungle of

interests in our more prosperous but more encumbered world.

The disposition to call the Cantonese Government “red” and to force it

into association with the Russian Government, which seems to be the aim

of a large section of the Atlantic press, may prove a very dangerous

disposition to our Western civilization. Manifestly China is not so

afraid of Russia as she is of Japan and the Powers whose warships

pervade her great rivers. Soviet Russia is further off and milder. And

anxious to be helpful.

But the rubbish that is written in some papers does not always perish

there. It goes to China; it goes to Russia. Suppose we Westerners

succeed in persuading the Chinese and the Russians that we regard

them with a common animosity, and that for us they are all one--Reds

altogether. Suppose we insist on treating them both as outcasts.

Suppose that as the United Soviets and the Kuomintang work out the

problems of economic and political construction before them, they

find they have problems very much in common, and that the irrational

hostility of the older civilizations obliges them to turn more and more

to each other. Suppose they take up scientific work more vigorously

than our fatuous self-satisfaction allows us to do. Suppose they decide

to make the pace for us. Europe and America are not so blindingly

brilliant and progressive that it would not be possible to press them

hard.

Suppose Russia and China chose to put in tens of thousands of

scientific workers against our thousands. The average Chinese brain is

said to be rather richer in grey matter than the average European. From

the Baltic to the Chinese coasts there is a population of more than

five hundred millions even now, and lands of a richness far surpassing

all the resources of North America. They are poor countries as yet, but

potentially they are very great countries. They have still to develop

effective railway links, but they can do that now with all the lessons

of our older system to warn and guide them. And no other countries in

the world are so happily placed for the promotion of aviation services.

It would not be difficult to argue that the backbone lines of the

air services of the future must pass over Russia and China anyhow.

Before we dismiss as incredible the development of a powerful and even

dominating civilization in the federated Soviets of Russia and Asia,

let us recall the contemptuous superiority with which Europe regarded

the United States during the strain of the Civil War.

At any rate it seems to me that this New China, whose brain and nervous

system is the Kuomintang, is the most interesting thing by far upon the

stage of current events, and the best worth watching and studying.

_23 January, 1927._