CHAPTER XVIICHANGING 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.
RICE-BOATS ON CANAL, CHINA.To face p.260.
RICE-BOATS ON CANAL, CHINA.To face p.260.
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 aman 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 ishard 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 contentswere 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 carefullyplaced, 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 theyare 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 educationfor 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 inthe 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 conditionsof 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.