China

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Title:     China
Author: Evelyn Baring [More Titles by Baring]

_"The Nineteenth Century and After," May 1913_

Mr. Bland's book, entitled _Recent Events and Present Policies in China_ (1912), is full of instruction not only for those who are specially concerned in the affairs of China, but also for all who are interested in watching the new developments which are constantly arising from the ever-increasing contact between the East and the West.

The Eastern world is at present strewn with the _débris_ of paper constitutions, which are, or are probably about to become, derelict. The case of Egypt is somewhat special, and would require separate treatment. But in Turkey, in Persia, and in China, the epidemic, which is of an exotic character, appears to be following its normal course.

Constitutions when first promulgated are received with wild enthusiasm. In Italy, during the most frenzied period of Garibaldian worship, my old friend, Lear the artist, asked a patriotic inn-keeper, who was in a wild state of excitement, to give him breakfast, to which the man replied: "Colazione! Che colazione! Tutto è amore e libertà!" In the Albanian village in which Miss Durham was residing when the Young Turks proclaimed their constitution, the Moslem inhabitants expressed great delight at the news, and forthwith asked when the massacre of the Giaours--without which a constitution would wholly miss its mark--was to begin.[66] Similarly, Mr. Bland says that throughout China, although "the word 'Republic' meant no more to the people at large than the blessed word 'Mesopotamia,' men embraced each other publicly and wept for joy at the coming of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

These ebullitions provoke laughter.

Sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni.

We Europeans have ourselves passed through much the same phases. Vandal and others have told us of the Utopia which was created in the minds of the French when the old régime crashed to the ground. Sydney Smith caricatured the delusive hopes excited by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may confidently be anticipated in Ireland if the Home Rule Bill becomes law, and the fairy prospects held out to the Irish people by Mr. Redmond and the other stage managers of the piece are chilled by the cold shade of reality.

We English are largely responsible for creating the frame of mind which is even now luring Young Turks, Chinamen, and other Easterns into the political wilderness by the display of false signals. We have, indeed, our Blands in China, our Milners in Egypt, our Miss Durhams in the Balkan Peninsula, and our Miss Bells in Mesopotamia, who wander far afield, gleaning valuable facts and laying before their countrymen and countrywomen conclusions based on acquired knowledge and wide experience. But their efforts are only partially successful. They are often shivered on the solid rock of preconceived prejudices, and genuine but ill-informed sentimentalism. A large section of the English public are, in fact, singularly wanting in political imagination. Although they would not, in so many words, admit the truth of the statement, they none the less act and speak as if sound national development in whatsoever quarter of the world must of necessity proceed along their own conventional, insular, and time-honoured lines, and along those lines alone. There is a whole class of newspaper readers, and also of newspaper writers, who resemble that eminent but now deceased Member of Parliament, who told me that during the four hours' railway journey from Port Said to Cairo he had come to the definite conclusion that Egypt could not be prosperous because he had observed that there were no stacks of corn standing in the fields; neither was this conclusion in any way shaken when it was explained to him that the Egyptians were not in the habit of erecting corn stacks after the English model. All these classes readily lend an ear to quack, though often very well-intentioned politicians, who go about the world preaching that countries can be regenerated by shibboleths, and that the characters of nations can be changed by Acts of Parliament. This frame of mind appeals with irresistible force to the untrained Eastern habit of thought. T'ang--a leading Chinese Republican--Mr. Bland says, "like all educated Chinese, believes in the magic virtue of words and forms of government in making a nation wise and strong by Acts of Parliament." And what poor, self-deluded T'ang is saying and thinking in Canton is said and thought daily by countless Ahmeds, Ibrahims, and Rizas in the bazaars of Constantinople, Cairo, and Teheran.

What has Mr. Bland to tell us of all the welter of loan-mongering, rococo constitution-tinkering, Confucianism, and genuine if at times misdirected philanthropy, which is now seething in the Chinese melting-pot?

In the first place, he has to say that the main obstacle to all real progress in China is one that cannot be removed by any change in the form of government, whether the ruling spirit be a full-fledged Republican of the Sun Yat-Sen type, aided by a number of "imitation foreigners," as they are termed by their countrymen, or a savage, albeit statesmanlike "Old Buddha," who, at the close of a life stained by all manner of blood-guiltiness, at last turned her weary face towards Western reform as the only hope of saving her country and her dynasty. The main disease is not political, and is incapable of being cured by the most approved constitutional formulae. It is economic. Polygamy, aided by excessive philo-progenitiveness, the result of ancestor-worship, has produced a highly congested population. Vast masses of people are living in normal times on the verge of starvation. Hence come famines and savage revolts of the hungry. "Amidst all the specifics of political leaders," Mr. Bland says, "there has been as yet hardly a voice raised against marriages of minors or polygamy, and reckless over-breeding, which are the basic causes of China's chronic unrest."

The same difficulty, though perhaps in a less acute form, exists in India. Not only cannot it be remedied by mere philanthropy, but it is absolutely certain--cruel and paradoxical though it may appear to say so--that philanthropy enhances the evil. In the days of Akhbar or Shah Jehan, cholera, famine, and internal strife kept down the population. Only the fittest survived. Now, internal strife is forbidden, and philanthropy steps in and says that no single life shall be sacrificed if science and Western energy or skill can save it. Hence the growth of a highly congested population, vast numbers of whom are living on a bare margin of subsistence. I need hardly say that I am not condemning philanthropy. On the contrary, I hold strongly that an anti-philanthropic basis of government is not merely degrading and inhuman, but also fortunately nowadays impracticable. None the less, the fact that one of the greatest difficulties of governing the teeming masses in the East is caused by good and humane government should be recognised. It is too often ignored.

A partial remedy to the state of things now existing in China would be to encourage emigration; but a resort to this expedient is impossible, for Europeans and Americans alike, being scared by the prospect of competing with Chinese cheap labour, which is the only real Yellow Peril,[67] as also by the demoralisation consequent on a large influx of Chinamen into their dominions, close their ports to the emigrants. That Young China should feel this as a gross injustice can be no matter for surprise. The Chinaman may, with inexorable logic, state his case thus: "You, Europeans and Americans, insist on my receiving and protecting your missionaries. I do not want them. I have, in Confucianism, a system of philosophy, which, whatever you may think of it, suits all my spiritual requirements, and which has been sufficient to hold Chinese society together for long centuries past. Nevertheless, I bow to your wishes. But then surely you ought in justice to allow free entry into your dominions to my carpenters and bricklayers, of whom I have a large surplus, of which I should be glad to be rid. Is not your boasted philanthropy somewhat vicarious, and does not your public morality savour in some degree of mere opportunist cant?"

To all of which, Europeans and Americans can only reply that the instinct of self-preservation, which is strong within them, points clearly to the absolute necessity of excluding the Chinese carpenters and bricklayers; and, further, as regards the missionaries, that there can be but one answer, and that in a Christian sense, to the question asked by jesting Pilate. In effect they say that circumstances alter cases, and that might is right--a plea which may perhaps suffice to salve the conscience of an opportunist politician, but ought to appeal less forcibly to a stern moralist.

Foreign emigration, even if it were possible, would, however, be a mere palliative. A more thorough and effective remedy would be to facilitate the dispersion of the population in the congested districts over those wide tracts of China itself which are suffering in a less degree from congestion. I conceive that the execution of a policy of this nature would not be altogether impossible. It could be carried into effect by improving the means of locomotion, possibly by the construction of irrigation works on a large scale, and by developing the resources of the country, which are admittedly very great. But there is one condition which is essential to the execution of this programme, and that is that the financial administration of the country should be sufficiently honest to inspire the confidence of those European investors who alone can provide the necessary capital. Now, according to Mr. Bland, this fundamental quality of honesty is not to be found throughout the length and breadth of China, whether in the ranks of the old Mandarins or in those of the young Republicans.

The essential virtue of personal integrity [he says], the capacity to handle public funds with common honesty, has been conspicuously lacking in Young China. The leopard has not changed his spots; the sons and brothers of the classical Mandarin remain, in spite of Western learning, Mandarins by instinct and in practice.

A very close observer of Eastern affairs--Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole--has said that the East has an extraordinary facility for assimilating all the worst features of any new civilisation with which it is brought in contact. This is what has happened in India, in Turkey, in Egypt, and in Persia. Even in Japan it has yet to be seen whether the old national virtues will survive prolonged contact with the West. Hear now what Mr. Bland has to say of China:

Where Young China has cast off the ethical restraints and patriotic morality of Confucianism, it has failed to assimilate, or even to understand, the moral foundations of Europe's civilisation. It has exchanged its old lamp for a new, but it has not found the oil, which the new vessel needs, to lighten the darkness withal.

In the opinion of so highly qualified an authority as Prince Ito, "the sentiments of foreign educated Young China are hopelessly out of touch with the masses." But while there has been alienation from the ideals of the East, there has been no real approach to the ideals of the West.

Education at Harvard or Oxford may imbue the Chinese student with ideas and social tendencies, apparently antagonistic to those of the patriarchal system of his native land; but they do not, and cannot, create in him (as some would have us believe) the Anglo-Saxon outlook on life, the standards of conduct and the beliefs which are the results of centuries of our process of civilisation and structural character. Under his top dressing of Western learning, the Chinese remains true to type, instinctively detached from the practical and scientific attitude, contemplatively philosophical, with the fatalistic philosophy of the prophet Job, concerned rather with the causes than the results of things. Your barrister at Lincoln's Inn, after ten years of cosmopolitan experience in London or Washington, will revert in six months to the ancestral type of morals and manners; the spectacle is so common, even in the case of exceptionally assimilative men like Wu Ting-fang, or the late Marquis Tseng, that it evokes little or no comment amongst Europeans in China.

Notably from the point of view of financial honesty, which, as I have already mentioned, is of cardinal importance if the regeneration of the country is to be undertaken by other means than by mock constitutions, the results of Western education are most disappointing.

The opinion [Mr. Bland says] is widely held amongst European residents and traders that the section of Young China which has received its education in Foreign Mission schools displays no more honesty than the rest.

What is the conclusion to be drawn from these facts? It is that not only in order to obtain adequate security for the bond-holders--in whom I am not in any way personally interested, for I shall certainly not be one of them--but also in the interests of the Chinese people, it is essential, before any loan is contracted, to insist on a strict supervision of the expenditure of the loan funds. That Young China, partly on genuine patriotic grounds and also possibly in some cases on grounds which are less worthy of respect and sympathy, should resent the exercise of this supervision, is natural enough, but it can scarcely be doubted that unless it be exercised a large portion of the money advanced by European capitalists will be wasted, and that no really effective step forward will be taken in the solution of the economic problem which constitutes the main Chinese difficulty. The very rudimentary ideas entertained by the Chinese themselves in the matter of applying funds to productive works is sufficiently illustrated by the episode mentioned by Mr. Bland, where he tells us that "the Szechuan Railway Company directors made provision for the building of their line by the appointment of station-masters"; while the fact that but a short time ago 1400 German machine guns, costing £500 apiece, which had never been used or paid for, were lying at Shanghai, indicates the manner in which it is not only possible but highly probable that the loan funds under exclusively Chinese supervision would be frittered away on unproductive objects.

Those, indeed, who have had some practical experience of financial administration in Eastern countries may well entertain some doubts as to whether supervision which only embraces the expenditure, and does not apply to the revenue, will be sufficient to meet all the requirements of the case. The results so far attained by the more limited scheme of supervision do not appear to have been satisfactory. Herr Rump was appointed auditor to the German section of the Tientsin-P'ukou Railway, but Mr. Bland tells us that "the auditorship on this railway has proved worse than useless as a preventive of official peculation." On the other hand, the system of collecting the revenue is in the highest degree defective. It violates flagrantly a principle which, from the days of Adam Smith downwards, has always been regarded as the corner-stone of any sound financial administration. "For every tael officially accounted for by the provincial authorities," Mr. Bland says, in words which recall to my mind the Egyptian fiscal system under the régime of Ismail Pasha, "at least five are actually collected from the taxpayers."

It is, therefore, earnestly to be hoped that the diplomatists and capitalists of Europe will--both in the interests of the investing public and in those of the Chinese people--stand firm and insist on adequate financial control as a preliminary and essential condition to the advance of funds.

As to whether the recently established Republic is destined to last or whether it will prove a mere ephemeral episode in the life-history of China, there seems to be much divergence of opinion among those authorities who are most qualified to speak on the subject. Mr. Bland's views on this point are, however, quite clear. He thinks that Confucianism, and all the political and social habits of thought which are the outcome of Confucianism, have "become ingrained in every fibre of the national life," and that they constitute the "fundamental cause of the longevity of China's social structure and of the innate strength of her civilisation." He refuses to believe that Young China, which is imbued with "a doctrinaire spirit of political speculation," though it may tinker with the superstructure, will be able seriously to shake the foundations of this hoary edifice. He has watched the opinions and activities in every province from the beginning of the present revolution, and he "is compelled to the conviction that salvation from this quarter is impossible." He thinks that although in Canton and the Kuang Provinces, which are the most intellectually advanced portions of China, a system of popular representation may be introduced with some hope of beneficial results,

... as regards the rest of China, as every educated Chinese knows (unless, like Sun Yat-Sen, he has been brought up abroad), the idea of rapidly transforming the masses of the population into an intelligent electorate, and of making a Chinese Parliament the expression of their collective political vitality, is a vain dream, possible only for those who ignore the inherent character of the Chinese people.

There is, however, one consideration set forth by Mr. Bland, which may possibly prove, at all events for a time, the salvation, while it assuredly connotes the condemnation of the present system of government, and that is that the Chinese Republic may continue to exist by abrogating all republican principles. According to Mr. Bland this "gran rifiuto" has already been made. "The actual government of China," he says, "contains none of the elements of genuine Republicanism, but is merely the old despotism, the old Mandarinate, under new names." "The inauguration of the Republican idea of constitutional Government in China," he says in another passage, "can only mean, in the present state of the people, continual transference of an illegal despotism from one group of political adventurers to another, the pretence of popular representation serving merely to increase and perpetuate instability."

It would require a far greater knowledge of Chinese affairs than any to which I can pretend to express either unqualified adherence to or dissent from Mr. Bland's views. But it is clear that his diagnosis of the past is based on a very thorough acquaintance with the facts, while, on _a priori_ grounds, his prognosis of the future is calculated to commend itself to those of general experience who have studied Oriental character and are acquainted with Oriental history.

[Footnote 66: _High Albania_, p. 311.]

[Footnote 67: See on this subject the final remarks in Mr. Bland's very instructive chapter xiv.]

[The end]
Evelyn Baring's essay: China

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