Letters from China and Japan Part 9

The guards around those boys were changed every four hours.

It is raining most of the time and it is typical of the Chinese character that my teacher did not come because of the rain. You have to remember he never takes a 'ricksha, though he might have looked at it that it was better to pay a man than to lose the lesson. The mud in the roads here is much like the old days on Long Island before the gravel was put there, only it is softer and more slippery here, and the water stands.

PEKING, July 17.

We are pleased to learn that the j.a.panese censor hasn't detained all our letters, though since you call them incoherent there must be some gaps.

I'm sure we never write anything incoherent if you get it all. The course of events has been a trifle incoherent if you don't sit up and hold its hands all the time. Since China didn't sign the peace treaty things have quite settled down here, however, and the lack of excitement after living on aerated news for a couple of months is quite a letdown.

However, we live in hopes of revolution or a coup d'etat or some other little incident to liven up the dog days.

You will be pleased to know that the University Chancellor--see letters of early May--has finally announced that he will return to the University. It is supposed that the Government has a.s.sented to his conditions, among which is that the police won't interfere with the students, but will leave discipline to the University authorities. To resign and run away in order to be coaxed back is an art. It's too bad Wilson never studied it. The Chinese peace delegates reported back here that Lloyd George inquired what the twenty-one Demands were, as he had never heard of them. However, the Chinese hold Balfour as most responsible. In order to avoid any incoherence I will add that a Chinese servant informed a small boy in the household of one of our friends here that the Chinese are much more cleanly than the foreigners, for they have people come to them to clean their ears and said cleaners go way down in. This is an unanswerable argument.

I hear your mother downstairs engaged on the fascinating task of trying to make Chinese tones. I may tell you that there are only four hundred spoken words in Chinese, all monosyllables. But each one of these is spoken in a different tone, there being four tones in this part of the country and increasing as you go south till in Canton there are twelve or more. In writing there are only 214 radicals, which are then combined and mixed up in all sorts of ways. My last name here is Du, my given name is Wei. The Du is made up of two characters, one of which means tree and the other earth. They are written separately. Then Wei is made up of some more characters mixed up together, one character for woman and one for dart, and I don't know what else. Don't ask me how they decided that earth and tree put together made Du, for I can't tell.

PEKING, July 19.

I met the tutor, the English tutor, of the young Manchu Emperor, the other day--he has three Chinese tutors besides. He teaches him Math., Sciences, etc., besides English, which he has been doing for three months. It is characteristic of the Chinese that they not only didn't kill any of the royal family, but they left them one of the palaces in the Imperial City and an income of four million dollars Mex. a year, and within this palace the kid who is now thirteen is still Emperor, is called that, and is waited upon by the eunuch attendants who crawl before him on their hands and knees. At the same time he is, of course, practically a prisoner, being allowed to see his father and his younger brother once a month. Otherwise he has no children to play with at all.

There is some romance left in China after all if you want to let your imagination play about this scene. The tutors don't kneel, although they address him as Your Majesty, or whatever it is in Chinese, and they walk in and he remains standing until the tutor is seated. This is the old custom, which shows the reverence in which even the old Tartars must have held education and learning. He has a Chinese garden in which to walk, but no place to ride or for sports. The tutor is trying to get the authorities to send him to the country, let him have playmates and sports, and also abolish the eunuch--but he seems to think they will more likely abolish him. The kid is quite bright, reads all the newspapers and is much interested in politics, keeps track of the Paris Conference, knows about the politicians in all the countries, and in short knows a good deal more about world politics than most boys of his age; also he is a good cla.s.sical Chinese scholar. The Chinese don't seem to worry at all about the boy's becoming the center of intrigue and plots, but I imagine they sort of keep him in reserve with the idea that unless the people want monarchy back he never can do anything, while if they do let him back it will be the will of heaven.

I am afraid I haven't sufficiently impressed it upon you that this is the rainy season. It was impressed upon us yesterday afternoon, when the side street upon which we live was a flowing river a foot and a half deep. The main street on which the Y. M. C. A. building is situated was a solid lake from housewall to housewall, though not more than six inches or so. But the street is considerably wider than Broadway, so it was something of a sight. Peking has for many hundred years had sewers big enough for a man to stand up in, but they don't carry fast enough.

Probably about this time you will be reading cables from some part of China about floods and the number of homeless. The Yellow River is known as the curse of China, so much damage is done. We were told that when the missionaries went down to do flood relief work a year or so ago, they were so busy that they didn't have time to preach, and they did so much good that when they were through they had to put up the bars to keep the Chinese from joining the churches en ma.s.se. We haven't heard, however, that they took the hint as to the best way of doing business.

These floods go back largely if not wholly to the policy of the Chinese in stripping the forests. If you were to see the big coffins they are buried in and realize the large part of China's scant forests that must go into coffins you would favor a law that no man could die until he had planted a tree for his coffin and one extra.

One of our new friends here is quite an important politician, though quite out of it just now. He told a story last night which tickled the Chinese greatly. The j.a.panese minister here haunted the President and Prime Minister while the peace negotiations were on, and every day on the strength of what they told him cabled the Tokyo government that the Chinese delegates were surely going to sign. Now he is in a somewhat uncomfortable position making explanations to the home government. He sent a representative after they didn't sign to the above-mentioned friend to ask him whether the government had been fooling him all the time. He replied No, but that the j.a.panese should remember that there was one power greater than the government, namely, the people, and that the delegates had obeyed the people. The j.a.panese will never be able to make up their minds though whether they were being deliberately deceived or not. The worst of the whole thing, however, is that even intelligent Chinese are relying upon war between the United States and j.a.pan, and when they find out that the United States won't go to war just on China's account, there will be some kind of a revulsion. But if the United States had used its power when the war closed to compel disarmament and get some kind of a just settlement, there would be no limit to its influence over here. As it is, they infer that the moral is that Might Controls, and that adds enormously to the moral power of j.a.pan as against the United States. It is even plainer here than at home that if the United States wasn't going to see its "ideals" through, it shouldn't have professed any, but if it did profess them it ought to have made good on 'em even if we had to fight the whole world. However, our financial pressure, and the threat of withholding food and raw materials would have enabled Wilson to put anything over.

Another little incident is connected with the Chancellor of the University. Although he is not a politician at all, the Militarist party holds him responsible for their recent trials and the student outbreaks.

So, although it announced that the Chancellor is coming back, the Anfu Club, the parliamentary organization of the militarists, is still trying to keep him out. The other night they gave a banquet to some University students and bribed them to start something. At the end they gave each one dollar extra for 'ricksha hire the next day, so there would be no excuse for not going to the meeting at the University. Fifteen turned up, but the spies on the other side heard something was going on and they rang the bell, collected about a hundred and locked the bribees in.

Then they kept them in till they confessed the whole story (and put their names to a written confession) and turned over their resolutions and mimeographed papers which had been prepared for them in which they said they were really the majority of the students and did not want the Chancellor back, and that a noisy minority had imposed on the public, etc. The next day the Anfu papers told about an awful riot at the University, and how a certain person had instigated and led it, although he hadn't been at the University at all that day.

PEKING, July 24.

We expect to go to Manchuria, probably in September, and in October to Shansi, which is quite celebrated now because they have a civil governor who properly devotes himself to his job, and they are said to have sixty per cent or more of the children in school and to be prepared for compulsory education in 1920. It is the ease with which the Chinese do these things without any foreign a.s.sistance which makes you feel so hopeful for China on the one hand, and so disgusted on the other that they put up so patiently with inefficiency and graft most of the time.

There seems to be a general impression that the present situation cannot continue indefinitely, but must take a turn one way or another. The student agitation has died down as an active political thing but continues intellectually. In Tientsin, for example, they publish several daily newspapers which sell for a copper apiece. A number of students have been arrested in Shantung lately by the j.a.panese, so I suppose the students are actively busy there. I fancy that when vacation began there was quite an exodus in that direction.

I am told that X----, our j.a.panese friend, is much disgusted with the Chinese about the Shantung business--that j.a.pan has promised to return Shantung, etc., and that j.a.pan can't do it until China gets a stable government to take care of things, because their present governments are so weak that China would simply give away her territory to some other power, and that the Chinese instead of attacking the j.a.panese ought to mind their own business and set their own house in order. There is enough truth in this so that it isn't surprising that so intelligent and liberal a person as X---- is taken in by it. But what such j.a.panese as he cannot realize, because the truth is never told to them, is how responsible the j.a.panese government is for fostering a weak and unrepresentative government here, and what a temptation to it a weak and divided China will continue to be, for it will serve indefinitely as an excuse for postponing the return of Shantung--as well as for interfering elsewhere. Anyone who knows the least thing about not only general disturbances in China but special causes of friction between China and j.a.pan, can foresee that there will continue to be a series of plausible excuses for postponing the return promised--and anyway, as a matter of fact, what she has actually promised to return compared with the rights she would keep in her possession amount to little or nothing. Just this last week there was a clash in Manchuria and fifteen or twenty j.a.panese soldiers are reported killed by Chinese--there will always be incidents of that kind which will have to be settled first. If the other countries would only surrender their special concessions to the keeping of an international guarantee, they could force the hand of j.a.pan, but I can't see Great Britain giving up Hong Kong. On the whole, however, Great Britain, next to us, and barring the opium business, has been the most decent of all the great powers in dealing with China. I started out with a prejudice to the contrary, and have been surprised to learn how little grabbing England has actually done here. Of course, India is the only thing she really cares about and her whole policy here is controlled by that consideration, with such incidental trade advantages as she can pick up.

(Later) July 27.

I think I wrote a while back about a little kid five years old or so who walked up the middle aisle at one of my lectures and stood for about fifteen minutes quite close to me, gazing at me most seriously and also wholly unembarra.s.sed. Night before last we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, under the guardianship of a friend here. A little boy came into our coop and began most earnestly addressing me in Chinese. Out friend found out that he was asking me if I knew his third uncle. He was the kid of the lecture who had recognized me as the lecturer, and whose third uncle is now studying at Columbia. If you meet Mr. T---- congratulate him for me on his third nephew. The boy made us several calls during the evening, all equally serious and unconstrained. At one he asked me for my card, which he carefully wrapped up in ceremonial paper. The restaurant is near a lotus pond and they are now in their fullest bloom. I won't describe them beyond saying that the lotus is the lotus and advising you to come out next summer and see them.

PEKING, August 4.

I went to Tientsin to an educational conference for two days last week.

It was called by the Commissioner of this Province for all the princ.i.p.als of the higher schools to discuss the questions connected with the opening of the schools in the fall. Most of the heads of schools are very conservative and were much opposed to the students' strikes, and also to the students' partic.i.p.ation in politics. They are very nervous and timorous about the opening of the schools, for they think that the students after engaging in politics all summer won't lend themselves readily to school discipline--their high schools, etc., are all boarding schools--and will want to run the schools after having run the government for several months. The liberal minority, while they want the students to settle down to school work, think that the students'

experiences will have been of great educational value and that they will come back with a new social viewpoint, and the teaching ought to be changed--and also the methods of school discipline--to meet the new situation.

I had a wonderful Chinese lunch at a private high school one day there.

The school was started about fifteen years ago in a private house with six pupils; now they have twenty acres of land, eleven hundred pupils, and are putting up a first college building to open a freshman cla.s.s of a hundred this fall--it's of high school grade now, all Chinese support and management, and non-missionary or Christian, although the princ.i.p.al is an active Christian and thinks Christ's teachings the only salvation for China. The chief patron is a non-English speaking, non-Christian scholar of the old type--but with modern ideas. The princ.i.p.al said that when three of them two years ago went around the world on an educational trip, this old scholar among them, the United States Government gave them a special secret service detective from New York to San Francisco, and this man was so impressed with the old Chinese gentleman that he said: "What kind of education can produce such a man as that, the finest gentleman I ever saw. You western educated gentlemen are spoiled in comparison with him." They certainly have the world beat in courtesy of manners--as much politeness as the j.a.panese but with much less manner, so it seems more natural. However, this type is not very common. I asked the princ.i.p.al what the effect of the missionary teaching was on the Chinese pa.s.sivity and non-resistance. He said it differed very much as between Americans and English and among Americans between the older and the younger lot. The latter, especially the Y. M. C. A., have given up the non-interventionalist point of view and take the ground that Christianity ought to change social conditions. The Y. M. C. A. is, he says, a group of social workers rather than of missionaries in the old-fashioned sense--all of which is quite encouraging. Perhaps the Chinese will be the ones to rejuvenate Christianity by dropping its rot, wet and dry, and changing it into a social religion. The princ.i.p.al is a Teachers College man and one of the most influential educators in China.

He speaks largely in picturesque metaphor, and I'm sorry I can't remember what he said. Among other things, in speaking of the energy of the j.a.panese and the inertia of the Chinese, he said the former were mercury, affected by every change about them, and the latter cotton wool that the heat didn't warm and cold didn't freeze. He confirmed my growing idea, however, that the conservatism of the Chinese was much more intellectual and deliberate, and less mere routine clinging to custom, than I used to suppose. Consequently, when their ideas do change, the people will change more thoroughly, more all the way through, than the j.a.panese.

It seems that the present acting Minister of Education was allowed to take office under three conditions--that he should dissolve the University, prevent the Chancellor from returning, and dismiss all the present heads of the higher schools here. He hasn't been able, of course, to accomplish one, and the Anfu Club is correspondingly sore. He is said to be a slick politician, and when he has been at dinner with our liberal friends he tells them how even he is calumniated--people say that he is a member of the Anfu Club.

I struck another side of China on my way home from Tientsin. I was introduced to an ex-Minister of Finance as my traveling companion. He is a Ph.D. in higher math. from America, and is a most intelligent man. But his theme of conversation was the need of a scientific investigation of spirits and spirit possession and divination, etc., in order to decide scientifically the existence of the soul and an overruling mind.

Incidentally he told a fine lot of Chinese ghost stories. Aside from the coloring of the tales I don't know that there was anything especially Chinese about them. He certainly is much more intelligent about it than some of our American spiritualists. But the ghosts were certainly Chinese all right--spirit possession mostly. I suppose you know that the walls that stand in front of the better-to-do Chinese houses are there to keep spirits out--the spirits can't turn a corner, so when the wall is squarely in front of the location of the front door the house is safe. Otherwise they come in and take possession of somebody--if they aren't comfortable as they are. It seems there is quite a group of ex-politicians in Tientsin who are much interested in psychical research. Considering that China is the aboriginal home of ghosts, I can't see why the western investigators don't start their research here.

These educated Chinese aren't credulous, so there is nothing crude about their ghost stories.