China and America to-day; a study of conditions and relations

Front matter

TO-DAY

AUTHUR'H- SMITH

Class _Jl^4

Contents

PAGE

I. The Occident and the Orient ... 13

III. Old China 28

Foreword

Among the many dramatic events at the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century, whether we consider the number of the human beings affected or the magnitude and variety of the interests involved, none are of greater importance than the changes m the Far East.

The usual attitude of Americans toward worldphenomena of this sort has been that of more or less intelligent indifference, regarding them — in the phrase of a British writer of half-a-century ago — as " ten- thousand miles offy," and therefore of no moment to us.

By the events of the last decade this way of thinking has been shown to be not merely unphilosophical, but irrational. Geographically, politically, commercially, and morally, the countries and the peoples of the earth are more and more felt to be interrelated by what Cicero called " a common bond," not in theory only, but in solid and indisputable fact. The number by whom this old truth, newly appreciated, is distinctly apprehended is, however, not large. Those who are willing to take trouble and to make sacrifices in order to compel others to apprehend it are even fewer; yet nothing is more cer-

II 12 Foreword

tain than that the welfare of the Commonwealth depends, as it always has depended, upon the insight and the outlook of the few. The following chapters, prepared in deference to the request of many friends, contain little which has not in some form been said by others; but timely truths nowhere require more varied iteration than in busy America, where there is an unconscious consciousness of a destiny for which there is but slight provision, and of which there is as yet a very inadequate comprehension.

All that is intended in these pages is merely an outline sketch, in charcoal, of the general relations between America and China.

The Author.

Shanghai, China.

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT

The author of one of the most beautiful of Oriental poems assumes the interval between the East and the West as a standard of immeasurable distance. The observant traveller v^ho crosses from Europe to the Syrian shore of the Mediterranean Sea recognises at once that he is now in another world. It is not mere differences of language or of race, for those are found everywhere ; but there is a pervasive barrier, felt, but unseen, which divides, and for aught that we can see always will divide, the Occident from the Orient. All this and much more is condensed into the five letters, which, to our thought, represent the greatest of all the continents — Asia. It is the land of origins. The human race must have come from somewhere, and whether we locate that somewhere in some valley to the north, or upon some plain to the south, we cannot persuade ourselves that our most distant ancestors were not Asiatics.

It is a realm of antiquities, the might and inexhaustible ruins of which have as yet been only superficially explored, of magnitude in space, of indefinite duration in time. It is the land in which all the religions of mankind have originated, and from which by widely different processes they have been spread over the earth. It is the land where fatalism reigns, where the sins committed in one state of existence are slowly and toilfully expiated by successive reincarnations during successive kalpas, or myriad-year periods. In our cold Western world we hold and we teach a doctrine of logical contradictions. A thing exists or it does not exist — one or the other, certainly not both at once ; or in the formal statement of the people that talk about " logic/' " A and not-A divide the universe." There is no, and there can be no, middle ground.

All this is in Asia sublimated nonsense. Every Chinese " believes " in three mutually contradictory religions at one and the same time, and with no sense of logical (or illogical) inconvenience. " A Hindoo will state with perfect honesty that Christianity is true, that Mohammedanism is true, and that his own special variety of Brahminism is true, and that he beheves them all implicitly." " A Hindoo astronomer who predicts eclipses ten years ahead without a blunder, believes all the while, and sincerely believes, that the eclipse is caused by some supernatural dog swallowing the moon, and will beat a drum to make the dog give up his prize." A similar phenomenon is witnessed in China, where, in accordance with orders published in " The Peking Gazette," the crew of a foreign-built man-of-war, armed with Krupp guns, turn out with drums, ironpans, and any implement which will make a din, to *' save the moon." At some future, and let us hope

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 15

not too distant, time, there may arise a philosophical observer able to combine into one harmonious whole the race-traits which in a lesser or in a greater degree characterise the Turk and the Arab, the Persian and the polyglot inhabitants of the Indian peninsula, the Siamese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Chinese, and the Tartar. When that happy day arrives, we shall be able to co-ordinate those isolated bones, of which we are now in but partial possession, into a complete skeleton which shall be styled ^' Asiatic Characteristics." The disregard of time, of accuracy, of what we mean by comfort, indifference to suffering in others, a self-seclusion which makes it forever impossible for the Occidental to comprehend the real inner thought of the Oriental, the passion for the theatrical and for the spectacular (with a general flavour of the " Arabian Nights "), the all-pervading doctrine of family, clan, corporate responsibility, the definite merging (or rather submerging) of the individual in the mass — ^all these will be seen to be only variant manifestations of a common heredity, education, environment. " Oriental," in the phraseology of Dr. Sidney L. Gulick, " signifies that type of civilisation which does not recognise the value or the rights of the individual person as such. It represents autocratic absolutism in government; it emphasises the rights of the superior and the duties of the inferior; it ranks men as inherently superior to women. It has no place for popular education or iox representative government, and it esteems milltary virtue as the highest type known. In other words, in Oriental civiHsation the community is supreme, the individual of no value whatever in himself." The unchanged and the unchanging East is best typified by the Arabs of the desert, of whom Mr. Meredith Townsend, in his illuminating essays on " Asia and Europe," has something to say, and from whom we may quote a few paragraphs.

" There is no puzzle in the world, either to the ethnologist or the psychologist, quite equal to the Arab, whether he dwells in a tent, half-nomad, halfrobber, or abides in the city of Nejd or South Arabia, the oldest, most tranquil and proudest of republicans. Why is he, of all men in the world, the one who changes so little, that the person who, of all mankind, most resembles Sheikh Abraham in ways and habits and bearing, and, as the best observers say, in habit of thought, is his collateral kinsman, ninety generations removed, a sheikh of Syria or Nejd? What induces the Arab to seclude himself in a dreary peninsula, in poverty such as no European conceives, and there live a life of remote antiquity; a life without object, or hope, or fear; a life so persistent that, a thousand years hence, if Europe does not conquer him, the Arab will be as to-day? ... No one who knows the Arab doubts his enterprise, and yet he lives on unchanged in the Syrian desert, or in his vast, secluded peninsula — Arabia is as large as India, or Europe west of the Vistula — seeking no advance, complaining of no

THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT 17

suffering, living his life, such as it is, straight on, and accepting death as a destiny neither to be sought nor to be feared and fled from. As it was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end — that is his conception of human life. Time is nothing to the Arab; progress has no attraction for his mind; wealth, though when abroad he seeks it zealously, has no charm to tempt him thither. Poverty is nothing to him, for the man who is contented with his skin can never be poor. . . . They despise industry, put wealth by as meaningless, keep the tradition of the past as a possession, and without decay as without progress, live on forever, as they were in ages of which history tells us nothing. . . . Imagine a clan which prefers sand to mould, poverty to labour, solitary reflection to the busy hubbub of the mart, which will not earn enough to clothe itself, never invented so much as a lucifer match, and would consider newspaper-reading a disgraceful waste of time. Is it not horrible that such a race should be? — more horrible, that it should survive all others? — most horrible of all, fiiat it should produce, among other trifles, the Psalms and the Gospels, the Koran, and the epic of Antar ? "

From the Occidental point of view, Immobility, Incomprehensibility, and general Irrationality — these too frequently compose the little that we think we know of the Orient. But as there is a sense in which the Occident is a whole, so likewise is the Orient. ,We are to-day confronted with the indisputable fact that parts of the Orient are undergoing greater changes, and, even as we reckon progress, are making more progress, than any other part of the world. To call the reader's attention to some of the concomitants of these new conditions is the purpose of the ensuing chapters.

II

There is a deep significance in those maps which are so drawn as to show the gradual, intermittent, but steady process by which the territory of the United States came to be increased. If ever an American statesman was committed against extraconstitutional acts, that man was Thomas Jefferson. The Constitution made no provision for the purchase of alien territory, therefore, according to the strictconstructionist Democrats of that day, no such purchase could constitutionally be made.

On the other hand, the right to navigate freely the Mississippi river was of vital importance to all settlers in the valley of that great artery and its tributaries, a right for which, if necessary, they would have been prepared to fight. At a " psychologic moment," " Napoleon seized the opportunity to do England a bad turn by increasing the power of her revolted colonies. Whatever the actual circumstances, however, it is a notable fact that the Federal Government without hesitation shouldered the responsibility of this huge acquisition of territory, with its tiny population of 50,000 whites, and the same number of black and colored people, although there was considerable opposition in the Northern States."

However great was the gratification felt at the outcome, no one living an hundred years ago could possibly have entertained any adequate conception of the ultimate importance of this event, the centennial anniversary of which was celebrated by a great industrial and commercial Exposition.

The history of Florida, the next acquisition, was remarkable, for it had been colonised by Spain, and in 1763 was ceded to Great Britain in return for Cuba and the Philippine Islands. Twenty years later, Great Britain restored Florida to Spain, most of the English leaving the country, and until 18 19 it remained a Spanish colony. It was then purchased by the United States, to be used seventy-nine years afterwards as the base from which those military and naval operations were conducted which in a brief period drove the Spaniard out of that New World which he helped to discover, and where for four centuries he had misused his power.

Our unwarranted aggression upon helpless Mexico, with the ensuing treaties, carried our boundaries from the Rio Grande to the Columbia, and by the settlement of the long-standing dispute with Great Britain the Canadian frontier was permanently adjusted.

The next step in expansion, less than two decades later, was to many Americans both a surprise and a puzzle. It was apparently taken through the skill and persistence of two men, Charles Sumner and' WilHam H. Seward, the latter one of the most prescient of statesmen that America has ever produced. The vast territory of Alaska became ours because Russia, for reasons not difficult to surmise, was anxious to sell and we were willing to buy. The transcendent importance of the transfer only became obvious to every one when during the Spanish war the United States took over Spanish rights in the Philippine Islands, and the island of Guam, and annexed the Hawaiian group.

" When these circumstances are taken into consideration,'' remarks Mr. Colquhoun, " it becomes the more remarkable that from the first the United States has never hesitated on her path of expansion. At the same time, the policy was not commended by any of her great statesmen." And again: " One cannot fail to pause and review the circumstances in which that unparalleled development took place, and one is immediately struck by the steady continuity of purpose which seems half-unconsciously to have dominated the people and their rulers. In prosperity and adversity, in defence of slavery and in spite of it, by the Federalists and by the Democrats, the work went steadily on. . . . In short, the career of the United States has been from the first one of masterful, irresistible expansion, not for lack of space or opportunity at home, but because of sheer force, initiative and nervous energy — characteristics which are peculiarly strong in the race which the North American continent has developed from many stocks."

Nothing, indeed, in the early history of the country is more remarkable than the variety of strains blended into a new whole, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish. Though it required four centuries to eliminate the Spaniard, it was accomplished at last. The dislodgment of the French was even more significant, for our American wars between French and English were but isolated moves in a wide and complicated game extending around the globe, from the continental peninsula of India to the Heights of Abraham on the St. Lawrence. As a result of these conflicts some brass plates buried at the junction of important rivers (many of them discovered by Frenchmen) certifying that all lands drained by these streams were the property of His Serene Highness, Louis IV., a few proper names of Gallic origin in North America and the little settlement of Pondicherri on the Bay of Bengal, were practically all that remained to register the evaporation of what was intended to become a mighty French world-empire.

As by the war between the States America may be said to have gradually come to a real self-consciousness, so by the Spanish war we have come at last to a world-consciousness. In each case, as in every great conflict, the results were far wider than could at the outset have been foreseen by the wisest. Nine fateful years have passed since the Spanish war, and for good or for ill, to the great disquiet of some of her children as well as to that of some of her neighbours, America is an actual as distinguished from a potential world-power, with a very imperfect apprehension of what the new relations imply and of what they may involve. The Monroe Doctrine admits of many interpretations, to none of which has the world at large given its assent ; but whether it be regarded as a warning to others not to interfere upon the Western Continent, or as a conditional promise that America will undertake to render such interference unnecessary, the responsibility is serious.

The Panama Canal brings us into new relations with the Caribbean Sea, some of the ports of which in the control of other nations might in the case of war, as Capt. Mahan reminds us, become of vast strategic importance. The completion of this great waterway will make America a first-class Pacific Power.

" As far back as 1869 money was voted for establishing a naval station and harbour on Midway Island, and though the project was abandoned the island was retained." The Samoan harbour of Pango Pango, one of the finest in the Pacific, although not actively occupied until after the Spanish war, was ceded to the United States in 1872, and may become of great importance.

Most instructive is the history of our relations with the Hawaiian Islands. More than sixty years ago, Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, declared that no other power would be suffered to hold this group, which, on the other hand, the United States did not want and would not take. Through their Christianisation by American missionaries their ties with that country were strong, and as soon as the sugar and other industries were developed they became commercially and economically dependent upon America. The spectacular monarchy ran its course, followed by a short-lived republic ; but it had long been evident that formal annexation by the United States was only a question of development.

These islands are important as a strategic base and as a unique centre of influence in the broad Pacific. In one of his luminous magazine articles, published five years before the Spanish war, Capt. Mahan wrote : " Too much stress cannot be laid upon the immense disadvantage to us of any maritime enemy having a coaling station well within 2,500 miles of every point on our coast line from Puget Sound to Mexico. Were there many others available we might find it difiicult to exclude from all. There is, however, but the one. Shut out from the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands as a coalbase, an enemy is thrown back for supplies of fuel to distances of 3,500 or 4,000 miles — or between 7,000 and 8,000 going and coming — ^an impediment to sustained maritime operations well-nigh prohibitive. It is rarely that so important a factor in the attack or defence of a coast-line — of a sea frontier — is c€tncentrated in a single position, and the circumstance renders it doubly imperative upon us to secure it if we righteously can." What influence these wise words exerted it may not be easy to say, but it is certain that when the little Hawaiian republic knocked for admission, the sober sense of the American people recognised that to grant it was at once a duty and a privilege, the advantages of which were reciprocal. The Hawaiian Islands are not only the Key of the Pacific, but the Cross-roads of the Pacific as well.

As Dr. Josiah Strong observes, they are " midway between Unalaska and the Society Islands, midway between Sitka and Samoa, midway between Port Townsend and the Fiji Islands, midway between San Francisco and the Carolines, midway between the Panama Canal and Hongkong, and on the direct route from South American ports to Japan." The following table of distances is only approximately correct, since different charts are marked with different figures, but it exhibits the unique situation of Honolulu:

MILES

Honolulu to San Francisco 2,100

Honolulu to San Diego 2,260

Honolulu to Portland, Oregon 2,460

Honolulu to Sitka 2,395

Honolulu to Unalaska 2,018

Honolulu to Vancouver 2,330

Honolulu to Acapulco 3,3io

Honolulu to Nicaragua 4,210

Honolulu to Callao 5,240

Honolulu to Valparaiso 5,9i6

Honolulu to Auckland 3,850

MILES

Honolulu to Sydney. , 4,480

Honolulu to Yokohama. , 3,400

Honolulu to Hongkong 4,893

Honolulu to Manila ,..,,, 4,700

Honolulu to Samoa 2,290

Honolulu to Tahiti , 2,380

Honolulu to Fiji Islands 2,735

With the opening of th? Panama Canal the position of Honolulu in the track of the world's commerce will be seen to be of decisive importance, " because it will lie in the path of an increasing file of vessels moving from Panama to China, Japan, or Asiatic Russia." Dr. Strong quotes the Hon. L. A. Thurston as follows : " In the whole Pacific Ocean, from the equator on the south to Alaska on the north, from the coast of China and Japan on the west to the American continent on the east, there is but one spot where a ton of coal, a pound of bread, or a gallon of water can be obtained by a passing vessel, and that spot is Hawaii." By the acquisition of the Philippine Islands the United States is brought within two days' easy steaming of China. Manila is but a little more than 600 miles from Hongkong, which is only eighty miles from Canton — perhaps the largest aggregation of population in the Chinese empire. America thus becomes de facto an Asiatic power. The completion of an all- American cable across the Pacific brings Washington within a few minutes of Manila, while branch lines to China and Japan complete the circuit.

The tropical archipelago which now constitutes the American outpost at the door of the Far East may be, in an important sense, a test of our national capacity, and it may easily become — what some already consider it — a Pandora box of evils. In what spirit and with what success we are to administer our newly-acquired island possessions, and in what manner we are to deport ourselves in presence of the Oriental peoples with whom we are now brought into contact, are vital questions for the New America.

Ill

An inherent difficulty in the forming of any adequate conception of China by a Westerner is that he is almost certain to regard it as a mysterious entity which, Minerva-like, sprang into being at one place and at one time. The truth is, however, that whatever may have been their origin, the Chinese are no exception to the universal law of human evolution. Their history differs from that of other peoples with which Occidentals are familiar in the co-operation of five factors nowhere else to be found in combination: namely, comparative isolation; extended duration ; extremely gradual progression ; superiority to environment, and the overwhelming influence of resident forces as compared with the relatively unimportant effect of those from without.

The Chinese are at once the oldest, the most numerous, and the most homogeneous people existing upon the earth. Their history begins with a mythical period not unlike those of Greece and Rome, passing which we come to what Occidentals term the legendary period, whose opening is almost thirty centuries b. c. This is the age of the Five Rulers, who were "much more like great tribal chieftains than kings in the true sense of the word. Each of these five is said to have ruled for a long period of time and to have done much for the civilisation of the people." The first of these was Fu Hsi, who is reputed to have lived not later than b. c. 2852, and perhaps several centuries earlier. He established marriage, introduced by means of certain characters a notation of time, regulated the seasons, invented the six styles of writing, and instructed the people in the arts of hunting, fishing, and pasturing. " Much is attributed to him which was undoubtedly of later origin, as, for instance, the highly complicated system of Chinese written characters. Probably at this date the Chinese possessed nothing except rude hieroglyphics, and the method of writing used at the present time is the product of the slow development of ages." ^

A successor of Fu Hsi was Shen Nung (b. c. 2737), who taught the people the art of agriculture, and the use of herbs as a medicine. A later ruler is supposed to have invented the 60 year cycles, while his wife taught the rearing of silk worms and the making of silk clothing.

Two famous members of this glorious quintette (although there were nine in all) were Yao (b. c. 2356) and Shun (b. c. 2286), who have been idealised as such perfect rulers that, as any coolie may

1 The foregoing quotations, and some which follow, are from the best epitome of Chinese history, by Rev. F. L. Hawks Pott, D.D., President of St. John's College, Shanghai, "A Sketch of Chinese History." 1903.

go CHINA AND AMERICA TO-DAY.

tell you, in their time doors were not shut at night, nor lost articles picked up by any save the real owner.

One of the most striking features of the intellectual civilisation of China is the universal habit of turning a considerable part of the national literature out of doors before every New Year, at which time antithetical couplets, composed with great literary skill, are pasted on the posts of houses or gates, window frames, and the like, there to remain throughout the year until replaced by fresh ones. References to the Classics, with poetic and historic allusions, abound. One of the couplets everywhere to be met with tersely glorifies the two worthies just named, together with the great Yii, who founded (2205 B. c.) the Hsia dynasty, and Wen Wang, a famous Duke, whose period was about 1 140 b. c.

"'The Day of Yao; The Time of Shun; The Rule of Yii; The Style of Wen."

To no people in the world have past ages and dead men ever been more of a " live issue " than to the Chinese, without a perception of which fact it is impossible to comprehend them or their history.

Like all other countries, China had inhabitants who arrived long before the " first settlers," and with them the Chinese waged warfare, gradually driving them back, but without exterminating them. Many of these tribes whom the Chinese have not been able to subdue are still to be found in the mountainous parts of southern China. When the rude maps of the empire at the different stages of its slow growth are examined, its historic evolution during the last 3,000 years becomes, by a similar representation, as clear as that of the United States since the adoption of the Constitution. The first territory occupied by the Chinese was in the northwest, along the Yellow River, and formed but a fraction of what is now China proper. By an expansion as normal as that in America, although so deliberate, the Empire has been pushed onward and outward until at certain periods it has been coextensive with the greater part of the continent of Asia, stretching from India on the one hand to Persia on the other. The earliest rulers were Patriarchs, developed by their struggles with their neighbours into Military Chieftains.

From a Western point of view, the history of China is divided into two well-marked periods, of which the first, the Legendary, began about 2500 years b. c, extending to the Ch'in dynasty (b. c. 221-209). Among the different feudal States into which China was then divided, that of Ch'in was situated on the western frontier, where its rulers might naturally be expected to become adepts in warfare, as compared with the more peaceful States remote from the stormy borders. It is from the name of this division of the Empire that the word China is supposed to have had its origin, a word, it should be observed, which the Chinese have never employed, and which they are now introducing from the West through Japan, in the form of Chih-na.

One of the Ch'in rulers, who, by the way, entered upon his labours at the early age of thirteen, recognising the weakness of the divided state of China, determined to unite it. After bringing all the States into submission he organised the country into provinces, over which officers were appointed, responsible to himself, a system which has practically been followed down to the present time. To guard against the ever-threatening Tartars, this Emperor built (and in part repaired) the " Great Wall," by far the most impressive of the tangible memorials of China's past, a gigantic undertaking, usually reckoned at fifteen hundred miles in length. It was completed (b. c. 204) in ten years' time, " at a vast expense of men and material, and not until the family of the builder had been destroyed."

This " statesman of puissant energy and strongly marked individuality," who has been called the Napoleon of China, was the real founder of the Empire as we know it. He took the ambitious name of The First Emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang, that history might be begun from him ; and to facilitate this end, as well as to dim the memory of the past which he was resolved to abandon, he despotically ordered the destruction of nearly the whole of the existing literature. The scholars of the time naturally resented and criticised this wholesale vandalism, and offered a keen and a persistent opposition. Upon this he ordered 460 of them to be buried alive " for the encouragement of the others " I The survivors concealed as many as possible of the priceless treasures of antiquity, and from the tablets of their memories — " wax to receive but marble to retain " — they were subsequently able to reproduce the greater part. China is perhaps the only country in which so overwhelming a calamity could have been followed by effects so relatively slight.

This period of Chinese history is from every point of view of capital importance. It contains the only revolution in the long experience of the Chinese race, although they have passed through rebellions literally innumerable. Ch'in Shih Huang was a reformer who appeared at a crisis. But in order to accomplish his nationalistic and egoistic purpose he was ready to make an abrupt and a final break with the past.

But a fundamental characteristic of Chinese civilisation is a refusal to break with the past: continuity is its life. The Chinese Muse of History is as inexorable as Fate — it is, indeed, but another name for Fate, and by that Muse and in that history Ch'in Shih Huang, the unifier of China and one of its ablest spirits, is adjudged a monster of wickedness and a warning to an hundred generations. The dynasty of Ch'in lasted but forty-nine years, but some of its effects were permanent. The Empire was put in condition to present a determined front to the incursions of the barbarous tribes to the north.