Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology

by Arthur H. Smith

Political disturbances which often rise to the dignity of small rebellions operate in the same way as famines and floods. In any of these cases families once widely dispersed are not likely again to recombine.

It is not in times of special stress only that families are parted. In several of the provinces of China a considerable proportion of the adult males earn their living at great distances from home.

Myriads of Chinese from the northern portion of China get such a livelihood as they can in Manchuria or elsewhere beyond the Great Wall, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, to which multitudes never return. Innumerable Chinese mothers never learn what has become of their sons, who went away in early youth to be heard of no more. Communication is irregular and uncertain, and uniformly untrustworthy. No wonder the current adage declares that when the son has gone a thousand miles the mother grieves.[8] The Chinese Enoch Arden perhaps returns from an absence of possibly ten or it may be twenty years, enters his house, throws down his bundle and without a question or a greeting to any one, proceeds to take a solacing smoke. He may have been away so long that no one recognizes him, and perhaps he is taken for a tramp and warned off. But he merely replies “Why should I not make myself at home in my own house?” and resumes his smoking, leaving details to be filled in later.

The equilibrium of every Chinese family is liable to be disturbed by an evil which may not unlikely work more mischief than an ordinary earthquake—to wit, a lawsuit. There is not a day in the life of any Chinese when his peace, his prosperity, and possibly his life may not be endangered by some complication for which he is not in any way responsible, but from which escape is practically impossible. Let not the reader suppose that most Chinese are entangled in the meshes of the law, for this is not the case. But there is always the unavoidable liability. A moment of uncontrollable passion on the part of any one of a score of persons, may precipitate a crisis involving the expenditure of the greater part of one’s resources, subjection to protracted detention in jail, to torture, to punishment of immeasurable barbarity, and to virtual starvation in prison unless the means of the family are drained to prevent it. Not every lawsuit has within it such phenomena as these, but they are everywhere potential, for no one can predict where or how any suit will end. It is not alone the principals who suffer in cases of this sort, for, as the current saying runs, “When one family has trouble none of the four neighbours are in peace.”

Attention has been repeatedly called to the familiar fact that practically no Chinese can maintain financial independence. To a foreigner nothing is more amazing than the reckless manner in which a debt is contracted which subsequently proves to have within it the fruitful seeds of ruin for the whole family. It is vain to ask why the money was borrowed. One might as well inquire why one is so wet who has been out all night in a Scotch mist. Ages of experience have made the Chinese relentless creditors, and woe to him who owes but cannot pay. China is full of small dealers with a limited capital, who do well enough in ordinary years. A very small percentage contrives to get so far ahead as to buy land, and thus the family is rooted to the soil. But a far larger number lose the capital invested, are obliged to sell their little holdings to pay their dues, and thenceforth they join the great, hopeless, landless class. A single failure of one important crop may carry with it consequences of this kind to many small dealers. In China the man or the family which is loaded with a debt beyond the recuperative power of the debtor, finds itself upon an oiled toboggan-slide at the bottom of which is remediless ruin.

In the families of the poor there is no margin of any kind for sickness, but sickness comes impartially to every grade of life. When the bread-winner is laid aside, when the mother of a little flock is no longer able to keep the simple domestic machinery in motion, then indeed trouble has arrived. If a young married woman is sick, the first step is to send for her mother; for ordinarily no one in the family into which she has married has the time or disposition to take care of her, least of all the husband, who regards himself as aggrieved by her disability, and who is often far more inclined to expect the family of his wife to bear all the resultant expenses, than to meet them himself. One of the legal occasions for divorce is chronic illness, although we have never heard of a single instance where formal steps were taken for that reason. It is a current saying that in the presence of a long continued sickness there is no filial son. How great the family strain often is, there are many things to prove. In the midst of it all one is sometimes agreeably surprised to find an amount of tenderness and forbearance worthy of all praise. But in the constitution of Chinese society these exhibitions are and must be in a great minority. A man well known to the writer in speaking of the serious symptoms of a disease of his wife, remarked that he had asked her how long she expected to keep up the groans called forth by the intolerable agonies of terrible and incurable ulcers, and that for his part he had offered to provide her with a rope that she might relieve him of his inconvenience, and herself of her miseries, though upon being remonstrated with for such an inhuman view of the case, he frankly admitted that his troubles had made him “stupid.” It is a significant saying in such instances that the sufferer although poor has contracted a rich man’s malady.

The disintegrating forces which operate in the Chinese family are more efficient in the homes of the poor than of the rich, because there is less power of resistance. But there are two of these agencies which imply a certain degree of prosperity ere they can be fully developed, the gambling and the opium habit, twin vices of the Chinese race. Each leads by swift and relentless steps to destruction, and in each case there ensues at last what is virtually a paralysis of the will, making amendment impossible. Against these gigantic evils there is in Chinese society no safeguard whatever, no preventive influences, and no remedies. It would be easy to illustrate in terrible detail how these forces act insidiously, universally and irresistibly. The wonder is that the track of devastation is not even wider. They take rank among the most destructive instrumentalities in Chinese social life. It is very rare indeed to hear of reform from either of these vices, when there has been no impulse imparted from without, and it is rarer that there is any one who can and who will impart it.

To this dark catalogue of maleficent forces must be added one more, violation of social morality. To what extent this prevails in any given place it is impossible for any Chinese—much less for any foreigner—to say with authority. There is among the people, despite their loquacity—an instinct of reticence in every way commendable. Little value is placed upon infant life. The air is always full of rumors and suspicious whispers, so that the judicious will believe nothing of which there is not positive evidence. The Chinese code of morals is a lofty one, both in theory and in practice. The social arrangements are all made with a carefulness which to the Occidental seems mere prudery, but which the accumulated experience of millenniums has convinced the Chinese to be not only wise, but indispensable.

Yet in the conditions of everyday life it is simply impossible that theoretical regulations should be reduced to practice. The elderly women die, and courtyards are left from sheer necessity in a condition to invite catastrophe. Against a bad father-in-law especially if he be a widower—there is in the Chinese social economy no provision and no defence. It is proverbial that insinuations lurk about the dwelling-place of widows. In a word it may almost be said that no one has absolute confidence in any one else.

In spite of all apparent evidence to the contrary, there is adequate reason to believe that Chinese social morality at its best is fully equal to that of any Western land. Yet it is necessary to take careful note of the circumstance that the consequences of a lapse from virtue are destitute of the ameliorations with which we have become familiar. The principal concern of every one interested is the “face” of the family involved, and to save this imaginary self-respect it may be necessary for some one to commit suicide, which is done with the smallest provocation at all times. No Chinese is ever quite free from the dread that some one of his household may take this step. Provision is expressly made in Chinese law for the punishment of those who can be proved to have “urged to death” others; a crime which is treated as manslaughter. This fact alone would serve as a gauge of the wide interval between the civilizations of the west and of China.