THE result of the operation of this commercial force is an economic revolution of vast proportions. When ever I went in Asia, I found wider interest in this subject than in the aggressions of European nations. The reason is obvious. The common people in Asia care little for politics, but the price of food and raiment touches every man, woman and child at a sensitive point. Almost everywhere, the old days of cheap living are passing away. Steamers, railways, telegraphs, newspapers, labour-saving machinery, and the introduction of western ideas are slowly but surely revolutionizing the Orient. Shantung wheat, which formerly had no market beyond a radius of a few dozen miles from the wheat-field, can now be shipped by railroad and steamship to any part of the world, and every Chinese buyer has to pay more for it in consequence. In like manner new facilities for export have doubled, trebled and, in some places, quadrupled the price of rice in China, Siam and Japan. The Consul-General of the United States at Shanghai reports that the prices of seventeen staple articles of export have increased sixteen per cent. in twenty years while in Japan the increase in the same articles for the same period was thirty-one per cent.[25]
[24] Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the Century Magazine, March, 1904. [25] ``Commercial China,'' p. 2902.
The depreciation in the value of silver has still further complicated the situation. The common Chinese tael, which formerly bought from 1,500 to 1,800 cash (the current coin of China), now buys only 950 cash. The Shanghai tael brings 897 cash, and the Mexican dollar only 665. This of course, means that the common people, who use only cash, have to pay a larger number of them for the necessaries of life. The same difficulty is being felt to a greater or less extent in many other countries of Asia, while in China, an already serious advance in prices is being heightened by the heavy import taxes which have been levied to meet the indemnity imposed by the Western Powers on account of the Boxer outbreak.
The prices of labour and materials have sharply advanced in consequence of the enormous demands incident to the construction of railways, with their stations, shops and round-houses, the vast engineering schemes of the Germans at Tsing-tau, the British at Wei-hai Wei and the Russians at Port Arthur, the extensive scale on which the Legations have rebuilt in Peking, the reconstruction of virtually the entire business portions of both Peking and Tien-tsin, as well as the coincident rebuilding of the mission stations of all denominations, Protestant and Catholic. It will be readily understood what all this activity means in a land where there are as yet but limited supplies of the kind of skilled labourers required for foreign buildings, and where the requisite materials must be imported from Europe and America by firms who ``are not in China for their health.''
It is futile to hope that the competition will be materially less next year, or the year after, or the year after that. Commerce and politics are planning works in China which will not be completed for many years. Railway officials told me of projected lines which will require decades for construction. China has entered upon an era of commercial development. The Western world has come to stay, and while there may be temporary reactions, as there have been at home, prices are not likely to return to their former level. There are vast interior regions which will not be affected for an indefinite period, but for the coast provinces, primitive conditions are passing forever.
The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods and articles has created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no longer content to burn bean oil; he wants kerosene. In scores of humble Laos homes and markets I saw American lamps costing twenty rupees apiece, and a magistrate proudly showed me a collection of nineteen of these shining articles. Forty thousand dollars worth of these lamps were sold in Siam last year. The narrow streets of Canton are brilliant with German chandeliers and myriads of private houses throughout the Empire are lighted by foreign lamps. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is only equalled by his passion for foreign clocks. I counted twenty-seven in the private apartments of the Emperor of China and my wife counted nineteen in a single room of the Empress Dowager's palace, while cheaper ones tick to the delighted wonder of myriads of humbler people. The ambitious Syrian scorns the mud roof of his ancestors and will only be satisfied with bright red tiles imported from France. In almost every Asiatic city I visited, I found shops crowded with articles of foreign manufacture. ``Made in Germany'' is as familiar a phrase in Siam as in America. Many children in China are arrayed only in the atmosphere, but when I was in Taian-fu, in the far interior of Shantung, hundreds of parents were in consternation because the magistrate had just placarded the walls with an edict announcing that hereafter boys and girls must wear clothes and that they would be arrested if found on the streets naked. At a banquet given to the foreign ministers by the Emperor and the Empress Dowager in the famous Summer Palace twelve miles from Peking, the distinguished guests cut York ham with Sheffield knives and drank French wines out of German glasses. Everywhere articles of foreign manufacture are in demand, and shrewd Chinese merchants are stocking their shops with increasing quantities of European and American goods. The new Chinese Presbyterian Church at Wei-hsien typifies the elements that are entering Asia for it contains Chinese brick, Oregon fir beams, German steel binding-plates and rods, Belgian glass, Manchurian pine pews, and British cement.
India is eagerly buying American rifles, tools, boots and shoes, while vast regions which depend upon irrigation are becoming interested in American well-boring outfits. Persia is demanding increasing quantities of American padlocks, sewing- machines and agricultural implements. German, English and American machinery is equipping great cotton factories in Japan. I saw Russian and American oil tins in the remotest villages of Korea. Strolling along the river bank one evening in Paknampo, Siam, I heard a familiar whirring sound and entering found a bare-legged Siamese busily at work on a sewing- machine of American make. Nearly five hundred of them are sold in Siam every year, and I found them in most of the cities that I visited in other Asiatic countries. When I left Lampoon on an elephant, six hundred miles north of Bangkok, a Laos gentleman rode beside me for several miles on an American bicycle. There are thousands of them in Siam. His Majesty himself frequently rides one and His Royal Highness, Prince Damrong, is president of a bicycle club of four hundred members. The king's palace is lighted by electricity and the Government buildings are equipped with telephones, and as the nobles and merchants see the brilliancy of the former and the convenience of the latter, they want them, too. In many parts of Asia people, who but a decade or two ago were satisfied with the crudest appliances of primitive life, are now learning to use steam and electrical machinery, to like Oregon flour, Chicago beef, Pittsburg pickles and London jam, and to see the utility of foreign wire, nails, cutlery, drugs, paints and chemicals.
Many other illustrations of a changed condition might be cited. Knowledge increases wants and the Oriental is acquiring knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that his grandfather never heard of, and when he goes to the shops to buy his daily food, he finds that the new market for it which the foreigner has opened has increased the price.
Americans are the very last people who can consistently criticise this tendency in Asia. It is the foreigner who has created it, and the American is the most prodigal of all foreigners. I never realized until I visited other lands how extravagant is the scale of American life, not only among the rich, but the so-called poor. My morning walk to my New York office takes me along Christopher Street, and I have often seen in the garbage cans of tenement houses pieces of bread and meat and half-eaten vegetables and fruit that would give the average Asiatic the feast of a lifetime. In Europe, Americans are notorious as spendthrifts. In the Philippine Islands, they have thrown about their money in a way which has inaugurated an era of reckless lavishness comparable only to the California days of ``forty-nine.'' In the port cities of China, the porters asked me extortionate prices because I was an American. Two or three coolies would seize a suit case or change it from man to man every few minutes, on the pretense that it was heavy. In Tien-tsin, you hire a jinrikisha and presently you find a second man pushing behind, though the road is smooth as a floor. In a few minutes a third appears to push on the other side, and once a fourth took hold between the second and third. All of course demand pay, and it is difficult to shake them off. They do not understand your protests, or they pretend not to, and you have to be emphatic to get rid of them. At Tong-ku, my sampan men calmly insisted on two dollars for a service that was worth but forty cents. Everywhere, I found that it was wiser to make all purchases and bargains through trusty native Christians, or to ascertain in advance what a given service was really worth, pay it and walk off, deaf to all protestations and complaints, even though as in Seoul, Korea, the men plaintively sat around for hours. In Cairo, a certain hotel charged me on the supposition that because I was an American, I was a millionaire or a fool—perhaps both. True, we have hack-drivers and hotel-keepers in America who are equally rapacious, and a New Yorker in particular need not go away from home to be overcharged. But it is just because we have become so accustomed to this careless profusion at home that we exhibit it abroad.
But it is useless to protest against the increased cost of living in Asia. It is as much beyond individual control as the tides. The causes which are producing it are not even national but cosmopolitan.