PART V The Future of China And Our Relation To It
XXV
IS THERE A YELLOW PERIL
WILL China ever be able to menace the nations of the West? This is the startling question that many sober-minded men are asking. Some writers, indeed, make light of the ``yellow peril,'' characterizing it ``a mere bugaboo of an excited imagination,'' because, as they allege, China has neither the organization nor the valour to fight Europe, and because, if it had, it could not transport its army and navy so vast a distance.
But surely organization and valour can be acquired by the Chinese as well as by any other people. Their present helplessness before the aggressive foreigner is rapidly teaching them the necessity for the former. As for the latter, it is well known that the most dangerous fighter is the strong but peaceably- disposed man who has been goaded to desperation by long- continued insult and injustice. Americans may discreetly remember that they themselves were once sneeringly described as ``a nation of shopkeepers who wouldn't and couldn't fight.''
It is easy to be deceived by the result of the China-Japan War of 1894. The Japanese were successful, not because they are abler, but because they had more swiftly responded to the touch of the modern world and had organized their government, their army and their navy in accordance with scientific methods. More bulky and phlegmatic China was caught napping by her enterprising enemy. Despising the profession of arms, China gave her energies to scholarship and commerce, and filled her regiments and ships with paupers, criminals and opium fiends, who were as destitute of courage, intelligence and patriotism as the darky who explained his flight from the battle-field by saying that he would rather be a live coward than a dead hero. As for the men above them, a Chinese officer admitted to a friend of mine that at the outbreak of the war with Japan, the army contractors bought a lot of old rifles in Germany, which had long before been discarded as worthless by the German army, paying two ounces of silver for each gun, and thriftily charging the Government nine ounces. Then they bought a cargo of cartridges that did not fit the guns and that had been lying in damp cellars for twenty years, and put the whole equipment into the hands of raw recruits commanded by opium-smokers.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Chinese were worsted before the onset of the wide-awake Japanese, and that the unorganized mobs with which they blindly tried to drive out foreigners in 1900 were easily crushed by the armies of the West. But it would be folly to imagine that this is the end. It takes a nation of 426,000,000 phlegmatic people longer to get under way than a nation of 43,000,000 nervous people, but when they do get started, their momentum is proportionately greater. China has plenty of men who can fight, and when they are well commanded, they make as good soldiers as there are in the world, as ``Chinese Gordon'' showed. Was not his force called the ``Ever Victorious Army,'' because it was never defeated? Did not Lord Charles Beresford, of the English navy, say, after personal inspection of many of the troops of China:—``I am convinced that properly armed, disciplined and led, there could be no better material than the Chinese soldiers''? Did not Admiral Dewey report that the fifty Chinese who served under him in the battle of Manila Bay fought so magnificently that they proved themselves equal in courage to American sailors and that they should be made American citizens by special enactment? During my tour of Asia, I saw the soldiers of England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Russia, America and Japan. But the Chinese cavalrymen of Governor Yuan Shih Kai, whom I have described elsewhere,[89] were as fine troops as I saw anywhere. They would be a foe not to be despised. When Bishop Potter returned from his tour of Asia, he declared that ``when Japan has taught China the art of war, neither England nor Russia nor Germany will decide the fate of the East.''
[89] Chapter VII.
It is odd that any intelligent person should suppose that distance is an effectual barrier against an aroused and organized Asia. It is no farther from China to Europe than from Europe to China, and Europe has not found the distance a barrier to its designs on China. England, Germany, France, Russia, and even little Holland and Portugal, have all managed to send ships and troops to the Far East, to seize territory and to subjugate the inhabitants. Why should it be deemed impossible for China, which alone is larger than all these nations combined, to do what they have done?
The absorption of China by Russia or any other single European power is not possible for the reason that the attempt would be resisted by all the other Powers, including the United States and Japan. The world will never permit one of its nations to make China what Great Britain has made India. A half dozen Powers are determined to have a share if the break up comes.