[ [26] ] Since this was written certain diplomatists in Peking have been forced to resign.
CHAPTER XVII
THE FINAL PROBLEM:—REMODELLING THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHINA AND THE WORLD
The careful narrative we have made—supported as it is by documents—of the history of China since the inception of the Republic six years ago should not fail to awaken profound astonishment among those who are interested in the spread of good government throughout the world. Even casual readers will have no difficulty in realizing how many lives have been lost and how greatly the country has been crippled both owing to the blind foreign support given to Yuan Shih-kai during four long and weary years and to the stupid adhesion to exploded ideas, when a little intelligence and a little generosity and sympathy would have guided the nation along very different paths. To have to go back, as China was forced to do in 1916, and begin over again the work which should have been performed in 1912 is a handicap which only persistent resolution can overcome; for the nation has been so greatly impoverished that years must elapse before a complete recovery from the disorders which have upset the internal balance can be chronicled: and when we add that the events of the period May-July, 1917, are likely still further to increase the burden the nation carries, the complicated nature of the outlook will be readily understood.
Happily foreign opinion has lately taken turn for the better. Whilst the substitution of a new kind of rule in place of the Yuan Shih-kai régime, with its thinly disguised Manchuism and its secret worship of fallen gods, was at first looked upon as a political collapse tinged with tragedy—most foreigners refusing to believe in an Asiatic Republic—the masculine decision of the 9th February, 1917, which diplomatically ranged China definitely on the side of the Liberal Powers, has caused something of a volte face. Until this decision had been made it was the fashion to declare that China was not only not fit to be a Republic but that her final dissolution was only a matter of time. Though the empire disappeared because it had become an impossible rule in the modern world—being womanish, corrupt, and mediaeval—to the foreign mind the empire remained the acme of Chinese civilization; and to kill it meant to lop off the head of the Chinese giant and to leave lying on the ground nothing but a corpse. It was in vain to insist that this simile was wrong and that it was precisely because Chinese civilization had exhausted itself that a new conception of government had to be called in to renew the vitality of the people. Men, and particularly diplomats, refused to understand that this embodied the heart and soul of the controversy, and that the sole mandate for the Republic, as well as the supreme reason why it had to be upheld if the country was not to dissolve, has always lain in the fact that it postulates something which is the very antithesis of the system it has replaced and which should be wholly successful in a single generation, if courage is shown and the whip unflinchingly used.
The chief trouble, in the opinion of the writer, has been the simplicity of the problem and not its complexity. By eliminating the glamour which surrounded the Throne, and by kicking away all the pomp and circumstance which formed the age-old ritual of government, the glaring simplicity and barrenness of Chinese life—when contrasted with the complex West—has been made evident. Bathed in the hard light of modern realities, the poetic China which Haroun al-Raschid painted in his Aladdin, and which still lives in the beautiful art of the country, has vanished for ever and its place has been taken by a China of prose. To those who have always pictured Asia in terms of poetry this has no doubt been a very terrible thing—a thing synonymous with political death. And yet in point of fact the elementary things remain much as they have always been before, and if they appear to have acquired new meaning it is simply because they have been moved into the foreground and are no longer masked by a gaudy superstructure.
For if you eliminate questions of money and suppose for a moment that the national balance-sheet is entirely in order, China is the old China although she is stirred by new ideas. Here you have by far the greatest agricultural community in the world, living just as it has always lived in the simplest possible manner, and remitting to the cities (of which there are not ten with half-a-million inhabitants) the increment which the harvests yield. These cities have made much municipal progress and developed an independence which is confessedly new. Printing presses have spread a noisy assertiveness, as well as a very critical and litigious spirit, which tends to resent and oppose authority.[[27]] Trade, although constantly proclaimed to be in a bad way, is steadily growing as new wants are created and fashions change. An immense amount of new building has been done, particularly in those regions which the Revolution of 1911 most devastated. The archaic fiscal system, having been tumbled into open ruin, has been partially replaced by European conceptions which are still only half-understood, but which are not really opposed. The country, although boasting a population which is only some fifty millions less than the population of the nineteen countries of Europe, has an army and a police-force so small as to allow one to say that China is virtually disarmed since there are only 900,000 men with weapons in their hands. Casting about to discover what really tinges the outlook, that must simply be held to be the long delay the world has made in extending the same treatment to China as is now granted to the meanest community of Latin America. It has been almost entirely this, coupled with the ever-present threat of Japanese chauvinism, which has given China the appearance of a land that is hopelessly water-logged, although the National Debt is relatively the smallest in the world and the people the most industrious and law-abiding who have ever lived. In such circumstances that ideas of collapse should have spread so far is simply due to a faulty estimate of basic considerations.
For we have to remember that in a country in which the thoroughly English doctrine of laissez faire has been so long practised that it has become second nature, and in which the philosophic spirit is so undisputed that the pillars of society are just as much the beggars who beg as the rich men who support them, influences of a peculiar character play an immense rôle and can be only very slowly overcome. Passivity has been so long enthroned that of the Chinese it may be truly said that they are not so much too proud to fight as too indifferent,—which is not a fruitful state of affairs. Looking on the world with callous detachment the masses go their own way, only pausing in their work on their ancient Festival days which they still celebrate just as they have always celebrated them since the beginning of their history. The petty daily activities of a vast legion of people grouped together in this extraordinary way, and actuated by impulses which seem sharply to conflict with the impulses of the other great races of the world, appear incredible to Westerners who know what the outer perils really are, and who believe that China is not only at bay but encircled—caught in a network of political agreements and commitments which have permanently destroyed her power of initiative and reduced her to inanition. To find her lumbering on undisturbed, ploughing the fields, marrying and giving in marriage, buying, selling, cursing and laughing, carrying out rebellions and little plots as though the centuries that stretch ahead were still her willing slaves, has in the end become to onlookers a veritable nightmare. Puzzled by a phenomenon which is so disconcerting as to be incapable of any clear definition, they have ended by declaring that an empty Treasury is an empty rule, adding that as it is solely from this monetary viewpoint that the New China ought to be judged, their opinion is the one which will finally be accepted as authoritative. The situation is admittedly dangerous; and it is imperative that a speedy remedy be sought; for the heirs and assigns of an estate which has been mismanaged to the brink of bankruptcy must secure at all costs that no public receivership is made.