Where Half The World Is Waking Up / The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

by Clarence Hamilton Poe

Great reforms were then proposed--twelve years ago--and the Emperor sanctioned edict after edict for their introduction. But their hour had not yet come.

I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was most potent at that time: a man whose heart was then aflame with the idea of remaking China. They dared much, did these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of high rank and a Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the great task, with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed and the Empress Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and five other leaders were beheaded.

Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already been fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand others will rise up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign has come; the Empress Dowager, dying, has been succeeded by a mere boy, whose father, the Prince Regent, holds the imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no longer all-powerful. {94} For the first time in all the cycles of Cathay the voice of the people is stronger than the voice of the Throne. Men do not hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years ago, they would have paid the penalty with their heads.

There are many things that give one faith in the future of China, but nothing else which begets such confidence as the success of the crusade against the opium habit. Four years ago, when the news went out that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit within ten years--had started on a ten years' war against opium--there were many who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quixotic even for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy but as being as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success to come even in twice ten years hardly dared express their confidence among well-informed people.

"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese has taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinaman will always be a slave to the opium habit." So said a professedly authoritative American book on China, published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory to common sense. "We white Americans can't get rid of whiskey intemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization and all our Christianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant Chinaman to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, but to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent history--China's victory over opium-intemperance already assured and in great measure completed, not in ten years, but in four--stands out as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress our own people have made in their warfare against drink-intemperance.

To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a man is no easy task. Officials right here in Peking, for example, died as a result of stopping too suddenly after the {95} edict came out announcing that no opium victim could remain in the public service. But a member of the Emperor's cabinet, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given up the habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five per cent, may smoke in secret, but with the constant menace of dismissal hanging like a Damocles sword over their heads, it may be assumed that even these few are breaking themselves from the use of the drug.

Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Because they recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of their people, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because they regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's family, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weakling officials who had lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess"--and with possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck--has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen.

The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy in some sections was far more profitable than that of any other crop; it was, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing the opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in the profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of old land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had {96} been home-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price too great to pay in the effort to free herself from this form of intemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did to me to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping the whiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we are stopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At a dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the occurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have not yet seen one.

China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe that every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the proper development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious habit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the brain.

The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which the people of America may well give attention. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will {97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for numberless other abuses.