Both Mr. Chen and Mr. Fu lay considerable stress upon the institution of the patriarchal Chinese family clan, which retains its sons at home, marrying them at an early age before they achieve economic independence, as a retarding influence upon Chinese progress. Mr. Chen and Mr. Duyvendak are also inclined to lay stress upon the paralyzing effect of the classical examinations upon the Chinese mind. These examinations have subdued or rejected all innovating intelligences. Mr. Duyvendak also points out that J. L. M. and E. B. have overlooked the fact that rice is grown only in South China.
L. C. B. disagrees with J. L. M. and E. B. in his analysis of the Chinese problem. His sympathies are with the south; with the philosophy of Lao Tse. He writes as follows:—
“In order to answer the question—why China achieved so much under the T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, and thereafter failed to achieve more, it is necessary to consider what were the principal factors of culture and progress under these dynasties, and how they came to be extinguished.
“From the earliest times there have always been two widely differing types of Chinese mind—the Northern or Confucian, and the Southern or Taoist. As Mr. Okakura has pointed out, the Yangtse-Kiang and the Hwang-Ho rivers are respectively, from the point of view of thought and culture, the Mediterranean and the Baltic of China. Taoism was the idealism of the south, Confucianism the practice of the north. Both stood for adjustment; but the adjustment of Confucius was the adjustment of the individual in his social and ceremonial relations to others, while that of Lao Tse was the adjustment of the individual soul in its relation to the Infinite. The history of China is bound up with the struggle of those two forces, culminating in the practically complete defeat of Taoism after centuries of ebb and flow. Chu Hsi, A.D. 1130-1200, was the later St. Paul of modern Confucianism. During the T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties China was temporarily united, and free play was allowed to the thought of both schools. Each played its part and each reacted upon the other, to the great benefit of the Empire. Yet both systems carried within them the seeds of decay. Taoism, divorced from the affairs of everyday life and the education of the people, lost itself in art, literature, and mythology. Confucianism added layer after layer of hard shell about the inert organism of social life. The end was finally reached in 1421 under the Mings with the transference of the capital from Nanking to Peking, and the dominance of the Confucian party who had brought it about. Only in the later Ming period does the great solitary figure of Wang Yang Ming arise. His central doctrine that thought and learning are of small value unless translated into action had little immediate effect in China, but it fell upon Japanese soil, quickened the drooping Samurai spirit, and reached maturity with the Russo-Japanese war and the advance of modern Japan.
“The imprisonment of the Chinese mind in the ancient script is merely one aspect of Confucianism in its bondage to the past. The statement of J. L. M. and E. B. that China is a nation of peasants is incomprehensible to me. There has always been a great urban industrialism and a great commerce. ‘The Chinese,’ as Dyer Ball says, ‘are pre-eminently a trading race.... Nor has the trade of China been simply a modern affair. From remote antiquity the Chinese have been true to their commercial instincts, and have not only been the civilizers of Eastern Asia, supplying them with their letters and literature’ [and artistic products], ‘but they have also provided for their more material wants, and received in exchange the commodities which they required from the neighbouring nations.’ Trade with India was developed to a great extent in the ninth century A.D.”
This interesting question is also discussed very ably and interestingly in Hubbard’s The Fate of Empires.
In discussing §§ 7 and 8, Mr. S. N. Fu has pointed out that little or nothing is said in this Outline of the period of confusion before Shi-Hwang-ti. It was an age of political division indeed, but of very great intellectual initiatives. Unhappily there exists as yet little or no material in Europe available for the purposes of this history, upon this equivalent to the Athenian period of mental vigour in Europe.
[316] See Watters’ Travels of Yuan Chwang and Beal’s Life of Hiuen Tsiang (= Yuan Chwang).
[317] There is some little doubt about this identification. See Watters.
[318] The British Encyclopædia article (Hsuan Tsang) is full and good on his Indian travels.