I met the tutor, the English tutor, of the young Manchu Emperor, the other day—he has three Chinese tutors besides. He teaches him Math., Sciences, etc., besides English, which he has been doing for three months. It is characteristic of the Chinese that they not only didn’t kill any of the royal family, but they left them one of the palaces in the Imperial City and an income of four million dollars Mex. a year, and within this palace the kid who is now thirteen is still Emperor, is called that, and is waited upon by the eunuch attendants who crawl before him on their hands and knees. At the same time he is, of course, practically a prisoner, being allowed to see his father and his younger brother once a month. Otherwise he has no children to play with at all. There is some romance left in China after all if you want to let your imagination play about this scene. The tutors don’t kneel, although they address him as Your Majesty, or whatever it is in Chinese, and they walk in and he remains standing until the tutor is seated. This is the old custom, which shows the reverence in which even the old Tartars must have held education and learning. He has a Chinese garden in which to walk, but no place to ride or for sports. The tutor is trying to get the authorities to send him to the country, let him have playmates and sports, and also abolish the eunuch—but he seems to think they will more likely abolish him. The kid is quite bright, reads all the newspapers and is much interested in politics, keeps track of the Paris Conference, knows about the politicians in all the countries, and in short knows a good deal more about world politics than most boys of his age; also he is a good classical Chinese scholar. The Chinese don’t seem to worry at all about the boy’s becoming the center of intrigue and plots, but I imagine they sort of keep him in reserve with the idea that unless the people want monarchy back he never can do anything, while if they do let him back it will be the will of heaven.
I am afraid I haven’t sufficiently impressed it upon you that this is the rainy season. It was impressed upon us yesterday afternoon, when the side street upon which we live was a flowing river a foot and a half deep. The main street on which the Y. M. C. A. building is situated was a solid lake from housewall to housewall, though not more than six inches or so. But the street is considerably wider than Broadway, so it was something of a sight. Peking has for many hundred years had sewers big enough for a man to stand up in, but they don’t carry fast enough. Probably about this time you will be reading cables from some part of China about floods and the number of homeless. The Yellow River is known as the curse of China, so much damage is done. We were told that when the missionaries went down to do flood relief work a year or so ago, they were so busy that they didn’t have time to preach, and they did so much good that when they were through they had to put up the bars to keep the Chinese from joining the churches en masse. We haven’t heard, however, that they took the hint as to the best way of doing business. These floods go back largely if not wholly to the policy of the Chinese in stripping the forests. If you were to see the big coffins they are buried in and realize the large part of China’s scant forests that must go into coffins you would favor a law that no man could die until he had planted a tree for his coffin and one extra.
One of our new friends here is quite an important politician, though quite out of it just now. He told a story last night which tickled the Chinese greatly. The Japanese minister here haunted the President and Prime Minister while the peace negotiations were on, and every day on the strength of what they told him cabled the Tokyo government that the Chinese delegates were surely going to sign. Now he is in a somewhat uncomfortable position making explanations to the home government. He sent a representative after they didn’t sign to the above-mentioned friend to ask him whether the government had been fooling him all the time. He replied No, but that the Japanese should remember that there was one power greater than the government, namely, the people, and that the delegates had obeyed the people. The Japanese will never be able to make up their minds though whether they were being deliberately deceived or not. The worst of the whole thing, however, is that even intelligent Chinese are relying upon war between the United States and Japan, and when they find out that the United States won’t go to war just on China’s account, there will be some kind of a revulsion. But if the United States had used its power when the war closed to compel disarmament and get some kind of a just settlement, there would be no limit to its influence over here. As it is, they infer that the moral is that Might Controls, and that adds enormously to the moral power of Japan as against the United States. It is even plainer here than at home that if the United States wasn’t going to see its “ideals” through, it shouldn’t have professed any, but if it did profess them it ought to have made good on ’em even if we had to fight the whole world. However, our financial pressure, and the threat of withholding food and raw materials would have enabled Wilson to put anything over.
Another little incident is connected with the Chancellor of the University. Although he is not a politician at all, the Militarist party holds him responsible for their recent trials and the student outbreaks. So, although it announced that the Chancellor is coming back, the Anfu Club, the parliamentary organization of the militarists, is still trying to keep him out. The other night they gave a banquet to some University students and bribed them to start something. At the end they gave each one dollar extra for ’ricksha hire the next day, so there would be no excuse for not going to the meeting at the University. Fifteen turned up, but the spies on the other side heard something was going on and they rang the bell, collected about a hundred and locked the bribees in. Then they kept them in till they confessed the whole story (and put their names to a written confession) and turned over their resolutions and mimeographed papers which had been prepared for them in which they said they were really the majority of the students and did not want the Chancellor back, and that a noisy minority had imposed on the public, etc. The next day the Anfu papers told about an awful riot at the University, and how a certain person had instigated and led it, although he hadn’t been at the University at all that day.
Peking, July 24.
We expect to go to Manchuria, probably in September, and in October to Shansi, which is quite celebrated now because they have a civil governor who properly devotes himself to his job, and they are said to have sixty per cent or more of the children in school and to be prepared for compulsory education in 1920. It is the ease with which the Chinese do these things without any foreign assistance which makes you feel so hopeful for China on the one hand, and so disgusted on the other that they put up so patiently with inefficiency and graft most of the time. There seems to be a general impression that the present situation cannot continue indefinitely, but must take a turn one way or another. The student agitation has died down as an active political thing but continues intellectually. In Tientsin, for example, they publish several daily newspapers which sell for a copper apiece. A number of students have been arrested in Shantung lately by the Japanese, so I suppose the students are actively busy there. I fancy that when vacation began there was quite an exodus in that direction.
I am told that X——, our Japanese friend, is much disgusted with the Chinese about the Shantung business—that Japan has promised to return Shantung, etc., and that Japan can’t do it until China gets a stable government to take care of things, because their present governments are so weak that China would simply give away her territory to some other power, and that the Chinese instead of attacking the Japanese ought to mind their own business and set their own house in order. There is enough truth in this so that it isn’t surprising that so intelligent and liberal a person as X—— is taken in by it. But what such Japanese as he cannot realize, because the truth is never told to them, is how responsible the Japanese government is for fostering a weak and unrepresentative government here, and what a temptation to it a weak and divided China will continue to be, for it will serve indefinitely as an excuse for postponing the return of Shantung—as well as for interfering elsewhere. Anyone who knows the least thing about not only general disturbances in China but special causes of friction between China and Japan, can foresee that there will continue to be a series of plausible excuses for postponing the return promised—and anyway, as a matter of fact, what she has actually promised to return compared with the rights she would keep in her possession amount to little or nothing. Just this last week there was a clash in Manchuria and fifteen or twenty Japanese soldiers are reported killed by Chinese—there will always be incidents of that kind which will have to be settled first. If the other countries would only surrender their special concessions to the keeping of an international guarantee, they could force the hand of Japan, but I can’t see Great Britain giving up Hong Kong. On the whole, however, Great Britain, next to us, and barring the opium business, has been the most decent of all the great powers in dealing with China. I started out with a prejudice to the contrary, and have been surprised to learn how little grabbing England has actually done here. Of course, India is the only thing she really cares about and her whole policy here is controlled by that consideration, with such incidental trade advantages as she can pick up.
(Later) July 27.
I think I wrote a while back about a little kid five years old or so who walked up the middle aisle at one of my lectures and stood for about fifteen minutes quite close to me, gazing at me most seriously and also wholly unembarrassed. Night before last we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, under the guardianship of a friend here. A little boy came into our coop and began most earnestly addressing me in Chinese. Out friend found out that he was asking me if I knew his third uncle. He was the kid of the lecture who had recognized me as the lecturer, and whose third uncle is now studying at Columbia. If you meet Mr. T—— congratulate him for me on his third nephew. The boy made us several calls during the evening, all equally serious and unconstrained. At one he asked me for my card, which he carefully wrapped up in ceremonial paper. The restaurant is near a lotus pond and they are now in their fullest bloom. I won’t describe them beyond saying that the lotus is the lotus and advising you to come out next summer and see them.