Western ideology has failed to enter China as a constructive whole, but it has smashed whatever reality there was to the old world view. Western-educated Chinese leadership has undertaken the task of governing a people which has learned only indirectly of the West. In carrying out a program of adaptation, contemporary Chinese leadership has relied on Sun Yat-sen's phrase, "modernization without Westernization." But a dilemma remains. How can the standards of the modern world be divorced from their Western origins? How can Western technology be used without the attitude of mind which has created it and brought it to operative efficiency? How can a world which never knew Rome or the Normanic Curia Regis know jurisprudence? How can modern government be made Chinese, when government itself has meant something far different in China from what it has meant in the West?
Further, the nature of Chinese leadership has not only been transformed from being literary and ethical in its orientation to being technical and legal; it has also been transformed socially in the replacement of scholars by soldiers. The ideal ruler of old was a humane classicist with a taste for historical studies; the contemporary Chinese ruler must be military, if not militaristic, and must have the inevitable background of engineering and management which modern war connotes. The soldier must collaborate with the modern administrator, while both recapture the high ideals of devotion typical of the old scholastic rule, even if they cannot use its substance. These imperatives are indispensable if China is to live.
Finally, the language system which did so much to create and then perpetuate the scholastic elite through thousands of years of Chinese culture has now submitted to changes deeper and more far-reaching than any in the past. The development of the pai-hua school of literature and the progress of mass education indicate that even with ideographs the Chinese can reach conditions of uniform literacy approximating those which prevail in the advanced Western nations. If the alphabetization of the Chinese language, which is now in the form of tentative experiment, should become a fact, even more striking developments could take place. Reading and writing, and on this basis the transmission of authoritative tenets, does not presuppose profound economic adjustments. The modern Chinese will know his classics increasingly through paraphrases no more difficult than a newspaper column. When it is realized that the simplification of intellectual activity is offered to a people schooled in the idolatry of books, the potentialities of educational and intellectual renaissance—already partially realized—become apparent.
With the disappearance of the imperial world society of the Confucians as a consequence of its encirclement by Westernized states, with the passing of the scholars and the rise of Western-trained soldiers, lawyers, and technicians, and with the alteration of the linguistic and intellectual foundation upon which the old society rested, what is there left of old China?
[The Nature of the Transformation]
In the first place, the ideological change is not complete. No Western idea can enter China unimpaired. Sun Yat-sen was influenced by the almost entirely contradictory notions of Western nationalism, democracy, and socialism. In the San Min Chu I their Western identity was destroyed, and the new doctrines had much in common with the past. Western ideas served largely as a mold; when the mold was removed, the form was Western but the content was still Chinese. Mazzini and Confucius might both approve of Sun's political doctrines.
Secondly, the extrapolitical agencies of Chinese life remain. Chinese society may be shattered in dogma, but it persists in fact. The family, though subject to legal redefinition caused by Western cultural and economic influences, nevertheless plays a role far greater than in the West. The village is still the fundamental grouping among the rural masses. The guild system is impaired by the Western impact, but the party organizations—Nationalist and Communist—have absorbed much of the strength which once lay in the hui. Under foreign domination, these institutions may play a determining role in the struggle against the intruder.
Thirdly, for modern government the Chinese have resources of their own experience on which to rely. But they also have Western devices and prescriptions. The National Government, while falling short of Western levels of government efficiency, nevertheless trained large numbers of Chinese to think in terms of the modern state. But no new pattern has as yet crystallized. Chinese political and military development may well present a flexibility beyond Western grasp.
Fourth, the Chinese have still ahead of them the choice of criteria of authority to prevail in society. Learning, office, property played a decisive part in the old society. Hitherto, the Republic has grown with three modes of power: ideological, military, governmental. The relation between them is not yet determined.