The result of this method of education was exemplified as late as 1897, two years after a war which had brought the Celestial Empire within an inch of ruin, when a censor, one of the highest officials in the Empire, addressed a document to the Emperor, wherein he protested against the concessions made to the inventions of the Western barbarians, which he did not hesitate to qualify as calculated to disturb the peace of the dead. Instead of constructing railways, he gravely insisted, it were wiser to offer a handsome reward to the man who should recover the secret of making flying chariots to be drawn by phœnixes which certainly existed in the good old times. A little time previously a member of the Tsung-li-Yamen had lifted his voice to protest against the various railway embankments and the nails that studded the lines, which, he believed, were likely to inconvenience and wound the sacred dragons who protect the cities of the Empire, and who dwell beneath the soil. The strange superstitions of the feng-shui geomancy dealing with the circulation through the air of good and evil spirits, and with the prescribed height to which buildings may be erected, and the exact positions of doors and other like grave matters, which, it seems, unless they be properly attended to, are apt to upset and offend the flying spirits in their progress through space, exercise a greater empire over the minds of Chinese officials in the very highest places than matters which we should consider of the greatest importance.
The fact that the mandarinate is recruited from the democracy renders it even more pernicious than if it constituted a hereditary aristocracy, for, as it stands, nobody has any interest in overthrowing it. The most intelligent people try to enter it, and it attracts all the most gifted men in the Empire, but only to corrupt them. The literary class enjoys an enormous prestige, and the poorest man lives in the hope of seeing his son one of its learned members. It, therefore, does not excite any of that hatred usually provoked by caste privilege, and thus does not stand the least danger of being upset. On the other hand, the condition to which it has reduced the Celestial Empire is a condemnation of the system of examination for Government office, and many a Western State might do well to study this question and to take its lesson to heart. That its effects have been more accentuated in China than elsewhere is undeniable, being the result of diverse historic and ethnographical circumstances peculiar to that nation. The Chinese reached a high state of civilization long before our era, and being more numerous and intelligent than their neighbours, so soon as they were cemented into one compact nationality they proceeded to subjugate Indo-China and Korea; and so it came to pass that China had no dangerous foes to disturb her, Japan being isolated in her island Empire, and she was separated from India by a formidable mountain barrier and from the West by immense deserts. From that time the Chinese had nothing to trouble them, and had but to live in quiet admiration of the labours of their ancestors, who were the authors of the perfect peace which they enjoyed, and thus little by little they accustomed themselves to look upon them as superior beings and as types of perfection. More advanced than any of their tributary subjects, and having nothing to fear from competition, they became lost in self-admiration, or, rather, in the admiration of those who had made their country what it was, and ended by believing that no further progress was either necessary or possible, and thus are now absolutely non-progressive.
The isolation and the want of emulation in which China has existed for so many centuries have destroyed whatever energy and initiative she might otherwise have possessed. It should be remarked, however, that the Roman Empire was in very much the same condition, and for the same reason, at the time of the invasion of the Barbarians, and that outside the moral revolution effected by Christianity—which, by the way, only obtained its fullest developments by the overthrow of the Empire—no further progress was being made. The sterile admiration of bygone greatness, therefore, is the foundation-stone of the doctrines of Confucius. The Chinese people, who are essentially practical and positive, and less given, perhaps, than any other in the world to study general questions and lofty ideals, soon deteriorated under so retrogressive a system, and eventually lost all sight of the origin of many of their most important institutions. Religion and morals were reduced to mere rites and ceremonies that only conceal the emptiness of Chinese civilization, and so the nation came to the conclusion that the one thing in this world worth the doing was to save appearances, and conceal corruption beneath a flimsy mask.
The isolation of China and her superiority over her neighbours produced another very grave consequence—the ruin of that martial spirit which has obliterated all idea of duty and sacrifice. The military mandarins are despised by their civil colleagues, and their tests consist almost exclusively of physical exercises such as archery and the lifting of heavy weights. ‘One does not use good iron to make nails, nor a good man to make a soldier,’ says the Chinese proverb, and thus it is that the Chinese army is recruited from a horde of blackguards and plunderers, whose only good qualities are their contempt for life and physical endurance, which might under proper management turn this raw material into an excellent army.
The Celestial Empire is quite as incapable of resisting the advance of modern civilization as it is of assimilating it. From the literati who govern the land nothing is to be expected, for they will neither learn nor forget anything. Their prejudices are so strong as to prevent their accepting any great movement of reform, even if it were in their interests, and in the stagnant position in which China is at present, aided by the lack of intercommunication between the provinces, the mandarins do exactly as they please. The Peking Gazette, the official paper, described quite recently in the most glowing terms the suppression of a revolt, showing at the same time the expenses incurred and the rewards offered to those who had aided in its suppression. The real truth of the story was that no revolution whatever had taken place in the district mentioned, and the only unusual event which had occurred was the pursuit of a runaway thief by three soldiers. Such an instance could not possibly occur in a well-regulated State, and naturally the men who profited by the lie will not be very desirous of a change in so profitable a system. ‘Those who despair most of China are those who know her best,’ once said a missionary to me; and his words have been confirmed by nearly every traveller in the Far East with whom I have spoken on the subject. No reform can be expected in the country from within, and a proof in point will be found in the history of the Palace Revolution of September 9th, 1898. The question, therefore, which presents itself is whether external pressure can be brought to bear on China with a view to reforming her Government without causing the dislocation of the Empire.
CHAPTER V
THE CHINESE PEOPLE AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS
Great antiquity of China’s national existence—Stagnation of her organization as well as of her social, religious and administrative institutions—Unity of Chinese civilization notwithstanding varied surroundings, differences of language and of racial origin, it being much more inflexible than that of the Western world—Some of the principal characteristics of the Chinese—Love of false appearances—Gulf that divides the theoretical from the practical in all matters of Chinese administration—Corruption of the Chinese Government and its determination to impede progress—Lightness of the taxes—The mass of the people apparently happy under distressing circumstances—The good-humour and liveliness of the Celestials—Pity said to be absolutely excluded from the Chinese character—Why the Chinese make bad soldiers—Organization of the family and position of women—Vices of the Chinese: love of gambling, opium, filthy habits and superstitions—Their better qualities—The people themselves not in a state of decadence—Primary effects of contact with Western civilization.
The Chinese are at one and the same time the most numerous and the longest existing nation in the world. The annals of the Celestial Empire date as far back as those of Egypt, and twenty centuries ago, when States which now rule the earth were in process of formation, China, having undergone several evolutions, was already constituted as she is to-day. The Chinese have never been subjected to any of those marked and repeated changes which, during the last two thousand years, have so profoundly modified the social organization and the manners and customs of other countries; and even the introduction of a new religion did not produce in the East anything comparable to the revolution which, at about the same time, occurred in the West through the spread of Christianity. Buddhism did not modify the Chinese people, but the Chinese people modified Buddhism after their own image and likeness, without, however, permitting the doctrines of Sakyamuni to exercise the least influence over their character, or change an iota of their ideas concerning life and morality, which were determined by Confucius and other sage Celestials, being in reality derived less from the meditations of philosophers or the inspiration of prophets than from the intuitive instinct of the race. The institutions of China have not altered the mental habits or method of life upon which they profess to be modelled, any more than has the theoretical principle of family existence altered the Imperial Government; for the Chinese even now often qualify their high officials by the endearing epithets ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ Political revolutions have not made a deeper impression upon the fossilized organization of the Chinese Government, than has religion on the character and manners of the people. The various dynasties that have succeeded each other have changed nothing, although some of them have been of foreign origin: the Mongolian in the thirteenth century and the Manchurian in our own time; but they effected no variations in the system of Government, and only placed certain functionaries to watch over the mandarins, precisely as the Tatar marshals are instructed to spy upon the officials of nowadays.
China has always been governed after Chinese methods, and although she has occasionally been conquered by foreigners, she has invariably absorbed them into her own civilization, and obliged them to observe her traditions. The Chinese care very little about the future, the greatness or the independence of their country; but they cling with extraordinary tenacity to their old manners and customs, and thereby offer a striking contrast to their neighbours the Japanese, who, notwithstanding their intense patriotism, will make any sacrifice, even that of religious principle and most cherished tradition, if they think that they may thereby benefit their Empire. The Japanese have almost the same conception of patriotism as Europeans, but not so the Chinese, with whom this virtue is merely a racial affair, which in the hour of danger invariably proves of little or no avail, especially against adversaries of a kind never previously encountered.
Does there exist, beyond this intense love of old customs and of an immutable civilization, any bond of union among the three or four hundred millions of human beings who constitute the population of China?[[23]] At first sight no people could possibly appear more thoroughly homogeneous than the Chinese; but it is not necessary to stay long among them to perceive that even from the physical point of view there are certain racial differences which make it more difficult at first to note the dissimilarity which separates their race from our own. Even more striking are the diverse dialects spoken in the Empire, several of which are not mere patois, but distinct languages, rendering it impossible for a native of Canton or Foochow to make himself understood at Peking; and in many provinces these idiomatic peculiarities are very interesting. In Fo-kien no less than three patois are spoken—the Amoy, Swatow, and the Foochow, which are utterly different from each other. Between the cities of Peking and Tien-tsin, scarcely thirty leagues apart, there is already a marked difference in the matter of dialect. It is also a noteworthy fact that very little sympathy exists among the Chinese from different provinces, who keep aloof from each other even when circumstances oblige them to live in the same town. Very marked, too, are the divergent characteristics and temperaments observable between the inhabitants of the North and those of the South, the former being much the most energetic and enterprising, but at the same time more hostile to foreigners. The Central Government is almost unknown by the multitudes outside of Peking, and it would be a comparatively easy task to raise an army in one part of China to fight against the inhabitants of another.