From Peking to Mandalay / A Journey from North China to Burma through Tibetan Ssuch'uan and Yunnan

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

CHINESE OF THE COAST-PORTS

That the Chinese people have in the past been misunderstood is due to a variety of quite unavoidable circumstances for which no one can be said to be responsible. The intolerable arrogance of the Chinese Court, up to very recent days, in all its dealings with other Powers, tended to spread the belief that this attitude was characteristic of the whole Chinese people. The admission of foreign merchants to certain "treaty ports" did not tend to bring about much change of feeling, for though the Chinese mercantile classes soon won, through their honesty and fair dealing, a liking or respect which they have never ceased to deserve, the European settlements early became the resort of the worst type of Chinese ruffian. The emigrants from Kuangtung and other provinces of south-eastern China have in the Straits Settlements, California and Australia proved themselves well-behaved and law-abiding members of society; but among them, too, there were many who left their country "for their country's good," and who, had they not prudently sought refuge on foreign shores, would have suffered a worse fate than mere exile. Great numbers of the coolies who were sent to work in the South African mines, and whose various malpractices there have raised so natural an outburst of disgust and indignation, belonged to the vicious and criminal classes of north China, and even the best of them were recruited from the lowest ranks of society. Chinese officialdom, needless to say, was only too delighted to see the last of them. Unfortunately, even a visit to Shanghai or Hongkong does not tend to modify very appreciably the unfavourable opinion of the Chinese which the average Englishman may have formed from his previous knowledge of that race. Whatever may be the cause—and several causes might be assigned—the lower-class Chinese of Hongkong probably have worse manners than any other inhabitants of the Chinese empire. The coolies who wilfully jostle Europeans in Queen's and Des Vœux Roads, and snatch watches and purses from ladies and children, the house-servants who are impertinent to their European mistresses in their masters' absence, and the shopkeepers who blink rudely at their foreign customers and remain seated, sleepily fanning their paunches, when according to their own canons of good manners they should be on their feet murmuring polite salutations—all these are persons to whom a glimpse of Western civilisation seems to have done nothing but harm. They have lost their own manners, and have altogether failed to acquire those of the Occident. For my own part, I may say that though I have travelled through a great part of China and visited many of her large cities, I have found nowhere such lack of manners as unfortunately characterises a large proportion of our fellow-subjects in Hongkong.

RACIAL ANTIPATHIES

It must be admitted that the Chinese do not like foreigners. It is all the more creditable to them that their native courtesy—outside the European settlements—so often prevents them from showing their dislike. Here and there, no doubt, a real friendship springs up between a foreigner and a Chinese, owing to qualities which each finds and appreciates in the other, but as a rule the feeling hardly goes beyond one of respect. Though many Chinese gentlemen in Hongkong are naturalised British subjects and are men of education and culture, they are practically excluded from the charmed circle of Hongkong "Society." It must be granted, of course, that a difficulty is introduced into the situation through the incompatible social customs of the two races, especially with regard to the position of women. But the difficulty is not, as it may be in the case of English and Hindus, an insuperable one. The total absence of caste-rules and the willingness of intelligent Chinese to relax the rigidity of their own social laws deprive Europeans of the excuse that friendly intercourse with the Chinese is from the nature of things an impossibility.

Dr Martineau tells us that the man who goes abroad and comes in contact with alien civilisations is at first chafed by every sound and sight of foreign things, and thinks he has left everything good behind him at home; but that as he grows accustomed to his surroundings he is "hit by many a happy phrase and won by many a graceful usage, and fairly conquered at last by a literature and art and national life which reveal to him an unimagined type of human culture."[394] Unfortunately all travellers and residents in foreign lands are not so easily dragged out of their prejudices as this passage would seem to imply. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the stay-at-home Englishman is often more apparently sympathetic towards alien races than those who come in daily contact with them. This, however, is too frequently due to a most dangerous form of ignorance,[395] that has already—within the British Empire—caused a good deal of possibly irreparable mischief. In spite of warning after warning, many an Englishman is still apt to think that Orientals under British rule should be put in possession of all the political "rights" of the Briton at home, and is constitutionally unable to see that a political and social system which has been slowly created during centuries of national growth by and for men of his own race may prove not only detrimental but even ruinous to the true interests—political, social and moral—of his Oriental fellow-subjects. It is quite possible—I desire to lay special stress on this point—that a sympathetic and broad-minded Englishman may have the highest regard for the individuals of an Oriental race, the deepest admiration for many aspects of Oriental life and character, and the keenest appreciation of the many splendid achievements of the East in art, philosophy and religion, and that he may nevertheless consistently repudiate any concurrence with the illogical doctrine that what is good for one is good for all, and that the aspirations of the Englishman must necessarily coincide with the aspirations of the Hindu or the Chinese. I would even go further, and say that the man who wishes to fit out the Oriental with a complete equipment of Western ideals proves thereby that he has either no understanding of or no true sympathy with Eastern peoples and Eastern modes of thought: and that if he tries to give practical effect to his theories he will prove himself that most dangerous of foes—the mischief-maker who comes in the guise of a smiling friend.

DIFFERENT APTITUDES

Every exiled Englishman who as a Government official is brought into direct contact with a large population of Asiatics is well aware that if his object is to win a certain kind of precarious popularity among those whom he assists in ruling, there is ready to his hand a cheap and nasty way of attaining his ambition. Fortunately for the honour of England and the stability of the Empire, he is generally content with the less dazzling rewards that come from the honest performance of duty. It has recently been reported by the newspapers that an English politician, a few hours after he had set foot on Indian soil for the first time, informed crowded Hindu audiences that he proposed to assist them in securing a constitution similar to that possessed by Canada, on the ground that "what was good for the Canadians must be good for the Indians"; in consequence of which it was arranged by half-educated Hindu demagogues that he should be greeted with the plaudits of million-throated Bengal, garlanded with flowers and hailed as "an angel and not a man." Meanwhile, scattered throughout India are hundreds of able and experienced Englishmen—members of the Civil Service—who are giving the best years of their lives to India and her people, who can speak the Indian vernaculars and know the Indian mind and character as well as they can be known by any foreigner, and who are carrying on day by day the great administrative work that saves India from chaos. Few of their names are known to the British public, and not one of them—so far as I am aware—has ever been hailed by a Hindu mob as "an angel." How is it that a roving politician has managed so quickly to out-run them all in the race for popularity? Perhaps, if the truth were known, most of them could, if they so desired, attain the dizzy elevation of this kind of angelhood without much difficulty; but the pity of it is that as time went on they would find the conditions of continued success growing ever more and more stringent, till at last they would have to be something greater even than angels to satisfy the expectations of their admirers. The young Englishmen of half a century hence might have cause to lament that their fathers had not limited their ambitions in this life to terrestrial instead of extending them to celestial promotion, and the young Hindus, as they sat amid the ruins of their violated temples or crouched under the lash of the Mohammedan, would perhaps bitterly wish that their sires had known how to give honour where honour was due, and had turned a deaf ear to the ignorant rhetoric of native and foreign demagogues.

PREJUDICES

But the Englishman at home, who in a spirit of misdirected generosity aims at conferring on the Asiatic all the political and other "blessings" (if indeed they are such, even in England) that he himself enjoys, oblivious of the fact that under Asiatic conditions the blessings may turn into curses, is guilty of a blunder no graver nor more dangerous than that committed by the Englishman abroad who acts on the other assumption that the Oriental was created to be the white man's slave. This attitude is unfortunately traceable among a certain class of Europeans in both India and China;[396] and in China it has certainly tended to widen the natural gulf that Nature has fixed between the hearts and intellects of East and West.

That the Chinese in general have no liking for the foreigner seems to me a matter for no surprise whatever. I think I am not far wrong when I say that the average young European comes to the East with a prejudice against the Chinese, and a distinct idea that they are his inferiors. Of course in a sense this form of national prejudice exists all the world over. The English schoolboy used to believe that every Englishman was as good as three Frenchmen.[397] The French of the Middle Ages used to retort that Englishmen had tails, which is just what many educated Chinese of the present day believe of the Miao-tzŭ tribes. The ancient Greeks called every one else "barbarian." In our own day we have it on the word of an emperor that the real "salt of the earth" are the people of Germany: more recently, indeed, the salt has been metamorphosed "into the block of granite upon which the Lord God can complete His work of civilising the world."[398] Yet was it not only a few years ago that a statesman assured us that the torch of civilisation had now definitely passed to Russia? It was a Russian statesman, of course, who said so: and the Englishman or the American may smile at the self-assurance of this or any other nation that arrogates to itself the rôle which, as he has always been convinced, exclusively belongs to the Anglo-Saxon. Yet this kind of national partiality—provided it is accompanied by a belief in the principle of noblesse oblige—is by no means to be sneered at or despised. "The sense of greatness keeps a nation great," and an honest belief in our own lofty destiny will stand us in good stead in the day of trial. If two nations of equal powers and resources come to blows, and one of them happens to be actuated by a belief, lacking to the other, in its "divine mission," we need be in no doubt as to the side on which victory will declare itself. But the feelings with which Europeans and Chinese too often regard each other are different in kind from the national prejudices that we know so well and make allowances for in the West.