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

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

OFFICIAL BEARING

In our relations with China we have been constantly offended by the air of superiority that is assumed towards us by the Chinese Government and by Chinese officials. They used to call us "barbarians" even in official documents, just as the street urchins of Canton still hail us as "foreign devils"; and we can never forget that Chinese officialdom used to do its best to humiliate us in our relations with the Court at Peking in a manner which was altogether intolerable. Of course, the Chinese were wrong in assuming a non-existing superiority, and they have had to pay bitterly for their arrogance. But is it not the case that we, as individuals and as Governments, have shown in different but not less provocative ways just as much unreasonable arrogance in our treatment of the Chinese? "The Chinese complain," writes a fair-minded American diplomatist,[399] "that an air of proprietorship is constantly manifested in unreasonable demands and impertinent criticisms, in denunciation of any of their officials who manifest a disposition to protect native interests, and that it practically amounts to a refusal to recognise China as the property of the Chinese. They object, perhaps unreasonably, against the application to their empire of those two well-known declarations, said to have been made by the unanimous voice of a religious body: 'Resolved, that the righteous shall inherit the earth. Resolved, that we are the righteous.'"

Many Europeans not only hold the view that Chinese civilisation is inferior to that of Europe—which is doubtless to a great extent true, though there is another aspect of that question—but they are strongly convinced that the Chinese represent a lower type of humanity—that they are, in fact, less far advanced in the scale of evolution than Europeans. An educated Englishman once told me that the Chinese were evidently a mean and inferior people, because when you whacked a Chinese coolie in the streets of Canton[400] he did not hit you back. This argument is curiously typical of the aggressive attitude which is so often assumed by Europeans not only in their dealings with Chinese, but also in their relations with all other Oriental races, whose lack of "grit" is supposed to be proved by the fact that they are not so ready with their fists as we are. One of the most enlightened Hindus of our own day—the late Swami Vivekananda—quotes as a curious instance of this attitude a remark that was made to him in London. "What have you Hindus done?" said an English girl, full of the pride of race. "You have never even conquered a single nation."

"INFERIORITY"

Now, setting aside all considerations of national prejudice and patriotism, is it a fact that the Chinese are as a race inferior to the peoples of the West? The question, when we examine it closely, has really very little to do with political strength or military efficiency, or (pace Mr Benjamin Kidd) relative standards of living, or even the usual material accompaniments of what we call an advanced civilisation; it is a question for the trained anthropologist and the craniologist rather than for the casual observer of men and manners. The Japanese people are now much more highly civilised, according to Western notions, than they were half a century ago, but it would be ludicrously erroneous to say that they are now a higher race, from the evolutionary point of view, than they were then. Evolution does not work quite so rapidly as that even in these days of "hustle." The Japanese have advanced, not because their brains have suddenly become larger, or their moral and intellectual capabilities have all at once made a leap forward, but because their intercourse with Western nations, after centuries of isolated seclusion, showed them that certain characteristic features of European civilisation would be of great use in strengthening and enriching their own country, developing its resources, and giving it the power to resist aggression. If the Japanese were as members of the genus homo sapiens inferior to us fifty years ago, they are inferior to us now. If they are our equals to-day—and the burden of proof certainly now rests on him who wishes to show that they are not—our knowledge of the origin and history of Eastern peoples, scanty though it is, should certainly tend to assure us that the Chinese are our equals too. There is no valid reason for supposing that the Chinese people are ethnically inferior to the Japanese. They have preserved their isolated seclusion longer than the Japanese, because until very recently it was less urgently necessary for them to come out of it. They have taken a longer time to appreciate the value of Western science and certain features of Western civilisation, because new ideas take longer to permeate a very large country than a small one, and because China was rich in the possession within her own borders of all the necessaries of life.

STAGES IN CIVILISATION

Many Europeans, dazzled and blinded by the marvellous inventions and discoveries of modern times, and the huge strides made by physical science, are apt to conclude too hastily that our ethnical superiority is sufficiently proved by the fact that all or nearly all such achievements are due to the white races only.[401] Even the Japanese, we are often reminded, are after all only our imitators, and being so must necessarily be our inferiors. If an artist were to make so excellent a copy of the Madonna di San Sisto as to deceive connoisseurs into the belief that it was the original, he would not thereby elevate himself to an equality with Raphael. But surely it is much too soon to make generalisations about the relative development of Eastern and Western nations from the few facts at our command. It is only during the last one or two hundred years that science has achieved her greatest triumphs in Europe, and it is with the aid of those triumphs of science and partly as a direct result of them that European civilisation has progressed during that time. Yet even with us popular opinion has not always been on the side of advancing science. I once heard a charming old lady declare that balloons or air-machines of any kind would never be successful, because the Almighty in His wisdom had decreed that mankind was to restrict its movements to the solid earth, and that even the attempt to make such machines was—like the building of a certain mythical tower that we have all heard of—an act of impiety which would certainly bring down divine vengeance. Yet the man who now denies that we are within measurable distance of the conquest of the air—especially if he denies it on religious grounds—is not likely to be listened to with much respect at the present day. Many persons—pious and other—were strongly opposed to the construction of railways in England in the early part of the nineteenth century. We grew impatient with the Chinese, because, until very recently, they showed similar reluctance to the introduction of railways and machinery into their own country, thus proving that they were oblivious of the enormous economic benefits that such innovations had conferred upon every country that had adopted them; yet we do not regard the University of Oxford as having been the last stronghold of barbarism in England, because that venerable corporation for a long time opposed the approach of a railway to its classic halls, nor do we consider that Lancashire was less civilised than the rest of England in the eighteenth century, because its cotton-spinners rose in their thousands to resist by force the introduction of Sir Richard Arkwright's spinning-frame. If we are willing to admit that Oxford and Lancashire did not act from a mere blind hostility to modern inventions as such, we should at least be willing to enquire whether the opposition of the Chinese has not also been due to other causes than mere barbarism or lack of intelligence.

I do not think it can be seriously contended that the civilisation of China to-day is on the whole lower than that of Europe in the comparatively recent days of the thumb-screw and the Holy Office, and it is possible that in the K'ang Hsi period (1662-1722) China was as civilised as most of the countries of Europe were at the same period. In that case it is not much more than two hundred years since European civilisation began to move ahead of that of China—a very short period in a nation's history, and almost infinitesimal from the point of view of the evolution of mankind.[402] Our racial superiority to the Chinese may be an anthropological truth, but it cannot be deduced merely from the fact that during the most recent portion of our national existence we have invented steam engines or wireless telegraphy or quick-firing guns or turbine battleships or even party government.