Lion and Dragon in Northern China

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

The Chinese are quite satisfied that so long as they behave in a filial manner (the word "filial" being taken in its widest possible signification) they have nothing whatever to fear from their ghostly ancestors. To be truly filial a Chinese must not merely behave with dutiful obedience towards his parents when they are alive and with dutiful reverence towards their manes when they are dead, but he must also act in such a way as to reflect no speck of discredit upon them by his own misdeeds. If his parents are themselves guilty of wrongdoing he is entitled to remonstrate with them, because after all his parents as well as himself owe filial reverence to their common ancestors. If the wrongdoing is all his own he is twice guilty, for he has committed an action which is in itself intrinsically wrong, and by degrading his own moral nature he has brought disgrace on his parents. According to this theory, the Chinese who commits a dishonourable action is unfilial; if he breaks the law he is unfilial; if he does not discharge all his dead father's obligations he is unfilial; if he ruins his own health through immorality or excesses of any kind he is unfilial; if he fails to bring up legitimate offspring (to continue the family and carry on the ancestral rites) he is unfilial.[325]

Needless to say there is no such person as a perfectly filial son in all China—or anywhere else in the world for that matter: but that fact no more justifies us in attempting to disparage the noble and lofty Chinese ideal of filial piety than the failure of Christian men and Christian Governments to act in accordance with the doctrines of the Sermon on the Mount justifies us in disparaging the highest ethical ideal of Christianity. If the ideal—in either the Christian or the Chinese system—were actually attainable, it would become necessary to form a new ideal to take the place of that which had ceased as such to exist or had been seen to "fade into the light of common day." Some Western observers are apt to think that the Chinese doctrine of filial piety is too one-sided to be practical: that it makes the son the slave of his parents and gives the parents at the same time the position of irresponsible tyrants. No greater mistake could possibly be made. The responsibilities of the parent are correlative to the duties of the child.

The locus classicus for this is a famous story told of Confucius himself. When he was Minister of Crime in his native state a father brought an accusation against his own son. Confucius sent them both to gaol, and when he was questioned as to why he punished the father as well as the son and did not rather condemn the son for the gross crime of disobeying his father, he replied thus: "Am I to punish for unfilial conduct one who has not been taught filial duties? Is not he who fails to teach his son his duties equally guilty with the son who fails to fulfil them?"[326]

This is a point of view which the Chinese—or at least those who have not succumbed to the seductive whispers of Western individualism—thoroughly understand and appreciate to this day. Cases have been heard in the British courts at Weihaiwei which prove this to be so. On the rare occasions when a father has been compelled to bring an action against his son, or on the more numerous occasions when a father is summoned to the court in connection with a criminal case in which his own son is the accused, he frequently begins by making a humble acknowledgment that his own failure to perform his duties as father must at least partially account for his son's depravity; or if in accordance with the Chinese practice the British magistrate sternly lectures a father on the enormity of his offence in bringing up his son so badly that the son has fallen into the clutches of the law, the unhappy man admits the justice of the charge promptly and without reserve. Yü ts'o: ling tsui,—"I am guilty: I accept punishment."

But the Chinese doctrine of filial piety does not concern itself only with the relations between parent and child. We have seen that the whole of Chinese society is regarded as a vast family of which the Emperor is Father; similarly the territorial officials are in loco parentis to the heads of the families living within their respective jurisdictions: they are the fu-mu kuan—the father-and-mother officials.[327] The doctrine of Hsiao—Filial Piety—applies not only to domestic relationships but also to the relations between Emperor and Minister and between rulers and ruled. The head of a family who disobeys an official proclamation is guilty of an offence towards the local fu-mu kuan which is almost identical in kind with the offence of a son who wilfully disobeys his father. Here again the responsibilities are not all on one side: the fu-mu kuan is by the higher authorities held theoretically responsible for the peace and good order and contentment of the district over which he presides, just as Confucius is said to have held the father responsible for the misbehaviour of his son.

Sometimes, indeed, this doctrine is carried too far, as when an official is degraded for not preventing an outbreak of crime which he could not possibly have foreseen. Western peoples have taken advantage of this theory when they have called upon the Government to punish an official within whose jurisdiction the slaughter of a missionary has occurred, even when the official's complicity is quite unproved. The people themselves know well that their officials are theoretically responsible for their well-being, and often—through their lack of scientific knowledge—blame their fu-mu kuan for troubles which the very best and most diligent of officials could not have averted. The local officials—nay, viceroys of provinces and even the Emperor himself—are regarded by their subordinates or subjects, or profess to regard themselves, as personally responsible for such occurrences as disastrous earthquakes, epidemics and inundations.[328] In 1909 the appointment of a new governor to the province of Shantung happened to be followed by a serious drought; he became highly unpopular at once and received the disagreeable nickname of the Drought-Governor. As recently as 1908 I passed through a district in the province of Shansi in which no rain had fallen for several months. On entering the magisterial town of the district I noticed that the streets were thronged with crowds of people from the country, all wearing willow-wreaths as a sign that the crops were threatened with destruction and that public prayers were being offered for rain.[329] The whole town was in confusion, and the sudden appearance of a foreigner made matters worse. A noisy and restless crowd followed me into my inn and proved so troublesome (though by no means violent) that I was obliged to send a message to the local magistrate to request him to have the inn-yard cleared. My messenger soon came back to report that the magistrate's official residence or yamên was also closely invested by a clamouring mob and that the wretched man had been obliged to barricade his windows and doors to save himself from personal violence. He was therefore powerless to grant my request. The crowd had no complaint whatever against him except that his official prayers for rain had failed to have the desired result and that his culpable inability to establish friendly relations with the divine Powers was the evident cause of the drought.

This of course is carrying the theory of the mutual responsibilities of father and son, ruler and ruled, a great deal too far: but occurrences of this kind will become less and less frequent with the gradual advance of scientific and general knowledge; and it is surely far better that the changes should occur automatically than by forcible interference with customs and superstitions which in their fall might involve the indiscriminate destruction of good and bad. We may now perceive, perhaps, how it was that Confucius, who was evidently almost an agnostic with regard to gods and spiritual beings,[330] was strenuously opposed to the abandonment of the rites and ceremonies that presupposed the existence of such beings. He insisted upon the importance of keeping up the cult of ancestors not so much for the sake of the dead but because it fostered among living men feelings of love, respect, reverence, and duty towards family and State. The souls of the dead might or might not be unconscious of what was done for them, but it was in the interests of social harmony and political stability that the traditional religious and commemorative ceremonies should be jealously preserved and handed down to posterity and that during the performance of such ceremonies the presence of the ancestral spirits should at least be tacitly assumed.