Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in this primitive fashion

The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three feet high and with forty-two hands. It fills a four-story building, and is the largest in China proper, being identical, according to the lamas, with those of Urga and Lhasa

A Chinese inn, with its heated k’ang, may not be the last word in comfort, but it is many degrees in advance of the earth floors of Indian huts along the Andes

The governor received me one Sunday morning, with his civil secretary, the British-educated dean of the engineering department of the university, as interpreter. It seemed almost strange to walk so peacefully into his yamen through the same now rather tumble-down entrance at which more than twoscore foreigners were massacred by Boxer-influenced mobs in 1900. The governor prides himself on being a plain man and does not believe in surrounding himself with magnificence or formality. With the single exception of the “Christian General,” Feng Yü-hsiang, he has retained, at least in his audiences with foreigners, fewer of the useless, time-squandering forms of old-fashioned Chinese etiquette than any of the high officials I have met in China. Yet the essential Chinese courtesies were still there; there was no suggestion of a general surrender to Western bruskness. A solid-looking man, in physical as well as the other sense, with a somewhat genial face sunburned with evidence of his personal attention to his outdoor activities, met us with no appreciable delay in a semi-private part of the yamen that was tasteful in the Chinese sense, yet which made no efforts at magnificence in the hope of increasing the impression of the occupant’s importance. Rather a man of plain common sense and perseverance than of brilliancy, a brief acquaintance with the governor suggested; and Heaven knows China needs this type just now much more than the other. His garments were of cotton, not silk, and the simplicity of life this symbolizes has its effect upon his subordinates, at least in his presence. Officials having an audience with him usually also put on cotton clothing for the occasion, lest the governor say, as he has more than once: “Ah, I see you are making lots of money out of your post. Now, there is a famine down in the southwest corner of the province, and ...” He talked freely, yet certainly not boastfully, of his various policies, plain, common-sense policies, like the man himself, but which do not suggest themselves to the Chinese as readily as one might expect. Later I had opportunity to compare actual results with verbal intentions.

His laws against opium and bound feet would be better enforced, Yen Hsi-shan’s friendly critics agree, if the officials under him were really in favor of such reforms. One man alone cannot cure a whole province, larger than most of our States, of the bad habits of generations. At first the governor was very assiduous on these points. Traffickers in, as well as growers of, the drug were fined and imprisoned, and life made as miserable as possible for those who persisted in consuming it. Inspectors examined the feet of women and assessed a fine of five dollars a year against those who had not unbound them, or who bound those of their daughters. Not a severe penalty from the Western point of view; but this is much money to the average Chinese countryman, and bound feet are most persistent in the rural districts. But the governor’s lee high (severity) is dying out, the people say, and little girls with bound feet may be seen near and even in Taiyüan. The stoutest reformer would be likely to lose heart before the unrivaled passive resistance of the Chinese against even their own best welfare; it needs unbroken generations of radicals to get permanent results. At least the pigtail has virtually disappeared from Shansi!

The “model governor” comes fairly near being a practical man in the Occidental sense. The forty automobiles in the government garages include huge streetcar-like buses that make good use of his new roads, and trucks that are run mainly by steam. Gasolene is expensive in Shansi, and coal is cheap. Much of the city is taken up by what resembles immense barracks, and the public is chased many blocks roundabout by the long mud walls enclosing them. But if this gives the appearance of a ruler who considers the capital his private property, it makes possible a great normal school for all the province, where handcrafts are given proper attention, up-to-date soldiers’ workshops, in which everything needed by the army is made, a model prison, and other spacious institutions on quite modern lines. Besides, there was evidently ample room inside the city. The old wall of Taiyüan is in a ruinous state, and any one can climb it, almost anywhere inside and with no great difficulty from without, as if the governor realized that such picturesque defenses are useless against modern attacks, and feels able to cope in the open with the bandits against which city walls still offer a certain amount of protection in many parts of China. There are lakes and broad sheep pastures, and many acres of cultivated fields, within the walls, and only one suburb of any size outside them, without a single smoking chimney except those of the big extramural arsenal standing forth against the distant low hills that half surround Taiyüan. In fact, one whole corner of the city is used as a rifle-range, with the ruined wall as a back-stop, and the soldiers still find plenty of room to throw their dummy hand-grenades and practise their modified goose-step. All this hardly means a prosperous city, were it not for the practical activities of a good governor. His soldiers, by the way, get six “Mex” dollars a month, which is the rate throughout most of China, and his “snappy” model police nine; but unlike so many of his colleagues Governor Yen actually pays his troops, which is one of the great secrets of his success. Unpaid soldiers not only do not drive brigands over the frontier, but they are prone to sell them ammunition and even to join them.

It was evident that the governor’s progressive administration includes one particular pet scheme, which he is working out as rapidly as possible, quite ready to admit that it takes time to make changes in China. He is gradually introducing a village military system, a kind of National Guard on a provincial scale. Instead of having military parasites from other provinces come to exploit the people or turn bandits among them, he is organizing militia companies for local protection. The chief advantages he expects are that it will thus be easier to maintain peace and repel outside invaders, as village soldiers will naturally do their best to protect their own homes; it should eliminate the danger of becoming an offensive force against neighboring provinces, since these soldiers are not riffraff and loafers recruited wherever they can be had but ordinary citizens with proper occupations, who will not care to sacrifice their peaceful living for the sake of a few ambitious militarists; and it does not take them away from their fields or their usual tasks, except for brief periods of training each year. It is not exactly an original plan, at least to the world at large, but self-evident things are not always so to the Chinese, and Governor Yen may be on the track of the very thing to wipe out rapacious militarism and its twin sister, banditry.

The mass of the people of Shansi are convinced that the governor loves them like a father, which is a very essential thing in China even for a virtual dictator, if he wishes to hold out. Yet Yen is a rich man, one of the richest men in China, some say, and he was not born that way. Only the uninformed masses think that he sacrifices everything to their welfare. Any land with China’s pressure of population, family system, and centuries-old, almost universal political corruption from top to bottom would need at least a demigod of which to make a ruler who actually thought of nothing but the public good. Yen Hsi-shan, it is said almost openly, has kept his position so long largely by preserving a strict neutrality even in the payment of “squeeze” toward those high up who might have taken his job away from him. It is almost publicly known that he gave one million two hundred thousand dollars each to Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Kun in the “Anfu” days as “military assistance.” But at least he has made the province he has ruled for twelve unbroken years a better place to live in; his worst enemies do not hesitate to admit that. Perhaps he is, as many Chinese who use their minds assert, a great governor only as a small hill is a mountain on a flat plain; the fact remains that he has some ideas and the will to carry them out, ideas which, if introduced into the other provinces would put the people of China in a much better position to solve some of those pressing problems that seem to be driving them to national destruction. With a score of Governors Yen the dismantled old Celestial Empire might still be no paradise, but the anxious visitor can sweep the country almost in vain for a glimpse of any other force that promises prompt and effectual resistance to the misfortunes that threaten to overwhelm her entirely.