It is said that there was more graft under the Germans than under their successors. German inspectors were conspicuous; Japanese ones blended more or less into the general racial landscape. In German days unrecorded telegrams sped along from station to station, “Inspector coming to-day,” and certain customs were temporarily suspended. On other days passengers often got on without tickets, crossed the hand of the Chinese guard with silver, and the latter gave the high sign to the gateman at the disembarking station, dividing the spoils with him at the first convenient opportunity. Whatever their other faults, the Japanese know how to run a railroad, and under them this sort of thing is reputed to have disappeared. Their influence was still distinctly in evidence. The people are said to have liked the Germans better than their successors because, among other things, they were not so strict—which speaks loudly indeed for Japanese sternness. Part of this strictness was the insistence on order instead of the free-for-all methods so loved by the Chinese. The Germans allowed huckstering at the trains; the Japanese licensed and curbed it. They introduced the innovation of standing in line for tickets, instead of the riot in vogue on all purely Chinese railways. It is said that it took the butt of many a rifle and the flat of many a sword to convince the coolies that they should drop back to the end of a cue when there was plenty of room at the front, but as they became more familiar with the language the Japanese, like the Germans before them, got their results with less violence. Foreigners, especially their somewhat kindred island neighbors, can discipline the Chinese as they never could themselves. The weakest thing in China is discipline, and there is not moral fiber enough in the country—or there is too much gentleness in the Chinese temperament, whichever way you choose to put it—to cure such things from within.
A private carriage, Shantung style
Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair nets for the American market
School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien, Shantung
The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills carefully reforested by the Germans, followed by the Japanese, has now been returned to the Chinese after a quarter of a century of foreign rule
Foreign residents, including some missionaries, were already complaining of a deterioration of the Shantung Railway under Chinese management. To one who had just come from the other railways of China this seemed rather exaggerated cynicism, for it certainly was superior to those others in many ways, though possibly these were relics of German and Japanese times, which were gradually dying out under the new régime. The almost praiseworthy cleanliness of at least the higher class cars may have been merely a memento of earlier days; also perhaps the brief, businesslike stops at stations. There were “red-caps” instead of the tidal wave of ragged ruffians who fight pitched battles for one’s baggage elsewhere; and the platforms were free from loafers, stragglers, beggars, and false passengers among whom the actual traveler is so completely swallowed up at the average Chinese station that he often despairs of getting on board at all. But with more than half the new personnel in the higher grades graduates of American colleges, some of them with real railroad experience, it hardly seems that the line can go entirely to rack and ruin, nor that it is being made the complete pawn of hungry politicians utterly devoid of ability which some rumors have it.