Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by man, boy, or beast, to break up the clods of dry earth
Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its population some two hundred Chinese Jews, descendants of immigrants of centuries ago
A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter shop in Kwanyintang, where the Lunghai railway ends at present in favor of more laborious means of transportation
An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in a village street, two men pushing brightly colored pictures along a two-row panel while they chant some ancient story
Disarmament, I reflected, is like those long and complicated cures for virulent diseases that are so easily caught. When what we somewhat mistakenly call the most civilized nations of the world set the example of war, of mighty military forces, the infection cannot but spread to what seem to us the more backward races. Like a pebble tossed into a pool, the bright idea is taken up by race after race, country after province, until by the time the advanced nations are on the verge of bankruptcy and ready to quit for a while they must keep the thing up as a protection against the peoples of color and of strange faiths who have been stirred up by their example. In China there is an added complication. Soldiery, and banditry, too, are there largely a phase of the problem of unemployment. If China has the four hundred million inhabitants popularly attributed to her, any one who has traveled even in the less crowded northern provinces has seen that at least a hundred million of them must be perpetually hovering about the brink of starvation. An ambitious politician, or a general who refuses to lose his perquisites as such, himself imbued with the centuries-old dread of becoming one of the hungry, inarticulate masses, gathers about him all the soldiers he can recruit and find any means of keeping in his service. Most of these are simple, boyish fellows gleaned from the farms and villages before they have really taken root in the complicated society and industry of China. If they are discharged, if they are not paid, if the overthrow of their leader makes them fugitives, there is nothing much left for them to do but to turn bandits. Many have served alternately as soldiers and as brigands for years; many know no other trade, and, though they did, it is little less difficult to find an opening in the crowded, ill paid ranks of China’s workmen than to perform the venerable trick of passing a camel through the eye of a needle.
Thus the same men who, as soldiers, force helpless villagers to make up their arrears in pay, find it no great leap, as bandits, to the torturing of rich Chinese who fall into their hands, until their victims have subscribed enough to drive starvation once more into the background. Raids on towns, invitations to chambers of commerce to save the community from the torch and looting by raising so many thousands of dollars, are the order of the day in many parts of China; and testimony is almost unanimous that most Chinese soldiers are as bad as the bandits. In fact, there are towns which pay the tu-fei fixed sums not only for promising not to loot them but to keep the soldiers from doing so. After all, is there any great difference between the flock of generals or provincial dictators misgoverning various regions of China as they see fit, by the use of their private armies, and another leader, who in his day may also have been a general and quite possibly will be one again, whose followers are referred to as bandits rather than soldiers? Often the only real distinction is that the one is strong enough to force recognition from the so-called Central Government, and the other is not, though they may be equally scornful of its commands and desires. How faint is the line of demarcation, even in the minds of the most successful Chinese generals, is shown by the opinion of almost all of them that when a force is defeated in one of the skirmishes of China’s almost constant, if unacknowledged, civil war the victor should take over most of the defeated troops and save himself the job of having later to clear them out of his region as bandits.
China, it is evident, will never get rid of her bandits until she has industries to absorb them, and her excess soldiers also. The latter are commonly “disbanded” merely by some other force coming into the territory they have been holding and driving them out, instead of surrounding and disarming them. Thus when they are forced to turn to brigandage they retain guns, ammunition, and uniforms; and they are helped by every one, including the soldiers. Understandings grow up between the two forces; the bandits bury money exacted from their victims and pass the word on to the soldiers, who pretend to have a great battle against the outlaws, but really dig up the money and bury ammunition in place of it. One can scarcely expect Chinese coolies to risk their lives, or even their skins, merely because they have been enlisted as soldiers. Moreover, banditry has been more or less continuous in China for many centuries. It is a rare play on the Chinese stage in which there is not some reference to the danger of falling into the hands of bandits; brigand chiefs are the heroes of many an old tale, just as they are in the popular legends of Spain; more than one dynasty was founded by some powerful outlaw who outfought his rivals. With industries to absorb the rank and file, who can say how many of the generals and chieftains themselves would not find a better field for their abilities, and a better way to free themselves from the dread of falling below the hunger line, as “captains of industry”?