The missionary who looks at these dark clouds which surround China, the land of his adoption, feels that there is only one course to take, namely, the course that he is taking, to try and build up in China a high tone of morality, founded on religion, which may enable her to accept necessary reforms and to put herself abreast of other nations.
CHAPTER V
CHINESE CIVILISATION—ITS WEAK SIDE
I do not suppose that we can have any conception of the amount of suffering which goes on at the present time in China. The first time we were in China I had the honour of meeting a Mr. Ede, who had just returned from distributing food in a famine-stricken district, and his description was truly terrible; the young men had walked away and found work in other districts, but the old people and the children had to remain. What had caused the famine in this case was characteristic of unreformed China; "China's sorrow," the river Hoang-ho, had done what it is ever doing, that is, it had flooded a district. When you pass over it, it looks most innocuous. It is wholly unable, as a rule, to fill its own vast bed, which is covered with delightful sands, reminding one more than anything else of the sea-shore at low tide; but this sand is what makes it dangerous, for it is not good heavy English sand, but a light sand which is called "loess," and when the river comes down in a flood—that is to say, when they have rainy weather in Thibet or the sun shines unduly on Himalayan snows—this sand is carried along with the water, and it is asserted indeed that the river consists more of sand than of water; as the river slackens the sand is deposited and the bed is filled up, with the result that the next flood, taking the Chinese unawares, overflows its banks and reduces a huge district to poverty; they cannot sow their fields because they cannot see them. Of course the authorities should not be taken by surprise and the banks should be made up, and canals should be cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese engineer assured me he had a scheme for raising the level of huge districts of China by using this peculiar character of the Hoang-ho and turning its sand and water flood on to bare places, and he asserted that the results were most wonderfully successful, and that districts which were unfertile before, when well washed and covered up with this loess, became fertile. Still, however beneficial a flood may be to the land in the end, its immediate result is to starve the population who are flooded out, for they have no reserves of food.
In the case already referred to, the country was a long time under water, because a canal which should have drained it away was not kept clear. The money had been paid, but, as often happens in China, the work had not been done. The action that the authorities took was characteristic of Chinese government. China possesses the system of internal custom-houses—a system which the wildest advocate of Tariff Reform would hardly like to see introduced into Europe; these custom-houses are called "Likin," and are a source at once of a great deal of profit to the provinces and of irritation to all traders. The Chinese used these custom-houses to engineer a corner in rice by which the area of scarcity of food was enormously increased and several officials amassed considerable sums of money; by the law of China it is illegal to export rice even from one province to another; this law was put in force, and the rice supply was cut off; at the same time early in the famine certain rich men bought up rice freely, with the result that it rose to a very high figure, so that round the area of famine and desolation there was an area of scarcity and shortage.
A large amount of food from all parts of the world was sent by the famine funds, but it was very difficult to induce the officials to allow the food to enter the famine district. They were filled with all sorts of scruples. They were afraid, for instance, that the steamers towing the barges full of food on a canal which had not before been opened for steamers, might excite the hostility of the population; they were courteous, they were diplomatic, but they were obstructive; and so it came about that while there was a famine in one district of China, in the other districts there was a very heavy surplus, of which they had difficulty in disposing. All this did not create the slightest surprise in those who knew China. When the story was told us all the old Chinese hands merely said, "How like China," or "Just like them." This was our first insight into what the civilisation of China means, and therefore for the first time we realised the problem that is before the world—the problem which missionaries, with great devotion, are trying to solve.
Chinese civilisation is not, as many people imagine it to be, a mere courtesy title for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism. Many of my humbler parishioners, for instance, when we left for China, ranked the Chinese as something very near cannibals, and I do not think they would have been in the least surprised to hear that we had been roasted and eaten by the natives. The Chinese have perhaps a greater right to be called civilised than we have on this side of the world; their civilisation dates from eras we are accustomed to call Biblical. Confucius and Ezra represent contemporaneous ideas—ideas that are not wholly different in thought. While on the other side of the globe civilisation has been handed from nation to nation, and a civilised race has become barbarous and a barbarous race civilised, the Chinese, without making any very great advance, have steadily proceeded along a path of progress, and at the present time they possess a very carefully organised system of society. On paper the whole thing is perfect: the Emperor at the top, the Viceroys over each province, under them the Prefectures, and so down to the village community in the country or the trade guild in the town. The system of government is so perfect that they claim that they are able to discover any individual wanted among those 400,000,000 of Chinese, unless his disguise is very perfect. When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was assured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise.
With this splendid organisation is joined great solidarity. The Chinese race are essentially one. If it were your duty to look through reports coming from China, as it has been mine, the first thing that would strike you would be its essential oneness; you will not find more difference between different parts of China than there is between England and Ireland. I do not for a moment mean to say that there are no differences between the Chinese—that would be untrue; but you will not find such a difference as one might expect from the diversity of geographical conditions. The civilisation is essentially similar. It is a civilisation with great merits. The population is sober, industrious, and perhaps I might add honest, all lovers of China will certainly agree; but if you are writing, as I am, to people who have never been out of England, I think you will have to qualify the phrase with some such a one as "honest as compared with other Orientals," or "honest when contrasted with the Japanese."