Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

Though the methods of the Chinese in doing business may be exasperating to a Western whose time is money and who wants them to come to some immediate decision, they are invariably delightful and courteous in all their negotiations. This courtesy is all the direct result of Confucian teaching. Stress is laid there on courteous behaviour, perhaps even to a degree which may strike the Western traveller as absurd. This courtesy, I understand, extends even to those of lower degree. Your servant in speaking to another calls him brother, and nothing makes the servant despise his master so much as seeing him lose his temper: it is to his mind a mark of our savagery.

The Chinese have higher virtues than courtesy. They are essentially industrious. You have only to look at a Chinaman's garden to realise the extent to which he possesses this quality. I am certain that those people who are proud of the culture of their kitchen gardens would be surprised and ashamed if they could compare them with those of a Chinaman. One passes garden after garden with rows of plants placed at even distances and every plant exactly the right distance in those rows, with never a weed to be seen all over the whole plot. Again in handicraft there is the same industry; you buy Chinese embroidery for a song in such a place as Changsha. No one will tell you that Chinamen ever object to length of hours; they are ideal men for work that needs care and accuracy.

Again they are very patient. A monotonous task is not at all unpleasing to them. An acute French observer used the word routinière in describing this characteristic. Even in intellectual work this liking for monotonous repetition will show itself. One of the doctors told us that he had the very greatest difficulty in inducing his pupils not to perpetuate his most casual gestures when he was demonstrating. For instance, when teaching bacteriology, quite unconsciously he might from time to time put an instrument down on the table, and just touch it again. Months after he would find one of his pupils when doing the same experiment repeating every gesture he had accidentally made with careful imitation. It was clear that the student had monotonously continued to practice these gestures for no other reason but that he had seen his master make them. All those words which our writers on social subjects are so fond of inditing against the modern factory system have no meaning to the Chinaman. Those complaints about long hours at mechanical work rendering the worker little better than a machine are doubtless true of the white race, but are quite beside the point as applied to the Chinese. If the Chinaman is well paid in the factory he will prefer rather than otherwise that the work should be mechanical; he will not mind if the hours are long.

Again, he is cheerful and contented under very adverse circumstances. When we were being rowed in a native boat up the Yangtsze, and the men were straining every nerve against the current, while they were chilled by a drizzling rain, there was never a word of discontent; they were always cheerful and bright, good-tempered and merry.

Their highest quality is obedience, which is the result of their Confucian culture. The central virtue of that teaching is obedience to parents, and they hold that doctrine to a degree which to the Western mind seems exaggerated. One of the grown-up sons of a Chinese clergyman did something which he considered unbecoming in a Christian; to the surprise of the missionary, he did not hesitate to administer a sound thrashing to his son, which the young man took without the slightest resistance, and in this action the clergyman was supported by the public opinion of the congregation. This quality gives to China its great power, and it is one of the points in which there is the greatest divergence between the teaching of the West and of the East. Every Chinaman points out to you how little Westerns care for their parents. I remember a Chinese gentleman explaining in a patronising way to the other Chinese that, strange though it seemed, he knew it as a fact that one of the commandments of our religion really was that we should honour our parents.

Were it not for this principle of obedience which is implanted in the mind of every Chinaman, the government of China would scarcely endure for a day; but he is taught from his earliest youth to obey his father, not as we teach in the West because the child is unable to think and understand, so that obedience to parents is a virtue which must fall into disuse as knowledge increases, but as an absolute duty, a duty equally incumbent on a man of forty as on a child of four. This principle is extended to that of civil government; the local official is in their quaint phrase "the father and mother of his people," and the obedience to parents taught in childhood is therefore extended to those who govern. No Chinaman has any doubt but that the first duty of man is obedience to authority. Let us hope these qualities will ever endure.

What may happen, and, alas, I am afraid, is at the present moment happening, is that the two civilisations may be so blended together that the qualities of each may be lost and its peculiar virtues destroyed while its characteristic vices are preserved. The great qualities of obedience to parents, of courtesy to strangers, are being forgotten. The Chinaman educated in the States is rude and abrupt; he fancies that it is Western and business-like. Every Chinese gentleman to whom I talked, allowed that one of the worst results of Western teaching had been that a Westernised Chinaman was less obedient and respectful to his parents. On the other hand, the Westernised Chinaman does not acquire the peculiar virtues of the Englishman.

The superficial Chinese thinker wants China to learn only the material side of our civilisation, to profit by our mechanical excellence without learning anything of our ethics. His view is that the West is immoral but wealthy; he regards Europe as the place where there is no principle excepting money-worship, and therefore he argues that if you would Westernise China you must despise morality and seek for money. Chang-Chih-Tung voiced this thought when he said, "Western education is practical, Chinese education is moral." If you try to argue with a thoughtless Chinaman who has perhaps never left China, and whose only experience of Western life is what he has seen in a treaty port, you will find that it is hard to convince him that Western education produces a high moral tone. After all we may, to a certain extent, be to blame for their want of appreciation of the morality of the West, for too often we show to the Chinese a very degraded side of our civilisation; and though I do not think that Shanghai at the present merits the term that was applied to it fifty years ago of being a "moral sink," yet undoubtedly the treaty ports, both by their constitution and by their geographical position, collect very unpleasant specimens of white civilisation. There are a certain number of men who spend a great part of their existence being deported from Shanghai to Hong-Kong, and from Hong-Kong to Shanghai.

One of the comedies in the tragedy of the extinction of the independence of Korea is illustrative of this point. The Emperor of Korea heard that the Western races were far more trustworthy than those of the East, and so fearing assassination after the murder of the Queen, he determined to enrol a corps of Europeans as a body-guard; he sent over officers to Shanghai with orders to enlist Europeans. Unfortunately for himself he did not take the precaution of sending with them any Western to help in the selection of the men. To Korean eyes all Westerns look alike, and as they were offering good pay, they soon had their corps complete; they returned to Seoul, and the corps was installed with suitable uniforms, and, alas, rifles and ammunition. The moment the corps was paid, the greater bulk of them got drunk, and for the next few hours Seoul was distinctly an undesirable place of residence, filled with drunken men of all nationalities shouting and shrieking and firing loaded rifles recklessly in every direction. The poor Emperor trembled as he looked from his palace windows at his body-guard out on the drink, and he made up his mind that it would be better to take a reasonable chance of assassination by the Japanese than to risk the danger of being guarded by this inebriate troop of Westerns. With the help of the Consul the body-guard when sober were returned to Shanghai, and let us trust the Chinese heard the story and were convinced that in accepting Western civilisation they must be careful to avoid accepting the vices of the West.

At Changsha I heard a similar story, but with a tragic side, which one felt exonerated the Chinese for being rather incredulous as to the morality of our civilisation. Changsha, I should explain, is reputed one of the most bigoted cities in China; even at the present moment white women are advised not to walk through the streets. The Hunanese have a bold independent character, which makes them rather hostile to any foreigner or to foreign ways, and I am afraid that the story I am going to repeat will have confirmed them in their conviction that foreigners are undesirable. Two white men belonging to one of the South European races—Greeks, I think—settled themselves down in defiance of treaty rights in Changsha, and at once opened a gambling hell. Very soon they taught the Chinese, who are as a race very addicted to gambling, new and most pernicious forms of that hateful vice. The Governor complained to the Consul; the Consul sent his officer down, accompanied by the police, to arrest the Greeks; the Private Secretary to the Governor informed the Consul of the tragedy that followed. The Consular officer warned the Greeks that they must give up their gambling establishment and go back to Hankow. They said they would not. He told them that if they refused he would arrest them, take them to the boat, and send them down by force to Hankow. They still refused, and he advanced, upon which one of the Greeks shot the officer dead. The Chinese police after their manner vanished, while the Governor's Private Secretary, according to his own account, spent most of the time of the interview under the table. The Greeks, seeing the coast clear, and realising that vengeance must come, took to the open country. The Chinese were told to arrest them if they could. Of course they had no difficulty in finding them, but to arrest them was a different matter. They mobilised two or three regiments, and surrounding the house in which the Greeks had taken refuge, they kept on firing at long range till they judged, from there being no signs of life, that they must have killed them. They then carried off the bodies, but thought it better to describe the incident in an official document as a case of suicide from fear of arrest, lest they should be held responsible for the death of these murderers. The next Greeks that came up the river were sent down with a guard of forty men, and so terrified were the Chinese that they had to put them first-class, as no Chinese would have dared to have travelled with them.