Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

CHAPTER I

WHAT HAS AWAKENED CHINA?

For centuries China has been the land that never moved. It had a political history full of wars and bloodshed, of intrigue and murder; periods of prosperity and enlightenment; periods of darkness and desolation; but the country remained essentially the same country. There might be some small alteration in its customs, but China was distinctly unprogressive. And everybody who knew China ten or fifteen years ago was prepared to prophesy that it would continue to remain unprogressive.

Many a missionary speaks of the China that he used to know as a very different land from the China of to-day. It used to be a sort of Rip Van Winkle land that had slept a thousand years, and showed every sign of remaining asleep for another thousand. Mrs. Arnold Foster told us that when she first came to Wuchang she used to see the soldiers dressed mediævally, learning to make faces to inspire terror in the hearts of the adversary. Monseigneur Jarlin, the head of the French mission in Peking, described the China of olden times by saying that in his young days all Chinamen had a rooted contempt for everything Western. Theirs was the only civilised land. The West was the land of barbarism. Now, he added, the positions are reversed; every Chinaman despises China, and is convinced that from the West comes the light of civilisation. Arch-deacon Moule tells how he sailed out to China in a sailing ship, and found a land absolutely indifferent to the existence of the West—more ignorant of the West than the West was of the East, and that, when he was young, was saying a great deal; and now he finds himself in a land that has telephones and motor cars and takes an active interest in flying machines.

China has fundamentally altered. She used to be absolutely the most conservative land in the world. Now she is a land which is seeing so many radical changes, that a missionary said, when I asked him a question about China, "You must not rely on me, for I left China three months ago, so that what I say may be out of date."

China is now progressive; yes, young China believes intensely in progress, with an optimistic spirit which reminds the onlooker more of the French pre-Revolution spirit than of anything else. And this intense belief in progress shows itself at every turn; the Yamen runner has become a policeman, towns are having the benefit of water-works, schools are being opened everywhere, railways cover the land. One may well ask what has accomplished this change, what has awakened China?

Perhaps, like many other great events in history, this change of opinion in China should be attributed to more than one cause. There are two chief causes. One may be small, but it is not insignificant; the other is certainly great and obvious. The less appreciated factor that is causing the regeneration of China is Christianity; the larger and more obvious factor is the new national movement.

The cause of the new national movement was the sense of humiliation brought about by political events culminating in the battle of Mukden, where a flagrant act of insolent contempt for the laws of neutrality was felt all the more deeply because China had to submit to that which she was powerless to resist.

The events of the last few years are so well known that I must ask the indulgence of the reader in recapitulating them. China, confident in the number of her people, which reached to a quarter of the world's population, attempted to assert her rights of suzerainty over Korea against Japan. She had not realised then that Japan was no longer an Eastern power, where knights with two-handed swords did deeds of valour and won for themselves everlasting renown. And when at Ping-yang the armies met, the Chinese General ascended a hill that he might direct the armies of the Celestial Empire with a fan. He conceived the battle to be merely a small affair, where a fan could be seen by all the officers engaged. The result was, of course, that the German-trained Japanese army had a very easy victory. The war ended in the taking of Port Arthur by the Japanese, and China was in the humiliating position of having to appeal to Western countries to secure her territory.

So far, however, the sting of her humiliation gave to China a sense of resentment against all foreigners, rather than a sense of repentance for her own shortcomings, and the missionaries found hostility to their work in every part of China. That hostility resulted in the murder of two German Roman Catholic missionaries in Shantung. The well-known action of Germany in demanding a cession of territory as a punishment for this murder may have been a good stroke of policy, but it has brought but little honour either to Germany or to Christianity. In fact it may be regarded as a most regrettable action from a missionary point of view, for it convinced the Chinese that the missionary was but a part of the civil administration of a hostile country, and that if China was to be preserved from the foreigner, missionaries must be induced to leave the country. A deep feeling of national resentment spread over the land, which was encouraged by some in authority. The direct connection between Government patronage of the anti-foreign movement and the German occupation of Kiauchau can be deduced from the fact that the Governor who was responsible for the awful murders in Shansi had been Governor of Shantung when Germany took Kiauchau.