A year of prophesying

26.4.24

China has been out of the limelight of the newspapers lately. It is the tradition of the Atlantic civilisations to think about China as little as possible. We ignore the enormous importance of its gifts to us in the past, and we do our utmost to disregard its immediate share in the world’s future.

China drove the Huns westward to relieve Europe from the decaying stagnation of the western Roman Empire. She gave the world paper, which made the printed book and newspaper possible, which made general education and the publication of scientific work possible, which indeed laid the foundation of the modern world. She taught the Mongols and Turks the organisation and military methods that ended the dying Greek impulse of the eastern Roman Empire, nearly conquered Europe, and drove the reluctant European seamen to discover South Africa and America. She numbers to-day more than a fifth part of the human race; has four times as many civilised citizens as the United States, and nearly as many as all continental Europe put together. When we discuss the struggles of a world civilisation to exist it is well now and then to give China a thought. For China must be a pillar of that world civilisation equivalent to the whole English-speaking world.

Two or three facts of some importance are not perhaps so actively present in the general consciousness as they might be. There is a Chinese Republic with a President in Pekin, who rules more or less in most of China proper, though Canton and several other provinces get along in a state of provisional independence. But besides the President there is also a young Emperor in Pekin with a large official income—in arrears—and a remarkable English tutor. The Emperor, we are told, is quite Anglicised, he is being taught constitutional history, and presently, if the British people do not wake up to the dangers of the position, there may be an attempt, open or furtive, with British assistance, to restore the Chinese monarchy. Moreover, although I understood at the Washington Conference that Wei-hai-wei was to be given up, the British are still there—waiting for something to turn up. The British never had much right to be in Wei-hai-wei; their excuse for being there collapsed with the collapse of Russian imperialism; and probably not one British voter in the hundred is prepared for the possibly expensive and humiliating consequences of keeping there too long. The abandonment of the Singapore dock enlargement implied a policy of general withdrawal from forcible adventures in Eastern Asia. But in the untidy way of the British, the shreds and patches of some old dream of a military and political predominance in China are left to brew misunderstandings and trouble in the future.

It is not that Britain has not a profound interest in the future development of China. All the English-speaking peoples, all the other peoples in the world, have a great and increasing interest in Chinese affairs. As the world is drawn together into a political unity, the Chinaman becomes the most important neighbour of everyone. But the method of expressing an interest by grabbing and fortifying settlements, threatening coasts with warships, levying tribute and imposing iniquitous trade arrangements, is now manifestly old-fashioned and barbaric, and a new line of activities has to replace these outworn puerilities.

The English-speaking communities have to work out, and do seem to be beginning to work out, a common conception of a world order, and of their common share in it. Regarded as a point of departure, as a new turn in international thought, the League of Nations movement marks an epoch in world history. That sort of thought is still most extensively carried by the English language; shallow and weak to-day, it may become deeper and more effective as time goes on. It is in the character of the English-speaking communities. It is manifestly of primary importance that so far as possible this thinking-out of the organised peace of the world by the English-speaking communities should go on parallel with, and in touch with, the similar thinking-out of the other great communities of the world. And with no other great community is it more possible and desirable to develop a joint system of ideas and a common political and social aim, than with the great Chinese mass. It is possible, because China is to an extraordinary extent renascent and blank and ready to consider and accept points of view and constructive conceptions. China is remaking her education from the foundation. The four hundred million mass of China is at present intellectually far more plastic than the forty million mass of France, and the thirty million mass of Italy. And it is desirable as well as possible, because a successful effort to bring modern Chinese and American and British thought about the world’s affairs into co-operative understanding would add the weight of four hundred million to the five hundred million of the American and British systems.

In America, China, and Britain alike there is a recognition—weak and partial though it is—of this great opportunity. The return of the Boxer indemnity, already partially repaid by America, and soon to be repaid by Britain, ear-marked for educational purposes, is an unprecedented and most significant thing in international relationships. Part of the American money has gone to educate Chinese students in English and so prepare them to become students in the American Universities. The rest is to be devoted to the development of a modern library in Pekin University. The British money is not yet apportioned, but Dr. Tsai, the Chancellor of the National University at Pekin, has recently been in London to urge the paramount need of a museum and a properly equipped system of scientific laboratories in China.

I saw Dr. Tsai giving an address to the China Society in the London School of Oriental Studies upon these new developments of Chinese education. It was one of the most reassuring things I have witnessed for some time, that little gathering of Chinese students and of a few interested English friends, in the steep little lecture theatre in Finsbury Circus, to discuss the making-over of the Chinese mind that is now in progress. We are still in the day of comparatively small things; sums like ten million pounds are dwarfed by such figures as four hundred million people; yet they are not too small to be perceptible and significant. A growing number of Chinese are making themselves thoroughly well acquainted with all the West has to teach them; they are not simply learning and accepting, they are criticising. The perennial vigour and originality of the Chinese mind is manifested by a prompt repercussion to British and American ideas.

I have before me as I write, for example, a memorandum on Chinese Politics and Professionalism, by Mr. S. C. Chang, which is one of the ablest criticisms of the Anglo-American panacea of “democracy” that I have ever read. It is one of the most remarkable and admirable things about China that in a time of great political confusion whole provinces, almost without government, go on in an orderly fashion and that arts flourish and reading and teaching spread. The nucleus of the mental organisation of a new China, in close touch and sympathy with the Atlantic peoples, appears. Before a generation has passed it may have gathered sufficient power to undertake the general education of the whole Chinese people. It already inspires a considerable Press.

These new relationships of study and discussion between the English-speaking and Chinese worlds will, I hope, increase, intensify, and develop. At present it is a very extraordinary thing that, while the young Chinese students in Britain and America can be counted by hundreds, there is still no system of sending English and American students, by way of scholarships, to study Chinese life and literature in China.

The Chinese are more conscious than the English-speaking peoples of deficient knowledge, and of the need of new inspiration. Our phase is, comparatively, a phase of self-satisfaction. The Chinese will know what we think, and know long before we have realised how much we have to learn from them, and what a wholesome thing it is for us to get their point of view. For Chinese schools multiply and teaching spreads, and where there are schools and teaching there the future grows.