All One Need Know About China

An Analysis of the Chinese Revolution and of the Prospects for a Stable Government

THOMAS T. READ

EDITOR'S NOTE:—Nothing in the newspaper headlines has been so clouded by misrepresentation, offstage alarums and false publicity as the events in China. Was a world cataclysm or a trivial family squabble occurring on the other side of the globe? The American reading public did not know. It had been told that armies were in the field, that something was happening, but the dimensional significance, the racial background behind the fragmentary and corrupted reporting of events, had been withheld. The author of this article, Mr. Thomas T. Read, knows China and the Chinese sympathetically and his article marks one of those rare occasions when a true perspective, neither contracted nor exaggerated, is brought to bear on an event during the event. Mr. Read was, until 1910, Professor of Metallurgy at Pei Yang University, Tientsin. China, and he has resided for some time in the Orient. He is a member of the American Asiatic Association and has written a notable book. Mineral Products and Resources of the Chinese Empire as well as many articles on Chinese economic and political matters.

THE question of the moment is "What is happening in China?" Whoso aspires to answer it meets his first difficulty with the realization that he is expected to say everything of importance in fifty words. I must discourage at once those who require of me a tabloid summary. It is impossible to summarize, explain, or dismiss, in fifty or even five hundred words, the present "Chinese situation".

Much of the difficulty of the question lies in its vagueness. Presumably what the questioner wants to know are the prospects for the speedy establishment of a sound and stable government. This can be answered, briefly enough, by saying that the prospects are poor, since they hinge on the arising of a leader who can sway all the people as Mussolini sways the people of Italy. Both the peculiar character of the Chinese people and the calibre of the available leadership make such a contingency highly improbable.

If either one of two political phenomena were possible in China, we might expect a stable government within a predictable period of time. The first is an informed citizenry, able and willing to accept leadership. The second is a people sufficiently susceptible to emotional appeals to be led and ruled by slogans.

An instance of the first is the present faith of the American people in Calvin Coolidge, and their belief that, no matter how absurdly Congress behaves, he will somehow manage things capably and well. In a literate people such leadership is possible; every one reads the newspapers, sees the picture supplements and film news-reels, and listens to radio speeches. Thus the average American feels that he knows Calvin Coolidge, and we have that consent of the governed which is the basis of democratic government. Practice in accepting leadership has made us so adept at it that its functioning is truly remarkable.

In the absence of conditions such as these, we have the second phenomenon in which consent is obtained by means of an emotional appeal, which usually is little more profound than a good battle-cry. "Carthago delenda est" is the earliest that comes to mind and "Make the world safe for democracy" the latest, but they are all alike in that they catch the popular imagination, and are usually as impossible of precise definition. In practice the logic behind the slogan is unimportant, if the projects of the leaders are sound and the slogan will prevail on the people as a whole to give the leaders complete and constant support.

AS for the present feasibility of the first situation, not one of the conditions that enable the American people to think more or less as a unit, exists now or ever has existed, in China. There is no radio (it is against the law to have a radio set), native news-reels are non-existent, and outside the large cities and for the bulk of the people the motion pictures are not even a myth. The same thing may be said of the daily newspaper: four-fifths of the people could not read one if they had it. It is unquestionable that the people of the United States have a clearer idea of who the six military leaders of China are, and what they are trying to do, than the people of China have. China is therefore unfitted to realize the comparative ideal of a modified democracy,such as that of the United States, wherein the people are intelligently able to follow leaders in whom they have faith and of whose actions and characters they are informed, through the press, and in other ways.

It is natural for us to believe that the transition of our Colonies into a Federated Republic at the end of the eighteenth century was an easy task, and to suppose therefore that the transition of China into a republic early in the twentieth century should be equally simple. Let us pass over the question as to whether the transition America made was actually as easy as we now believe it to have been, and consider how different the situation is in China.

A significant fact about the Chinese is that they are not a military people. The soldier has always been regarded as a rather low order of being. The people have feared the soldier but they have not respected him. Therefore they do not regard as admirable the cardinal principle of a soldier, willingness to follow leadership. Their whole social life has for centuries been organized with seniority by age as a substitute for leadership, and since seniority by age often is intolerable they have tempered it with a system of modification of government by clamour that is as indescribable as it is effective. The net result of this is that when the Chinese in 1911 "established" a republic they were making as sweeping a change as if a pigeon were to fold its wings with the intention of thereafter living like a duck.

IT is easy to prove the absence of radio, A news-reels, and daily newspapers in China, but quite difficult to prove what I believe to be even more important, that the Chinese have no tradition of, and little inclination toward, the acceptance of leadership. Since a detailed proof of this contention requires either the reader's intimate knowledge of the Chinese temperament or an exhaustive analysis of it (neither of which seems warranted here) I must attempt to make my point by drawing an analogy, which may suggest all that I must leave unsaid.

It is the custom of shoats, when the autumn nights grow cool, to burrow side by side into a bed of corn-husks. All are comfortable except the two on the flanks, each of whom is exposed to the cold on one side. Eventually these two arrive at a revolutionary state of mind and force themselves into the middle against opposition and angry squeals of protest. Thus in the course of the night all take their turn on the ends. Chinese family life exhibits a similar community of interest, a similar opposition to anyone who wants to alter the status quo, and a similar determination of one who is too uncomfortable to alter it in his favor. There is no leadership. They follow the customs of the group in a general son of way.

(Continued on page 118)

(Continued from page 39)

In this lies at least one explanation of the fact that the Chinese who have invented so many things have developed so few of them. They invented the mariner's compass, but never attained any distinction as navigators; they invented printing from movable blocks, but popular education or even the ability to read is as remote as it was before the invention of printing; they invented gunpowder and cannon but have never made much use of them. Most of the Chinese people today are doing what most of the Chinese did centuries ago: working hard in an ineffectual and irregular way, to sustain a meager existence. There are many reasons why this is so, but an important one is the Chinese unwillingness to recognize a leader of the herd.

If this trait of indifference to leadership is typical of the Chinese, as my observations persuade me that it is, the implications are very serious. The general way of living and thinking of a whole people is a difficult thing to change.

Many books about China were written twenty-five years ago. All anticipated profound and sweeping changes in China. Yet the change to a republican form of government has had no more—indeed, less—effect on the people as a whole than the change from the Ming to the Citing (Manchu dynasty) in 1644, or the change from the Yuan (Mongol) to the Ming dynasty in 1360. China has not awakened; it has not been transformed; it is no more convulsed now than it has been many times before, and may reasonably be expected to be again. The world today seems to regard what is happening in China as something quite abnormal. Yet no one can read the history of China for the period 1850-1865 and maintain any great excitement over the conditions existing in 1927. About the only thing that seems changed is that international public opinion today would probably not sanction imposing indemnities on China to compensate for foreign lives and property damage; but, on the other hand, the Chinese, having learned by experience that taking the lives of foreigners and wrecking their property is decidedly unprofitable, both individually and collectively, are not likely to stage a repetition of 1900 or even of 1870, unless the "World Revolution" wing of the Southern group get into control.

To one who asks how China can manage without a responsible government, the answer is that it will continue to manage as it has always managed. A well-organized effective government has been the exceptional thing in China's history; what has been going on in the past sixteen years is not far from an average condition. It is mainly dearth of front-page material for the newspapers here that makes it loom so large at the present time. If the Chinese rural population realized the world's interest in its affairs, they would be genuinely astonished.

Profound transformations in China have been expected before and have failed to materialize. The reason is that the people are not disposed to follow popular leaders except under the influence of some wave of national feeling. Mechanical means of awakening popular emotion are absent in China; superstitions, such as those which were so effective in 1900, have greatly declined; and everyone must admit that unequal treaties must be rated pretty low as stimulants of public opinion. But antagonism to the alien is a time-tried method of stirring up popular excitement; it is generally the basis of riots in American cities. The difficulty is that its use is so dangerous. If it should now go to the lengths it did in 1900, the endpoint would conceivably be an international protectorate for China. The leaders of the armed groups in China understand this quite clearly and it is not likely to happen.

What does all this really matter to the American people, some one will ask. It really matters a good deal, China represents approximately one-fourth the people in the whole world, yet our whole trade with them, imports and exports together, amounts to less than the domestic business done by one American corporation, General Motors. Kerosene and other manufactured products form the bulk of their purchases but even at that they have been a considerate market for American-grown cotton and rice. They need a stable government before they can rise to a standard of living that will give them a consuming status much above the present mere margin of existence. The Chinese are nearly all kept busy now in raising enough food to live on. Eventually they will discover how to barter their products in other lines of activity for more food than they could themselves raise in the same time. China will then have to provide more food for her people (the people are not now sufficiently well-fed to make good workmen) and produce it without much increase of area under cultivation and with a much less extravagant use of human labour. The result will be an enormous increase in the consuming power of approximately one-fourth of the population of the world.

In the beginning, at least, and perhaps always, the industrial rise of China will initiate a corresponding increase in her trade along what may be called the frontiers of her contact with the rest of the world. It seems probable that American industry can advantageously compete with the domestic industries of China in meeting that demand. But if the demand is to develop, industry must develop, and before industry can develop there must be a stable government.

The sound interest of our own and other governments is to avoid aligning ourselves with a faction that seems to be on top at the moment, because next month or year that faction may be underneath. Also it is never profitable, in the long run, to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations.

There is an earnest group of foreign-educated Chinese, mostly young men, who sincerely believe that China, which has been over four thousand years making itself what it is, can be remade overnight by an acceptance of a revolutionary philosophy. For this over-articulate minority the men with power, the Chinese politicians, have only contempt. These latter are merely and gladly exploiting in the Chinese the innate hostility to the foreigner which is latent in every people.