China and the West

Russell, Bertrand. Sketches of modern China. In : The Nation and the Athenaeum ; vol. 30, 3, 10, 17. Dez (1921).
I. The East and the eclipse.
China is traditionally a land of leisure, but the visiting foreigner must not hope for much personal experience of this side of Chinese life. The busiest thirty hours I ever spent in my life were spent in Chang-sha, a city which is reached by travelling up the Yangtze for three or four days from Shanghai to Hankow, and then going south for another day across a vast lake. (In spite of its remoteness it is a Treaty Port.) When I arrived in Chang-sha, there was an educational Congress in session, at which all kinds of people lectured on all kinds of subjects. During my thirty hours, I gave four lectures and two after-dinner speeches, and attended a great reception at the American hospital. My lectures, which were on Russia, displeased the student by being somewhat critical of the Bolsheviks, whom almost all Chinese students passionately admire. I spent the night (in a Chinese hotel), as Saint Paul spent his time in Ephesus, fighting with wild beasts. So on the whole my impression of Chang-sha was lacking in Oriental calm.
The proceedings ended with a great feast given by the Tuchun, the military governor of the Province of Hunan. Most Tuchuns are wicked ; indeed they are the chief internal source of trouble in China. They intercept the provincial revenue and spend it on raising private armies ; they indulge in war, one against another ; and they practice depredations in the style of Verres. A British missionary for many years resident at Chang-sha assured me that the predecessor ou our host had, in two years, amassed a fortune of thirty million dollars, partly by downright robbery and partly by debasing the currency in his province. At the end of that time he had fled from popular vengeance, with his plunder, to Japan, where, I gathered, he is living happily ever afterwards. An Englishman not accustomed to China might expect to find, in consequence of this worthy's activities, such scenes of desolation as are now to be seen in Eastern Europe, but he would be agreeably disappointed. Chinese scoundrels have sill much to learn from the West as regards efficiency in evil, and it was clear that the absconding Tuchun had done far less harm than is done by the 'honest' governments of the Great Powers. The Chinese government does some harm to its own people, but none to anybody else ; from an international point of view, it is the best government in the world, because it is the most inefficient.
However, the Tuchun who was our host was an exception to the general rule, being perfectly virtuous and a great friend of education. (He fell a few weeks after my visit.) The guests were received in one vast hall, and banqueted in another. The food was European ; there was an endless succession of courses and an infinite variety of wines. Our host, through an interpreter, apologized to me for the frugal fare he was offering in his humble abode, but said he thought we would rather have a glimpse of every-day Chinese life than be treated to a display of pomp and splendor. I tried to remember quickly all I had read of Chinese etiquette, and mumbled something about my pigship being honoured that His Magnificence should deign to notice me ; but I fear I was not very adequate.
If the Tuchun displayed something of traditional Chinese manners, the after-dinner speeches differed from those of Europe in the opposite direction, by being free from make-believe and humour, very serious and very businesslike. Professor Dewey spoke of Chinese education and of the lines along which it should progress ; Mrs. Dewey informed the dignitaries of Chang-sha that in some provinces co-education had been adopted, and that Hunan ought to do likewise. To this the Tuchun made a statesmanlike reply, promising that the matter should receive his best consideration, and that action should be taken when the time was ripe. Various Chinese educationists, whose speeches were interpreted into English by Chinese interpreters, spoke of their aims and their efforts, and of what they hoped from their European and American guests. Reverence for sages is traditional in China, and many modern Chinese transfer this attitude to the educationists who come from foreign countries. Their expectations are so far beyond one's powers as to be often embarrassing ; it is very difficult to explain that one is not a sage without feeling that one is rather a fool.
The educationists and the students in China are extraordinarily keen, and there is no doubt that the movement for modern education represents the most solid advance that is being made. Chinese who have been at foreign universities do not become unbalanced, or unable to see what is good in China (except in art). Their native civilization is sufficiently strong and solid to enable them to assimilate what the West has to teach without becoming simply Europeans ; and, strange to say, they like our best better than our worst. They are, as a rule, less learned than Japanese professors, but more genuinely cultivated, more open-minded, more capable of a scientifically skeptical outlook. Nationalism and religion, the two great enemies of honest thought in the West, are absent from the educated classes in China ; respect for Confucius is not excessive among those who have assimilated Western culture. I was never conscious in China, as one almost always is in Japan, of a barrier to mutual comprehension. The Oriental is said to be inscrutable and remote, but this is certainly not true in China. I found the Chinese just as easy to talk to as the English, and just as easy (or as difficult) to understand psychologically.
But Young China has to contend against a terrible dead-weight of ignorance and superstition in the mass of the people. When I left the banquet to go on board the boat on which I was leaving Chang-sha, it happened that en eclipse of the moon was in progress. As in the earliest annals of Chinese history, the streets were full of people beating gongs to frighten away the Heavenly Dog who was supposed to be trying to eat up the moon ; little bonfires were being lit everywhere to rekindle the moon's light by sympathetic magic. The missionary whom I mentioned earlier told me that often, as he walked about, he had heard passers-by express astonishment that he could bend the knee, because he was a 'foreign devil', and devils have to keep their knees always straight. They also can only travel in straight lines, and therefore every Chinese house has the front door opening onto a blank wall, with the courtyard round the corner. Even within the courtyard, a screen provides other corners, so that at worst the evil spirits cannot get beyond the servants' quarters. Great care has to be taken in putting up telegraph wires to prevent them from pointing straight at any man's house, because if they did they would help devils to get at him. There are innumerable superstitions of this kind, some merely picturesque, others very inconvenient. Educated people do not believe them, but they have to be respected in any public undertaking. Until recently, no house could be built of more than one story, for fear of disturbing the spirits of the wind and the air.
The only cure for these superstitions is universal education, and for that, at present, there are not enough funds or enough modern teachers. But the love of education and respect for it are so great that one may hope to see it rapidly extended, provided political troubles can be sufficiently settled for the money to be forthcoming. I hope that, when education becomes more widespread, it will be in the hands of the Chinese themselves, not in those of missionaries, clerical or lay, who want to spread our civilization as the finest thing on earth. China has shortcomings, which to us are very obvious, but it also has merits in which we are deficient. What is to be hoped is not that China should become like ourselves, reproducing our Napoleons and Bismarcks and Eminent Victorians, but that a new civilization should be developed, combining our knowledge with Chinese culture. The Chinese are capable o this, if they are encouraged but not coerced. The methods of Europe and Japan would force them in time to become like Japan, militaristic, imperialist and brutal ; the methods of America would persuade them to become like America. But if their development can be left free, I think they can give the world a new civilization, to carry on the arts and sciences after Europe has perished in a sea of blood.

II. Chinese ethics.
The Chinese are more fond of laughter than any other nation with which I am acquainted. Every little incident amuses them, and their talk is almost always humorous. They have neither the grim determination to succeed which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon, nor the tragic self-importance of the Slav ; Samuel Smiles and Dostoevsky, the typical prophets of these two races, are both equally remote from the Chinese spirit. A Slav of Teuton believes instinctively that he alone is truly real, and that the apparently external world is merely a product of his imagination ; hence the vogue of idealistic philosophies. It follows that one's own death is a tremendous event, since it makes the universe collapse ; nothing short of personal immortality can avert this awful cataclysm. To the Anglo-Saxon, it is his own purposes rather than his own imaginings that are sacred, because he cares more for action than for thought ; but to him, as to the Slav, the ego is all-important, because the immutable principles of morality demand the victory of his volitions. And so he snatches a moral victory out of the very jaws of death by alliance with a Heavenly Will.
These solemnities are not for the Chinese. Their instinctive outlook is social rather than individual ; the family takes the place which for us is taken by the single personality. To us, self-development or self-realization is not a palpably absurd basis for ethics ; to the Chinaman, the development of the family is not a palpably absurd basis. Accordingly, when a Chinaman finds that he is dying, he does not take the event tragically, as we do ; he merely follows the rites. He assembles his sorrowing family (their sorrow is part of the rites) ; he makes an appropriate farewell speech to them ; he sees to it that his coffin is duly prepared, and that his funeral will be worthy of so important a family. When these duties are accomplished, his dead is an occurrence to which he resigns himself without any particular interest or emotion.
This absence of self-feeling produces and absence of pomposity ; Meredith's Egoist would be impossible in China. The Chinese, of course, are selfish, like other people, but their selfishness is instinctive, as in children and animals, not clothed in fine phrases as ours is. I doubt whether psycho-analysis would find much material among them. There is in Chinese no word for 'persecution' ; I forgot to ask whether there was any word for 'prig', but I doubt it. Barring Confucius himself, I cannot think of any Chinaman, either in history of among my acquaintance who could be described as a prig. The result of all this is a liberation of the impulses to play and enjoyment which makes Chinese life unbelievably restful and delightful after the solemn cruelties of the West.
It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Chinese conventional morality is less absurd, or demands less self-sacrifice, than that of Christian countries. While I was in Peking an old woman of no particular importance died, and her daughter died of grief immediately afterwards. (I heard of the case from the European doctor who was attending them, and who assured me that no ordinary cause of death could be found in the daughter.) To die of grief on the death of a parent is a supreme victory of filial piety, conferring great lustre upon the individual and the family. It is customary to put up memorial arches, nominally at the public expense, in some public place, to hand down to posterity the knowledge of such signal virtue. So far, so good ; but the sequel is not so pleasant. In the case in question, public opinion demanded that the family should provide a specially magnificent funeral for the mother and daughter, and in order to defray the expenses, the sons, who were moderately well-to-do, had to sell all they possessed and become rickshaw coolies. This is one concrete example of the harm done by making the family the basis of ethics.
The family is the source of a great deal of the corruption that vitiates Chinese public life. When a man is appointed to a post, filial piety demands that he should use his position to enrich his relations. As his legitimate salary does not admit of much being done in this way, he is compelled to eke it out by methods which we should consider dishonest ; if he does not, he is condemned by public opinion as an unnatural son or brother. Many returned students who begin with Western ideals find themselves caught in this net and unable to escape from its meshes.
The subjection of women is, of course, essential to a strong family system, and is carried very far by Chinese conventional morality, though not so far as in Japan. Old-fashioned Chinese women are not allowed to see any men except their husbands' relations, though they may go out (with a female attendant) for shopping or visiting other women. When a man marries, he takes his wife to live in his father's house, and she becomes, usually, the slave of her mother-in-law, who believes any slanders brought by the servants, and uses them to keep her daughter-in-law in subjection. The wife is not considered to have any ground of complaint if her husband takes a concubine, and she is censured if she marries again after his death. Betrothals are arranged by the parents of the young people, who do not meet until the wedding ceremony. Betrothals are often entered into in infancy, and are more binding even than marriage. There are recognized grounds for divorce, but there is no recognized way of escaping from a betrothal.
All this is, of course, very bad, and Young China reacts against it vigorously. I became acquainted with various married couples living in houses of their own, where the wife enjoyed all the liberties that an English wife would have. Many girls nowadays are well educated on Western lines in normal schools and afterwards in colleges or universities. They are admitted to Peking Government University, where quite a number attended my lectures. These girls, naturally, are not willing to enter upon the old-fashioned kind of marriage, and the men students whom I came across were quite at one with them on this point.
When I arrived in Peking, I said that I wished to have a seminar for the better students. Accordingly they organized what they called a 'Society for studying Russell's philosophy', which met one a week under the presidency of an Oxford philosopher, Professor Fu, who usually acted as interpreter. We met in the 'Returned Students' Club', the pupils seated at a long table and the professors at a smaller table with tea and cakes. The pupils asked questions and discussed our answers with great keenness and perfect candour. After spending some time on problems of pure philosophy, we began to consider social questions, which interested them far more. We had lively debates on communism and Bolshevism, most of the students taking the view that China could and ought to become communist tomorrow. But the liveliest evening of all was devoted to the family system. Afterwards I discovered that these youths, to whom a new intellectual and moral world was just opening, were most of them already married or betrothed, without their participation, to girls whom they did not know and who were presumably full of traditional prejudices. This presented an acute moral problem, upon which it was difficult for an outsider to offer an opinion.
It is clear that worship of the family in China is an evil comparable in magnitude to worship of the State or the nation among ourselves, though the nature of its bad effects is quite different. Most Europeans in China are ultra-conservative as regards Chinese institutions, and assert that without the family ethic all Chinese morality would crumble. I believe this to be a profound mistake. All progressive Chinese take the opposite view, and I am firmly convinced that they are right. All that is worst in Old China is connected with the family system. In old days, some degree of public duty was deduced from the system by the fiction that filial piety demanded service of the Emperor. But since the establishment of the Republic this fiction no longer serves, and a new morality is needed to inculcate public spirit and honesty in government. Young China fully understands this need, and will, given time, provide the new teaching that is required. But whether the Powers will allow enough time is very doubtful. Chinese problems are not capable of being satisfactorily settled by a mechanical imposition of order and what we consider good government. Adjustment to new ideas demands a period of chaos, and it is not for the ultimate good of China to shorten this period artificially. But I doubt whether this view will commend itself to the foreigners who think they know how to save China.

III. Chinese amusements.
One of the most obvious characteristics of the Chinese is their love of fireworks. On arriving at a Chinese temple, the worshipper is given a set of Chinese crackers to explode on the temple steps, so as to put him in a good humour. When I invited the most intellectual of my students to an evening party, they sent several days ahead extraordinarily elaborate 'feux d'artifice' to be let off in my courtyard. On the night of the Chinese New Year (which is different from ours) it is impossible to sleep a wink, because every household north, south, east, and west, spends the whole night sending off rockets and golden rain and very imaginable noisy display. I did not find any Chinaman, however grave, who failed to enjoy these occasions.
Chinese New Year is like our Christmas, or rather, what our Christmas would be if no one in the country were over ten years old, except the shopkeepers and confectioners. Everybody buys toys of one sort or another : paper windmills which go round and round in the wind as they are held in the hands of fat old gentlemen in rickshas ; rattles more rattling than any European baby enjoys ; gaudy paper pictures of all kinds ; Chinese lanterns with horsemen on the outside who begin to gallop round as soon as the lantern is lit. All these things are sold in the courtyards of temples, which take the place of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday. I went on their New Year's Day to the 'Temple of the Eighteen Hells', where the posthumous tortures of eighteen kinds of sinners are depicted in the spirit of 'Ruthless Rhymes'. A vast crowd was going round, shouting with laughter at the various horrors, none of which were portrayed in any but a comic spirit. In the largest, gayest and most crowded temple, in the inmost court, I found the Salvation Army singing hymns to a brass band and preaching through an interpreter, assuring the Bank Holiday crowd that its amusements were idolatrous and must infallibly bring eternal damnation. The crowd enjoyed this even more than the eighteen native hells, laughed more vociferously, and applauded with vast good humour. I do not think it occurred to any of them that the Salvationists were in earnest, for if it had, good manners (never deficient in any class in China) would have demanded a different reception. I alone was left somewhat pensive, reflecting upon the benefits of the civilization we are bringing to the poor benighted heathen.
The educated classes, though they do not lose the capacity for childish pleasures, have also others of a more refined kind ; in fact the art of exquisite enjoyment has probably been carried to greater perfection than anywhere else in the world. In all the most beautiful places are Buddhist monasteries, to which scholars go when they desire a studious retreat. At any specially admirable point of view, one finds a pavilion, put up, not by a tourist agency, but by some Emperor of poet with a perfect appreciation of what the landscape needs. No sooner has one sat down in this astonishing summer-house than some kind person, like a genie in 'The Arabian Nights', brings tea in little cups – not the gross liquid that we call tea, but an amber-coloured nectar with an intoxicating fragrance, half aromatic, half like the meadows in June, combining the freshness of spring with the beauty of summer sunshine robbed of its dust and heat. One's Chinese hosts begin immediately to discuss some ancient philosophic theme : whether progress is rectilinear or cyclic; whether the perfect sage must be always self-sacrificing, or may on occasion consider his own interest; whether it is better to meditate on death or to ignore it. These subjects will he argued with a wealth of classical quotation and anecdotes of ancient philosophers. But presently some one will mention Japanese aggression in Shantung, or missionary education, or labour conditions in the cotton mills on the Yangtze. At once the delicate spell is broken, and one realizes that, willingly or unwillingly, one is part of the force that must inevitably destroy this beauty and peace inherited from a happier age.
The Chinese have a great aptitude for games of skill. They play a kind of chess which is far more complicated than ours, and needs a board of 256 squares. Those who subsequently learn our variety of the game find it exceedingly simple, and can soon beat quite good European players. They are also much addicted to various easier games, which they play for money. Gambling has always been a national vice, and is their principal vice now that the smoking of opium has been nearly stamped out except where Japanese pedlars can smuggle it in.
One of the less agreeable sides of Peking life is the enormous number of beggars. Even in the severest winter frosts, they are dressed in rags which let die air through; sometimes they have wounds or sores at which they point like the Saints in medieval pictures. As one goes through the streets in a ricksha, beggars run after one, calling out in a piteous voice: 'Da lao yeh!' which means 'Great old sire'. If one is on foot, they sometimes perform the kow-tow to one in the middle of the street. All this is embar¬rassing and painful, and at first one reacts with a C.O.S. emotion. But gradually one discovers that they have their beats and their office hours ; that well-to-do Chinese like giving to them, and that many of them are fat. When they are not at work, they congregate together under a sunny wall and smoke cigarettes. At these times they take a holiday from the pretence of misery, and talk and laugh with the utmost gaiety. I do not think any European tramp could endure the hardships they put up with, and live ; but there is no doubt that they preserve to the full that capacity for enjoy¬ing every pleasant moment which is the gift of the gods to the Chinese nation.
Educated Chinese derive considerable pleasure from gently pulling the foreigner's leg—but with such delicacy that no one could possibly be annoyed. I was taken one day by two Chinese friends to see a famous old pagoda, which was in a slightly ruinous condition. I went up the winding stairs to the top, and thought they were following; but when I emerged I saw them below me engaged in earnest conversation. On reaching the bottom again, I asked why they had not come up. Their reply was characteristic : 'We debated for a long time, with many weighty arguments pro and con, whether we should follow you or not. But at last we decided that if the pagoda should crumble while you were on it, it would be as well that there should be some one to bear witness as to how the philosopher died, so we stayed below.' The fact was that the weather was warm and one of them was fat.
The modernized Chinese, unfortunately, have mostly lost the power to appreciate native art; when I praised Chinese pictures, they invariably retorted that the perspective is wrong. I was assured by Europeans that good pictures in the old style are still being produced, but I saw none of them myself ; I was shown the imitations of our painting produced in the up-to-date art schools, but it was a devastating and horrible experience. The older Chinese still appreciate the old pictures, many of which are inconceivably beautiful. There is in China a much closer connection than in Europe between painting and poetry, perhaps because the same instru¬ment, the brush, is used for both. The Chinese value a good piece of calligraphy just as much as a good picture; often the painter will write a poem or sentiment on the margin of his picture, and the beauty of the writing will be as much admired as that of the painting. Pictures are not hung on walls, as with us, but kept rolled up, and treated like books, to be read one at a time. Some of them are so long that they cannot be seen all at once ; they represent, perhaps, all the scenery that you might see suc¬cessively during a long day's walk in the mountains. At the beginning of the picture you see two figures starting up a footpath from the plain, probably with a willow-pattern bridge in the foreground; presently you find the same figures ascending through strange gorges and forests, which are realistic though no one unacquainted with China would think so ; just as your legs begin to ache in sympathy, the friends arrive at some exquisite temple and enjoy tea with philosophic converse in a pavilion. From there the mountains rise vaster and more inaccessible, into dim regions where their shapes seem like misty epiphanies of something divine, and the spectator cannot tell where solid ground has passed into the cloud-shapes of mystical imagination. This is only one style of picture; there are many others, just as admirable. For my part, I derive far more pleasure from them than from even the best of European pictures; but in this I am willing to suppose that my taste is bad. I wish I could believe that some¬thing of the Chinese capacity for creating beauty could survive, but at the devastating approach of the white man beauty flies like a shy ghost. For us, beauty belongs to museums or to the final self-glorification of blatant millionaires ; we cannot regard it as a thing for every day, or as equal in importance to health or cleanliness or money. Chinese dealers, with whom avarice is a passion, will sacrifice large sums sooner than sell a beautiful thing to a person of no taste. But neither they nor anyone else can keep alive the ancient loveliness of China, or the instinctive happiness which makes China a paradise after the fierce weariness of our distracted and trivial civilization.