China and the West

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Nanking, May 18. [18.5.1919].
There is no doubt we are in China. Hangchow, we are told, was one of the most prosperous of the strictly Chinese cities, and after seeing this town we can believe it. It has a big wall around it, said to be 21 miles and also 33—my guess is the latter; nonetheless there are hundreds of acres of farm within it. This afternoon we were taken up on the wall; it varies from 15 to 79 feet in height, according to the lay of the ground, and from 12 to 30 feet or so wide; hard baked brick, about as large as three of ours. They always had a smaller walled city inside the big one, variously called the Imperial and Manchu city. But since the revolution they are tearing down these inner walls, partly I suppose to show their contempt for the Manchus, and partly to use the brick. These are sold for three or four cents apiece and carted all around on the big Chinese wheelbarrow, by man power, of course. The compound wall of this house is made of them, and they have several thousand of them stored at the University grounds. They scrape them off by hand; you can get some idea of the relative value of material and human beings. I started out to speak of the view—typical China, deforested hills close by, all pockmarked at the bottom with graves, like animal burrows and golf bunkers; peasants' stone houses with thatched roofs, looking like Ireland or France; orchards of pomegranates with lovely scarlet blossoms and other fruits; some rice fields already growing, others being set out, ten or a dozen people at work in one patch; garden patches, largely melons; in the distance the wall stretching out for miles, a hill with a pagoda, a lotus lake, and in the far distance the blue mountains—also the city, not so much of which was visible, however.
One of the interesting things in moving about is the fact that only once in a while do I see a face typically Chinese. I forget they are Chinese a great deal of the time. They just seem like dirty, poor miserable people anywhere. They are cheerful but not playful. I should like to give a few millions for playgrounds and toys and play leaders. I can't but think that a great deal of the lack of initiative and the let-George-do-it, which is the curse of China, is connected with the fact that the children are grown up so soon. There are less than a hundred schools for children in this city of a third of a million, and the schools only have a few hundred—two or three at most. The children on the street are always just looking and watching, wise, human looking, and reasonably cheerful, but old and serious beyond bearing. Of course many are working at the loom, or when they are younger at reeling. This is a good deal of a silk place, and we visited one government factory with several hundred people at work; this one at least makes out to be self-supporting. There isn't a power reeler or loom in the town, nor yet a loom of the Jacquard type. Sometimes a boy sits up top and shifts things, sometimes they have six or eight foot treadles. A lot of the reeling isn’t even foot power—just hand, though their hand reeler is much more ingenious than the Japanese one. There seem so many places to take hold and improve things and yet all of these are so tied together, and change is so hard that it isn't much wonder everybody who stays here gets more or less Chinafied and takes it out in liking the Chinese personally for their amiable qualities.
Just now the students are forming a patriotic league because of the present political situation, Japanese boycott, etc. But the teachers of the Nanking University here say that instead of contenting themselves with the two or three things they might well do, they are laying out an ambitious scheme covering everything, and their energy will be exhausted when they get their elaborate constitution formed, or they will meet so many difficulties that they will get discouraged even with the things they might do. I don't know whether I told you about the clerk in the tailor shop in Shanghai; after taking the usual fatalistic attitude that nothing could be done with the present situation, he said the boycott was a good thing but 'Chinaman he got weak mind; pretty soon he forget'.
In various places there are lots of straw hats hung up painted in Chinese characters where they have stopped passersby and taken their hats away because they were Japanese made. It is all good natured and nobody objects. There are policemen in front of Japanese stores, and they allow no one to enter; they are 'protecting' the Japanese. This is characteristic of China. The policemen all carry guns with bayonets attached; they are very numerous and slouch around looking bored to death. The only other class as bored looking is the dogs, which are even more numerous, and lie stretched out at full length, never curled up, and never by any chance doing anything.
We visited the old examination halls which are now being torn down. These are the cells, about 25,000 in number, where the candidates for degrees used to be shut up during the examination period. Said cells are built in long rows, under a lean-to roof, mostly opening face to face on an open corridor, which is uncovered. Some of them face against a wall which is the back of the next row of cells. Cells are two and one-half feet wide by four long. In them are two ridges along the wall on each side, one at the height of a seat, the other at the height of a table. On these they laid two boards, two and a half feet long, and this was their furniture. They sat and wrote and cooked and ate and slept in these cells. In case it did not rain, their feet could stick out into the corridor so they might stretch out on the hard floor. The exams lasted eight days, divided into three divisions. They went in on the eighth day of the eighth moon in the evening. They wrote the first subject until the afternoon of the tenth. Then they left for the night. On the afternoon of the eleventh they came in for the second subject and wrote till the afternoon of the thirteenth, when there was another day off. On the evening of the fourteenth they re-entered the cell for the third period and that ended on the evening of the sixteenth. They had free communication with each other in the corridors, which were closed and locked. No one could approach them from the outside for any reason. Often they died. But if they could only get put into a corridor with a friend who knew, the biggest fool in China could get his paper written for him, and he could pass and become an M.A., or something corresponding to that degree. Thus were the famous literati of China produced. Preparation for the exam was not the affair of the government, and might be acquired in any possible way. The houses of the examiners are still in good condition and might be made into a school very easily. But do you think they will do that? Not at all. The government has not ordered a school there, and so they will be torn down or else used for some official work. You can have no conception of how far the officialism goes till you see it. We also visited a Confucian Temple, big and used twice each year. It is like all temples in that it is covered with the dust of many years' accumulation. If you were to be dropped in any Chinese temple you would think you had landed in a deserted and forgotten ruin out of reach of man. We went to the Temple of Hell on Sunday, and the gentleman who accompanied us suggested to the priest that the images ought to be dusted off. 'Yes', said the priest, 'it would be better if they were'.