China and the West

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Peking, July 2. [2.7.1919].
The rainy season has set in, and now we have floods and also coolness, the temperature having fallen from the late nineties to the early seventies, and life seems more worth living again.
This is a great country for pictures, and I am most anxious for one of a middle-aged Chinese, inclining to be fat, with a broad-brimmed straw hat, sitting on the back of a very small and placid cream colored donkey. He is fanning himself as the donkey moves imperceptibly along the highway, is satisfied with himself and at ease with the world, and everything in the world, whatever happens. This would be a good frontispiece for a book on China—and the joke wouldn’t all be on the Chinese either.
To-day the report is that the Chinese delegates refused to sign the Paris treaty; the news seems too good to be true, but nobody can learn the facts. There are also rumors that the governmental military party, having got everything almost out of Japan that is coming to them and finding themselves on the unpopular side, are about to forget that they ever knew the Japanese and to come out very patriotic. This is also unconfirmed, but I suppose the only reason they would stay bought in any case is that there are no other bidders in the market.