China and the West

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
May 9 [1919]
Dear children, Im writing from Hangchow, a city some four or five hours south from Shanghai, and the thermometer at half past four p.m stands in the house at 94, and I dont know that it has been much below this day or night for three days. Mamma is now speaking to the girls of various schools in the big hall here, and she hasnt slept much the aforesaid three nights Im afraid she will be too used up. We came here sunday and this p m is about the first free time Ive had; I use this paper because I havent any other and because you may learn seomthing from what's on the other side, and we are staying with the Barnetts, he being the Y M C A secy who wrote the appeal. Japan was rather baffling and tanatslizing. China is overpowering, and the size of the difficulties and obstacles to be overcome, in modernizing China and even in maintaining its continued existence as an independent nation are I think depressing to most, the educated Chinese who realize the situation included. One could write more easily in Japan, because in spite of the reserve over everything, the unlifted screen, things are more or less tied up in packages and ticketed, while here one only ctaches separet glimpses of a vast panoramic kaleidoscope. I doubt if the Chinese are personally as much as sealed mystery as reported sometimes, but the country is so vast, and the parts of it so different, and the accumulations from the past so enormous, and one would have to live here so long to begin to get hold of even the most important which are hneeded to understand things, that theit is easy to see how and where the idea of China as an impenetrable mystery came from. Here is one incident which personally concerns us, and also seems typical. The other day the Peking univ students started a parade in protest of the Paris Peace Conference action in turning the German interests in China over to the Japanese. Being interfered with by the police they got more unruly and beat up the Chinese minister to Japan who negotiated the treaties that sold China out, he having been bribed; they burned the house where he was staying,5 and he went to the hospital, in fact was reported dead. Well, in one sense this || was a kind of Halloween students spree with a somewhat serious political purpose attached. In another sense, it may be—tho probably not—the beginning of an important active political movement, out of which anything may grow. All the educated japanese [ink del.] Chinese [in ink] regard the beating not as lynching but as just expression of social disapprobation; they are sorry the man wasnt killed. Some twenty students were arrested; practically every organization in China is sending telegrams to the government requesting that they be not punished If they should be, [pencil comma] there may be a kind of revolution directed against the present government in form and the Japanese in reality. This way of going at things seems typical of the way China acts, and it is equally typical that no one will guess which way things are going to turn whether this ais a temporary excitement or the beginning of the new political movement China needs. And the most typical thing is that tho the Chinese have known the facts for some years, they have done nothing—except hate the japanese and hope that America and japan would get into war and the U S lick Japan. In fact during this time they have allowed things to go from bad to worse so far as internal division and disorganization are concerned, and so far as wholesale graft by the political authorities—not quite all—is concerned. The only reason for not believeing the stories along this line you hear of is because they come so far short of the fatcs. In fact if anyone put down the things that are alluded to in passing and taken as a matter of course no one in [pencil underline] America would believe them; he would think we had been gulled by some one—Governors [G in ink] who in the last few years who have got title to all the mines in their provinces as big and rich in coal as perhaps Penn—others who own onetenth of the land in a province bigger than NY and so on. Well, they stood by and allowed all this to go on, including the selling out to Japan, and did nothing—but the students row may set them off. If you can figure this out, you will understand the country better than I do. I am pretty sure however that China is the country of pure original human nature, just as Japan is the high-||ly cultivated, trained, over-trained, country. Well, where it affects [in ink] us is this. Accordinding to etiqueete here, the Chancellor of the University is "responsible" for the students action. If the government punishes them he will doubtless reisgn on the ground that he is the one really to blame. He is a liberal, and if he goes I think our invitation to the University will doubtleas be lost and forgotten. They were planning a conference of the chief educational officials in Peking for the last two weeks in June, and this will probably be called off to, if the liberals lose out. In that case we shall beack in Tokyo or Japan as according to recent letters, whereas according to this other plan, developed I think since we wrote last, we should be here two weeks longer than we expected. Our guide and friend who wrote had charge of us in Sh and who piloted ^us^ down here and was to have interpreted here, left suddenyl for Sh on receipt of the Peking news to see what had happenned, and how it was going to affect the plans made for us. We have been to two dinner parties here, and two lunch parties since we came Monday—nor Friday, almost all Chinese guests. There are fewer American returned students here, mostly the authorities here having been educated in Japan—which they hate, and whose educational system they have slavishly copied, in because of the hate, because they havent seen anything else and because they have an idea that it was Japan' system that has enabled Japan to put it over on them. But the scheme is as unfitted for big sprawling go as you please China as it is fitted for compact and obeyful Japan. The impressive thing about their hatred for Japan is that it isnt loud and boisterous; it is just as much a matter of fact as the weather, and it is combined with great moral contempt. There was a rumor in Sh sunday that Wilson was assisinated, Every Chinaman who spoke of it said the Japanese had started the story. When asked why, the answer was always because that is the way they do everything—the point being that here assasination is resorted to only when a man has become an object of universal detestation and only then.
Hangchow is a city of six or seven hundred thousand and the centre of both the best tea—which is much like the best green tea of Japan near Kyoto and of the best silks. We have been to a big silk filature,9 quite modrenized and run by Chinese and also a silk school where mamma was delighted by seeing absolutely everything in the line of worms, coconns the care of them—this is just the tail end of the season, and we had been told before we shouldnt see them feeding. But they had em, including the wild kind that makes the Pongee silk, brought from another district for experimentation. They live not on oak trees but on what seemed to be a kind of chestnut. They are experimenting crosing with japanese, french and Italian breeds. It is said the quality of their own coccons has deteriorated. In the factory we say the treads drawn the cocoons—girls in charge and very skilful.
Thank the Lord a rain has set in since we I began and perhaps the weather will change before we give up thr ghost. Hangchow is on a Lake known as West Lake, one of the most spots in China, scenically and historically, quite beautiful though not over three or four feet deep anywhere, hills and mts about. We have been taken out and around on it some three times, once to visit a missionary American college on the hills overlooking the big Hangchow river, the situation is wonderful when you get to itn like Pacific Heights in Honolulu as mamma pointed out after I had feebly compared it to the outlook from Berkeley hills. We go back to Shanghai sunday, then in a day or two to Nanking where we stay two weeks, unless everything is upset. I have given but one lecture to about eight or nine hundred, and had a conference with about fifty—called a conference, in fact a series of brief lectures on various topics—and another conference tomorrow. In many ways they are pathetic, so genuinely openminded and anxious to learn many of them, and yet so up gaainst conditions, that it seems hopeless to make suggestions and preach theories. It is significant that they thing they respond to most is the idea of making the child rather the lesson the centre. In Japan in spite of the uniform love of children, I doubt if they could grasp the idea.
[John Dewey]