China and the West

Letter from John Dewey to Wendell T. Bush
Care Y M C A Peking China Aug 1 '19
Dear Mr Bush,
Your letter of early June came two or three days ago. Mails are uncertain here, especially as the technique of the Bank in Tokyo is of a primitively casual type. I am glad to have a permanent address here, for while we cannot stay where we are longer than a few weeks more (we are with a Princeton man, a Y M C A secy, whose family has gone to the seashore) mails will be recd. You are owed many apologies rega[r]ding all the troubles you had about our staying over. Yet it wouldnt be easy to tell from whom the apologies should come, unless it was the young Chinese men who saw us in Tokyo and said they would see Dean Woodbridge. They would have explained that it was not expected that Columbia would bear any expense unless a regular exchange was arranged. Other wise the difficulties were due to the upset in the university, and we had no idea till your last cablegram to Suh Hu [Hu Shi] came that there was any trouble except in the delay of the cables, as we didnt know that any return inquiry [in ink w. caret] had been recd. But there is no reason in the world why the cablegram should have come out of your pocket, and if you will only allow a reimbursement Im asking Evelyn to pay you for it. I wrote an article on the Students Movement for the N R which you may [in ink w. caret] have seen if they published it. It couldnt give the color of the thing however nor what it meant to the boys and girls, or even to the people of China . An after echo took place the other day. The militarists in present control of things here form what they call the Anfu Club, which has a majority in Parliament. They hate the Chancellor of the University whom they regard as morally responsible for the students taking an interest in politics—altho he himself is no politician—in fact is own interest is in esthetics and literature—Paris educated. So last week they bribed a few students, some ex-students and a few more who were just applying for admission to demonstrate agt the Chancellor. They got together about fifteen, when the other students heard of it and to the number of about a hundred attacked them, locked them up, and made them sign a written confession. Then a few days ago, some of the attacking students were arrested charged with assualt and battery. Now the interesting thing about the matter from our standpoint is that public opinion is entirely against this "interference" by the police. The matter is wholly one between students, not one for the courts. It wasnt at all sporty for the beaten (quite literally I think) party to appeal to the law. So some of the students who were dismissed by the trial judge as quite innovent decline to leave jail. They are staying there as a protest! [ink exclamation mark] This place [in ink w. caret] is really upside down on the globe as you can see, and it makes life very amusing not to say interesting. The other strange thing is the number of foreigners who get converted to the Chinese standpoint. Except in Shanghai and some of the other outports where many foreigners especially British pride themselves on having been in China twenty five years and never set foot in Chinese town—tho I cant quite see what good it does them as eighty to ninety percent of the population in the foreign settlements is Chinese. To go back to the student strike. I was invited last the first of the week to a conference of heads of higher schools in this province to consider the reopening of schools. The great majority of heads are very conservative and strongly opposed to the strike and to the students having any part in politics. So as the students have been saving the country all summer, and are probably somewaht cocky and unruly, there is much nervousness about what will happen when the schools reopen. The action of the peace conference as regards Shantung has done ^one^ thing that probably wasnt intended—it has stimulated in one summer [w. caret] the development of national consciousness in China as more than otherwise might have happened in ten years. Nationalistic consciousness in its early stages is apt to be rather blind, but tho the Japanese have tried to make out on one hand that the movement isnt national but instigated by American traders money, [ink comma] and on the other hand have tried to change it into a general anti-foreign movement, it has so far been quite restrained. Except that the illiterate and common people have got it in their heads that the Japanese are carrying on a food poisoning campaign, and when you recal how many Americans believed in the groundglass stores etc, it is easy to see that there may still be violent outbreaks, if the rumors keep up.
It still isnt certain under just what auspices my lectures will be given, some of them under certain Chinese Societies for promoting modern learning, as they have guaranteed me a salary in case the University situation doesnt stay cleared up. We shall be here into March and then move southwards, to Nanking etc. It is very hard to get living accommodations; the Rockefeller Foundation which is putting in the big medical plant has had to build over thirty houses for its staff already. We are on the trail of the flat, almost the only one in Peking which is given up in Sept by a bank man ordered to the Phillipines, but have had to cable to the U S to the man from whom he subleases and are still waiting for a reply as cables are reported ten days behind. Lucy came a week ago, after a very pleasant month in Japan and we are living in earnest hopes that Evelyn will condescend to join us during the year.
She brougt over with her the mss. of my University lectures there, which I had left for translation into Japanese. Im glad you liked the outline, and I hope you will like the lectures when they come out. I am going over the copy again and shall then send it on to Holt. I cant afford to waste so much good typewriting. I think it has one merit; it is reasonably free from philosophic partisanship, being an attempt to evaluate the modern spirit in general in contrast with that of classic philosophies. I am changing the order of some of the earlier lectures.
Suh Hu is very influential here; the weekly magazine he edits has a circulation of five thousand which is large for this country, and would be in ours for an intellectual organ. The vernacular speech movement which he and some others started is taking widely. The students started twnety or thirty journals this summer, all printed in the spoken language, and there are now many other less ephemeral organs that use it. His history of Chinese philosophy is the first written on modern historic lines. He chafes under the conditions which divert so much of his time tofrom scholarship; he wants to study and write more. If Columbia wanted to offer him the Chinese professorship—if it still vacant—I think he would take it at least for a specified time. I dont see how China can spare him, but it is rather pathetic to see how many of the old students here long for life in the U S. It is a hard proposition they are up against. Many of the things that make it interesting to a mere visitor make it trying for them. I was glad to get a little gossip about university matters. Did [Roberts Bishop] Owen come back? I had heard Coss was not to, and waam glad to know he did. I hope you will have a good time in France. Do you spend the whole year there? We also hope you and Mrs Bush are having a good summer. Please accept the best regards of both of us to both of you. Two years is making a large hole in our New York life and at times we get quite homesick, but after all it is a wonderful experience, and we wish you were here to share it and talk it over with us. It was some comfort to know that some of our friends miss us. When I recal the pace at which New York moves I sometimes wonder whether anybody will remember us when we get back. We get the New York papaers in the Club reading room after they are a month old, and in that respect can follow matters better than we did formerly. Again with affectionate regards,
Sincerely yours, John Dewey