China and the West

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
Feb 20 [1920] Peking, the same being the first day of the lunar new year.
Dearest family,
We lived and dozed thru a night that on the whole has 4th of July beaten for noise; there were no explosions quite so rude as our big dynamite crackers, and thank God the tin horns were not. For uninterrupted cracking however the night was a sucess. This morning the boys have all been in and made their boys bows. Spite of age, they are all boys when you see how happy the New Years Day made them. I wish I knew enough Chinese to ask them why it made them so happy; I dont think it was entirely the cumshaws, sctho they seemed pleased and perhaps surprised at the amount they got; perhpas they had thought we were tightwads. It hardly seems possible as if a people as old and disillusionized as the Chinese could thibk New Years was going to make the world turn over a new leaf and behave decently for a change, but if [pencil del.] every [in pencil w. caret] day ought to be New Years if it can make people happy so easily. If you ever see Mr [possibly George] Hopkins (and I hope you do sometimes) tell him that tho China doesnt seem idyllic, I sympathize with his feeling about it. Mr Barry has taken to sending the Call lately. The red headlines and screaming type and break up into millions of unrelated paragraphs most of which cant have any interest except to the epople who in them are killed divorced and sued for breach of promise or knocked out, [pencil comma] brought back a picture Id about that had almost lapsesd [d in pencil] from consciousness. I had forgotten anyone could be so crazy, and yet I know very well before Ive been back two weeks it will seem to represent the normal curse of life (I started to write course of life, but I bow to the superior wisdom of the Typewriter)…
Suh Hu [Hu Shi] in suggesting to me that we stay over next year, said it probably wouldnt be safe for me to go home, as I would be deported. This wasnt all a joke on his part. It represents the impression our present doings in America make on an intelligent foreigner as they they get reported. Of course we are rich enough and big enough, to say nothing of being crazy enough, to care nothing for any what any dam fool foreigner cares about us, but I wonder how much of a headache we'll [pencil apostrophe] have when we wake up the morning after. After sveral million unskilled laborers take the advice of those who are telling them if you dont like this country go back to where you came from, and the labor market is cornered by the unions, and the prize boobs of the universe, the middle class has reaped the full reward of its asininity and servility, we shall certainly have some country. This sounds dyspeptic, but Im only too fate, and all that ails me physically is a bad cold. But Mr Hunt told last night about going back to his old home town in the country in Ill and the respectables of the village were brought out to do him honor, the hardware merchant, the lawyer and doctor and preacher and banker, and he said there wasnt one of them who wasnt ready to fight and die for for Mr [Elbert Henry] Gary. I only started out to say that he has begun to tell the facts about Siberia as practically everybody here knows them, but which have been systematically distorted by the propaganda press and the state dept along with the rest of the diplomatists. About one thing he differs from the others Ive heard talk who have been there. He says America isnt hated, that 90 per cent of our soldiers became sympathetic with the revolutionaries, and that the Russian common people know it, as our soldier[s] generally let the revolutionaries escape as fast as the Kolchak people captured them—the train that went to Vladivostock tand back to dem and the surrender of the latter city to the revolutionaries went under an escort of armed American soliders. Mr Morris ofur minister in Tokyo understod the whole situation he says which bears out the impression I got in Tokyo, but felt bound to be loyal to the state dept which had instructed him to find reasons for recognizing Kolchak. I didnt dare ask Mr Hunt how much Russian he speaks, for as he tells about his experiences it seems to make a little difference whether he is telling literal facts, or whether he is an artists and facts meet him more than havelf way. I suspect something of the latter. Anyway I had him here at dinner last night to meet the man who probably knows the most about the student movement from within, as the Chinese student is at least as much entitled as the Siberian peasant to figure picturesquely in the American newspapers. There is a certain kind of lie which only predicts the future in such a way as to help it come true, and if Hunt lies, which Im not at all sure of, it's [pencil apostrophe] that kind. Anyway he has brains and is an artist. He must also be a newspaper man, for I think he is the man who got the Peace treaty for the Chicago Tribune when the Senate couldnt get it. Mama and Ev must be together by this time; they are supposed to come back here next tuesday but I hae my doots. I just started out to wish you another Happy New Years, under the influence of the spontaneous happiness of our servants, moved especially by Fred's letter of Jan 176 [6 in pencil] || which looks as if mails were to be more regular agin. If it were of any use Id tell him not to work so hard, but nobody ever takes that advice But wall street isnt unlike other places and in taking everything a man will give even if uses himself up doing it, and then saying afterwards what a fool he was to let himself be used…
Laotze over here in China was another one Be [in pencil w. caret] a useful citizen and somebody will use you; be worthless and useless, and youll do something, [pencil comma] because you will be let alone and have a chance. This isnt advice, merely a net quotation from Mr Laotze who is the real philosopher of China as Confucius is of the ruling class…
Here are two or three little glimpses of China—draw your own morals. There is perfect and complete censorship here. Students unions and teachers suppressed. The last number of the students union paper comes out with an article advsing the soldiers to turn on their officers and divide the property of the latter among themselves. The soldiers ran into alot of inoffensive soldiers with the butts of their guns and sent about forty to hospitals and as many more to jail. The soldiers who guard the students in jail go in and listen to them talk in jail ad then when they are relieved of guard duty carry the letters back and forth from [pencil del.] between [in pencil w. caret] the prioners and the friends—nor for money either. The premier who of China had a talk wthe other day with some men from Shantung province who told him about the actual treaty nd legal status of Shantung. He got very hot and said he had never known the facts before—his subordinates had misrepresented and suppressed them. However the last is not distinctively Chinese—probably every important poilitical decision of the last few years has been made in just this way. So maybe the other things arent distinctively Chinese either.
Anyway love to all, and a very Happy lunar new year— I think Ill transfer my allegiance from sun to moon and see if it wont be as cheering as with the Chinese.
Dad