China and the West

Dewey, John. Chinese national sentiment [ID D28474].
Is it possible for a Westerner to understand Chinese political psychology? Certainly not without a prior knowledge of the historic customs and institutions of China, for the institutions have shaped the mental habits, not the mind the social habits. The West approaches all political questions with ideas composed on the pattern of a national state, with its sovereignty and definite organs, political, judicial, executive and administrative, to perform specific functions. We have even made history over to fit into this pattern. We have taken European political development as a necessary standard of normal political evolution. We have made ourselves believe that all development from savagery to civilization must follow a like course and pass through similar stages. When we find societies that do not agree with this standard we blandly dismiss them as abnormalities, as survivals of backward states, or as manifestations of lack of political capacity. Approached with such preconceptions, Chinese institutions and ideas are often given up as a bad job and as a case of arrested development. In actual fact, they mark an extraordinary development in a particular direction, only one so unfamiliar to us that we dispose of them as a mass of hopeless political confusion and corruption, or a striking object of what happens when there happens to be even a high code of ethics without the blessings of a divine revelation. The attempt to read Chinese institutions in terms of western ideas has resulted in failures of understanding and of action from the very beginnings of our contact. For example, in the early days of intercourse there was ground of complaint of the treatment received by western shipwrecked sailors on Korean coasts. The Foreign Offices knew that there existed some tributary relation between Korea and China. They interpreted this relation of dependence, as Mr. Holcombe has pointed out, in the way familiar to them. They thought of the connection as that of feudal suzerain and vassal. Hence they demanded that China make its dependent behave. When China disclaimed authority, they thought that this was either equivalent to a renunciation of all relationship, or else a wilful piece of deceit in a characteristic endeavor to evade just responsibility. They had no precedent for a relationship which, while one of genuine dependence, was moral and advisory in nature. The whole early history of the dealings of western nations with the Court at Peking is full of similar misconceptions. There was an undoubted monarch. The monarchy was even of the despotic kind; there were none of the checks of constitutional and representative institutions familiar to the western mind. Hence all the attributes of political sovereignty, external and internal, were attributed to the Court. Here again there was no precedent for conceiving of a dynastic rule which was a combination of a primitive tribute-levying empire and an authority of a moralistic, homiletic, hortatory kind. And as we go from such external aspects to deeper conditions we find that China can be understood only in terms of the institutions and ideas which have been worked out in its own historical evolution. The central factor in the Chinese historic political psychology is its profound indifference to everything that we associate with the state, with government. One inclines to wonder sometimes why the anarchists of the pacifist and philosophic type have not seized upon China as a working exemplification of their theories. Probably the reason is that being preoccupied with the problem of active abolition of government, they have not been able to conceive of an anarchy which should be only a profound apathy towards government. Or else they, too, have been misled by the popular association of anarchy with extreme freedom and mobility, and could not imagine it in connection with the stagnation attributed to China. According to literary records, the following verse is the oldest poem in the language—a song put into the mouth of a farmer: Dig your well and drink its water; Plow your fields and eat the harvest; What has the Emperor's might to do with me? China is still agricultural, as it was in the bygone centuries. Its farmers still go about their own business of tilling and eating, marrying and giving in marriage, begetting and dying. As of old, they attend to their own affairs, and the power of Emperor or President concerns them not. Governors come and go, and fuss about their petty intrigues of glory and greed. But they do not govern the farmers, who are the mass of the population. The only governance known to them is that of nature, the rules of the immemorial change of seasons, the fateful laws of birth and death, of seed-corn and harvest, of flood and pestilence. In the words of perhaps their oftenest quoted proverb, 'Heaven is high and the Emperor far away'. The implication is that earth is close and intimate, the family and village nearby. M. Hue tells an incident that dates from 1851; it might, however, have happened at any period in the long history of China. After the recent death of the Emperor, he endeavored without success to engage his fellow guests at a roadside tavern in a discussion of political prospects and possibilities. There was no response, though he exhausted his ingenuity. Finally one of the Chinese replied: 'Listen to me, my friend. Why should you trouble your heart and fatigue your head with all these vain surmises? The Mandarins have to attend to affairs of state; they are paid for it. Let them then earn their money. But we should be great fools to torment ourselves about what does not concern us. We should be great fools to want to do political business for nothing. ' And the anecdote continues: 'That is very conformable to reason,’ cried the rest of the company. Whereupon they pointed out to us that our tea was getting cold and our pipes were out. ' The state, the government, was a special business or trade, less interesting and less important for the mass of the people than ordinary affairs. It was, however, lucrative to those who specialized in it; let them carry its burdens. Meanwhile not merely the wedding and funeral, the sowing and reaping, concerned intimately the life of the people, but even the social consolations of the teacup and the tobacco-pipe were of more importance than affairs of state. If the people were indifferent to government, the government, which in our western terminology we have to call the state, reciprocated. In theory it was the representative of Heaven, and consequently owned the earth, namely, the soil, and was the symbolic cause of its fertility, exercising a beneficial paternal influence upon the prosperity of the country. In fact, like Heaven itself, the government was high above. In earlier days Heaven may have directly intervened in the affairs of earth, but for outnumbered centuries in later days it had remained discreetly aloof, satisfied with relations long ago established and interrupting the affairs of earth only at great crises. Except for a few purposes well understood by custom, the central government was irrelevant to the life of the people. It was a Court, and its dignity, prestige, ceremony and pleasures had to be maintained. The material side of this life required material supplies and money. The ideal life, the glory and supremacy of the reigning dynasty, could be satisfied symbolically and ceremonially, as the spirits had learned to be satisfied with symbolic money and imitations of servants, animals and food. The primary material function of government was then to receive a tribute from the products of the earth, partly in kind, partly in money. The amount was not onerous, and long custom had converted the tax into part of the regular order of nature, though, like the crops and other phenomena of nature, it was subject to unexpected ups and downs. The moral and ceremonial sovereignty was incarnated in the officialdom of viceroys, governors, heralds and other functionaries, who represented the Imperial Court, and who communicated to the people its mandates and exhortations, composed in the best literary style and manifesting the continuous benevolent solicitude of the representative of Heaven for their morals. These morals were, in turn, the source of the prosperity of the country and of the stability of the Empire. These officials also had to lead a life of a certain symbolic grandeur and glory which cost money, but taxation was kept within limits prescribed by custom, and as a rule the burden was not heavy. Pains were taken that it should fall upon the well-to-do as far as possible, thus serving the double end of keeping down the power of possible rivals and of not arousing the disfavor of the masses. It is possible to trace in the old Chinese theory of politics the survivals of an original theocracy. But in China, even more than in Europe in its most deistic days, God, or Heaven, was remote, contenting itself with a general benevolent oversight. Its lordship was of an absentee nature. And the Court which represented Heaven was contented to imitate the latter’s non-interference with the details and customs of life. The result was that for all practical purposes each province was an independent state, composed, in turn, of a large number of petty republics called villages. In 1900 an English writer, made competent by long residence and intimate experience, wrote: 'Each of China’s eighteen provinces is a complete state in itself. Each province has its own army, navy, system of taxation and its own social customs. In connection only with the salt trade and the navy certain concessions have to be made to one another under a certain modicum of imperial control. ' These independent units are traditionally called provinces. But, as the quotation shows, they might have been called principalities, save that they had no orderly lineage of princes. China was not even a confederation, much less a national state or an imperial state, in the sense which history has given those terms in the West. Again we have no precedents by which to interpret and understand such a situation. We are acquainted with empires that left local customs undisturbed and that contented themselves with levying tribute and exacting booty. But they were military powers, and always existed in unstable equilibrium. They never became so interwoven with local custom as to be a part of the established order of nature and able to dispense with military support. But China has worked out a scheme of remarkable static equilibrium—the most stable known to history. The political life of China went on essentially undisturbed, even though rebellions overthrew dynasties. Such rebellions were themselves as much a part of the established order of Heaven or Nature as was an occasional flood or plague. All such crises had their natural causes and were proper and normal, however uncomfortable or destructive they might be. The texture of life was unchanged; it continued to exhibit the same patterns. The equilibrium was a human and internal one, a moral one, not one maintained by external pressure or military force. The actual government of China was a system of nicely calculated personal and group pressures and pulls, exactions and 'squeezes', neatly balanced against one another, of assertions and yieldings, of experiments to see how far a certain demand could be forced, and of yielding when the exorbitance of the demand called out an equal counter-pressure. Long before the time of Sir Isaac Newton, China worked out a demonstration in the field of politics, of the law that action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions. It exemplified the working of the principle in every aspect of human association. Such a social system implies a high state of civilization. It produces civilized persons almost automatically. For the essence of civility, or of civilization, is the ability to live consciously along with others, aware of their expectations, demands and rights, of the pressure they can put upon one, while also conscious of just how far one can go in response in exerting pressure upon others. The Chinese, as long as they were left undisturbed by other peoples, had all the complex elements of the social equation figured out with unparalleled exactness. Their social calculus, integral and differential, exceeded anything elsewhere in existence. This fact, and this fact only, accounts for the endurance of China for almost four thousand years of recorded history. Then there came the eruption of forces from the outside which were radically new, which were unprecedented, for which the social calculus provided no rules. They were not, strictly speaking, human; they were physical forces of a strange and incalculable kind—battleships, artillery, railways, strange machines and chemicals. At first China was complacent. It remembered the numerous eruptions and invasions which had broken into its system in the past, and recalled how they had been subdued by ab-sorption, how they had been gradually worked into the patterns of adjustments, demands, concessions, compromises and intercourses which constitute China. But gradually it became evident that old formulae would not apply, that a radically new force had been introduced. And it gradually became apparent that the new physical agencies and forces which were so irresistible were themselves the tools and designs of an unaccustomed social and political order. China, a civilization, was confronted by a civilization which was organized as China was not, into national states. The consequences of this contact are written in every problem, internal as well as external, that occupies China today. There is a story of an intelligent Chinese who asked a foreigner to explain to him the nature and amount of the indemnity exacted from China by Japan after the successful war waged by the latter about the Korean question. After hearing the explanation he reflected a while to take in the full force of the matter, and then remarked in a contented way, 'Well, that is the Manchus' affair; it doesn't concern us. They will have to pay, not we. ' The remark appears to indicate not merely the extraordinary indifference to politics already spoken of, but an equally extraordinary political stupidity. But it is stupidity only to the mind built after the pattern of western political institutions. From the standpoint of Chinese customs the remark was intelligent. Relations with foreign states were the business of the Imperial Court. And any expenses consequent upon such relations had to be met out of the purse of that Court. In the established system of taxation and revenues, the funds accruing from the tariff on imports from foreign countries belonged to the Imperial Treasury. It was nobody's business what the Court did with them. It was a logical conclusion that any debit item was also the exclusive affair of the ruling dynasty. The logic was good. But it was based upon the past, upon premises that no longer hold good. The Japanese Indemnity was followed by the Boxer Indemnity. The whole revenue system was thrown out of balance. The long-established Imperial balance of expenditures and receipts was destroyed. Yet any radical change in the established system of taxation was practically out of the question, entirely out of the question in any immediate or abrupt way such as the situation required. It would have wrenched the whole social system out of order. Even such changes as had to be introduced had a large part to play in the dissatisfaction with the Manchu dynasty, which led to its overthrow. There was not merely the ordinary opposition felt anywhere to a marked increase in taxation. There was not merely the interference with custom which for immemorial ages had set limits in the game of exactions and resistance. There was an indissoluble association of taxation with the peculiar prerogatives of the Imperial Court, none too popular at best. There was an equally fixed association of increased taxes with 'squeezes' on the part of officialdom, with corruption which was not exactly corruption if kept within certain limits of percentages, but which was intolerable when it surpassed them. The internal system of taxation, adequate to all internal emergencies, was not elastic in the face of the externally induced crisis. Foreign loans had to be resorted to. The remedy increased the disease. It gave the opportunity for more and more intervention from without; it invited a multiplication of precisely those dependencies upon foreign power which were the original root of the difficulty. And gradually the entire internal equilibrium has been upset in consequence of the contact with foreign powers. It cannot be regained without a radical transformation of China's historic political system. It has to nationalize itself in some fashion in order to meet the conditions imposed by its intercourse with other peoples who are organized into national states. What is true of the matter of taxation and revenues is true of almost every phase of Chinese life. Public finance but gives a typical example. There has been discussion of whether the Chinese have national loyalty, whether they have patriotism. Here also our words in their accustomed meanings betray us. In its literal sense the word 'nation' is connected in derivation with the word for birth. In the sense of community thus implied, the Chinese are certainly a nation. But in its acquired historical meaning, nation means a people with a certain political organization, a people claiming or possessing sovereignty of a centralized sort over a certain territory. And this is what the Chinese have not, but have to acquire in the face of sharp demands from foreign nations. It is contrary to their own social inertia and momentum, which has been acquired in minute and complicated ways through centuries of adjustments. Patriotism means love of country. In the sense of love of their earth, their native soil, the Chinese are perhaps the most patriotic of all existing peoples. The love may not be acute as with the Japanese, as ardent as with the Poles, but it is inter-woven with every detail of life. It is not so much a sentiment, a fact of consciousness, as an unbreakable habit of life. Attachment to soil and birthplace is quite a different thing from an effectively organized allegiance to the state, that political entity which is constituted by political means rather than by matter-of-course habits of daily life and intercourse. It is customary to try to escape from the dilemma of a spontaneous, pervasive and unquestioned love of country that exists without the familiar manifestations of public spirit and political nationalism, by saying that the Chinese have a strong sense and pride of race which does for them what patriotism does for western peoples. Literally, this will hardly work. The Chinese regard themselves as five races, not one, as their flag testifies. In a certain genuine sense the Chinese are profoundly indifferent to race and racial distinctions. They have not been infected as have the Europeans and Japanese with the ethnological virus. While the Revolution was expedited by the fact that the Manchu dynasty was foreign, yet this ground of objection had had no effect for over two hundred years. It became significant only after western contact had aroused nationalistic feeling. What the Chinese abundantly possess is community of life, a sense of unity of civilization, of immemorial continuity of customs and ideals. The consciousness of a unity of pattern woven through the whole fabric of their existence never leaves them. To be a Chinese is not to be of a certain race nor to yield allegiance to a certain national state. It is to share with countless millions of others in certain ways of feeling and thinking, fraught with innumerable memories and expectations because of long- established modes of adjustment and intercourse. This consciousness becomes loyalty, patriotism, in our sense in just the degree in which it gets transferred to the idea of a national state made after the model familiar to us, a state with an army and navy, a system of regular taxation and public revenue, an organized system of legislation, judiciary and administration, a subordination of all local powers to a central power, and all the other paraphernalia of sovereignty which we take for granted. It is not easy to transform a traditional feeling into nationalism, and then attach it to an object which is largely non-existent, an object of faith rather than of sight. For this reason nationalistic sentiment has tended to take an anti-foreign color among the Chinese. In spite of the Boxer outbreak and other violent demonstrations against aliens, it may be doubted whether there has been a strong hostility against the foreigner as such. The Chinese, one surmises, are rather unusually tolerant. Their amiable live-and-let-live policy is applied all around. Their normal attitude is that of indifference to strangers rather than of aggressive antagonism. But conditions were such that about the only way in which they could show their devotion to their own civilization was negative. It was the outsider who was disturbing it. The Chinese lacked the positive organs of national life through which to resist foreign encroachments. Their loyalty to their own customs was therefore bound, one might say, to take the irregular and disorderly form of attack upon foreign residents. There are few who think that the Boxer days are likely to recur. The Chinese are intelligent, and they learned the hopelessness of holding their own by such methods. But it is still true that their national feeling can be aroused and concentrated more readily for purposes of resistance and opposition to foreign nations than for constructive purposes. There are fine illustrations of this fact in recent Chinese international relations. There can be little doubt that the Government had officially instructed its delegates to the Peace Conference in Versailles to sign the treaty, recognizing though it did the Japanese appropriation of German rights in Shantung. National sentiment was, however, tremendously aroused. If Japan had set out to instigate a new national spirit which should overwhelm the old local provincialisms, she could not have proceeded in a more effectual way to accomplish the purpose. The people took the matter out of the hands of the Government. By cablegrams to Paris, by telegraph to Peking, by mass-meetings and agitations, finally by a strike of students and then of the mercantile guilds in the larger cities, they made it clear that national sentiment would regard as traitors all those who should take part in signing the treaty. It was an extraordinarily impressive exhibition of the existence and the power of national feeling in China. It was all the more impressive because it had to work without organized governmental agencies, and, indeed, against the resistance of deeply-intrenched pro-Japanese officialdom. If there still remained anywhere those who doubted the strength and pervasiveness of Chinese patriotism, the demonstration was a final and convincing lesson. But it took a great crisis of foreign menace to focus the feeling; Japan in the last two years has done for China what otherwise might have taken a generation more. But when the immediate task of preventing the signing of the treaty that gave away Chinese rights was performed, the feeling lapsed. Perhaps it remains equally intense, but it has lost in sureness of direction. The outward means and the established habits of thought required for positive determination of constructive national policies are still inchoate. Everyone knows that the chief instrumentality of foreign encroachment in China has been finance. Russia first conceived the policy of conquest by bank and railway, and other nations joined in. Japan, with her usual alertness, saw the point, and with her usual energy acted upon her perception. The question of finance remains pivotal in any positive national policy for China. Even if China had the capital to take care of her own developments, and she certainly has more than she has used, the denationalized customs work against loaning it to the Government. And lack of trust in the competency and honesty of the officials reinforces the other influences that tell against extending domestic credit for public needs. Clearly, an international financial consortium which should loan money to China in bulk without assigning in return special concessions and spheres of influence to any particular nation is the obvious solution. But it is extremely difficult to arouse any popular interest in this matter. It is, so to speak, too positive and too specialized. On the contrary, it is comparatively easy for interested parties to stir up opposition. They have only to keep saying that this is a move on the part of foreign powers to get complete subjugation of China, and national feeling is excited in the negative direction. The alternative, namely, foreign loans from separate powers, in fact, Japan claiming specific rights and privileges in return, is not faced except by the more enlightened. The masses trust to a laissez-faire, happy-go-lucky policy of meeting each stringency as it arises, rather than of committing the country to some comprehensive scheme which, because of the organization involved in it, makes the fact of foreign influence obvious. Habituated to dealing with obstacles and dangers in a piecemeal way, playing off one force against another with great skill, the natural dread that all feel towards the unknown is felt towards organization on a large scale. And the fact that the organization is one on the part of foreign nationalism makes it appear particularly dreadful. And who can blame China in view of its past experiences with foreign influence? There is even now a small section which quite sincerely argues that it would be better to let Japan have Tsing-tao than to make it an international settlement. The situation is critical. The fear of coming against an organization of foreign nations was sufficient recently to defeat, at least for the time being, the proposition to unify the railways of China. Ultimately it would mean the development of a large national system under exclusive Chinese control. But for the time being it involved a certain amount of international control. Foreign nations interested in maintaining separate spheres were naturally hostile. But their easiest way of working was not to offer public opposition, but to play secretly, through domestic agencies profiting by the existing state of affairs, upon the national fears of China. The same forces are already at work attacking the proposed international consortium and may wreck it. In fact, they will almost certainly succeed in delaying it until it becomes a matter of dire necessity. Yet it seems almost axiomatic that as long as China is dependent upon foreign loans it is much better for her to be dependent upon a combination of powers that have agreed to forgo special privileges, and who will have to use their funds to build up China as a whole, than upon single separate powers that loan money only in response for special concessions and command of strategic points. These points are strategic not only economically, but in a political and military way. It seems at first sight very unreasonable that China should prefer to continue a system, or lack of system, which has brought her to the present pass. And it is unreasonable. But we need to understand that China has now reached a point of intense national feeling and a position where she can act with assurance as a nation. Feeling is feeling. It is comparatively easy to arouse national aspiration and national fears. It is not so easy to secure a national understanding of and agreement of any comprehensive or constructive plan of operations. And the reason is obvious, for there are no national institutions, no national organs, to supply the material of understanding and afford the basis of enduring faith and confidence. This union of intense national sentiment, with absence or lack of channels and organs of national action, describes the dilemma in which China finds itself today, both internally and externally. It is especially important that the United States should sympathetically comprehend the situation. Just now there is a warm wave of pro-American feelings, especially outside of the governmental circles, which have become involved in Japanese intrigues. It is genuine. Yet it is largely a rebound from the prevalent anti-Japanese feelings. It is in any case a national feeling, not a national idea. It will be subjected in the future to the forces which always operate to make feeling, as distinct from thought, a fluctuating affair. Because of past history and because of economic interests, the United States stands against the policy of partitioning China, whether overdy or by means of spheres of influence and special interests. That is all to the good with respect to China's feeling towards us. She also stands, as in the case of unifying railways and combined financial aid, for organized international assistance. With an ordinary amount of decency and good will, this policy should build up China rapidly and get her to the point where she can dispense with foreign control. But for reasons just explained, China will hesitate and object and postpone. She may conceivably completely balk, and prefer to continue the policy of playing one nation off against another, in spite of the fact that that will mean for the time being an increase of Japanese control. It is most important that America should understand the causes of this attitude and should be patient and persistent in its policy, instead of being swayed by an emotional gust of revulsion at 'ingratitude'. Revulsion and withdrawal of active interest on our part, because our advances and plans do not meet with an immediate and hearty approval, will only play into the hands of those countries who desire special and selfish rights in China, and who for this reason, and because of lack of faith in the political capacity of the Chinese, always carry in the back of their heads a scheme of ultimate partition and subjection. We need to realize that it is just because the Chinese have great political capacity that the problem of national redirection is difficult and slow. For this capacity has been committed to definite lines which are contrary to those that fit into the present situation. It will help an intelligent sympathy to remember that China has not advanced on the path of modem political nationalism to the point where national feeling is warm and intense, but where definite organs of national thought and action are only in the early stage of formation.