China and the West

Dewey, John. China and the West : 'The problem of China' by Bertrand Russell [ID D28501].
Before his visit to China Mr. Russell had been in Russia. While journeying on the Volga he realized how 'profound is the disease in our Western mentality'—a mentality which even then the Bolsheviks were trying to force upon an essentially Asiatic population. The disease springs from excess of energy and its rationalizations. 'Our industrialism, our militarism, our love of progress, our missionary zeal, our imperialism, our passion for dominating and organizing, all spring from a superflux of the itch for activity'. The company on the Volga boat was 'noisy, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything'. Yet one of the company lay at death's door, and 'all around us lay a great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed that none had the leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the information of the well-informed'.
One night while the vocal and futile arguing was going on, the boat stopped and Mr. Russell went ashore, and in the silence found on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings. . . The flickering names lighted up gnarled, bearded faces of wild men; strong, patient, primitive women, and children as slow and sedate as their parents… To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia, unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the little set of westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or reaction. . . Something of the patient silence communicated to me, something lonely and unspoken remained in my heart all through the comfortable familiar intellectual talk. And at last the I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or theory. . . From time to time I heard sad songs or the hunting music of the balalaika; but the sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes, and left me with a terrible questioning pain in which Occidental hopefulness grew pale. It was in this mood that I set out for China to seek a new hope.
The passage gives more than the background of Mr. Russell' experience in China of which this book is a fruit. It is a symbol of the Problem of China, which in Mr. Russell's treatment becomes the problem of our Western civilization. The noisy, doctrinaire assertive, cocksure, propagandizing set of passengers is Western mentality going headlong to destruction. China is the brooding silence of nature, calm—indolent perhaps, but still tranquil in soul—tolerant, possessed of an unbroken instinctive sympathy with nature and power to draw consolation and happiness from simple things, content with death as with life because free from the corroding egotism of the West.
The book, of course, is more than an expatiation on this philosophic theme. It is a remarkably clear and condensed account of the historical forces and factors which have led up to the present situation in the Far East together with an analysis of the present situation. The report supplements his personal experience with a judicious and discriminating use of secondary sources. As a result, the book is to me the most enlightening, as a matter of information and comment, of all the many works which have been recently written to put Western readers in touch with the issues of the Far East. It is extraordinarily well done; so well done in fact that only those who by some personal experience recognize the difficulties which have been overcome, will perceive how well it is done.
But those who extract information from the book will miss its chief significance if they do not find on almost every page the haunting refrain of the note sounded in the passage quoted. Through 'industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live' we have lost that 'instinctive happiness and joy of living' which China has retained. 'Our prosperity can be obtained only by wide-spread oppression and exploitation of weaker nations, while the Chinese are not strong enough to injure other countries, and they secure whatever they enjoy by means of their own merits and exertions alone… By valuing progress and efficiency we have secured power and wealth; by ignoring them Chinese, until we brought disturbance, secured upon the whole peaceable existence and a life full of enjoyment… Chinese have discovered, and have practised for many centuries a way of life which, if it could be adopted by all the world, would make all the world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life demands strife, exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. ' And America, it should be added, is Europe at its worst because it is Europe at its peak of energy, efficiency, and proselytizing intolerance, plus a complacent and impenetrable self-righteousness which in Europe is beginning to crumble. America presents the acme of the mechanistic outlook, 'something which exists equally in imperialism, Bolshevism and the Y.M.C.A… the habit of regarding mankind as raw material, to be molded by our scientific manipulation into whatever form may happen to suit our fancy... the cultivation of will at the expense of perception'. It is belief in government, in a life against nature, in the desirability of conversion to one's own point of view and creed that Chinese culture has escaped. Discriminating Chinese would probably be the first to admit that Mr. Russell has idealized their civilization, slighted its defects and exaggerated its excellences. China tends to become an angel of light to show up the darkness of Western civilization. Chinese virtues are made a whip of scorpions with which to lash the backs of complacent Westerners. I do not regard this fact, however, as a serious defect. For my own experience in China convinces me that Mr. Russell has justly stated the direction in which Chinese excellence exists, even though, in his soul's revulsion against the stupidities of the West, he has overstated its degree of attainment. And I do not find it in me to differ with Mr. Russell as to the extent and urgency of the need in the West to pause and to learn from the Orient. A ground of complaint lies elsewhere, I think. His method permits Mr. Russell to make a lucid exposition of the external, or political and economic, problem of China—with a lucidity which, emerging in an obscure world, must always be close, as it is with Mr. Russell, to irony. For, of course, it is precisely the restless predatory energy of the Occident which in itself and as communicated to Japan has created the present political industrial problems of China. With biting precision and his accustomed artistry of selection and elimination Mr. Russell has depicted this situation to all who still have eyes to see.
But the internal and deeper problem of China, that of the transformation of its own culture and institutions, Mr. Russell hardly seems to touch. He mentions indeed some of the bad consequences of their family system, the lack of science in their tradition, their callousness. But he appears content to dismiss them with the remark that they have not brought in their train consequences as tragic as the defects of the Western mind have brought to the Western world. This may be quite true; and for who is chiefly interested in the West perhaps it suffices. I cannot see however that it throws much light upon the problem of Chin as that exists for the Chinese. A sense of the deepest problem of China as it exists in the consciousness of thoughtful Chinese is what one misses in Mr. Russell's pages. As a good European he is perhaps chiefly interested in European culture and what Europe has to learn from Asia; in comparison the stupendous and marvellous problem of the intrinsic remaking of the oldest, thickest, and most extensive civilization of the world does not attract his attention.
It would be churlish to quarrel with Mr. Russell for what he has not done, in the view of what he has done so well. But the world still needs, although probably no one but a Chinese can give it to the world, a picture of the most wonderful drama now enacting anywhere in the world, and, I sometimes think, the most wonderful as well as the most difficult to bring to conclusion of any that human history has yet witnessed. Contact with the West has induced in China a ferment of reawakening, a true Renaissance. I rarely met a Chinese who, with all his sense of the unjust and cruel problems which the exploiting, aggressive West had forced upon China, who with all his sense of the evils of Western materialism, nationalism, and egotistic individualism, was without a grateful recognition of an awakening due to Western influence—an awakening which seemed necessary to prevent further decay of what was good in old culture as well as necessary to a new and richer life. The ultimate 'Problem of China' concerns, it seems to me, the question of what is to win in the present turmoil of change: the harsh and destructive impact of the West, or the internal re-creation of Chinese culture inspired by intercourse with the West.