China and the West

Dewey, John. Industrial China [ID D28481].
Nowhere in the world is the difference between industrious and industrial as great as in China. The industriousness of the Chinese is proverbial. Industrially, they are in the earliest stages of the revolution from domestic to machine production, and from transportation on the necks of men (and women and children) to the freight car. The necks of men:—for while the bulk of goods in central China is doubtless carried by its marvellous system of water-ways, yet whenever winds fail the boats are towed with ropes attached to the shoulders of men—and women and children. On the Grand Canal, you can sometimes count forty persons from ten years up tugging at a rope attached to the mast of some clumsy junk. Even a Ruskin if abruptly placed in strictly mediaeval economic conditions might be forced to admit that there are two sides to the humanity of the steam locomotive. And the indiscriminate admirers of the mediaeval guild might learn something from a study of the workings of its Chinese counterpart.
My last six weeks have been spent in travelling through the Province of Kiangsu. Shanghai is located in this province and it is industrially and commercially the most advanced in China, the one with the most mills, railways and foreign trade. For details and statistics the reader may go to consular reports, trade journals, etc. This article has a humbler task. Its aim is merely to record impressions which seem to me to be indicative of the problems China has to face during the years of its oncoming accelerated industrial transformation.
The fifteen towns visited are scattered from the extreme north to the extreme south of the province; strictly speaking, two of them lie in the Province of Chekiang to the south. The towns fall into four groups. The first contains the treaty ports, where foreign merchants have come in, where foreign capital is concentrated, and where foreign methods, though usually subjected to Chinese conditions in the form of acceptance of the compradore as a middleman, set the pace. For technical commercial purposes, from a statistical point of view, these towns of which Shanghai is the most important, are doubtless the most interesting. From a social point of view they are the least interesting, except as one may want to make a study of the contact of two civilizations meeting with but one common object—the making of money.
Otherwise they are chiefly significant as revealing an increasing ability of the Chinese to adopt the joint-stock and managerial system without coming to grief—as did most of the early companies that were exclusively Chinese. The reasons are worth recording, because they affect the entire problem everywhere of the introduction of modem industrialism. The speculative element, the promoter element, was at first most marked. The general psychology was that of gold mine promoting. After an early furore in which most 'investors' lost their money, the bitten became wary, and even legitimate enterprises could not secure attention, except in the case of a very small number of persons who had made a success of their joint-stock mills. In the next place, the Chinese family system with the obligation it puts upon the prosperous member of the family to carry all his relatives who wish to be carried made nepotism so common as to be an impossible burden. And in the third place, most of the earlier enterprises scorned the technique of putting aside reserve funds in a prosperous season, and of writing off for depreciations. A short life and a merry one was the usual motto. Now, however, business methods have developed to the point where many Chinese mills are successfully competing with foreign capital and foreign management. In fact many Chinese think that the latter will soon be at a disadvantage because of the diversion of profits to the compradore, and the lack of personal contact with workmen. But upon this point it is not possible to get facts that can be depended upon.
The second class includes towns at the opposite extreme of development, towns that are not only non-treaty ports but that are only beginning to be touched. The northern part of the province, for example, is almost as primitive as it was five hundred years ago. The building of a railway has created some flour mills, and since the war egg-factories have made a new market. Eggs that used to sell for a third of a cent apiece now bring three times that, and the producer gets most of the increase. In all of the towns and villages, the number of hens any one family can keep is limited by communal action, as otherwise hens would poach. The extraordinary cumulative effect of large numbers so characteristic of China is nowhere better demonstrated than in the hundred thousands of eggs that nevertheless are daily brought by hand, or rather by neck, to the factories. Such an impression may seem too slight to be recorded. But it is typical of the kind of happening that is still most significant for the larger part of industrial China. Even this fact is increasing the value of land, raising the standard of living so that rural families that had only one bedding now have two, and is changing the attitude toward railways from one of hostility to one of favor.
In these primitive districts one realizes also the immense odds that have to be overcome. There are districts of a million population that a few years ago had no public schools whatever, no public press, no postoffices, and where these facilities are still most scanty. The great positive obstacle is the activity of bandits. Being a robber is a recognized profession like being a merchant. The well-to-do live in constant fear of being looted so that their homes are almost as bare as those of beggars and in fear of being kidnapped for ransom. The professions of soldier and bandit are interchangeable, and upon the whole the peasants prefer the latter. One hears the story of the traveller who met a whole village in flight with their household goods on mules and in wheelbarrows, because the soldiers were coming to protect them from bandits.
It is such facts as these that lead many to assert that any genuine industrial development of China must wait upon the formation of a strong and stabilized government. The significance of the political factor is evidenced in the province of Anwhei which juts into the northern part of Kiangsu. Here is seen the perfect flower of militarism. The military governor recently closed all schools in the province for a year in order to spend the money on his army. He has been getting personal possession of all the mines in the province and recently diverted a river from two cities in order to make a canal to some of his mines. This is only an extreme case of the effect of present political conditions upon the industrial growth of China. Almost everywhere officials use their power, based on control of soldiers, to exact tribute. They levy blackmail on mills and mines; use the control of railways to manipulate the supply of cars until they can force an interest to be given them. Then they reinvest their funds in pawn shops, banks and other agencies of economic domination. Thus a new kind of feudalism is growing up in which militarism is a direct adjunct to capitalism. These men keep their spare millions in foreign banks and have places of refuge in foreign concessions. The control of the Ministries of Communications and of Finance is equivalent to an economic overlordship of China, and the effects ramify everywhere. The station master has to pay several thousands of dollars to get his job, and he recoups by charging fifty or a hundred dollars when a shipper wants a car. Yet industry and commerce are advancing, and there is probably as much reason for thinking that in the end their growth will reform government as that a stabilized government will permit the normal growth of industry.
The third class of towns consists of cities that also represent old China, but the prosperous and cultivated side of old China, cities that are now lazy, luxurious and refined along with extreme poverty and ignorance; towns that are slowly degenerating, for they want none of the new methods while at the same time the new methods are diverting industry and trade from them. To these cities go many retired officials with their stolen funds. As one moves about near the clubhouses and gilded house boats one hears everywhere the click of the gambling dominoes. There is money for dissipation and opium, but little for new industrial developments. Surplus funds are invested in neighboring rice lands; old small owners are crowded out, and a large class of tenant farmers is being created where family ownership has been the rule. Where the northern towns are merely primitive and backward, these once rich cities of the southern part of the province are reactionary and corrupt.
Finally there are industrial towns where foreigners cannot own land or trade, and where the chimneys of cotton and flour mills and silk filatures are as numerous and smoky as in the factory districts of Shanghai—a development mostly of the last ten years, and indeed largely post-war. As it happens, the two most important of these towns present opposite types. In one of them the entire development has been in the hands of a single family, two brothers. And the leading spirit is one of a small group of men who vainly and heroically strove for the reformation of the Manchu dynasty from within. Finding his plans pigeon-holed and his efforts blocked, he retired to his native town and began almost single-handed a course of industrial and economic development. He has in his record the fact that he established the first strictly Chinese cotton mill in China and also the first normal school. And since both were innovations, since China had never had either of these things, he met with little but opposition and prophecies of disaster to himself and the district. Now the district is known popularly as the model town of China, with its good roads, its motor buses for connecting various villages, its technical schools, its care of blind and deaf, its total absence of beggars. But the method is that of old China at its best, a kind of Confucian paternalism; an exhibition on the small scale of the schemes for the reformation of the country which were rejected on the large scale. The combination of the new in industry and the old in ideas is signalized in the girl and woman labor in the factories, while the magnate finds it 'inconvenient' that boys and girls should be educated together after the age of ten years, with the usual result that most of the girls receive no schooling. The other town represents a go-as-you-please competitive development. There is less symmetry but more vitality. Many deplore the absence of cooperation and organization in developing civic life. But it is characteristic of young China that it regards the greater individualism with all its lack of system as more promising than what it terms the benevolent autocracy of the model town.
But all of the industrial towns have one problem in common, and it is the problem of China. Is the industrial development of China to repeat the history of Great Britain, the United States and Japan until the evils of total laissez faire bring about a labor movement and a class struggle? Or will the experience of other countries be utilized and will the development be humanized? China is the land of problems, of problems so deadlocked and interlocked that one is constantly reminded of the Chinese puzzles of his childhood days. But for China and for the whole world this problem of the direction to be taken by its industrial evolution is the one of chief importance. Outwardly all the signs as yet point to movement in the inhuman direction, to blind repetition of the worst stages of the western industrial revolution. There are no factory laws, and if there were, no government capable of admin¬istering and enforcing them. You find silk filatures in which chil-dren of eight and ten are working fourteen hours a day for a pit¬tance, and twelve hours is the regular shift in all the mills. And these establishments have many of them for the last few years paid dividends of from fifty to two hundred and fifty per cent a year. Superficially China looks at the outset of its industrial career like the paradise of the socially unrestrained exploiter. The case however is not so simple or so certain. It is still conceivable that the future historian will say that the resistance of China to the introduction of the agencies of modern production and distribu¬tion, the resistance which was long cited as the classic instance of stupid conservatism, was in truth the manifestation of a mighty social instinct which led China to wait until the world had reached a point where it was possible for society to control the industrial revolution instead of being its slave. But the tail of an article is no place even to list the conditions and forces which make such a history conceivable, and only conceivable at the best.