China and the West

Dewey, John. Is China a nation ? [ID D28482].
An answer could easily be given to the questions in Mr. Helburn's letter which would be literally correct, and yet almost wholly misleading. China certainly is not a nation as we know nations in Europe. It is sprawling, not compact. It is as diversified as Europe, if not more so, instead of being homogeneous like Switzerland or France. Every one has heard of students from the north and south who talk to one another in English so as to be understood. But there are populous parts of China where a native has to go only a few miles to fail to understand the language of his compatriots. As for political self-consciousness, let the following true story serve. Students went from Shanghai to a neighboring village at the beginning of the anti-Japanese agitation a year and a half ago. The villagers listened patiently to their impassioned pleas for an interest in the policies of Peking dominated by 'traitors', and for a patriotic boycott of Japan. Then they said in effect: 'This is very well for you. You are Chinese. But we are Jonesvillians. These things are not our business'. And this was not in the hinterland but close to the most developed coast city.
Yet if any would argue alone or chiefly to the future from such facts, he would certainly go wrong. Not because they are not massively representative, but because things are in flux. It is not safe to prophesy where they are going. But they are going somewhere, so that a Chinese politician who goes steadily contrary to the interests of China as a nation is sure of overthrow sooner or later. Even a Chinese within China cannot safely base his actions upon the state of things which is correctly represented above. Yet it would be equally unsafe to argue to the existence a persistently influential minority from the fact of the thousands of telegrams sent to Paris in protest against signing a treaty that had within it the Shantung clause, or from the fact that a cabinet dominated by pro-Japanese politicians, and in control of finance and the army, simply did not dare enter into direct negotiations with Japan about Shantung. In a crisis there may be a minority so substantial as to be dominating. But only in a crisis.
Is China a nation? No, not as we estimate nations. But is China becoming a nation, and how long will it take? These are the open questions. Any one who could answer them definitely could read the future of the Far East like a book. But no one can answer them definitely. In this suspense and uncertainty lies the momentous interest of the situation. When did nations begin to be, anyway? How long has France been a compact and homogeneous nation? Italy, Germany? What forces made them nations? And what is going to be the future of the national state outside of China? What is the future of internationalism? Our whole concept of a nation is of such recent origin that it is not surprising that it does not fit in any exact way into Chinese conditions. And possibly the days in which political nationality is most fully established are also the days of its beginning to decline. The last suggestion may be wild. But it suggests that the world as well as China is in flux, and that answers to the questions whether and when China is to be a nation, and what kind of a nation it is to be, cannot be found till we know also what is going to happen in Russia, and Europe generally.
At present, to continue the negative side of the affair, there is little public spirit in China. Family and locality spirit give China its strength for its old traditional ends and its weakness for contemporary conditions and for international relations. Even among the politicians factional spirit is much stronger than public or national spirit—and this is a weakness alike for traditional and new objects. A big army eats up public revenues and makes China increasingly dependent upon foreign loans and subject to foreign spirit interference. It is of no use for national aggression and of next to none for national defense. It is of use for graft, for personal ambitions and factional strife. China has all the disadvantages of both extreme centralization and extreme states' rights, and few of the advantages of either. There is not only a division between north and south, but a cross division in both the north and south, and in addition a multitude of cross currents of provincial isolations and ambitions.
And yet was the United States a nation in the critical years after 1785? Was there not a bitter civil war only sixty years ago, and did not Gladstone announce that Jefferson Davis had created a new nation? Are all questions of national unity and states' rights yet settled? Not many centuries ago European politicians took funds from foreign governments to strengthen the hands of their own factions, and upon occasion foreign interference was invited or welcomed for furtherance of party or religious strife. Hardly today are the respective claims of state and church fully adjusted, while up till recently a church located outside the nation claimed and secured powers of intervention. And this at least is a complication which China is spared.
I have recently read the words of an intelligent English visitor in America to the effect that the diversity of unfused populations and traditions is such that the United States is one country only in the sense in which the continent of Europe is one. And at about the same time H.G. Wells, using a different criterion, that of freedom and ease of movement and transportation, was saying that the United States was such a complete empire within itself that we could not speak of it and of France as nations in the same sense of the word nation. Such miscellaneous citations warn us that we cannot use the conception of nation in any but a fluid sense, even in western affairs. They indicate the difficulty in making hard and fast statements about Chinese national unity.
When we turn from political to economic affairs, our habitual western ideas are even less applicable. Their irrelevancy makes it impossible intelligently to describe Chinese conditions, or even grasp them intelligently. In the familiar sense of the word, there is no bourgeoisie in China. There used to be a gentry with considerable unwritten power, but for the time being at least it is practically non-existent. The merchant class is traditionally outside of political concerns, and has not as yet developed any political or social class consciousness, though some signs of its beginnings were evidenced in connection with the boycott of 1919.
Even in the west one has considerable difficulty in placing the farmers in the bourgeoisie-proletariat terminology (one is tempted to say patter). And how is a class of peasant proprietors who form not merely the vast mass of a people but its economic and moral backbone, who are traditionally and in present esteem, the respectable part of the population, next to the scholars, to be classified under our western notions? Even in the west the point of these distinctions is the product of the industrial revolution. And in China the industrial revolution has still to occur. China is a much better place to study European history of a few centuries ago than to apply the concepts and classifications of present political and economic science. The visitor spends his time learning, if he learns anything about China, not to think of what he sees in terms of the ideas he uses as a matter of course at home. The result is naturally obscurity rather than light. But it may be questioned whether the most enlightening thing he can do for others who are interested in China is not to share with them his discovery that China can be known only in terms of itself, and older European history. Yet one must repeat that China is changing rapidly; and that it is as foolish to go on thinking of it in terms of old dynastic China—as Mr. Bland for example insists we must do—as it is to interpret it by pigeon-holing its facts in western conceptions. China is another world politically and economically speaking, a large and persistent world, and a world bound no one knows just where. It is the combination of these facts that give it its overpowering intellectual interest for an observer of the affairs of humanity.
The question of China's nationhood, as the writer of the letter of inquiry goes on to observe, 'is not an idle one. China is the stock example of survival by submission. If she is a nation in the European or Balkan sense, it is obvious that Japan cannot sit upon her chest forever. If not, the nation that organizes her industries and education may be able to swallow her, for political and economic purposes, more completely than England swallowed India—swallowed, if not digested. Or the old inertia of size and patience may prevail, and the Japanese be swallowed and digested like their predecessors. '
These remarks are pertinent, and they enter into the constant query of the foreign observer in China. And yet he can hardly go further than noting the problem, noting the flux of events, and some of the factors that may turn its direction. It is not safe, for one thing, to argue that because China has absorbed all previous invaders she will end by incorporating into herself future intruders. Her previous conquerors were northern barbarians upon a lower plane of civilization. What would have happened if they had brought with them a superior technique of industry and administration no one knows. Marquis Okuma is reported to have accounted for China’s long story of independent existence on the ground that she had no railways. At first sight this may seem to resemble the child's statement that pins save persons' lives, because persons don’t swallow them. But it suggests the radically different character of ancient and modem invasions. The latter centre about exploitation of previously unused economic resources. A country that had possession of China's ports, railways, mines and communications would have China in subjection. The wiser the invading country, the less would she assume the burdens of civil administration beyond necessary policing. She would act as permanent exploiting capitalist using the natural resources and unskilled labor of the country to serve her own ends. In addition she would doubtless try to conscript native man-power for her armies. Generally speaking, the natives would act as coolies, the foreigners as upper-class personages. Under such conditions, success or non-success in cultural assimilation would amount to little.
But as soon as such things are said, the mind at once recalls that improvement of internal communication and transportation has been a chief factor in developing countries into political units, while oppression from without has been the other great factor. The same forces are operating in China and will continue to operate. Nationalistic feeling as it now exists is largely the product of reaction against foreign encroachments. It is strongest on the sea board not merely because industrial development is most advanced there, but because the aggressions of foreigners have been most felt at that point. Effort to take advantage of absence of national unity to subject a country is likely to end in creating a national consciousness. Korea is a striking example. Politically corrupt and divided, with no national political consciousness, less than a generation of alien rule combined with industrial and educational changes designed wholly to subserve the interests of the foreign power, have almost converted Korea into a second Ireland. History seems to show that nations are hardened into being under influences intended to subvert nationality. China is not likely to be an exception. While it is not a nation 'in being', events are probably evoking a nation 'in becoming'. And the process is hastened by efforts to prevent it. At the same time no report is honest which does not state that almost any faction in any part of China, north or south, will surrender national rights to a foreign country in return for factional aid against its internal foes.
One other factor in probable evolution should be mentioned. For a long time, the great Powers, with the exception of the United States, proceeded upon the assumption that China was bound to be disintegrated, and that the policy of each foreign nation was to get its fair share of the spoils. This statement may be too strong. But at least the working assumption was that whenever any disintegration occurred, surrender to one nation must be compensated for, at China’s expense, by concessions to others. The world war made conditions such that other nations could not compete with Japan in this game. It is fairly clear now that the disintegration of China would be almost exclusively to Japan's advantage. Hence a great access of benevolent interest on the part of other Powers in China's national integrity. China's historic foreign policy has been to play one Power off against another. Now she is aided by a tendency of all the Powers to give her at least passive assistance against Japanese encroachments. The formation of the consortium with its abolition of distinctive spheres of foreign influence, the question of the re-affirmation or abrogation of the British-Japanese Alliance, the Shantung affair, acquire their meaning in this context. The as yet unsolved question is what Japan can by promise or threat offer by way of compensation to other great Powers to induce them to give her a freer hand in China.
An American educator long resident in central China remarked to me that China was trying to crowd into a half century literary, religious, economic, scientific and political revolutions which it had taken the western world centuries to accomplish. The remark indicates the difficulty in making predictions and in offering definite descriptions. In spite of the inertia and stability that still dominate the vast rural districts, in spite of non-fulfillment of specific past prophecies of changing China, China is in a state of flux. The accumulated effect of thousands of petty changes due to contact with western methods and ideas, has been to create a new mind in the educated class. This fact is at present more important than any single big external change or external failure to change that can be singled out. It will take a long time for this new mind to work itself out in definite achievement or even to trace definitely perceptible lines of progress. But these conditions which make intelligent description to difficult are those which lend China its absorbing interest.