China and the West

Dewey, John. New culture in China [ID D28486].
A Chinese friend, to whom I owe so much that he would be justified in arresting me for intellectual theft, has summarized for me the stages of foreign influence in China. At first, new military devices were thought to be the secret of western power. According to tradition, earlier divinities had come to China borne by the waves or riding a white horse. Some divinity must be associated with all organized power; and now 'Christ was riding on a cannon-ball' to China. This is not a literary phrase; it was the common man's literal belief. So an arsenal was built in Shanghai, and then gunboats. The guns wouldn't go off, or they exploded. The men-of-war were sunk by the Japanese navy in the Chino-Japanese War.
Then the weakness of China was attributed to her outworn form of government. Reform was to come by political means. A republic was to be constructed instead of a navy, as easily and in as short a time. But the republic hardly came off either. At this period, some foreigners made up their minds about Chinese ideas of reform and they have never changed their notion since. They labeled this political movement 'Young China' and have stuck right there. Meanwhile the thought of China has moved on; the representatives of this movement and their successors are now almost like fossil reminders of an olden time. The period is hardly ten years distant, but thoughts, if not things, change with such rapidity in China that one is hard pressed to keep up—and unfortunately many foreigners make little effort to keep pace.
The third period is that of reliance upon technical improvements. After all, the artillery and the naval equipment of the West are due to applied science, to engineering. So the distinguishing feature of western civilization, the one to be imitated, was thought to be neither military nor political but economic. Civil and mechanical engineers were to be the saviors of the country. Railways, factories, steam and electricity were to enable the old country to compete with new nations on even terms. But somehow this movement ran up against all sorts of obstacles; progress was slow; it brought new dangers and evils.
Soon there was a wave of moral reform. Thousands of societies were organized for the cure of this, that and the other evil. This was the time of the anti-footbinding societies, of anti-opium movements, of anti-gambling associations, of remodeling of the old system of education and so on through the list. Though Christian influence counted for much in the initiation of these reforms, they were mostly carried on in a Confucian revival.
Then came a conviction that underlying ideas must be changed, that democracy was a matter of beliefs, of outlook upon life, of habits of mind, and not merely a matter of forms of government. Democracy clearly demanded universal education, the extension of schools to all the people and a change from literary learning to something connected with civic and social action. It was the tradition that what was written must be written in the vocabulary, forms and cherished expressions of hundreds of years ago, in a language that bears little relationship to the spoken language of today. But the people could never be reached until the written language was simplified and made more accessible. And the language of speech must also be used in writing in order that modem ideas might get adequate expression. A scholar of the old school remarked to me in Hangchow, a centre of the older culture, that no one knew how many valuable ideas had been lost to China in the past few hundred years because those who thought them could not make them known, for lack of command of the cumbrous and artificial medium of writing. So there grew up, about two years ago, the so-called literary revolution—an attempt to write and publish in the vernacular and also to familiarize Chinese readers with what is distinctive in the trend of modem western literature, from free verse to Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Ibsen and Maeterlinck. I know of one school that criticized its foreign teacher of literature as not up-to-date, because he used Shakespeare and Dickens while they wanted H.G. Wells and Strindberg! They even suggested that he take a vacation, go home and catch up! He had become, they said, too 'Chinafied' and conservative.
The matter of content, of ideas, soon became more important than that of language and style. The new ideas were turned full against ancient institutions. The family system came in for full measure of criticism, and this not only from the point of view of the traditional western idea of family life, but from that of A Doll's House and the most advanced western radical thought. Socialistic literature, anarchism, Marx and Kropotkin ran like wild-fire through reading circles. Tolstoi became perhaps the most read of foreign writers. Thus was evolved a new formula: China could not be changed without a social transformation based upon a transformation of ideas. The political revolution was a failure, because it was external, formal, touching the mechanism of social action but not affecting conceptions of life, which really control society.
And now there are signs that the next stage will be an interest in scientific method. It is recognized that technology and other branches of applied science are dependent upon science as a method of thought, observation, registration, criticism, experiment, judgment and reasoning. The idea is gaining ground that the real supremacy of the West is based, not on anything specifically western, to be borrowed and imitated, but on something universal, a method of investigation and of the testing of knowledge, which the West hit upon and used a few centuries in advance of the Orient.
These latter ideas underlie what may be literally translated from the Chinese as 'the new culture movement'. Concretely and practically it is associated with the student revolt that began on May 4, 1919. Some foreigners think of the latter as simply a new form of political movement. They have been encouraged in this belief by Chinese politicians and by conservatives, most of whom doubtless believed it was a purely political movement. Anything of a cultural and social nature is too far removed from their own lives and thought to be conceivable. But though it directed its outward manifestations against a group of corrupt politicians, and though it was stimulated by the failure of Chinese claims at Versailles, on account of commitments made by these politicians, for value received, to the Japanese, it was in its deeper aspect a protest against all politicians and against all further reliance upon politics as a direct means of social reform. The teachers and writers who are guiding the movement lose no opportunity to teach that the regeneration of China must come by other means, that no fundamental political reform is now possible in China, and that, when it comes, it will come as natural fruit of intellectual changes worked out in social, non-political ways. And the great mass of the student body in the higher schools of China is now virtually pledged to abstinence from official life. Doubtless many will fall by the way in the future. They will not be able to resist the lure of an easy living and of power. But the anti-political bias is pretty firmly established.
This sketch, hurried and superficial as it is, suggests a number of comments. In the first place, the movement, though instigated by foreign contacts, which is only to say, after all, by contacts with the distinctively modem world, has become more and more characteristically Chinese. The movement of May 4 was directly undertaken by Chinese students, not only without the instigation of returned students, but against their advice. It was spontaneous and native. The movement for a reform of language would hardly have been started without foreign influence, but it is naturally a movement conducted by Chinese, for specifically Chinese ends, and it has precedents in Chinese history. The subsidiary movement toward phonetic script has been encouraged largely by missionaries, and so one hears more about it in western newspapers. Even the anti-political movement, the belief that reform is conditional upon scientific and social changes, is in a way a return to Chinese modes of thinking, a recovery of an old Chinese idea, plus an assertion that the power of that idea was not exhausted and terminated by Confucianism. It has now to be worked out in adaptation to new conditions, even if it involves the overthrow of Confucian forms of belief and conduct. Another obvious feature of the evolution is that it shows steady progress from the superficial to the fundamental.
The comments just made take the movement at its best, in its spirit. From the point of view of results concretely attained by it, they involve an undoubted idealization of its development. Each old stage has left behind it a deposit, a stratification. 'Young China' is at best an ambiguous term. It lumps into a single mass representatives of each of the phases described—military, political, economic, technological, ethical, literary, social, etc. By selecting certain individuals from each of these strata, one may, with some degree of truth, bring almost any charge against 'Young China'. Naturally, in other words, there is confusion, un-certainty, mutual criticism and hostility among the various tendencies. Most of the returned students of some years ago are opposed to the present anti-political movement and to the literary revolution. Many are still in a nationalistic stage where they rely upon some change to be wrought miraculously in the army and the government. More are distinctly in the technical stage, believing that if they could get the engineering jobs for which they have trained themselves, China would begin to move—as it doubtless would, to some degree.
One more discrimination has to be made. Although cultivated Japanese as well as politicians like Marquis Okuma have long proclaimed the right and duty of Japan to lead China, to be the mediator in introducing western culture into Asia (including India, where they look upon the English as alien interlopers), few Americans have taken seriously the dependence of China upon Japan in just these ways. I have seen books on the development of modem Chinese education which do not mention Japan, which attribute the renovation of the Chinese system to American influence, and which leave the impression that it is modeled upon the American common school system. As a matter of fact, it is modeled administratively wholly after the Japanese system, which, so far as western influence enters in, is based on the German system, with factors borrowed from French centralization. I have visited nine provinces and seen the educational leaders in the capitals where the higher schools are concentrated. There are but two cities, Peking and Nanking, where, in the government schools, direct western influence begins to approach the Japanese, either in methods or in personnel. To talk about returned students and fail to discriminate between those from Japan and those from Europe and America is to confuse everything touched by the discussion.
This is not said by way of criticism of Japanese-trained returned students. I believe that, in spite of the too bitter rivalry between them and other Chinese students educated abroad (partly a matter of the ever present 'rice-bowl' question), the great mass of Japanese-trained students are doing the best they can, according to their light, for China. The exceptions are enormous, for they include some of the politicians and military men who have been doing their worst during the past few years for China, and who have provoked a large measure of the present universal condemnation of Japan and things Japanese.
The point is that western ideas from the West itself and via Japan are two such different things that only confusion ensues when representatives of both schools are massed, as Mr. Bland constantly combines them, under the name of 'Young China'. The defeat of Russia by Japan created a vogue for Japan that no western country has ever begun to touch. Here was another oriental nation, using Chinese characters and deriving its civilization from China, which had conquered the dreaded foe, the West, in the person of mighty Russia. No wonder thousands flocked to Japan to study and most reformers took their models from Japan. By far the greater number of the revolutionary leaders who formed the Republic were Japanese or had lived in Japan as refugees and imbibed its culture as they never assimilated that of the West. The Manchu dynasty was doomed in any case. Full fifty years before the Revolution, the Taiping rebellion would probably have put an end to it, if foreign aid had not come to the support of the throne. The direct cause of its final downfall was the defeat of Russia by Japan. The historic parallel is the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan and the imperial restoration. By an accident, historically speaking, the change in China eventuated in a republic. Its main object, aside from getting rid of a foreign dynasty, was to modernize China as Japan had been modernized. 'Young China' at this period meant Japanized Chinese.
What the new leaders brought to the situation was western ideas via Japanese utilization of them. And this meant in effect not a new culture, but a utilization of western technique in military, technological and administrative affairs in the interest of old culture. The Japanese have persistently taught, doubtless sincerely, that western civilization is essentially materialistic, while oriental culture is idealistic and spiritual in basis and aims. They have held that the West obtained its temporary supremacy merely by artillery and machines. Hence it must be fought by adoption of its own devices, while old oriental ideas and ideals are retained intact. Most of the Chinese who studied in Japan returned to China with this idea of the materialistic, technological nature of western civilization firmly fixed in their heads. It fell in with the conceit of their own superiority, which was so common and amusing a feature of all the earlier intercourse of the West with the Orient. All that China needed to learn from America and Europe was technical science and its applications.
'Young China' is thus a diversified and fluent term. Among those popularly labeled with that name by western writers there are all kinds of contradictory aspirations. But the two things that stand out today as active and dominant features of the situation are the need of reform in culture as an antecedent of other reforms, and a tendency for leadership to revert to those who are distinctively Chinese in their attitude, as over against those who would introduce and copy foreign methods, whether from the West or from Japan.
The two traits seem to contradict each other. How can reversion to Chinese leadership coincide with attack upon Chinese customs and habits of mind? How can it coincide with a realization that the real source of western superiority is found, not in external technique, but in intellectual and moral matters? Well, history is never logical, and many movements are practically effectual in proportion to their logical inconsistency. But so far as an answer exists it is found in the fact, already alluded to, that the idea of the supremacy of intellectual and moral factors over all others is itself a native Chinese idea. It is much more Chinese than the idea that salvation can be found by introducing guns and factories and technical administrative improvements. It implies also that the real breakdown in Chinese national life is moral and intellectual. It implies a demand for new ways of thinking. Some of the new leaders might assert that they are truer to Confucianism in attacking it—as they mostly do—than others are in clinging to it. For the real idea, the vital idea in Confucius, they may say, is belief in the primacy of ideas, of knowledge, and in the influence of education to spread these ideas. But the ideas that are now petrified into Confucianism are not fitted to modem conditions. The breakdown in Chinese national life is proof of their inefficacy according to the standard of Confucianism itself. And Confucian education had become aristocratic, for the few only. Hence the need for a new culture, in which what is best in western thought is to be freely adopted—but adapted to Chinese conditions, employed as an instrumentality in building up a rejuvenated Chinese culture.
The program is an ambitious one. It may seem to many much more pretentious, much less hopeful, than an attempt to borrow specific devices from the West. To many foreigners on the ground, it certainly seems a deviation from the real path of Chinese reform, which they hold to be the adoption of Christianity. But its relation to Christianity bears out the account here given of it. Some of its leaders are as non-Christian as they are anti-Confucian. They do not attack Christianity. They are merely indifferent to it. Others, especially in active educational work, are Christians. But I have generally found that these men are profoundly indifferent not only to denominational and dogmatic Christianity, but to everything except the social aspect of Christianity. They do not even take the trouble to call themselves liberals in religious belief. They approach Christianity from such an angle that they are indifferent to the distinction between conservative and liberal in belief. In effect they assert their claim to develop a distinctively Chinese Christianity. And though the movement toward an independent Chinese Church has not as yet gone far, it is likely to be a large feature of the future.
It would be foolish to say that any great number of the students and teachers influenced by the new culture movement are wholly conscious of the underlying philosophy that has just been expounded. This is confined as yet to a small group of leaders. The movement is for the most part still a feeling rather than an idea. It is also accompanied by the extravagances and confusion, the undigested medley of wisdom and nonsense that inevitably mark so ambitious a movement in its early stages. By making a clever selection of extracts from the writings put forth in its name one could easily hold up the whole movement to ridicule, as less than half-baked, as an uncritical and more or less hysterical mixture of unrelated ideas and miscellaneous pieces of western science and thought. Or a selection of writings could be made which would show it to be dangerous to society, to the peace of the world. Japanese writers who have paid attention to it have mostly held it up as a subversive radicalism and have attributed it to Bolshevist propaganda. But in the nine provinces I have visited, I have yet to find a single trace of direct Russian influence. Indirectly the Russian upheaval has of course had a tremendous influence as a ferment, but far subordinate to that of the World War, and even to President Wilson’s ideas of democracy and self-determination. For the new culture movement, though it cares nothing for what is politely called a republic in present China, is enthusiastically stirred by democratic ideals, and is starting out with the premise that democracy must be realized in education and in industry before it can be realized politically. For Bolshevism in the technical sense there is no preparation and no aptitude in China. But it is conceivable that military misrule, oppression and corruption will, if they continue till they directly touch the peasants, produce a chaos of rebellion that adherents of the existing order will certainly label Bolshevism.
After the upheaval of May 4, the student unions started periodicals all over China. It is significant that at this moment of the height of the revolt against corrupt and traitorous officials and also of the Japanese boycott, these topics were secondary in the students’ journals. They were written in Pei-wha, the vernacular already referred to, and were ardent in advocacy of its use. Their burden was the need of educational change; attacks upon the family system; discussion of socialism; of democratic ideas; of all kinds of utopias, such as taking away children from their parents and giving them to public authorities to be reared, the abolition of all national and even provincial government and the reduction of China to a state of self-governing communes. Naturally there was much effervescence along with the fermentation. Lacking definite background of experience, the students thought all ideas and proposals much alike, provided only they were new and involved getting away from old customs and traditions.
In one prominent provincial city, some teachers in a normal school joined with a youth of seventeen in advocating free love as a remedy and substitute for the family system, communal rearing of children, abolition of all private property, the election of teachers by students as a form of democracy, the abolition of examinations as a relic of autocracy. Since the articles were written in the vernacular, an alarmed provincial governor, scared by the noise made by this blowing off of steam, closed the school and wrote to Peking, demanding that future use of the vernacular be prohibited by law. But some official had enough of the saving grace of common sense to remark that these dangerous thoughts would then be written in the old literary language, and then it would be necessary in consistency to forbid its use, too. Practically speaking, these ideas were about as dangerous as those set forth in schoolboys’ debating clubs would be in any country. Yet they are important symptoms and potentially they involve a menace, not to the peace of society, but to those who profit by the evils of the established order. It is significant that in my whole experience I have not found one of these extremists who had been trained in America or England. They are almost without exception persons who have been educated in China and who speak and read only Chinese. They can easily quote sanction for their extreme ideas from old Chinese writings and legends. The few exceptions were students trained in France, who had adopted as congenial to the anarchistic vein in Chinese thought certain ideas coming from the French Revolution.
In Nanking last spring some students were kind enough to make out for me a list of journals, mostly founded within the previous year and a half, to advocate the principles of the new culture. A cursory reading of the titles and professed objects of these periodicals confirms what has been said. The organ of this particular group of students gives the key-note of the whole undertaking. The journal is called Youth and Society. Its motto, with true Chinese balance of phrasing, is, 'To make society youthful and youth social'. The Dawn, New Voice of Society, The New Individual, The Citizen, The Warm Tide, Young China, The Young World, The New Group, The New Life, Upward, Construction, Learning and Labor and Truth are other typical names. And among the objects professed occur almost with monotony such phrases as 'to reform the nation and society, physically and socially'; 'to investigate society'; 'to study social and economic problems and introduce new ideas'; 'to introduce new thoughts to the citizen and uplift his personality while promoting home industries'—the last phrase of course an echo of the boycott; 'to arouse the workingman and reform society'; 'to promote popular education and save society'—this by a journal called Save the Country, 'to promote the new culture and develop thinking and pure science'; 'to bring about a development of learning so as to apply the idea of research and criticism to the reform of society'; 'to study society and introduce western ideas’; 'to reform society in the light of scientific ideas'; 'to introduce new thoughts to the world, and to apply an optimistic but critical attitude to the reconstruction of society'. Many of these papers were of course as ephemeral as all of them are ambitious. But they illustrate the spirit of the movement as hardly anything else could. The list would not be complete without the mention of journals like The New Woman, the object of which is 'to arouse women as a means to reforming society', and The Woman's Bell, the aim of which is 'to educate women and enable them to take part in the progress of society'. In fact, in the journals as a whole, the three most discussed topics are reform of the family system, the emancipation of women and the labor question, all of them in connection with educational reform. The three parent journals, which continue to exercise the greatest influence, and so are peculiarly the organs of the new culture movement, are called 'Youth', 'The Renaissance' and 'Emancipation and Reconstruction'. It must not be gathered that the whole activity has been literary and theoretical. For the first time in Chinese history, the educated youth have given themselves to what at home we term social service.
I suppose most foreigners approach China with an antecedent belief in its essential conservatism, its aversion to change. The conservatism is unquestionably there. But so also is a predilection for change. And the scene shifts so often as to be dizzying to observe. Teachers complain of the 'bumptious' insubordination of students—not a new complaint in China, where students have prerogatives in respect to their own discipline most disconcerting to visitors from free America. They complain also of instability of mind, which leads students to rush enthusiastically into a new cause only in a few months to lose interest and turn to some newer thing. The symptom is characteristic of conditions outside of schools. It is to be regretted. But it is genuine evidence of a general state of transition, with the hesitation, uncertainty and openness to novel stimuli that such periods are bound to exhibit. On the other hand, there is a maturity of interest far beyond that which marks American students of the same years. High-school boys and girls listen soberly and intelligently to lectures on subjects that would create nothing but bored restlessness in an American school. There is an eager thirst for ideas—beyond anything existing, I am convinced, in the youth of any other country on earth. At present the zeal for ideas outruns persistence in getting knowledge with which to back up the ideas. But it supplies an extraordinary vitality to the growing desire for knowledge and scientific method. It means that knowledge is being acquired, not as a technical device nor as a conventional badge of culture, but for social application. If the students in any higher school in China are asked why they are taking a particular course, the greater number will answer, 'To help our country' or 'To promote the reform of society'. Discount the superficiality with which many make this reply and there still remains a substantial basis for hope for the future.
After a few months in China, a visitor will take an oath, if he is wise, never to indulge in prediction. For prophecy is sure to be dictated by hope or fear rather than adequate facts. Flesh is weak, however, and loves to pass upon the present in terms of the future. The observer will consequently fall into the vice he abjures—as I have occasionally done—to his own prompt undoing. Yet, moving between the thin, but exciting, ice of prediction and the safe, dull ground of sure fact, one may assert that, with all its crudities and vacillations, the new culture movement provides one of the firmest bases for hope for the future of China. It cannot take the place of better means of communication—railways and highways—without which the country will not be unified and hence will not be strong. But in China there is need, too, for a unified mind, and that is impossible without the new intellectual movement. It also makes a great deal of difference whether the mind when unified looks to the past or is in sympathy with modem thought in the rest of the world. A China unified according to the scheme that Japan successfully adopted would be no less isolated than Japan has turned out to be, and more menacing to the world. China needs schools; it needs, and needs badly, universal elementary education. But it makes a great deal of difference what these schools teach and what their spirit and aim is—as German and Japanese universal education both prove.
Chinese educated youth cannot permanently forswear their interest in direct political action. Their attention needs to be devoted more than it has been to detailed, practical economic questions, to currency reform, public finance and problems of taxation, to foreign loans and the Consortium. One finds schools where foreign-educated students are teaching theoretical political economy from books based on the assumption of competition, machine production and capitalistic accumulation, which have no more to do with the surrounding industry—strictly local as it is, and carried on by handwork according to custom and for a static market—than has lunar astronomy. Or one finds the interest centering in socialism even when there is next to no problem of distribution of wealth (except checking the rapacity of officialdom) and when the problem of increased productivity for labor is acute. But China is after all in the early stage of the industrial revolution, and, if it is not to repeat the experience of the rest of the world, with all the evils and dangers of the warfare of capital and labor, with sweated industries, child and woman labor, oppression by capital and sabotage by the worker, if it is going to profit by the nineteenth-century experience of the rest of the world, it has to come to the problem prepared. And not even the most extravagant speculations of the present will, when brought to earth by the demands made by actual conditions, prove wholly useless as preparatory equipment.
China has the alternatives of perishing, to the disturbance of the world, as well as itself, or of condensing into a century or so the intellectual, scientific, industrial, political and religious progress for which the rest of the world has taken several centuries. It cannot, like the United States, make the change with plenty of elbow-room, but must accomplish it in a civilization crowded with traditions and superstitions as well as with people. Young China, especially Youngest China, shows an appreciation of this fact. There are hours when, stimulated by contact with what is best in the movement, I am willing to predict that it will succeed and, in succeeding with its own problems, will also give to the world things of new and permanent value. There are other times, when, after contact with the darker features of the situation, I wonder that the supporters of the cause do not all lose hope and pessimistically surrender. It is easy to see why some give up effort and devote themselves to making the best of a bad situation by feathering their own nests. At the end, one comes back to the sobriety, the industry, the fundamental solidity of the average common man. These qualities have weathered many previous storms. They will pull China through this one if they are redirected according to the demands and conditions of that modern world that has thrust itself so irresistibly and so disturbingly upon China. The new culture movement is a significant phase of the attempt to supply the direction so profoundly needed.