China and the West

Wells, H.G. What is happening in China ? : does the Kuomintang foreshadow a new sort of government in the world ? [ID D31300].
Where is history being made most abundantly at the present time ?
One may doubt whether any of the events of the last twelve months either in America or in Europe will figure very conspicuously in the histories of the future. Political futilities and a slow economic contraction in Great Britain, phases in the process of superabundance in America, government by rhetoric and outrage in Italy, the sluggish recognition at Geneva that Germany is after all in the middle of Europe, and the arrest of the franc at the very moment when its plunge seemed definitive—these and the steady progressive reconstruction of a modem-spirited trading and manufacturing life upon the wide foundations of Russia, mark no turning point in the course of human affairs. All these things are, so to speak, merely Fate carrying-on. But when we look to China there seems to be something more than carrying-on in progress. There seems to be something new there, something which has at any rate, so far as the Western observer is concerned, only become credible and important in the last eight or ten months. It is a change in the rhythm. It is
the clear onset of a new phase, of a new China, like nothing the world has ever seen before, a challenge, a promise to all mankind.
Let us try to realise in the most general terms the significance of this new movement in China. It is not an easy thing to do. Our world is densely ignorant of things Chinese. At school few of us learnt anything of the slightest importance about China, except that it had a population so immense that you could kill Chinamen by the hundred and they scarcely noticed it, that they ate rice, rats, and puppies, and that they possessed two long rivers that seriously challenged the records of the Nile and the Mississippi.
We learnt less formally that Chinamen of all ages wore highly decorative skirts and flew kites, whereas we knew perfectly well that the only proper amusement for gentlemen is hitting expensive little balls about golf links until they are lost, and that the only proper wear for a dominant race is chromatic pull-overs and highly-illuminated plus fours. Moreover, we were given to understand that die Chinese of all ages and sexes preferred work to any other form of enjoyment, and found an almost infantile pleasure in living exactly on the margin of subsistence. And they were cruel, very cruel. Their artistic productions amused us very greatly; they were so unlike the great masters, Victorian art and British Academy pictures. Of beauty in the proper sense of the word they knew nothing. So furnished forth upon this matter of China, our minds rested and were content.
Bight up to the present time we have been as satisfied with the pre-eminence of our civilisation and the worthlessness of theirs as were the Chinese about their own perfections a hundred years ago. But since then the Chinese have suffered blow after blow and humiliation after humiliation, until the need of learning has been forced upon them. Students came from China to America and Europe, and come in increasing numbers. Never a Western student, except for some eccentric, goes to China. Traders go, the European Governments send battleships to back up their traders, and missionaries are despatched by various denomina¬tions to advise the Chinese of the chief sorts of salvation practised among us and available for their use. The traders send back news with an eye to their privileges, and the missionaries with an eye to their paymasters. A bright young man of position at Oxford or Harvard would as soon think of leaving his ball games and his "rags" and all the pleasant procedure that lead to preeminence as lawyer and legislator in our world, for two or three years of study in China, as get into a shell and be shot off to the moon. So that the Chinese may even have crept ahead of us in breadth of outlook during the past few years. Many of them now seem to know most of what we know and to know also quite a lot about their own country. If one wants to know about China nowadays, it is best to ask a Chinaman.
And now with a sense of surprise we find ourselves confronted by a modem self-conscious Chinese nationality, consolidating its power very rapidly and demanding to speak on equal terms with the American and European. A living Chinese nation has appeared in the world.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the present Chinese situation is this, that it is not apparently the work of any single man ; the consolidation and recon-struction of China that has made such rapid progress in the last twelve months has not gone on under the direction of some strong-jowled hero of the Diaz or Mussolini type. When the long-tottering Manchu dynasty fell, and China became a republic and fell into all the violent diversions and dissensions inevitable after so extreme a change of régime, we Westerners, with our antiquated ideas, looked at once for the strong man who was either to foist a new dynasty on China or restore and bolster up the old—just as we looked for a Napoleon to emerge in Russia. That marked how far the Western intelligence had got in these matters. And just as the Western Powers of Europe, follow¬ing out dreary foreign policies they ought to have scrapped ten years ago, muckered away an enormous amount of war gear and money in supporting crazy "white hopes" against the nascent new thing in Russia, ugly and queer and incomprehensible to them, so they have wasted their prestige and resources upon this or that Chinese brigand and general who was to play the rôle of Diaz in Mexico and make China safe for the European investor.
No such "hero" has emerged either in Russia or China. It marks a new age. Hie days of great adventurers seem to be past in any country larger than Italy, and even in Italy it is possible to regard Mussolini less as a leader than as the rather animated effigy of a juvenile insurrection. What has happened in these wider, greater lands is something much more remarkable, something new in history, a phenomenon that calls for our most strenuous attention—namely, government, effective government, competent military control, and a consistent, steady, successful policy by an organised association. This Kuomintang in China in so far as it is an organised association is curiously parallel to the Communist Party which, standing behind the quasi-parliamentary Soviets, has now held Russia together, restrained such dangerous adventurers as Zinovieff, and defended its frontiers against incessant foreign aggression for nine long years. We shall be extraordinarily foolish if we do not attempt to realise the significance of this novel method of controlling government which has broken out over two of the greatest political areas of the globe. We have now two governments through organised associations, governments which are neither limited monarchies, dictatorships, nor parliamentary republics, on the American and French models,—one in Russia, and now another over the larger half of China, which md fair to spread over the entire breadth of Asia until they are in complete contact.
When I say that the Communist Party and the Kuomintang are similar, I mean only in so far as regards organisation. They have profound differences in origin, and aim and profession, and to those I will give a word later. But first I want to point out the complete novelty of their method.
Some twenty years or more ago I wrote a fantastic speculation about government, called "A Modem Utopia", in which I supposed all administrative and legislative functions to be monopolised by an organisation called the Samurai, which any one could join by passing certain fairly exacting tests and obeying the rules of an austere, disinterested, and responsible life. One was free to leave the organisation and drop power and responsibility when one chose. The organisation ran the world. There were no great heroes and leaders, and there were no representatives nor parliaments nor elections. Any one who chose to face the hardships of the job could have a hand in control, but there was no room in the direction of public affairs either for the adventurer or for appeals to the oafish crowd.
Now this fantasy seems to have been one of those odd guesses that hover dose to latent possibilities. If the "Modem Utopia" were published now, every-body would say I had taken a leaf from the book of the Communist Party or the Kuomintang, or even (though this is rather a different animal) the Fascisti. But indeed this anticipation sprang only from an early recognition that modem means of communication, the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of co-operating centres, of getting quick replies and effective discussion, has opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality, and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstandings. So it is that both New Russia and this New China that has hatched itself out so astonishingly in the last year are things as new and different structurally from any preceding political organisms as mammals were from the great reptiles that came before them.
Directly we turn to their origins we note a wide difference. New Russia is the creation of the Communist Party, based upon and knit closely together by the economic dogmas of the Marxists. It was a cosmopolitan party with more than half a century of insurrectionary and revolutionary activity behind it before it secured power. It was a party of antagonism to the current system, it captured Russia as a war-shattered ruin, and for a time it showed itself very poor in constructive ideas and economic organisation. Its habits were habits of opposition and sabotage. But from the outset it had immense political resistance and strength, and it persists and learns, and is now manifestly building up a new social and economic order tentatively and experimentally, that is neither communistic nor individualistic on Western lines. The Kuomintang seems to owe its origins and inspirations to that valiant man, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who so nearly escaped decapitation in the Chinese Legation in London a quarter of a century ago. Its vital element is the student class, and especially the students fired by Western ideas but by no means overwhelmed by them. It has come mam rapidly to power against suppression. Its centre of origin is Canton; it is the creation of the South. Perhaps it was inevitable that the New China should arise far away from the ancient imperial traditions of Peking, far away from the foreign Legations and the military memories of the North. And while the Russian movement was primarily social and only secondarily Russian, the Kuomintang started apparently with the idea of "China for the Chinese" and accepted most of the established traditions of property.
We remain, I say, still largely ignorant of the true quality of the Kuomintang. Three-quarters of the information we get from China is untrustworthy on account of its commercial or antiquated bias. Obviously the Chinese want to secure a free hand in the control of their own political and economic life, to levy tariffs according to their needs and extinguish the injustice of extra-territorial rights, and as obviously these simple and reasonable aspirations are deeply resented by the inadaptable Europeans who have lived in and profited by the old régime. But in spite of the manifest eagerness of a large section of the Western press to make capital out of any outrage upon Europeans in South China, they have had very little to record, and on the other hand the tale of European violence against the Chinese is a heavy one. The "fool behind the gun" who has been so busy in recent years shooting away the links of confidence and good feeling that hold together the British Empire in Ireland, in India, and elsewhere, seems to have had a glorious time out of bounds in China. He has blazed away at unarmed processions of students and shot into crowded towns. The English illustrated papers have offered us the most damning evidence of obstructive junks rammed and sunken and of the general high-handedness of British procedure.
Since the Bolshevik Government is still a useful bogey for American and European scaremongers, the Kuomintang is declared to be Bolshevist in origin and sympathy. This is just the common abuse natural in the situation. The Kuomintang seems to be unencumbered by the Marxist dogmas that still clog the feet of Russian development. It is probably a decade or so more modem and flexible in its ideas.
Our illustrated papers have published photographs of Kuomintang leaders grouped with Borodin and other Bolshevist representatives in support of the "Red" accusation. But that no more commits China and Russia to a hand-and-glove alliance than the photographs in circulation of the poor little Manchu emperor boy with a British "tutor" standing like a keeper beside him commit Great Britain to a restoration of the Son of Heaven's sacrifices in Pekin. There seem to be far more Russians with the brigand generate of North China than among the Cantonese armies, but these Pekin Russians are Russians of the "white" persuasion and useless for the purpose of creating prejudice. I do not hear of any attempts on the part of the Cantonese Government to expropriate any one, Chinese or foreigner, or to restrain trading, or to confiscate or nationalise industry. If anything of the sort did occur, we should certainly have all the reactionary European press proclaiming it, and so it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no tendency whatever in that direction. The social and economic life of China has never run strictly parallel to ours, and the Kuomintang develops in its own way—but that is a different story from the establishment of Communism.
And also it is a different story if, under similar necessities, the new social trading and industrial experiments of the Chinese presently come to display some sort of similarity to Russian developments, as the dogmas of the Marxists are shaken off or sterilised as pious sentiments by the latter people, and as both races settle down to work in the face of realities. Surely no man in his senses can believe that the financial, trading, and industrial methods of America and Europe to-day are the ultimate triumph of human wisdom, and it is as probable that successful innovations of system may spring from the desolated and renascent economic life of Russia and China as amidst the jungle of interests in our more prosperous but more encumbered world.
The disposition to call the Cantonese Government "red" and to force it into association with the Russian Government, which seems to be the aim of a large section of the Atlantic press, may prove a very dangerous disposition to our Western civilisation. Manifestly China is not so afraid of Russia as she is of Japan and the Powers whose warships pervade her great rivers. Soviet Russia is further off and milder. And anxious to be helpful.
But the rubbish that is written in some papers does not always perish there. It goes to China ; it goes to Russia. Suppose we Westerners succeed in persuading the Chinese and the Russians that we regard them with a common animosity, and that for us they are all one— Reds altogether. Suppose we insist on treating diem both as outcasts. Suppose that as the United Soviets and the Knnmintang work out the problems of economic and political construction before them, they find they have problems very much in common, and that the irrational hostility of the older civilisations obliges them to turn more and more to each other. Suppose they take up scientific work more vigorously than our fatuous self-satisfaction allows us to do. Suppose they decide to make the pace for us. Europe and America are not so blindingly brilliant and progressive that it would not be possible to press them hard.
Suppose Russia and China chose to put in tens of thousands of scientific workers against our thousands. The average Chinese brain is said to be rather richer in grey matter than the average European. From the Baltic to the Chinese coasts there is a population of more than five hundred millions even now, and lands of a richness far surpassing all the resources of North America. They are poor countries as yet, but potentially they are very great countries. They have still to develop effective railway links, but they can do that now with all the lessons of our older system to warn and guide them. And no other countries in the world are so happily placed for the promotion of aviation services. It would not be difficult to argue that the backbone lines of the air services of the future must pass over Russia and China anyhow. Before we dismiss as incredible the development of a powerful and even dominating civilisation in the federated Soviets of Russia and Asia, let us recall the contemptuous superiority with which Europe regarded the United States during the strain of the Civil War.
At any rate it seems to me that this Hew China, whose brain and nervous system is the Kuomintang, is the most interesting thing by far upon the stage of current events, and the best worth watching and studying.
23 January, 1927.