China and the West

Nathaniel Hawthorne and China : general.
1989
Norman Michael Bock : Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The scarlet letter.
Chinese readers unfamiliar with the religious traditions of the West should understand that the sense of essential selfhood in The scarlet letter builds directly upon the tenets of Calvinist religious doctrine, which Hawthorne secularized in order to express his ideal of the American.
Heather's reaction to public condemnation will puzzle Chinese readers. The motivations behind Hester's affair with Dimmesdale hold no mystery for Chinese readers : she seeks a quality of love her husband can not provide because of his age, his temperament, and his physical absence. Chinese readers will find fascinating the complex, culture-specific implications of Hawthorne's vision. Hawthorne touches upon sever cultural ironies in The Scarlet letter. When Hester humbles herself before the community, her self effacement appears to be more consistent with traditional Chinese sensibilities than American. But contrary to what we would expect in a traditional Chinese environment, Hester's actions do not lead unambiguously to the rectification of her public roles as wife, mother, and citizen.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The may-pole of Merrymount.
This tale highlights for Chinese students certain subtly concealed authorial sympathies that result from the paradigmatic tension between the individual's visceral desires and the external 'realities' of the physical and metaphysical realms, as perceived according to characteristic American cultural assumptions. Chinese readers, so accustomed to listening to common wisdom about the primacy of personal sentiment in America, will find illuminating Hawthorne's insinuated plea to resign certain of those feelings before the demands of the nonself. This story demonstrates for Chinese students that Hawthorne, displaying a tendency found throughout classic American fiction, seeks to develop his personal approach to life independently, rather than follow established models slavishly.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The birth-mark.
Chinese readers committed to a vision of China resurgent upon a wave of supposedly apolitical scientific discovery and technical advance will find fascinating Hawthorne's deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the scientist Aylmer. In what Chinese will identify as the characteristic American proclivity toward striving taken toward its monomaniacal extreme, Aylmer insists upon an ethereal, flawless goddess for a wife, not a being subject to diurnal change.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The artist of the beautiful.
The novel illuminates for Chinese readers the culturally distinctive 'sumbjunctive' dimension of American thought.

2013
Pu Lixin :
First period : 1910-1949.
China chose Hawthorne, and paid attention to The Scarlet letter and his other writings because Chinese inellectuals wished to learn from Hawrhorne to build a new China. Hawthorne studies in China began in the 1910s and developed quckly in the following decades. Two elements stimulated the study. One, China was enthusiastic about the introduction of American literature into China because Chinese intellectuals believed it was of great importance for them to buils up their own national literature. American literature, because it had broken away from the tradi6tions of British literature, embodied the spirit of independence and revolution. Chinese scholars still held the idea that Hawthorne had helped to initiate a new tradition of the 'Great American novel'. The second element involved a desire, on the part of Chinese intellectuals, for solutions to social problems. Chinese intellectuals wanted to learn something from American literature that might be applied to solve problems in China.
Second period : 1949-1979.
China rejected Hawthorne. During this stage, Hawthorne studies were inged by ideological concerns. Chinese scholars could still translate The scarlet letter and other works without running any political risk. Besides translatioins of Hawthorne's works, Hawthorne studies almost came to a halt in the frozen period. There were no academic articles except a few prefaces in the translations.
Last period : 1979-present.
Chinese studies of Hawthorne flourished and became increasingly complex. Critical attention has been focused on Hawthorne's thought. Puritanism exerted a great influence upon Hawthorne. When exploring the relationship between Puritanism and Hawthorne, Chinese scholars usually place it in the context of the history of New England in general and Hawthorne's own family in particular. Chinese scholars are also interested in Hawthorne's attitude toward women. Some hold to the idea that Hawthorne is a feminist and even glorify Hester as 'a feminist myth'. Others argue that The scarlet letter is not a construction of, but rather a deconstruction of, a feminist ideal in the nineteenth century. Chinese schlolars lack an independent and profound examination of Hawthorne, and they blindly follow the ideas of foreign scholars, losing themselves in a sea of opinions and theories.
Chinese scholars also came to realize that Hawthorne is a writer who makes canny observations about political isssues and social reforms.

Wilder, Thornton. The selected letters of Thornton Wilder [ID D30360].
1910
Letter to Amos P. Wilder ; [Berkeley, Calif. mid-Dec. 1910].
Tonight I am going to Rev. Browns Church to hear Handel's great Oratorio 'The Messiah', sung. Do they ever have anything like that in China ?

1911
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, early May ? 1911].
And about Mother's picture it has been blown around the room by the Chefoo monsoons (Janet's too) until the 'fall of the house of Wilder' is complete. Now a roommate has lent me a frame of his and the swings on the wall.

1913
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Thacher School, Dec. 13 ? [Jan. 13, 1913 ?].
None of the Thacher boys are original. They are all of the same whereas at Chefoo each boy was to any other as blue to red.

1913
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkely, Calif., Sept. 1913].
The beauty of the school is that so far it has left me entirely alone. I confess that I never expected that. I got a little of that at Chefoo, but never a drop at Thacher…
Kwong Ling goes to church with us every Sunday, but we let him out, after childrens sermon. The poor boy doesn’t understand a work, I myself taught him for a while. I cant imagine what he does when the teacher asks him to read the Heading to the Paragraph or the Title of this Poem (registered in K. Lings vocabulary as song). I suppose he just gollops for a while and then says to himself in Chinese that four times three are twelve and three times – Oh well you know what hes like.
[Kwong Ling (1896-1979) : Chinese orphan 'adopted' by Thornton Wilder's father in Shanghai. He was sent in 1913 to live in Berkeley with the family and attend school there. He became a minister, Reverend John K.L. Yong].

1913
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Berkeley, Calif. Sept. 21 [19]13.
What a lot of your best friends are away from Shanghai just now. Mrs. DeGray, Mr. Hinckley, (from Kwong Ling I heard bad reports of him), Malpus, Stedmans, Kwong Ling, and Ravens.

1915
Letter to Elizabeth Lewis Niven, [Berkeley, Calif.], Jan. 7 [19]13.
I guess when the fog has lifted over the 'wortwechsel' which is now on – it will be decided that I go to Oberlin next year. There is a family there, the boys of which were my room mates at the Chefoo boarding-school, and by coincidence called 'Wilder' – that will probably take me in as a boarder.

1915
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif., May ?, 1915].
Rowley Evans, of Shanghai, is a commissioned officer – according to Theodore Wilder and will soon be at the front.

1915
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif.], Tues. May 25 [1915].
We graduate next Friday night. I do not feel it as a solemn occasion. I don't think even mother can go and here it, because that will leave Isabel alone with the baby and possibly Kwong Ling…

1915
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif.], June 20 [19]15.
Cesar-Nepos (failed when taken at Thacher ; never had him in class work because of jumping him at Chefoo !)…
Sometimes I wish I were a Japanese or a Chinese in America ; it almost seems like being physically disembodied and holds humilitations of a kind I wouldn't mind so much.

1916
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Sunday Morning July 16 [1916], Mt. Hermon School.
My friend Sibley from Chefoo, a fine boy, hopes to go to China soon, is in this graduating class of eighty boys. I forgot to mention altho you probably guessed it that this is a reunion of Ford cars as well. The banquet – workers invited too – is Monday evening – do but picture the enthusiasm ! – I see the toastmaster is a Wilfred Fry of Philadelphia. Isn't there a famous Chinese art-connaiseur of Philad. named Fry, too ?

1916
Letter toIsabella N. Wilder, [Oberlin, Ohio], Nov. 23, [19]16.
One of these is a cuous mystico-religious fantasy, the other, called 'Stones of Nell Gwyn' is a defense of Nell and Catullus and Earnest Dowson and Villon etc – that kind of person ! The play is for the Washington Square Players and is uni8que. It is about the China coast.

1917
Letter to Isabel Wilder, Men' Building Oberlin O Jan 11 [19]17.
I want to put it to some use if I can and prevent such awful mistakes as Amos going to see 'Hush' when there were such stunning thing as 'Pierrot the Prodigal' and 'The Yellow Jacket' [by Hazelton and Benrimo ID D30346] in town.

1920
Letter to Amos P. Wilder, American Express Co. Paris, June 27, 1920, Sunday.
I remember against the wall, too, long envelopes burstin with matter that I have always supposed to be your notes on the years in China.

1933
Letter to Edward Sheldon, The University [of Chicago], Aug 7, 1933.
I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is ; and I enjoy the visitors. Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father's, brother's, sisters') from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc. is in town.

1937
Letter to Isabella N. Wilder and Isabel Wilder, Hotel Buckingham [Paris], July 20, 1937.
Delightful time at our end of the table at lunch today : M. Prescu, Prof of history of art at Bukharest ; Paul Hazard of the Collège de France (a charmer), Dr. Yu Ying, of the Univ. of Peking, and a Signor Pavolini, president of the Fascist Confederati8on of Artists and Writers…

1961
Letter to Martha Niemoeller, Wisconsin, July 25, 1961.
Late in life I have taken a great interest in the Noh plays – first through Fenollosa and Pound. A Japanese translator (of my work) sent me as a present a most satisfying selection with a rich annotation. It's a very great manifestation of theatre. And I wish I had known it earlier in my life. My plays may seem to reflect some elements of Chinese and Japanese theatre but – in spite of the years I spent in the Orient as a boy – I have not been aware of any influence prior to the '40s that could derive from the East. My use of a 'free' stage has other sources. (To this day I have never seen a Noh or Kabuki performance – and no Chinese theatre except that program of 'selections' which Mei Lan Fang gave in New York in the 30s).

1962
Letter to Glenway Wescott, S.S. Bremen approaching New York, March 30, 1962.
The older I get the more things I find funny. I really ought to grow a pot-belly and resemble those ribald drunken old poets that are pictured sitting under cliffs and waterfalls on Chinese wall-hangings.

1962
Letter to Amos Tappan Wilder, 12th St. Douglas Arizona, Dec 19, 1962.
Morning after morning I'd get up at dawn, or before, and walk to the Battery, each day by a different route – through Chinatown, Polish Town, Italian Greenwich Village, the Jewish acres around Grand Street.

1966
Letter to Cheryil Crawford, St. Augustine Fla, Maundy Thursday, [April 7], 1966.
The theme of your play [musical Chu-Chem] makes me nervous. Milieu, however exotic, cannot pull us into a theatre by itself. Jews in China, Mormons in Uruguay, Yankees at King Arthur's Court.

1968
Letter to William A. Swanberg, Columbia, July 25, 1968.
About 10 years ago Harry [Luce] invited me to a meeting at the Chinese Inst[it]ute (if I remember the name of the institute correctly) to honor the recently dead Dr. Hu Shih [Hu Shi]. He gave me no intimation that I was to be called on to speak. I went to this meeting in New York merely to express my regard for Harry. (I have never been sympathetic to the non-recognition of the People's Republic of China). To my surprise I discovered that I had been assigned the role of concluding speaker on the program. I heard Harry introduce me as an old friend of Dr. Huh Shi, I spoke – to the best of my knowledge – of Dr. Huh Shih's work as a scholar and reformer of the Chinese language. I did not tell the audience (nor Harry until the close of the meeting) that I had never met Dr. Huh Shi. I liked and admired much in Harry. I believe (with Charles Lamb) that 'one should keep one's friendships in repair' ; but that takes two. I shall be here a number of weeks under house arrest. If you wish to mail me the photo from the China Inland Boys' School I shall endeavor to identify Harry ; but I am still too tired to receive any callers except relatives and old friends.

1975
Letter to Dalma H. Brunauer, Hamden, Conn, November 11, 1975.
I have often been reproached for not having made a more explicit declaration of commitment to the Christian faith… But I was a Protestant and I was thoroughly formed in the Protestant beliefs – my father's, my school's in China ; Oberlin !...

Charles Robert Hager kehrt nach Amerika zurück.

Lina Boegli reist mit der transsibirischen Eisenbahn nach Japan. Nach zwei Jahren reist sie über Korea nach China : Shenyang, Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai bis Nanjing. In Nanjing finded sie eine Anstellung als Sprachlehrerin und besucht Hankou, Yangzhou und Umgebung. 1913 verlässt sie China von Shanghai aus per Schiff.

Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D.H. Lawrence [ID D31624].
Letter from D.H. Lawrence to Grace Crawford ; 9 July, 1910.
Herewith the Lute of Jade [ID D9273]: it is a ghastly little object, but then, this yellow is truly oriental. I have seen little Burmese gentlemen, very tiny, like sprigs of golden privet, skating like bits of yellow machinery round and round the Crystal Palace rink : and they did look unhappy. Poor Orientals : even the Lute of Jade is sick yellow with us. When it talks it is moving – but scarcely musical : full of the lofty Chinese spirit, abstract and noble, which I admire so much – it is the same in their paintings in the British Museum – but the lute itself chinks rather like brass pennies. ‘On the Banks of Jo-Yeh’[Li Bo] is one of the best : the third verse is very good.

Letter from D.H. Lawrence to Louie Burrows ; 3 Nov., 1911.
I wonder when I shall buy things for ourselves. One of the bowls was so pretty – a French theme in violets and grey leaves, on pure china.

Letter from D.H. Lawrence to Walter de la Mare ; 16 May, 1912.
Commend me to Edward Thomas, and to the 50 – or 25 Chinese poems man, if you happen to see either of them. [Bax, Clifford. Twenty Chinese poems ID D29126].

Françoise Teilhard de Chardin ist Missionarin in Shanghai.

London, Jack. Revolution and other essays. (London : Macmillan, 1910).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4953/4953.txt
Goliah.
Strange stories of blacks stolen from Africa were remembered, of Chinese and Japanese contract coolies who had mysteriously disappeared, of lonely South Sea Islands raided and their inhabitants carried away; stories of yachts and merchant steamers, mysteriously purchased, that had disappeared and the descriptions of which remotely tallied with the crafts that had carried the Orientals and Africans and islanders away…
The shrinkage of the planet.
The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world over, with the morning toast…
The house beautiful.
And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness of their spotless houses…
What life means to me.
This one rung was the height I climbed up the business ladder. One night I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen…
There weren't any dividends that night, and the Chinese fishermen were richer by the nets and ropes we did not get…

London, Jack. The unparalleled invasion. In : McClure Magazine (1910). In : London, Jack. The strength of the strong. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1914).(Geschrieben 1907).
http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/StrengthStrong/samuel.html
It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred. Many other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason. The world awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.
The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development that, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole world. The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the historians of the time gravely noted it down that that event marked the entrance of Japan into the comity of nations. What it really did mark was the awakening of China. This awakening, long expected, had finally been given up. The Western nations had tried to arouse China, and they had failed. Out of their native optimism and race-egotism they had therefore concluded that the task was impossible, that China would never awaken.
What they had failed to take into account was this: THAT BETWEEN THEM AND CHINA WAS NO COMMON PSYCHOLOGICAL SPEECH. Their thought- processes were radically dissimilar. There was no intimate vocabulary. The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze. The Chinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall. It was all a matter of language. There was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind. China remained asleep. The material achievement and progress of the West was a closed book to her; nor could the West open the book. Back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness, in the mind, say, of the English-speaking race, was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words; back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind was a capacity to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind could not thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking mind thrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens. And so it was that Western material achievement and progress made no dent on the rounded sleep of China.
Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japanese race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In some strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer. Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full- panoplied, a world-power. There is no explaining this peculiar openness of Japan to the alien culture of the West. As well might be explained any biological sport in the animal kingdom.
Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly set about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself. Korea she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japan was not satisfied. She turned her eyes upon China. There lay a vast territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits in the world of iron and coal - the backbone of industrial civilization. Given natural resources, the other great factor in industry is labour. In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls - one quarter of the then total population of the earth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers - if they were properly managed. Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish that management.
But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was a kindred race. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to the West was no baffling enigma to the Japanese. The Japanese understood as we could never school ourselves or hope to understand. Their mental processes were the same. The Japanese thought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese, and they thought in the same peculiar grooves. Into the Chinese mind the Japanese went on where we were balked by the obstacle of incomprehension. They took the turning which we could not perceive, twisted around the obstacle, and were out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where we could not follow. They were brothers. Long ago one had borrowed the other's written language, and, untold generations before that, they had diverged from the common Mongol stock. There had been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their beings, twisted into the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a sameness in kind that time had not obliterated.
And so Japan took upon herself the management of China. In the years immediately following the war with Russia, her agents swarmed over the Chinese Empire. A thousand miles beyond the last mission station toiled her engineers and spies, clad as coolies, under the guise of itinerant merchants or proselytizing Buddhist priests, noting down the horse-power of every waterfall, the likely sites for factories, the heights of mountains and passes, the strategic advantages and weaknesses, the wealth of the farming valleys, the number of bullocks in a district or the number of labourers that could be collected by forced levies. Never was there such a census, and it could have been taken by no other people than the dogged, patient, patriotic Japanese.
But in a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan's officers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the mediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed to all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average of marksmanship than the soldiers of any Western nation. The engineers of Japan deepened and widened the intricate system of canals, built factories and foundries, netted the empire with telegraphs and telephones, and inaugurated the era of railroad- building. It was these same protagonists of machine-civilization that discovered the great oil deposits of Chunsan, the iron mountains of Whang-Sing, the copper ranges of Chinchi, and they sank the gas wells of Wow-Wee, that most marvellous reservoir of natural gas in all the world.
In China's councils of empire were the Japanese emissaries. In the ears of the statesmen whispered the Japanese statesmen. The political reconstruction of the Empire was due to them. They evicted the scholar class, which was violently reactionary, and put into office progressive officials. And in every town and city of the Empire newspapers were started. Of course, Japanese editors ran the policy of these papers, which policy they got direct from Tokio. It was these papers that educated and made progressive the great mass of the population.
China was at last awake. Where the West had failed, Japan succeeded. She had transmuted Western culture and achievement into terms that were intelligible to the Chinese understanding. Japan herself, when she so suddenly awakened, had astounded the world. But at the time she was only forty millions strong. China's awakening, with her four hundred millions and the scientific advance of the world, was frightfully astounding. She was the colossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in no uncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations. Japan egged her on, and the proud Western peoples listened with respectful ears.
China's swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than to anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The Chinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that. For sheer ability to work no worker in the world could compare with him. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him what wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure had been to other peoples. Liberty, to him, epitomized itself in access to the means of toil. To till the soil and labour interminably was all he asked of life and the powers that be. And the awakening of China had given its vast population not merely free and unlimited access to the means of toil, but access to the highest and most scientific machine-means of toil.
China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant. She discovered a new pride in herself and a will of her own. She began to chafe under the guidance of Japan, but she did not chafe long. On Japan's advice, in the beginning, she had expelled from the Empire all Western missionaries, engineers, drill sergeants, merchants, and teachers. She now began to expel the similar representatives of Japan. The latter's advisory statesmen were showered with honours and decorations, and sent home. The West had awakened Japan, and, as Japan had then requited the West, Japan was not requited by China. Japan was thanked for her kindly aid and flung out bag and baggage by her gigantic protege. The Western nations chuckled. Japan's rainbow dream had gone glimmering. She grew angry. China laughed at her. The blood and the swords of the Samurai would out, and Japan rashly went to war. This occurred in 1922, and in seven bloody months Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa were taken away from her and she was hurled back, bankrupt, to stifle in her tiny, crowded islands. Exit Japan from the world drama. Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and her task became to please the world greatly with her creations of wonder and beauty.
Contrary to expectation, China did not prove warlike. She had no Napoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts of peace. After a time of disquiet, the idea was accepted that China was to be feared, not in war, but in commerce. It will be seen that the real danger was not apprehended. China went on consummating her machine-civilization. Instead of a large standing army, she developed an immensely larger and splendidly efficient militia. Her navy was so small that it was the laughing stock of the world; nor did she attempt to strengthen her navy. The treaty ports of the world were never entered by her visiting battleships.
The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in 1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised. For some time all territories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese immigration; but now it suddenly came home to the world that China's population was 500,000,000. She had increased by a hundred millions since her awakening. Burchaldter called attention to the fact that there were more Chinese in existence than white-skinned people. He performed a simple sum in arithmetic. He added together the populations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, European Russia, and all Scandinavia. The result was 495,000,000. And the population of China overtopped this tremendous total by 5,000,000. Burchaldter's figures went round the world, and the world shivered.
For many centuries China's population had been constant. Her territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported the maximum limit of population. But when she awoke and inaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had been enormously increased. Thus, on the same territory, she was able to support a far larger population. At once the birth rate began to rise and the death rate to fall. Before, when population pressed against the means of subsistence, the excess population had been swept away by famine. But now, thanks to the machine-civilization, China's means of subsistence had been enormously extended, and there were no famines; her population followed on the heels of the increase in the means of subsistence.
During this time of transition and development of power, China had entertained no dreams of conquest. The Chinese was not an imperial race. It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving. War was looked upon as an unpleasant but necessary task that at times must be performed. And so, while the Western races had squabbled and fought, and world-adventured against one another, China had calmly gone on working at her machines and growing. Now she was spilling over the boundaries of her Empire - that was all, just spilling over into the adjacent territories with all the certainty and terrifying slow momentum of a glacier.
Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter's figures, in 1970 France made a long-threatened stand. French Indo-China had been overrun, filled up, by Chinese immigrants. France called a halt. The Chinese wave flowed on. France assembled a force of a hundred thousand on the boundary between her unfortunate colony and China, and China sent down an army of militia-soldiers a million strong. Behind came the wives and sons and daughters and relatives, with their personal household luggage, in a second army. The French force was brushed aside like a fly. The Chinese militia-soldiers, along with their families, over five millions all told, coolly took possession of French Indo-China and settled down to stay for a few thousand years.
Outraged France was in arms. She hurled fleet after fleet against the coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort. China had no navy. She withdrew like a turtle into her shell. For a year the French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposed towns and villages. China did not mind. She did not depend upon the rest of the world for anything. She calmly kept out of range of the French guns and went on working. France wept and wailed, wrung her impotent hands and appealed to the dumfounded nations. Then she landed a punitive expedition to march to Peking. It was two hundred and fifty thousand strong, and it was the flower of France. It landed without opposition and marched into the interior. And that was the last ever seen of it. The line of communication was snapped on the second day. Not a survivor came back to tell what had happened. It had been swallowed up in China's cavernous maw, that was all.
In the five years that followed, China's expansion, in all land directions, went on apace. Siam was made part of the Empire, and, in spite of all that England could do, Burma and the Malay Peninsula were overrun; while all along the long south boundary of Siberia, Russia was pressed severely by China's advancing hordes. The process was simple. First came the Chinese immigration (or, rather, it was already there, having come there slowly and insidiously during the previous years). Next came the clash of arms and the brushing away of all opposition by a monster army of militia-soldiers, followed by their families and household baggage. And finally came their settling down as colonists in the conquered territory. Never was there so strange and effective a method of world conquest.
Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary of India pressed against by this fearful tide of life. To the west, Bokhara, and, even to the south and west, Afghanistan, were swallowed up. Persia, Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt the pressure of the flood. It was at this time that Burchaldter revised his figures. He had been mistaken. China's population must be seven hundred millions, eight hundred millions, nobody knew how many millions, but at any rate it would soon be a billion. There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world, Burchaldter announced, and the world trembled. China's increase must have begun immediately, in 1904. It was remembered that since that date there had not been a single famine. At 5,000,000 a year increase, her total increase in the intervening seventy years must be 350,000,000. But who was to know? It might be more. Who was to know anything of this strange new menace of the twentieth century - China, old China, rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!
The Convention of 1975 was called at Philadelphia. All the Western nations, and some few of the Eastern, were represented. Nothing was accomplished. There was talk of all countries putting bounties on children to increase the birth rate, but it was laughed to scorn by the arithmeticians, who pointed out that China was too far in the lead in that direction. No feasible way of coping with China was suggested. China was appealed to and threatened by the United Powers, and that was all the Convention of Philadelphia came to; and the Convention and the Powers were laughed at by China. Li Tang Fwung, the power behind the Dragon Throne, deigned to reply.
"What does China care for the comity of nations?" said Li Tang Fwung. "We are the most ancient, honourable, and royal of races. We have our own destiny to accomplish. It is unpleasant that our destiny does not tally with the destiny of the rest of the world, but what would you? You have talked windily about the royal races and the heritage of the earth, and we can only reply that that remains to be seen. You cannot invade us. Never mind about your navies. Don't shout. We know our navy is small. You see we use it for police purposes. We do not care for the sea. Our strength is in our population, which will soon be a billion. Thanks to you, we are equipped with all modern war-machinery. Send your navies. We will not notice them. Send your punitive expeditions, but first remember France. To land half a million soldiers on our shores would strain the resources of any of you. And our thousand millions would swallow them down in a mouthful. Send a million; send five millions, and we will swallow them down just as readily. Pouf! A mere nothing, a meagre morsel. Destroy, as you have threatened, you United States, the ten million coolies we have forced upon your shores - why, the amount scarcely equals half of our excess birth rate for a year."
So spoke Li Tang Fwung. The world was nonplussed, helpless, terrified. Truly had he spoken. There was no combating China's amazing birth rate. If her population was a billion, and was increasing twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would be a billion and a half - equal to the total population of the world in 1904. And nothing could be done. There was no way to dam up the over-spilling monstrous flood of life. War was futile. China laughed at a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed invasion. In her capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could be hurled at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life poured out and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazines the learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.
But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on - Jacobus Laningdale. Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense. Primarily, Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to that time, a very obscure scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of the Health Office of New York City. Jacobus Laningdale's head was very like any other head, but in that head was evolved an idea. Also, in that head was the wisdom to keep that idea secret. He did not write an article for the magazines. Instead, he asked for a vacation. On September 19, 1975, he arrived in Washington. It was evening, but he proceeded straight to the White House, for he had already arranged an audience with the President. He was closeted with President Moyer for three hours. What passed between them was not learned by the rest of the world until long after; in fact, at that time the world was not interested in Jacobus Laningdale. Next day the President called in his Cabinet. Jacobus Laningdale was present. The proceedings were kept secret. But that very afternoon Rufus Cowdery, Secretary of State, left Washington, and early the following morning sailed for England. The secret that he carried began to spread, but it spread only among the heads of Governments. Possibly half-a-dozen men in a nation were entrusted with the idea that had formed in Jacobus Laningdale's head. Following the spread of the secret, sprang up great activity in all the dockyards, arsenals, and navy-yards. The people of France and Austria became suspicious, but so sincere were their Governments' calls for confidence that they acquiesced in the unknown project that was afoot.
This was the time of the Great Truce. All countries pledged themselves solemnly not to go to war with any other country. The first definite action was the gradual mobilization of the armies of Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Then began the eastward movement. All railroads into Asia were glutted with troop trains. China was the objective, that was all that was known. A little later began the great sea movement. Expeditions of warships were launched from all countries. Fleet followed fleet, and all proceeded to the coast of China. The nations cleaned out their navy-yards. They sent their revenue cutters and dispatch boots and lighthouse tenders, and they sent their last antiquated cruisers and battleships. Not content with this, they impressed the merchant marine. The statistics show that 58,640 merchant steamers, equipped with searchlights and rapid-fire guns, were despatched by the various nations to China.
And China smiled and waited. On her land side, along her boundaries, were millions of the warriors of Europe. She mobilized five times as many millions of her militia and awaited the invasion. On her sea coasts she did the same. But China was puzzled. After all this enormous preparation, there was no invasion. She could not understand. Along the great Siberian frontier all was quiet. Along her coasts the towns and villages were not even shelled. Never, in the history of the world, had there been so mighty a gathering of war fleets. The fleets of all the world were there, and day and night millions of tons of battleships ploughed the brine of her coasts, and nothing happened. Nothing was attempted. Did they think to make her emerge from her shell? China smiled. Did they think to tire her out, or starve her out? China smiled again.
But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant eye turned skyward. And high up in the blue he would have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would have identified as an airship. From this airship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles - strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house- tops. But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass. Nothing happened. There were no explosions. It is true, three Chinese were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from so enormous a height; but what were three Chinese against an excess birth rate of twenty millions? One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a garden and was not broken. It was dragged ashore by the master of the house. He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of the district. The latter was a brave man. With all eyes upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe. Nothing happened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought they saw some mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd set up a great laugh and dispersed.
As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China. The tiny airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each, and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved, one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass tubes.
Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few of them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their carcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and piled high on the abandoned death-waggons. But for the rest he would have had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire. And not all would he have found fleeing from plague-stricken Peking, for behind them, by hundreds of thousands of unburied corpses by the wayside, he could have marked their flight. And as it was with Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, and villages of the Empire. The plague smote them all. Nor was it one plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every virulent form of infectious death stalked through the land. Too late the Chinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossal preparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights of the tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass. The proclamations of the government were vain. They could not stop the eleven million plague-stricken wretches, fleeing from the one city of Peking to spread disease through all the land. The physicians and health officers died at their posts; and death, the all- conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang Fwung. It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the second week, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died in the fourth week.
Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it. But from a score of plagues no creature was immune. The man who escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever. The man who was immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that had come down upon China in the rain of glass.
All organization vanished. The government crumbled away. Decrees and proclamations were useless when the men who made them and signed them one moment were dead the next. Nor could the maddened millions, spurred on to flight by death, pause to heed anything. They fled from the cities to infect the country, and wherever they fled they carried the plagues with them. The hot summer was on - Jacobus Laningdale had selected the time shrewdly - and the plague festered everywhere. Much is conjectured of what occurred, and much has been learned from the stories of the few survivors. The wretched creatures stormed across the Empire in many-millioned flight. The vast armies China had collected on her frontiers melted away. The farms were ravaged for food, and no more crops were planted, while the crops already in were left unattended and never came to harvest. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the flights. Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds of the Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of the West. The slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries was stupendous. Time and again the guarding line was drawn back twenty or thirty miles to escape the contagion of the multitudinous dead.
Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German and Austrian soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan. Preparations had been made for such a happening, and though sixty thousand soldiers of Europe were carried off, the international corps of physicians isolated the contagion and dammed it back. It was during this struggle that it was suggested that a new plague- germ had originated, that in some way or other a sort of hybridization between plague-germs had taken place, producing a new and frightfully virulent germ. First suspected by Vomberg, who became infected with it and died, it was later isolated and studied by Stevens, Hazenfelt, Norman, and Landers.
Such was the unparalleled invasion of China. For that billion of people there was no hope. Pent in their vast and festering charnel-house, all organization and cohesion lost, they could do naught but die. They could not escape. As they were flung back from their land frontiers, so were they flung back from the sea. Seventy-five thousand vessels patrolled the coasts. By day their smoking funnels dimmed the sea-rim, and by night their flashing searchlights ploughed the dark and harrowed it for the tiniest escaping junk. The attempts of the immense fleets of junks were pitiful. Not one ever got by the guarding sea-hounds. Modern war- machinery held back the disorganized mass of China, while the plagues did the work.
But old War was made a thing of laughter. Naught remained to him but patrol duty. China had laughed at war, and war she was getting, but it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the war of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale. Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro- organic projectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of death, the destroying angels that stalked through the empire of a billion souls.
During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno. There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the remotest hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last, millions died daily of starvation. Besides, starvation weakened the victims and destroyed their natural defences against the plagues. Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China.
Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the first expeditions made. These expeditions were small, composed of scientists and bodies of troops; but they entered China from every side. In spite of the most elaborate precautions against infection, numbers of soldiers and a few of the physicians were stricken. But the exploration went bravely on. They found China devastated, a howling wilderness through which wandered bands of wild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived. All survivors were put to death wherever found. And then began the great task, the sanitation of China. Five years and hundreds of millions of treasure were consumed, and then the world moved in - not in zones, as was the idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, according to the democratic American programme. It was a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years that followed - a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-fertilization. We know to-day the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output that followed.
It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that the ancient quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine recrudesced. The war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April, and on April 17 the Convention of Copenhagen was called. The representatives of the nations of the world, being present, all nations solemnly pledged themselves never to use against one another the laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the invasion of China.
Excerpt from Walt Mervin's "CERTAIN ESSAYS IN HISTORY."

Sekundärliteratur
Under the influence of Japan, China modernizes and undergoes its own version of the Meiji Reforms in the 1910s. In 1922, China breaks away from Japan and fights a brief war that culminates in the Chinese annexation of the Japanese possessions of Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria. Over the next half century, China's population steadily grows, and eventually migration overwhelms European colonies in Asia. The United States and the other Western powers launch a biological warfare campaign against China, resulting in the destruction of China's population, the few survivors of the plague being killed out of hand by European and American troops. China is then colonized by the Western powers. This opens the way to a joyous epoch of "splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output".

Joe Lockard : This allohistorical story, narrated by a future historian at the end of the twentieth century, begins in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 in order to trace the rise of China, followed by extermination of the Chinese at the hands of Western military powers using biological warfare. London opens his story with an attempt to explain differences between supposed Chinese and Western mentalities. In his account of the origins of this conflict, there was "no common psychological speech" between Chinese and Western cultures. It is Japan that is able to awake and modernize China through extension of this empire. Under Japanese imperial guidance, China reorganizes, industrializes, and makes astounding scientific advances. Having mastered Western technology and no longer needing tutelage, China throws out its Japanese advisors. Angered, Japan declares war and quickly loses its empire in Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan. With its new "machine-civilization" China enters fifty years of peace and prosperity that end when population pressure causes it to expand into neighboring territories.

Bernhard Karlgren hält sich in China auf, studiert Chinesisch und 19 Dialekte in Mandarin der Provinzen Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Nanjing, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Guangzhou.

Sten Bugge ist als Missionar in China, arbeitet für den YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) in Hankou, Changsha und Taohualun (Hunan). 1928-1934 ist er Lehrer des Lutheran Seminary in Shekou (Hankou).

Leo Tolstoy received a copy of The world's Chinese students' journal. In his Diary he commented that this 'interests me very much'. He penciled marginal notes to one of its articles : 'The Civilization of China'.
It is reported that he have remarked : "Were I young, I would go to China."

Laotse [Laozi]. Izrecheniya kitaiskovo mudretsa Laotze [ID D36253]. [On the essence of Laozi's techings].
"The foundation of Lao Tzu's teaching is the same as that of all the great and true religious teachings. It means : Man first of all recognizes himself as a corporeal being, distinct from all others and filled only with egoistic desires. But besides the fact that the individual man considers himself to be a Peter, a John, a Mary or a Catherine, he also recognizes each as an incorporeal spirit which lives in all beings and gives life and growth to all forms of existence. Thus man may exist either as a physical personality, distinct from all others, or as an incorporeal spirit which moves in him and desires the growth of all existing things. Man can live either for his body or for his soul. If he lives for his body, his life is a continual suffering, inasmuch as the body endures pain, becomes ill and dies. But if he lives for his soul, his life is blessed, inasmuch as for the soul there is no suffering, no illness and no death…
According to the teaching of Lao Tzu, the only way for man to unite with God is through Tao. Tao is achieved by abstinence from all that is personal and corporeal. The same teaching is to be found in the First Epistle of Saint John, and just as, by the word Tao in Lao Tzu's teaching, is to be understood not only the means of uniting oneself with Heaven, but also Heaven itself, so, according to Saint John, by the word love is to be understood not only love, but also God himself. (God is love.) The essence of both teachings consists in the fact that man can conceive of himself as either separate or indivisible, body or spirit, temporal or eternal, animal or divine. In order to gain consciousness of oneself as spiritual and divine, there is, according to Lao Tzu, only one means, which he defines with the word Tao, a word which also includes in itself the idea of the highest virtue."
Derk Bodde : When Tolstoy equates 'Tao' with Heaven, and through his term with God, this in itself could not be objected to, if by 'God' he really meant a naturalistic principle similar to what Lao Tzu and the other Taoists intended when they used the term 'T'ian' or 'Heaven'. When he introduces the love of Saint John into his equation and when he creates a dichotomy between spirit and body and advocates 'abstinence from all that is personal and corporeal', it is obvious that his view of Taoism has been colored by his own Christian spectacles.

Alfred E. Hippisley beendet seine Arbeit für den Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

Fred Rowntree was invited to tender and submit plans for the building of West China Union University in Chendu (Sichuan).

Harvey J. Howard ist Leiter des Ophthalmology Department der University Medical School des Canton Christian College. [Guangzhou].

Wolfgang Limpricht ist Direktor der School of Languages und Dozent der German Medical School in Shanghai.

Queen Anne bedroom in Beaudesert, Staffordshire, decorated by Captain Harry Lindsay, using eighteenth-century Chinese wallpapers showing scenes of daily life.

Gründung und Bestehen des britischen Konsulats in Harbin.

Gründung und Bestehen des britischen Konsulats in Shenyang (Liaoning).

Walter James Clennell ist Konsul des britischen Konsulats in Yingkou.