China and the West

Allen Upward was Ezra Pound's mentor on Chinese poetry. When Pound was introduced to Upward in London in 1911, Upward had already made a name for himself as a poet and a writer of original thought. Although Upward's admiration for Confucius may have inspired Pound's lifelong interest in Confucianism, his enduring influence on Pound in the area of Chinese poetry. This influence may be attributed to two important events : The publication of Upward's Scented leaves from a Chinese jar [ID D29136], a sequence of poems based on Chinese works. In these poems, Pound found what had earlier fascinated him in Japanese haiku – sharp, contrasting colors and the evocative juxtaposition of emotions and images. Pound wrote to Dorothy : "The chinese things in Poetry are worth the price of admission". The second event was Upward's initiation of Pound into the study of Herbert Allen Giles A history of Chinese literature.

Mansfield, Katherine. Works.
In a German pension. (London : Swift, 1911).
Chap. 4 : Frau Fischer
"Surely I wore it last summer when you were here? I brought the silk from China--smuggled it through the Russian customs by swathing it round my body.
Chap. 5 : Frau Brechenmacher attends a weeding
She lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and drew forth a baby's bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls.
Chap. 7 : At Lehmann's
Here the floor had to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out, each with its little china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business.

Journal
1916
They let me go into my mother's room (I remember standing on tiptoe and using both hands to turn the big white china door-handle) and there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet, and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel across her knees…
Grandmother sat in her chair to one side with Gwen in her lap, and a funny little man with his head in a black bag was standing behind a box of china eggs.
1917
A Victorian idyll
Yesterday Matilda Mason
In the Parlour by herself
Broke a Handsome China Basin
Placed upon the Mantelshelf.
1918
No, not quite sure, and that little Chinese group on the writing table may or may not have shaken itself awake for just one hundredth of a second out of hundreds of years of sleep…
To one side of the door the porter's cave dotted with pigeon holes, and a desk, furnished with a telephone, usually a big tea-stained china tea cup crowned with its saucer. In front of it a squeaking revolving chair with a torn imitation leather seat.
1920
December 27
Whence has come the tiny bouquet of tangerine fruits, the paste-pot on the writing-table, the fowl's feather stuck in Ribni's hair, the horn spectacles on the Chinese embroidery.
1920
The rivers of China
She sat on the end of the box ottoman buttoning her boots. Her short fine springy hair stood out round her head. She wore a little linen camisole and a pair of short frilled knickers.
"Curse these buttons", she said, tugging at them. And then suddenly she sat up and dug the handle of the button hook into the box ottoman.
"Oh dear", she said, "I do wish I hadn't married. I wish I'd been an explorer". And then she said dreamily, "The Rivers of China, for instance".
"But what do you know about the rivers of China, darling", I said. For Mother knew no geography whatever; she knew less than a child of ten.
"Nothing", she agreed. "But I can feel the kind of hat I should wear". She was silent a moment. Then she said, "If Father hadn't died I should have travelled and then ten to one I shouldn't have married". And she looked at me dreamily—looked through me, rather.

Bliss and other stories. (London : Constable, 1920).
Prelude [First publ. : Richmond : Hogarth Press, 1918].
As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore…
Mother, whatever can I do with these awful hideous Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It's absurd to say that they are valuable, because they were hanging in Chung Wah's fruit shop for months before…
At the Chinaman's shop next door he bought a pineapple in the pink of condition, and noticing a basket of fresh black cherries he told John to put him a pound of those as well…
I’ll get to be a most awful frump in a year or two and come and see you in a mackintosh and a sailor hat tied on with a white china silk motor veil. So pretty.
The wind blows
The carts rattle by, swinging from side to side; two Chinamen lollop along under their wooden yokes with the straining vegetable baskets —their pigtails and blue blouses fly out in the wind.
A dill pickle
A great many people taking tea in a Chinese pagoda, and he behaving like a maniac about the wasps—waving them away, flapping at them with his straw hat, serious and infuriated out of all proportion to the occasion.
In fact, I have spent the last three years of my life travelling all the time. Spain, Corsica, Siberia, Russia, Egypt. The only country left is China, and I mean to go there, too, when the war is over."

The garden party, and other stories. (New York, N.Y. : A.A. Knopf, 1922).
At the bay
Now she sat on the veranda of their Tasmanian home, leaning against her father's knee. And he promised, "As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we'll cut off somewhere, we'll escape. Two boys together. I have a fancy I'd like to sail up a river in China."
Over her white frock she wore a yellow, pink-fringed shawl from the Chinaman's shop.
The young girl
The waitress appeared. I hardly dared to ask her. "Tea--coffee? China tea--or iced tea with lemon?"

The canary. In : In : The Nation and the Atheneum ; vol. 33, no 3 (21 April 1923).
When the Chinaman who came to the door with birds to sell held him up in his tiny cage, and instead of fluttering, fluttering, like the poor little goldfinches, he gave a faint, small chirp, I found myself saying, just as I had said to the star over the gum tree, 'There your are, my darling.' From that moment he was mine!

Something childish and other stories. (London : Constable, 1924).
Ole Underwood
He walked past the Chinamen's shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and slushed a pail of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile. He looked and looked, pressing his face against the glass and sniggering. They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons. Some of them had knives in their belts, and one old man sat by himself on the floor plaiting his long crooked toes together. The Chinamen didn't mind Ole Underwood. When they saw him they nodded. He went to the door of a shop and cautiously opened it. In rushed the wind with him, scattering the cards. "Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya! " screamed the Chinamen, and Ole Underwood rushed off, the hammer beating quick and hard. Ya-Ya! He turned a corner out of sight. He thought he heard one of the Chinks after him, and he slipped into a timber-yard. There he lay panting.
Pension Séguin
Her round red face shone like freshly washed china.
Something childish but very natural
He took his watch out of his pocket, went into the cottage and popped it into a china jar on the mantelpiece.
A suburban fairy tale
Little B. dropped his bread and marmalade inside the china flower pot in front of the window.
Sixpence
In the corner of the drawing-room there was a what-not, and on the top shelf stood a brown china bear with a painted tongue.

Chen Xiying macht Schulen in England, studiert an der University of London und erhält den Ph.D in 1922.

Wallace Stevens was reading Confucius and Mencius. Comment to his wife Elsie : "I always have the wise sayings of Tzu and K'Ung Fu-Tzu to think of".

Marianne Moore visits the Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings at the British Museum.

Thornton Wilder besucht kurze Zeit eine deutsche Schul in Shanghai, dann die China Inland Mission School in Chefoo [Yantai, Shandong]. (Frühling 1911-Aug. 1912).

Wilder, Thornton. Chefoo, China. [Yantai, Shandong]. [ID D30356].
It used to be said that to have lived in China during those years between the Boxer Rebellion and the 1911 Revolution was to have enjoyed a foretaste of Heaven. Skilled and tireless servants could be engaged for six to ten dollars a month. There were superb cooks and inspired gardeners; there were tailors able to copy faithfully the fashion plates from Paris and London. International trade and diplomatic relations were expanded. Chinese officials had been rendered tractable by the "foreign devils". In fact the Empress Dowager had finally deigned to accord ambassadorial rank to representatives from those late-appearing, those barely civilized powers of Europe and America. Vast new markets had been opened; money could be made easily. Clerks and accountants could be taught the methods of the western world, though the beads of the abacus continued to be heard clicking in the back rooms of offices. In the Imperial City and in the treaty ports the privileged were borne from place to place in the two most soothing conveyances obtainable since the womb: first, the sedan chair suspended from men’s shoulders; then—after the introduction of rubber tires—the jinrickisha. There was leisure for talk at the clubs on the Bunds, at the eternal tiffins, and teas, and dinners. There were numerous celebrations in the international compounds: Independence Day, Bastille Day, royal birthdays. There were boating parties, polo matches, and picnics "in the hills." Even in the missionary compounds there were cricket games on St. George's Day among the Anglicans and Kaffeeklatsches with the Lutherans and open-house concerts at the orphanages and institutions for the blind. "Old China hands" still refer to those days as sheer Heaven. "You didn't have to raise a hand." My own father—a rugged individualist from the state of Maine—returning to America after fifteen years was unable to tie his own shoes without a spasm of annoyance.
And yet:
There was another saying often heard up and down the China Coast: "Living ten years in China either makes or breaks a man."
My father as Consul-General had to ship home scores of "broken men," alive or dead, or to bury them in some potter's field. Any head-shaking tongue-clicking moralist (that is to say, any American) can see why living in this earthly paradise might lead a man to lose a grip on himself. But there were other elements in the China scene that contributed to breaking a man. There was the spectacle of omnipresent misery,—untended, ignored, and uncomplainingly endured.
To consider the second of these first:
A Scandinavian diplomat’s wife wrote her sister: "We live a charmed life in the international city. There is no need for us to leave its enclosure. The tailors, the jewelers, the dealers in works of art bring their wares to our homes. Even when we drive out into the country we pass along a wide avenue shaded by great trees. Many of us have been here for years without advancing more than a few yards into the native city. Our husbands forbid us to enter it . . . Finally Lady B. and I rebelled. We made expeditions every Thursday morning. We selected certain trusted houseboys as guides and unnecessary guards . . . Oh, Marie! What shall I say? On one day we seemed to see mostly goitres and tumors; on another only leprosy and scrofula; and on another the children; and always emaciation, skeletal arms and legs, blindness—flies swarming upon the poor sufferers' eyes." Another testimony: a missionary's wife told my mother that when she arrived many years before in one of the treaty ports her life was made miserable by the sight of a group of old people and young women with babies who camped, night and day, before the barred gate of the compound where she lived. One evening, during her husband's absence and to the loud consternation of her servants, she directed that a dozen cups of condensed milk and a large platter of rice and dried fish be carried out to them. Within an hour a howling mob of hundreds had gathered before the gate. In the end the treaty port’s police had to drive them away with bamboo poles. In the larger missionary compounds there were rice-kitchens, but doles were arranged under complicated systems. "Some of us have been destined to starve, some to eat." Even the bright young men sent out from Europe and America to work in the banks, import-export offices, and law firms—even the attractive young brides who came out in due time to Chefoo, join them—could not long remain entirely unaware of the ocean of suffering around them. A slow creeping apprehension is more disintegrating than a brutal confrontation.
Consider then the human multitude in China.
Years later, in Algiers, during the Second World War, we found ourselves in a plague of locusts. We were cloaked and bonneted and shod in locusts; our jeeps careened from side to side in haystacks and puddings of locusts. We were filled with wonder at nature’s fecundity. Yet what is many, what is few? What is large, what is small? We have been told that there are more stars in the firmament than all the men and women born into the world since its creation; more than all the locusts. Heraclitus said, "Man is the measure of all things." It is frightening to contemplate another measure; perhaps a star or an atom can be better said to be the measure of all things: it obscurely undermines a man’s self-esteem. This multitude was another confrontation that tended to make or break men in China. New York or London was a larger city than Nanking or Foochow (not to consider Peking, where no reliable census has ever been or could ever be taken) but the Chinese population lives in the street, spills into the street. Even in the coldest weather it surges about you, it encumbers you, it is underfoot . . .
But that's not all. All those hundreds of thousands of eyes rest on you for a moment, really see you (you are the "foreign devil") and in those two glances is neither antagonism nor admiration nor even indifference,—there is a touch of curiosity and some amusement. There is something that is more chilling for an occidental. The Chinese have lived in this density of population for tens of centuries (even the villages convey a shoulder-to-shoulder density); their customs are fashioned by it; their religion has been moulded by it. Those glances reflect also the reason for the omnipresent untended misery: they devaluate the importance of any one individual life.
Associated with my father's work in Shanghai was a delightful and thoughtful American, Judge Thayer of the International Court. Someone once asked him his opinion of that often quoted phrase about life in China either making or breaking a man.
"Well," said the Judge, turning his level quizzical gaze on the questioner, "living thirty-three years anywhere on the earth either makes or breaks a man, doesn't it? Maybe China merely accelerates it."
Even small boys are affected by these confrontations.
In 1906 my father—through connections he had made at Yale College—was appointed American Consul-General in Hongkong, China. At the time of this appointment he was editor and owner of a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, which he had bought with borrowed money, a loan which he was still struggling to repay many years later. He took his wife and four children—another child was to be born four years later—across the Pacific Ocean on what was then a month's journey. Mrs. Wilder and the children were to enjoy the "sheer heaven" I have described for only six months. The educational opportunities in Hongkong appeared to my father to be unsatisfactory and he sent his family back to Berkeley, California. When he was transferred to Shanghai three years later some of us rejoined him. Thereafter like a chess-player he moved his wife and five children about the world, sending some to Europe, some to America, and some to north China—always in the interest of the young people's education.
My sister Charlotte and I were sent to the China Inland Mission Boys' and Girls' Schools at Chefoo in Shantung Province, on the coast some 450 miles north of Shanghai. All our fellow students were missionaries' children. Missionaries hated the consuls; consuls hated the missionaries. My father was the only American (or even European) consul within memory who admired, who venerated missionaries. The duties of a consul (apart from salvaging or burying human derelicts) were largely given over to ratifying contracts and facilitating international commerce. Consuls were selected "at home" for astute business sense, for an unsentimental attitude toward drifters and wastrels, and for representing their native lands’ character as congenial and even convivial good fellows. Consuls hated the missionaries for their clamorous demands (missionaries could not see why the consuls should not personally relieve all China's sufferers from drought, flood, and famine), for their pride in their calling (it appeared to be arrogance), for their stern disapproval of consular ways (that is, smoking, drinking, card-playing, absenting themselves from church attendance, and otherwise misrepresenting before the Chinese people the great countries from which they came), and for their passion for martyrdom,—in troubled times they had to be rescued by river gunboats, literally dragged from their besieged churches and compounds. The missionaries hated the consuls. When it became known up and down the Yangtse Kiang River that Dr. Wilder at Shanghai fell over himself in order to be serviceable in any possible way to those "noble Christian men and women," there was great rejoicing. It was assuredly this reputation for serviceability that enabled him to have us enrolled in those schools. I suspect my father selected Charlotte and myself as the two of his children most in need of the edifying influences we would find there. Besides, the board and tuition was very cheap.
It was a good school. All the teachers and administrators were English or Scottish. Of the one hundred and twenty students in the Boys' School one hundred were English, about a dozen were American; there were a few Scandinavians. Much attention was given to religion, but there was none of the "hell-fire" evangelism that I was later to encounter occasionally at Oberlin College and even at Yale. The background was not primarily of the Anglican Church but of those denominations they called "chapel,"—Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and so on; hence there was little class-consciousness. In a history recently published dealing with Henry Luce and his publications the writer quotes from Luce's letters telling of floggings and of that tyrannizing of older over younger boys that was called "fagging". Harry was at the school longer than I was. I heard of only one flogging, before my time; a boy had stolen a watch. In the classes we were often given short written tests; the three students who received the lowest grades were thwacked smartly over the palm of the hand with a ruler. I had many occasions to compare my rising welts with those of my fellow-students.
It was a very English school, modeled on those "at home". Games—cricket and soccer—were compulsory. Latin phrases abounded: permissions to leave the grounds were accorded us on exeat days. We were addressed by our last names; if a number of students bore the same family name they were known as Smith Major, Smith Minor, Smith Tertius . . . Quartus . . . Quintus . . . and so on, to Smith Minimus. The sons of an eminent medical missionary in Peking, Dr. George Wilder, arrived at the school before and after me. I was Wilder Minor. Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to be my best friends among my fellow students, as well as five years later at Oberlin College.
All the students (and teachers) had nicknames. I was called "Towser", though the nickname at home had been Todger.
Every Sunday the students of both schools marched into the great city of Chefoo,—two by two, in long "crocodiles", as the English say—to attend the Church of England services there. Sunday is not a day of rest for the Chinese. The long procession was often held up in the narrow streets by a blockage of one kind or another. There we saw on either side: the goitres, the tumors, the abscesses, the flaking white stumps of a leper's arms and legs, the blind, the skeletal children . . .
The life of a missionary in China is a difficult one. The missionary must be an exemplary Christian, an exemplary representative of the nation from which he came, an exemplary representative of that triumph of human development western civilization. In addition—following the steps of St. Paul—he should be an inspired orator in an appallingly difficult language, and a profound student of the Chinese thought-world, the Chinese ethos. Many missionaries labored for years without making a single convert other than those unhappy adherents they had rescued from destitution and who were universally called "bowl-of-rice converts". The missionary was fortified throughout these disappointments by his sense of his mission. He had received a "call" to preach to those who walk in darkness. Now there is no doubt that there is much that the great Chinese people can learn from the Christian dispensation,—but how? Occasionally there appeared a missionary, a joyous man, who learned and reveled in the language, who had slowly and wonderingly entered into that subtle, disciplined, tradition-buttressed world: the Chinese mind. I have known some of these men and their families; I have attended their churches.
The majority of the American missionaries came from small colleges and seminaries in our middle southern states. Their religion turned largely upon sin. The early translators of the Bible into Chinese found difficulty in translating that word. The Chinese knew all about wickedness and injustice, but when these "foreign devils" harangued them from street corners, beseeching them to confess their sins to God and be saved, they could only listen with blank wonder. The Chinese are not introspective. They had not diverted irrigation canals; they had not "stripped" copper coins; they had not stolen their neighbor’s piglets. My father was once rendered very angry by a chance remark of a fellow-consul who held that "the missionaries had introduced sin into China". Only an occasional missionary was able to render Christianity attractive to his native listeners, to himself, or to his family.
I was assigned to Room 7, North Corridor. The room was on the second floor; its large window looked on the school's paved quadrangle; it contained four beds,—all for Americans. I settled in easily, for novelty quickens rather than intimidates me. In class work Americans were at a disadvantage. English students begin the study of Greek, Latin, algebra and geometry several years before Americans do; moreover they were well advanced in those basic studies, the history and geography of Great Britain and its empire. We were frequently rebuked and derided for speaking the English language incorrectly. We gave the impression of being stupid, ill-educated, and uncouth. There was little possibility of our ever, ever growing up to be gentlemen.
I was introduced to two of my roommates, a third arrived a week later. Wilkins was a fat boy, easily excited by anything unusual, given alternately to giggling and bursting into tears. Like many of the smaller boys he was often poignantly homesick. They missed those compounds in remote stations, those parents who had received so awe-inspiriting a Call, those amahs of boundless understanding, devotion, and noble firmness. Smith Sextus was gloomy, bilious, and very religious. Fortunately for me, they were loquacious; they introduced me to all the customs, taboos, written and unwritten laws of the community. They put me in possession of the idiosyncrasies of our overseers,—the masters, the prefects. Two weeks later, delayed by the mumps, our fourth member arrived,—Dawson Minor, like myself a "new boy". His older brother was seventeen and had been in the school for five years. He was in the sixth form, a prefect and a pillar of the school, a captain in soccer and even in cricket. He took his turn in conducting prayer meetings, impressively. He would have been Head Boy, if he had been a little better in his studies and if he had spoken the English language more intelligibly, for the Dawson brothers were of Tennessee stock and their speech was difficult for any of us. They were tall and knotty. Dawson Major was a model boy; Dawson Minor, fifteen, was of a very different sort. He had a square, uncheering face. His eyes weighed appraisingly, even distrustfully, everything that was said to him. There was an insolence and a suggestion of violence under his control.
After lunch the students were granted a twenty-five minute break in the day's routine during which we were permitted to return to our rooms. We entered Room 7 to discover Dawson Minor standing in tense fury before our house mother, Miss Cunningham, who was unpacking his suitcase. He had not foreseen this procedure. Most boys have secrets—secret treasures —that are not to be revealed to the prying adult: fossil shells, a faded admission card to the St. Louis World’s Fair, pages torn from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue displaying unobtainable delights in shotguns or Brownie cameras, a dog-eared copy of My Forty Years as a Wild Animal Trainer—fetishes for comfort in a dark hour. "Dawson Minor, these are your roommates. This is Smith Sextus and this is Wilkins. We all wish they were better students, don't we? But they seem to teach things differently in America. I suppose that's because it's a new country. And this is Wilder Minor. He's only been here a fortnight and we hope he'll learn our ways.—You may sit down, you other boys. —Now let's see what your dear mother has sent. I hope she read carefully the list of recommendations . . . American mothers seem to have their own ideas. I don't know why that is. Oh, dear me, I find only five undergarments; and I see only five pairs of stockings . . . There's been a good deal of mending here, hasn't there? . . . I hope they hold together in the laundry. . . . Collars, yes. Shorts for games. Singlets.—Bless my soul, what are these? Look, boys,—beads ! Really, Dawson Minor, at the Boys' School we don't play with beads. Beads! I think you’ll outgrow them soon. Ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Miss Cunningham had managed in a very short time to disparage his mother and his native land, to expose his poverty, to cast doubt on his manliness and to violate a sanctuary in his heart. The prayer beads were a gift from his amah at a leave-taking of all but unbearable pain.
"Why, they're Chinese! Are you sure they're clean? One can never be too careful. You must know that we have very little to do with the Chinese at this school, Dawson Minor. All of us—and all of your parents, except Wilder Minor's—are here to help the Chinese, to show them the Truth and the Way, but . . ."
And so on.
Many boys and girls of that age, all over the world, go through hell a part of the time in their relations with adults, another part of the time in their relation with their coevals. Hell.
The moment after Miss Cunningham left the room Dawson Minor went to the window, overlooking the large square that served for recreation between classes. It was enclosed on three sides by the main building of the school,—classrooms, assembly hall, dining room and kitchen on the first floor; dormitories, linen rooms, and so on, on the second. Opposite our window the square was bounded by a high white-washed stone-and-rubble wall; beyond the wall the ground rose toward the Girls' School and the mountains. Standing at the window Dawson Minor could see at his right the great entrance gate. Without turning his head he asked, "Is that big door locked at night?"
"Yes."
"Did any of you ever get over the wall?" None of us answered. "Is there some other door you can get out of at night?"
Wilkins asked, "Where would you go?"
"To town."
"Even in the day you're not allowed to go to town. Even on exeat days you're not allowed to go farther than the playing fields."
"You don't know anybody that ever went to town at night?" The idea was so preposterous that we didn't even shake our heads. He continued addressing Wilkins. "How long have you been at this school?"
"Three years."
"You don't know anybody who got out at night?"
Wilkins was so intimidated that his voice cracked. "My first year a boy was caned for even going downstairs at night. In front of the whole school. "
"How caned?" Wilkins leaned over and made a gesture of lowering his trousers.
"What was he doing downstairs?"
"He tried to get in the kitchen."
"Don't you get enough to eat here? "
We all nodded slowly and gravely. Again Wilkins piped up. "He said he had to have a lot of treacle and sulphur. He had worms."
Dawson Minor's eyes kept examining the room. "What time do they turn the lights out?"
"Nine-thirty."
"Do the masters walk up and down at night and look in the rooms?"
"There's a master on duty; he sleeps in the room down there. They change every week. Some masters try to catch you. You get a demerit even if you whisper."
Again Dawson Minor strolled to the window, his hands in his pockets, whistling. (Students received two demerits for whistling indoors, four for putting their hands in their pockets.) He said slowly and chillingly: "Did you ever hear of people that walk in their sleep? I walk in my sleep. When I was at the Kuling School I walked in my sleep a lot."
Smith Sextus who had listened to this talk with growing resentment declared belligerently, "You didn't go to the Kuling School."
"Yes, I did. A business man in Nanking had a kid who had fits. He paid my father to send me to the Kuling School with him to watch him when he was sick. I went there two years."
The school for boys at Kuling was a very different institution from ours at Chefoo. It was situated at a fashionable summer resort in the hills far from the coast. The cost of board and tuition was said to be ten times higher than ours. The majority of the students were American, drawn from the homes of diplomats, oil men, and import-export men. Most of the students were being prepared for entrance into American universities. Religious exercises were limited to one hour on Sunday. Athletic games were properly coached to resemble struggles to the death. Very little was known about it at Chefoo. It was thought to be worldly, godless, and invested with glamour.
Smith Sextus returned to the attack with one more sneer.
"Why would you want to go into the city at night?"
Dawson Minor was at his best under challenge. A great actor. He turned, took his time, and replied coolly, "Why, to make money, of course".
A Tennessee wildcat.
All the boys—to a varying extent—waged an unremitting war against the masters, and vice versa. Because we were all, in both camps, of English or Scottish stock, the contest turned on the burning issues of FAIR PLAY,—the gift to civilization of our race. But fair play is not as self-evident a code of behavior as it is generally believed to be. Justice, Honor, and Conscience may be implanted by God in every human being, but they are certainly interpreted, shaped and trimmed differently by environment, social class, private interest, and individual condition. Adolescents develop a fanatical idea of what is "fair". Adults, whom experience has taught that this ideal is at best an exhausting accommodation, have the authority to impose their convenient interpretations on the young. In short ALL ADULTS CHEAT. The result is that all adolescents brood over their wrongs, arm themselves for resistance, and seize every opportunity for retaliatory "foul play". Foul play is permissible to victims of foul play. Most boys are able to estimate quickly how far another boy has progressed in his accommodation to the unfairness of adults—including one’s parents. It was soon obvious to us that Dawson Minor was a seasoned veteran in that unremitting war.
In the limited time that was accorded us for desultory conversation the American boys tended to associate together. Dawson Minor let the conversation flow about him unheeding. We Americans were deeply engaged in the matter as to where we were to go to college "in the states". It was all settled that Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to go to Oberlin College; others were to go to Berea, to Claremont; Dawson Major was to attend the college and divinity school from which his father had graduated; Harry Luce and I were to go to Yale. For several weeks Dawson Minor behaved with the circumspection proper in a new boy. Because of those deficiencies I have mentioned he was put back into the lowest forms in certain subjects. He was brilliant in English composition and spelling, in "Bible", and "athletics", in arithmetic (he even mastered quickly those tormenting problems in pounds, shillings, and pence); yet he calculated to a nicety the degree of dullness that became his situation. He avoided association with his important older brother. He made a favorable impression. He afforded happy opportunities for the masters to score off him. In Room 7 he proved to be a fairly companionable roommate. He took no undue advantage of his seniority. During the limited free time accorded to us we generally found him lying on his bed studying ("boning up on") Latin and Greek. He took little part in our excited talk about games or food or the unfairness of masters or the cost and quality of the products at the school's candy store or "tuck shop". We were puppies; he was a huge, indifferent, unsmiling mastiff. We were never able to forget for long, however, that first alarming conversation. From time to time, with apparent casualness, he asked us about our homes, our proficiency in Chinese, what we planned to do when we left Chefoo. We knew well that everything he said and did was related to some plan, some Grand Plan.
For several weeks I was the only one in the room who was aware that he prowled at night. Later I learned, from him, the stages in his campaign. He studied the behavior and habits of the successive masters on night duty. He satisfied himself that none of them ever turned a flashlight on the sleeping students after ten-thirty. He went downstairs several nights a week as practice runs. The next problem that faced him was that of external doors and windows. The masters and all who had charge of us had tea—that unalterable, sacred institution—at four-thirty. We had supper at six-thirty. We came in from games or recreation at five-thirty. Dawson Minor found ways of returning to the main building at five. It was then that, ever so casually, he examined the windows and shutters in the long assembly room, in the classrooms, in the piano practice room, in the tuck shop. The building was old and aged by extreme alternations of humid heat and bitter cold. It has been often said that to the impassioned will nothing is impossible. It stimulates the imagination, nourishes both audacity and patience, and sustains endurance. In the gardener'’ and caretakers' shed (tents and chairs for prize-giving day, wheelchairs for invalids, old cricket bats and wickets) he found a screw-driver. He found a strong wrench that could twist eroded latches. He strolled into forbidden territory, into the Headmaster's office, the faculty’s cloakroom, the ladies' sittingroom: windows, shutters, latches, and locks.
By October 15 he had found—or rendered practicable—three avenues of egress and ingress.
One night in early November he spent three hours in the native city of Chefoo. He repeated the visit a week later. Thoughtfully considered, these were notable achievements. The next step was to make money; but, first there was something else he must do.
He must tell someone about it.
Men do not climb the Himalayas or discover the source of the Nile for their own private pleasure or even for the benefit of mankind. In human life the reward conferred upon feats of daring and ingenuity is the admiration of their fellow men: its name is Glory. Dawson Minor felt a great need for an audience of at least one.
His eyes rested speculatively on his roommates. We were a sorry lot. We were anxiously law-abiding, meek, and indubitably "good". No adventurer would dream of confiding in Wilkins. Nor in Smith Sextus, who detested Dawson Minor. There remained Wilder Minor, but Wilder Minor was light-minded; he enjoyed everything; he thought everything was funny. There was the danger that Wilder Minor might not be impressed.
In the meantime I had contrived too—though less ambitiously—to leave the bounds of our compound and to "go to China". On several afternoons a week we were all required to take part in compulsory athletics, cricket or soccer; on Wednesday afternoons, however, we were permitted to engage in some exercise of our choosing, tennis, running, jumping, swimming in season, or "rounders". I put in a request to pursue cross-country running. This privilege was open only to older boys of proven reliability, but it was accorded to me, probably because of my father’s position. I gave my solemn promise not to linger in the villages, not to fall into conversation with the "natives", not to touch the offerings on the graves,—simply to complete the three-mile course and return to the school. This was delightful. On leaving the great gate of our quadrangle one turned left, ascended the slope, passed the tennis courts, passed the high walls surrounding the Girls' School, and reached the country road that ran level under the mountain. It ran through intensively cultivated fields and past farmhouses—every farmhouse is a family village; above all, it ran among many graves. These were upright inscribed slabs, graceful stelae. At the base of many of them were small altars or thrones, some of them in the shape of primitive houses surrounded by offerings in bright colored paper and festooned with streamers invoking the dead. The seacoast of Shantung is almost treeless, but at the mile-and-a-half turn-around point of my course was a fine grove of sycamores and gingko trees enclosing a semicircle of noble tombs. This I called the Grove of the Ancestors. Long distance running has little resemblance to the shorter heats; it is solitary and ruminative. Already at that age I had the notion that I would be a writer. It is well known that writers require long stretches of time alone,—to think. I thought throughout the entire course, but I thought best in the Grove.
One afternoon I was resting there, sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. I was not even thinking, for I had fallen asleep. I woke abruptly to find Dawson Minor sitting opposite me.
"Oh!—Hello!!" I said.
"Hello!"
"Did you get permission for cross-country?"
"I’m supposed to be at hurdles."
This was the first of many conversations in the Grove and it was there that I first became aware of Dawson Minor's grin. In the School he seldom smiled and then only in a superior removed way. Here—particularly when he had something outrageous to say or when, as on this occasion, he knew that he was not wanted—he resorted to a broad grimace. At first it seemed to have nothing behind it except brazen impertinence. I wrote in my journal that it was like the reflection of a winter sun on a sheet of polished tin. I was to understand later that it was a mask to conceal despair. We had no liking for one another but each saw in the other someone to contend with, to explore,—like dogs of different breeds.
We sat in silence.
Presently an elderly man entered the Grove. He bowed to us gravely, his hands clasped within the sleeves of his jacket. Dawson Minor rose—as any Chinese boy would do in the presence of a senior—and saluted him with great propriety. They held a long conversation. The old man seemed to be explaining the inscription on the central monument. When he had finished, Dawson Minor folded his hands; lowered his head several times, then, raising it, declaimed in a high singsong nasal voice what must surely have been a prayer. The old man took formal leave of us and returned to his village.
"What was that, Pepper?" (By this time we had acquired nicknames. Dawson Minor had introduced from American slang the word "pep", which led to his being called "Pepper". I was called Towser.)
"Whenever any 'foreign devils' come here, the village sends someone to keep an eye on them. A few years ago some boys from the School kicked up an awful mess here. "
"Was that a prayer you said?"
"Sort of."
"Who taught it to you?"
"My amah."
Silence. The grimace.
"The same amah that gave you the beads?"
"Yes."
"What was her name?"
"Go Po."
"Do you . . . do you believe in it?"
He shrugged his shoulders, looked about a moment and then said to me with the greatest directness, "Everything Chinese is good; everything American and English is sickening."
I rose, grunted something, shook my feet preparatory to running, and started toward the road.
"What did you say?" he asked sharply.
"Think what you like. Say what you like, Pepper. But remember this: I'm not eight years old. Don't talk to me like I was.—It's late. You'd better run back the short way by the bathhouse."
looked back at him. The grin had disappeared from his face. He was staring at me with a sort of fierceness, struggling with himself. Finally he said, with a stammer in his excitement,
"Last . . . last night I was three hours in the city . . . and that was the third time."
“Dawson, you’re crazy as a coot. Why do you do it? You'll get caught and sent home."
The joyless grin returned in strength and he dashed past me down the hill.
We exchanged few words in Room 7. Wilkins and Smith Sextus were a roomful in themselves. One morning at the washstands Wilkins whispered to me, "I think Dawson has been walking in his sleep a lot."
"Well, if I were you, I'd keep it under my hat, Beanie. If any trouble comes, you don't want to be a part of it. The less you say about it, the better off you'll be."
Fortunately, Smith Sextus slept and snored through everything.
The following Wednesday Dawson Minor was sitting in the Grove of the Ancestors when I arrived.
"Have you been making any money, Pepper?" No answer. "What is it,—opium? . . . Gambling? . . . Fortune-telling? . . . I know what it is! It's snake-oil medicine. You're going to get found out and sent home. I don't know about your father and mother, but most fathers and mothers would just about die. And we up in our room are going to get into a mess of trouble too. 'Trees' [our Headmaster Dr. MacCartney] will call us into his office and ask us a thousand questions. Maybe I'll be sent home because I didn't run and tell him that you walked in your sleep. I don't want to know anything. I don't want to tell a pack of lies."
My tirade made Pepper very happy. To him this was the first whiff of glory.
"What are you so crazy about money for?"
"If you have money, you can do anything."
I rose and shook my shoes. "Like what?" I asked.
"Like going to Harvard," he said passionately. "Like curing leprosy. Like . . . like preventing those floods. What's the matter with you? Can't you see that money can do anything?"
"You're crazy," I said. "You're crazy as a mad dog."
I started down the hill.

Lawrence, D.H. Works.
1911
Lawrence, D.H. The white peacock. (London : Heinemann, 1911).
Chap. 6
The men talked on the most peculiar subjects: there was a bitter discussion as to whether London is or is not a seaport—the matter was thrashed out with heat; then an embryo artist set the room ablaze by declaring there were only three colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the rest were not colours, they were mixtures: this amounted almost to atheism and one man asked the artist to dare to declare that his brown breeches were not a colour, which the artist did, and almost had to fight for it; next they came to strength, and George won a bet of five shillings, by lifting a piano; then they settled down, and talked sex, sotto voce, one man giving startling accounts of Japanese and Chinese prostitutes in Liverpool.
Chap. 7
He was twenty-nine years old; had been a soldier in China for five years, was now farming his father's farm at Papplewick, where Emily was schoolmistress. He had been at home eighteen months.
Chap. 9
The yellow shaded lamp shone softly over the table, where Christmas roses spread wide open among some dark-coloured leaves; where the china and silver and the coloured dishes shone delightfully.

1912
Lawrence, D.H. The trespasser. (London : Duckworth & Co., 1912).
Chap. 1
On the mantlepiece were white lustres, and a small soapstone Buddha from China, grey, impassive, locked in his renunciation. Besides these, two tablets of translucent stone beautifully clouded with rose and blood, and carved with Chinese symbols; then a litter of mementoes, rock-crystals, and shells and scraps of seaweed.
Chap. 19
It was dark and cumbered with views, cheap china ornaments, and toys. He asked for a telegraph form.

1913
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and lovers. (London : Duckworth & Co., 1913).
Chap. 12
There was a lot of room at the oval table; the china of dark blue willow-pattern looked pretty on the glossy cloth.

1914
Lawrence, D.H. The Prussian officer and other stories. (London : W. Heinemann, 1914).
The thorn in the flesh.
She picked it up, and stood with the glittering china and silver before her, impassive, waiting for his reply.

1915
Lawrence, D.H. The rainbow. (New York, N.Y. : Viking, 1915).
Chap. 11
He yielded her the child, that smelt of babies. But it had such blue, wide, china blue eyes, and it laughed so oddly, with such a taking grimace, Ursula loved it.
Chap. 15
She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by Chinese and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops.

1920
Lawrence, D.H. Women in love. (New York, N.Y. : Thomas Seltzer, 1920).
Chap. 8
He had taken a Chinese drawing of geese from the boudoir, and was copying it, with much skill and vividness…
One gets more of China, copying this picture, than reading all the books.

1921
Lawrence, D.H. Sea and Sardinia. (New York, N.Y. : Thomas Seltzer, 1921).
Chap. 2
"Oh dear! Why it isn't as big as a china-closet. However will you get in!" cries the American girl.

1922
Lawrence, D.H. Aaron's rod. (London : Heinemann, 1922).
Chap. 6
Jim was twisting in his chair, and looking like a Chinese dragon, diabolical.
Chap. 9
I can't do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether.
Chap. 18
And he cast it over in his mind. He wanted her--ha, didn't he! But the husband sat there, like a soap- stone Chinese monkey, greyish-green.

1922 Lawrence, D.H. England, my England. (New York, N.Y. : T. Seltzer, 1922). [Short stories geschrieben zwischen 1913-1921].
The blind man.
The white cloth glistened and dropped its heavy, pointed lace corners almost to the carpet, the china was old and handsome, creamy-yellow, with a blotched pattern of harsh red and deep blue, the cups large and bell-shaped, the teapot gallant.

1922
Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the unconscious. (New York, N.Y. : Thomas Seltzer, 1922).
Foreword
And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story…
Just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe…

1923
Lawrence, D.H. Bat. In : Lawrence, D.H. Birds, beasts and flowers : poems. (London : Martin Secker, 1923).
In China the bat is symbol for happiness.
Not for me!

1923
Lawrence, D.H. Bibbles : a poem. In : Lawrence, D.H. Birds, beasts and flowers : poems. (London : Martin Secker, 1923).
All your wrinkled miserere Chinese black little face beaming
And your black little body bouncing and wriggling…
Yet you're so nice,
So quick, like a little black dragon…
And turning the day suddenly into a black tornado of joie de vivre, Chinese dragon…
Left in the dust behind like a dust-ball tearing along
Coming up on fierce little legs, tearing fast to catch up,
A real little dust-pig, ears almost blown away,
And black eyes bulging bright in a dust-mask
Chinese-dragon-wrinkled, with a pink mouth grinning,
Under jaw shoved out
And white teeth showing in your dragon-grin as you race,
You split-face,
Like a trundling projectile swiftly whirling up…

1928
Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley's lover. (Firenze : Tipografia Giuntina, 1928).
Chap. 10
"Yes, I'm glad I went, and such a quaint dear cheeky baby, Clifford," said Connie. "It's got hair just like spider-webs, and bright orange, and the oddest, cheekiest, pale-blue china eyes.

1935
Lawrence, D.H. The spirit of place. (London : W. Heinemann, 1935).
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/lawrence/dhlch01.htm.
Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars : call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produces not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.

Fritz Max Weiss ist Konsul der deutschen Konsulate in Chongqing und Chengdu.

Albert Menzo Dunlap ist als Arzt mit seiner Frau Eva Wyman Dunlap in Shanghai. Er ist Head of Department of Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat Diseases.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Works.
1911
Whitehead, Alfred North. An introduction to mathematics. (London : Williams and Norgate, 1911).
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Whitehead%2c%20Alfred%20North%2c%201861-1947.
Meanwhile from the earliest epoch (2634 B.C.) the Chinese had utilized the characteristic property of the compass needle, but do not seem to have connected it with any theoretical ideas. The really profound changes in human life all have their ultimate origin in knowledge pursued for its own sake. The use of the compass was not introduced into Europe till the end of the twelfth century A.D., more than 3000 years after its first use in China.

1917
Whitehead, Alfred North. The organisation of thought : educational and scientific. (London : Williams and Norgate, 1917).
https://archive.org/stream/organisationofth00whit/organisationofth00whit_djvu.txt.
At the present time — interrupted for the moment by the war — a great revolution in the art of painting is in progress throughout the world. Its centres are Paris and Italy and London and Munich, and its origin in the far east, in China and Japan…

Whitehead, Alfred North. An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919).
https://archive.org/details/enquiryconcernpr00whitrich.
When Dr Johnson surveyed mankind from China to Peru, he did it from Pump Court in London at a certain date…

1920
Whitehead, Alfred North. The concept of nature. (Cambridge, The University Press, 1920). [The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919].
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Whitehead%2c%20Alfred%20North%2c%201861-1947.
The series may start with any arbitrarily assumed duration of any temporal extension, but in descending the series the temporal extension progressively contracts and the successive
durations are packed one within the other like the nest of boxes of a Chinese toy…
Such a set, as you will remember, has the properties of the Chinese toy which is a nest of
boxes, one within the other, with the difference that the toy has a smallest box, while the abstractive class has neither a smallest event nor does it converge to a limiting event which is not a member of the set.

1926
Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the making. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1926). [Tarner lectures delivered in Trinity College, November, 1919].
http://alfrednorthwhitehead.wwwhubs.com/ritm1.htm.
When Christianity had established itself throughout the Roman Empire and its neighbourhood, there were before the world two main rational religions, Buddhism and Christianity. There were, of course, many rivals to both of them in their respective regions; but if we have regard to clarity of idea, generality of thought, moral respectability, survival power, and width of extension over the world, then for their combination of all these qualities these religions stood out beyond their competitors. Later their position was challenged by the Mahometans. But even today, the two Catholic religions of civilization are Christianity and Buddhism, and if we are to judge by the comparison of their position now with what it has been both of them are in decay. They have lost their ancient hold upon the world…
Both the great religions, Christianity and Buddhism, have their separate set of dogmas which deal with this great question. It is in respect to the problem of evil that one great divergence between them exists. Buddhism finds evil essential in the very nature of the world of physical and emotional experience. The wisdom which it inculcates is, therefore, so to conduct life as to gain a release from the individual personality which is the vehicle for such experience. The Gospel which it preaches is the method by which this release can be obtained…
One metaphysical fact about the nature of things which is presupposes is that this release is not to be obtained by mere physical death. Buddhism is the most colossal example in history of applied metaphysics…
Christianity took the opposite road. It has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysic generating a religion…
It is difficult to develop Buddhism, because Buddhism starts with a clear metaphysical notion and with the doctrines which flow from it…
The Buddha left a tremendous doctrine. The historical facts about him are subsidiary to the doctrine…
Christianity, like Buddhism, preaches a doctrine of escape. It proclaims a doctrine life is placed on a finer level. It overcomes evil with good. Buddhism makes itself probable by referring to its metaphysical theory. Christianity makes itself probable by referring to supreme religious moments in history.
Thus in respect to this crucial question of evil, Buddhism and Christianity are in entirely different attitudes in respect to doctrines. Buddhism starts with the elucidatory dogmas; Christianity starts with the elucidatory facts…
Buddhism and Christianity find their origins respectively in two inspired moments of history: the life of the Buddha, and the life of Christ. The Buddha gave his doctrine to enlighten the world. Christ gave his life. It is for Christians to discern the doctrine. Perhaps in the end the most valuable part of the doctrine of the Buddha is its interpretation of his life…
The divergence in the expression of dogmas is most clearly shown in the two traditions of Buddhism and Christianity…
There are close analogies between the two religions. In both there is, in some sense, a saviour Christ in the one, and the Buddha in the other…
To put it briefly, Buddhism, on the whole, discourages the sense of active personality, whereas Christianity encourages it…
If Europe, after the Greek period, had been subject to the Buddhist religion, the change of philosophical climate would have been in the other direction…
Thus, according to prevalent Western notions, the moral aims of Buddhism are directed to altering the first principles of metaphysics…
The absolute idealism, so influential in Europe and America during the last third of the nineteenth century, and still powerful notwithstanding the reaction from it, was undoubtedly a reaction towards Buddhistic metaphysics on the part of the Western mentality…
The decay of Christianity and Buddhism, as determinative influences in modern thought, is partly due to the fact that each religion has unduly sheltered itself from the other…

So to-day it is not France which goes to heaven, but individual Frenchmen; and it is not China which attains nirvana, but Chinamen…
In India and China the growth of a world-consciousness was different in its details, but in its essence depended on the same factors. Individuals were disengaged from their immediate social setting in ways which promoted thought…
Throughout India and China religions thought, so far as it has been interpreted in precise form, disclaims the intuition of any ultimate personality substantial to the universe. This is true for Confucian philosophy. There may be personal embodiments, but the substratum is impersonal…

1926
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the modern world. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1926).
http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&id=L6kZPLbCrScC&q=china#v=snippet&q=china&f=false.
There have been great civilisations in which the peculiar balance of mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands of years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently devoting their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and to the population concerned, China forms the largest volume of civilization which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet Yhinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in science…
We quickly find that the Western peoples exhibit on a colossal scale a peculiarity which is popularly supposed to be more especially characteristic of the Chinese. Surprise is often expressed that a Chinaman can be of two religions, a Confucian for some occasions and a Buddhist for other occasions. Whether this is true of China I do not know ; nor do I knew whether, if true, these two attitudes are really inconsistent…

1929
Whitehead, Alfred North. The function of reason. (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1929). [Louis Clark Vanuxem Foundation Lectures delivered at Princeton University, 1929].
https://archive.org/details/functionofreason031865mbp.
The ascription of the modern phase of the speculative Reason wholly to the Greeks, is an exaggeration. The great Asiatic civilizations, Indian and Chinese, also produced variants of the same method…

1929
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and reality : an essay in ecomology. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1929). [Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburg 1927-1928].
https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndReality.
In monistic philoso-
phies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also
equivalently termed 'The Absolute.' In such monistic schemes, the ulti-
mate is illegitimately allowed a final, 'eminent' reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought…

1933
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of ideas. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1933).
http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&id=UZeJuLvNq80C&q=china#v=snippet&q=china&f=false.
The mystical religion which most whole-heartedly adopts this attitude is Buddhism.
A recourse to observation at once discloses the importance of the doctrine of Malthus. China and India both afford examples of societies which illustrage his law…
Now India and China are instances of civilized societies which for a long period in their later history maintained themselves with arrested technology and with fixed geographical location…
The history of civilization in the Old World is the history of the internal development of the four continental regions fringing Asia, namely China, India, the Near East, and Europe…
China and India survived, with populations blighted by hopeless poverty…
European life began to approach the standards of the Near East and of China so far as concerned technology and general commercial activities…
For the purpose of understanding how it happened that European life escaped the restrictions which finally bound China, India, and The Near East, it is important to recapture the attitude towards Commerce prevalent in various epochs…
It must be remembered that China and Bagdad, at the height of their prosperity, eshibited forms of human life in many ways more gracious than our own…
There is ample evidence of active Commerce in China and the Near East in ancient times…
Three thousand years ago the importance of credit would have been no news either in Mesopotamia or in China. Also there was foreign trade beyond the boundaries of the Near East. There are evidences of ocean-borne trade between India and Egypt, perhaps even between China and Egypt, with Ceylon as an intermediary. Also Central Asia was nearing its last phase of prosperity before it faded out into desert. It seems to have provided the route for a flourishing overland trade between China and the Near East…
Modern Europe and America have derived their civilization from the races whose countries border the Eastern Mediterranean. In the earlier chapters, Greece and Palestine were the regions providing the initial formulations of the ideas concerning the essence of human nature. When we examine the history of science, to these two countries we must add Egypt. These three countries are the direct ancestors of our modern civilization. Of course there is a long tale of civilization behind them, Mesopotamia, Crete, Phoenicia, and India, China, also conbributed…
Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America…
The details of these codes are relative to the social circumstances of the immediate environment – life at a certain date on ‘the fertile fringe’ of the Arabian desert, life on the lower slopes of the Himalayan Mountains, life on the plains of China, or on the plains of India, life on the delta of some great river…

Baring, Maurice. The blue rose. In : Baring, Maurice. The blue rose fairy book. (New York, N.Y. : Dodd, Mead and Co. 1911).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36008/36008-h/36008-h.htm.
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/58871/.
Once upon a time there lived in China a wise Emperor, whose daughter was remarkable for her perfect beauty. Her feet were the smallest in the world; her eyes were long and slanting, and as bright as brown onyxes, and when you heard her laugh it was like listening to a tinkling stream, or to the chimes of a silver bell. Moreover, the Emperor's daughter was as wise as she was beautiful, and she chanted the verse of the great poets better than any one in the land. The Emperor was old in years; his son was married and had begotten a son; he was, therefore, quite happy about the succession to the throne, but he wished before he died to see his daughter wedded to some one who should be worthy of her.
Many suitors presented themselves at the palace, as soon as it became known that the Emperor desired a son-in-law, but when they reached the palace, they were met by the Lord Chamberlain, who told them the Emperor had decided that only the man who found and brought back the Blue Rose should marry his daughter. The suitors were much puzzled by this order. What was the Blue Rose, and where was it to be found? In all a hundred and fifty suitors had presented themselves, and out of these, fifty at once put away from them all thought of winning the hand of the Emperor's daughter, since they considered the condition imposed to be absurd.
The other hundred set about trying to find the Blue Rose. One of them--his name was Ti-Fun-Ti, he was a merchant and immensely rich--went at once to the largest shop in the town and said to the shopkeeper: "I want a blue rose, the best you have."
The shopkeeper, with many apologies, explained that he did not stock blue roses. He had red roses in profusion, white, pink, and yellow roses, but no blue rose. There had hitherto been no demand for the article.
"Well," said Ti-Fun-Ti, "you must get one for me. I do not mind how much money it costs, but I must have a blue rose."
The shopkeeper said he would do his best, but he feared it would be an expensive article and difficult to procure.
Another of the suitors, whose name I have forgotten, was a warrior and extremely brave; he mounted his horse, and taking with him a hundred archers and a thousand horsemen he marched into the territory of the King of Five Rivers, whom he knew to be the richest king in the world and the possessor of the rarest treasures, and demanded of him the Blue Rose, threatening him with a terrible doom should he be reluctant to give it up.
The King of the Five Rivers, who disliked soldiers, and had a horror of noise, violence, and every kind of fuss (his bodyguard was armed solely with fans and sunshades), rose from the cushions on which he was lying when the demand was made, and, tinkling a small bell, said to the servant who straightway appeared, "Fetch me the Blue Rose."
The servant retired and returned presently bearing on a silken cushion a large sapphire which was carved so as to imitate a full-blown rose with all its petals.
"This," said the King of the Five Rivers, "is the Blue Rose. You are welcome to it."
The warrior took it, and after making brief, soldier-like thanks, he went straight back to the Emperor's palace, saying that he had lost no time in finding the Blue Rose. He was ushered into the presence of the Emperor, who as soon as he heard the warrior's story and saw the Blue Rose which had been brought, sent for his daughter and said to her: "This intrepid warrior has brought you what he claims to be the Blue Rose. Has he accomplished the quest?"
The Princess took the precious object in her hands, and after examining it for a moment, said: "This is not a rose at all. It is a sapphire; I have no need of precious stones." And she returned the stone to the warrior, with many elegantly-expressed thanks. And the warrior went away in discomfiture.
When Ti-Fun-Ti, the merchant, heard of the warrior's failure, he was all the more anxious to win the prize. He sought the shopkeeper and said to him: "Have you got me the Blue Rose? I trust you have; because if not, I shall most assuredly be the means of your death. My brother-in-law is chief magistrate, and I am allied by marriage to all the chief officials in the kingdom."
The shopkeeper turned pale and said: "Sir, give me three days, and I will procure you the Blue Rose without fail." The merchant granted him the three days and went away. Now the shopkeeper was at his wit's end as to what to do, for he knew well there was no such thing as a blue rose. For two days he did nothing but moan and wring his hands, and on the third day he went to his wife and said: "Wife, we are ruined!"
But his wife, who was a sensible woman, said: "Nonsense! If there is no such thing as a blue rose we must make one. Go to the apothecary and ask him for a strong dye which will change a white rose into a blue one."
So the shopkeeper went to the apothecary and asked him for a dye, and the chemist gave him a bottle of red liquid, telling him to pick a white rose and to dip its stalk into the liquid and the rose would turn blue. The shopkeeper did as he was told; the rose turned into a beautiful blue and the shopkeeper took it to the merchant, who at once went with it to the palace, saying that he had found the Blue Rose.
He was ushered into the presence of the Emperor, who as soon as he saw the blue rose sent for his daughter and said to her: "This wealthy merchant has brought you what he claims to be the Blue Rose. Has he accomplished the quest?"
The Princess took the flower in her hands, and after examining it for a moment said: "This is a white rose; its stalk has been dipped in a poisonous dye and it has turned blue. Were a butterfly to settle upon it, it would die of the potent fume. Take it back. I have no need of a dyed rose." And she returned it to the merchant with many elegantly-expressed thanks.
The other ninety-eight suitors all sought in various ways for the Blue Rose. Some of them travelled all over the world seeking it; some of them sought the aid of wizards and astrologers, and one did not hesitate to invoke the help of the dwarfs that live underground. But all of them, whether they travelled in far countries, or took counsel with wizards and demons, or sat pondering in lonely places, failed to find the Blue Rose.
At last they all abandoned the quest except the Lord Chief Justice, who was the most skilful lawyer and statesman in the country. After thinking over the matter for several months, he sent for the most skilful artist in the country and said to him: "Make me a china cup. Let it be milk-white in colour and perfect in shape, and paint on it a rose, a blue rose."
The artist made obeisance and withdrew, and worked for two months at the Lord Chief Justice's cup. In two months' time it was finished, and the world has never seen such a beautiful cup, so perfect in symmetry, so delicate in texture, and the rose on it, the blue rose, was a living flower, picked in fairyland and floating on the rare milky surface of the porcelain. When the Lord Chief Justice saw it he gasped with surprise and pleasure, for he was a great lover of porcelain, and never in his life had he seen such a piece. He said to himself: "Without doubt the Blue Rose is here on this cup, and nowhere else."
So, after handsomely rewarding the artist, he went to the Emperor's palace and said that he had brought the Blue Rose. He was ushered into the Emperor's presence, who as he saw the cup sent for his daughter and said to her: "This eminent lawyer has brought you what he claims to be the Blue Rose. Has he accomplished the quest?"
The Princess took the bowl in her hands, and after examining it for a moment, said: "This bowl is the most beautiful piece of china I have ever seen. If you are kind enough to let me keep it I will put it aside until I receive the blue rose. For so beautiful is it that no other flower is worthy to be put in it except the Blue Rose."
The Lord Chief Justice thanked the Princess for accepting the bowl with many elegantly-turned phrases, and he went away in discomfiture.
After this there was no one in the whole country who ventured on the quest of the Blue Rose. It happened that not long after the Lord Chief Justice's attempt, a strolling minstrel visited the kingdom of the Emperor. One evening he was playing his one-stringed instrument outside a dark wall. It was a summer's evening, and the sun had sunk in a glory of dusty gold, and in the violet twilight one or two stars were twinkling like spear-heads. There was an incessant noise made by the croaking of frogs and the chatter of grasshoppers. The minstrel was singing a short song over and over again to a monotonous tune. The sense of it was something like this:--
"I watched beside the willow trees
The river, as the evening fell;
The twilight came and brought no breeze,
No dew, no water for the well,
"When from the tangled banks of grass,
A bird across the water flew,
And in the river's hard grey glass
I saw a flash of azure blue."
As he sang he heard a rustle on the wall, and looking up he saw a slight figure, white against the twilight, beckoning to him. He walked along under the wall until he came to a gate, and there some one was waiting for him, and he was gently led into the shadow of a dark cedar tree. In the twilight he saw two bright eyes looking at him, and he understood their message. In the twilight a thousand meaningless nothings were whispered in the light of the stars, and the hours fled swiftly. When the East began to grow light, the Princess (for it was she) said it was time to go.
"But," said the minstrel, "to-morrow I shall come to the palace and ask for your hand."
"Alas!" said the Princess, "I would that were possible, but my father has made a foolish condition that only he may wed me who finds the Blue Rose."
"That is simple," said the minstrel, "I will find it!" And they said good-night to each other.
The next morning the minstrel went to the palace, and on his way he picked a common white rose from a wayside garden. He was ushered into the Emperor's presence, who sent for his daughter and said to her: "This penniless minstrel has brought you what he claims to be the Blue Rose. Has he accomplished the quest?"
The Princess took the rose in her hands and said: "Yes, this is without doubt the Blue Rose."
But the Lord Chief Justice and all who were present respectfully pointed out that the rose was a common white rose and not a blue one, and the objection was with many forms and phrases conveyed to the Princess.
"I think the rose is blue," said the Princess. "It is, in fact, the Blue Rose. Perhaps you are all colour blind."
The Emperor, with whom the decision rested, decided that if the Princess thought the rose was blue, it was blue, for it was well known that her perception was more acute than that of any one else in the kingdom.
So the minstrel married the Princess, and they settled on the sea-coast in a little green house with a garden full of white roses, and they lived happily for ever afterwards. And the Emperor, knowing that his daughter had made a good match, died in peace.

Baring, Maurice. The Russian people. (London : Methuen, 1911).
https://archive.org/details/russianpeople017102mbp.
The Tartar invasion
A the same time that the Russians of the European Ukraine were engaged in an unremitting warfare with the tribes of the Steppes, the Polotsi, a new factor in the situation arose in the far eastern Steppes of Asia. This was the trek of the Tartars. The Tartars, who invaded Russia at the beginning of the thirteenth century, were Mongols, who came from the region of Chinese Tartary, south of Siberia, the Mongols being kindred in race to the Turks. They were subject to a Tartar race who ruled in the north of China ; they were nomads ; their manners and customs were the same as those of the Huns, the Scythians and Polotsi. In the first quarter of the thirteenth century a rising took place amongst the Mongols, and one of their Khans, Temuchin, developed an ambition to be a kind of superman; he established his independence, and reduced all the other Tartar and Mongol chiefs to subjection. Shortly after this, at a time when the Mongol warriors were gathered in hordes at the source of the River Amur, a prophet appeared and declared that Heaven had granted to Temuchin the empery of the whole world, and that henceforward Temuchin should be called Gengis-Khan, or the Great Khan. The news was received by the Mongols with joy, and the tribes of Asia, the Kirghiz, Southern Siberia, proclaimed their allegiance to him.
Gengis-Khan then refused to pay tribute to the King of the Tartar tribe, whose vassal he had hitherto been ; he invaded China, and in 1215 took Pekin. Then, leaving a certain number of his warriors in China, he turned homewards.
The Russians crossed the Dnieper (in 1224) and met the Mongol hordes at the River Kalka now Letza, in the Government of Ekateiinoslav. They fought bravely against the Mongols, but were defeated. After this battle, the Mongols turned their steps eastward, and disappeared as quickly as they had come. For six years nothing more was heard of them, and Gengis-Khan, after having made further conquests in the East, returned home and died in 1227.
His eldest son and successor, Oktai, put his nephew Batii at the head of 300,000 warriors, and bade him conquer the northern coast of the Caspian Sea and the countries beyond it. In 1237 Batii invaded Russia ; he took the town of Riazan, burnt Moscow, and in 1238 took Vladimir.
In 1240 he took Kiev and destroyed it, and put the inhabitants to the sword. The only town which escaped destruction at the hands of the Mongols was Novgorod. Batii, having made victorious raids in Poland, Hungary, Kroatia, Servia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, and Wallachia, returned to the banks of the Volga. He proclaimed himself khan and declared his suzerainty over Russia, the Taurus peninsula, the Caspian districts, and all the territory from the mouth of the Don to the Danube. Batii and the Mongols seemed satisfied with being masters of the Steppes of the south ; they did not attempt to establish themselves in the wooded regions of the north. Nor did they leave the Steppes, where their settlement was called "the Golden Horde" or abandon the nomad life, which suited them, to settle in the towns. Had they done in Russia what they did in India and Turkey, they might have been there until this day. Fortunately the climate of Russia damped any ambition of this kind. The Khans wished only to be suzerains at a distance ; they demanded tribute and homage from the Russian provinces ; the civil affairs of the kingdom were of no interest to them, and they wished in no way to interfere with them. The Russians therefore became the vassals of the Mongols. They were obliged to go to Asia to receive their investment from the heirs of Batii. They had also to support the presence in Russia of a kind of resident Mongol called Bashak, whose duty it was to levy taxes.
The Bashaks represented the Khans in Russia, and did what they pleased. They treated the Russians with contempt, as did all Mongols, even the merchants, and the tramps. The inevitable result was a moral degeneration amongst the Russian people. They forgot their pride or turned it into cunning, and in learning to deceive the Tartars they learnt to deceive one another. They exchanged the virtues of the strong for the expedients of the weak. And in growing accustomed to bribe the barbarians, they became greedy of gold and insensible to affront and shame. Their honour suffered. The only weapons of the Russian Princes were gifts, brides, and intrigue, and these they used freely. They intrigued one against the other, each one accusing the other to the Tartar Princes in order to increase his own power…

To finger gems, to assist at the services of the church, had been their principal distraction; hunting and falconry their only diversion ; and the ceremony with which they were surrounded had an almost Chinese complication. Peter the Great reformed this altogether. He " lost his
face " in the Chinese sense once and for all. He could not endure formality of any kind. His whole life long he aimed at living as cheaply and as simply as possible. His wife and his sister used to darn his socks, and his boots would be resoled again and again. In the morning he would wear a dressing-gown of Chinese nankin, and when he went out, a thick, long jacket of doth, which he disliked changing often...
The duties and scope of the Senate were wide, various, and comprehensive, and included the supervision of matters as widely different as the military service of the young nobles, Chinese and Persian trade, and the collection of the tax on salt...
Homer would still remain the greatest poet in the world, although only a dozen people knew Greek, and the absolute supremacy of
Sappho as a lyrist is not diminished by the fact that nine-tenths of the world have not read her at all, or have only read her in a translation. The 'stop-shorts' of the great age of Chinese poetry are believed to be unequalled, although few Europeans know Chinese...
Talk to a Frenchman who has learnt English, and not known it from his childhood, of the melody of Paradise Lost, and it is like talking
to a Chinaman of the melody of Beethoven, or to a European of the modulations of the tom-tom...
As far back as the time of the Russo-Chinese operations he stated, with regard to the occupation of Manchuria, that Russia was not in a fit state to carry on an aggressive policy...

Alfred North Whitehead and China : Sekundärliteratur
1965
Fang Dongmei [Fang Thomé] : The so-called freedom is to create incessantly. Both in man and in nature there is always something new and progressive which indicates the realities of both man and nature. The whole universe exhibits novelty and wonder all the time and everywhere, and there seems to be a high order to which it abides. So let's borrow the words from Whitehead, nature in essence is a 'creative advance'.
Yu Yih-hsien : Fang's philosophy is closely allied with Bergson's vitalism and Whitehead's philosophy of organism and is against materialistic mechanism.
(WhiA1)

1971
Wu, Joseph S. : Whitehead has offered not merely a synthesis within the Western tradition, but also attempted to include the cultural contributions of the East. Contemporary Chinese philosophers have respected Whitehead as one of the greatest speculative philosophers in the Western world. Romantic poetry has taught Whitehead that an adequate concept of nature can never be divorced from aesthetic values. This has led him into the saying that philosophy is akin to poetry. This is perhaps one of the major reasons that he is so respected by contemporary Chinese thinkers.
(WhiA28)

1974
Tong Lik Kuen [Tang Liquan] : Whitehead once admitted that his philosophy seemed closer to the Indian, or Chinese, way of thought than to the Western-Asiatic, or European, way of thinking. For Whitehead Being, the field of all existence, is in essence a field of creative activity. Creativity, not God, is the ultimate metaphysical principle. In Whitehead's cosmology God is the principle of concretion, functioning both as the reservoir of potentiality and as the coordinator of achievement, so the Tao of Heaven and Earth in the I Ching is what determines the field order of I, being the 'way' (tao) of its creative operations. Just as in Whitehead the variable and the permanent textures of Being are equally essential to the field character of Creativity, so in the I China I includes in its meaning both the changing (p'ien i) and the unchangeable (pu i).
Lying at the heart of Whitehead's ontology and cosmology is the idea of 'organic synthesis', which replaces both the Aristotelian primary substance and the concept of matter in scientific materialism. In so far as Whitehead is concerned, organic synthesis, which defines the real essence of Creativity, is basically what the field theory of Being is all about.
What are the ultimate principles or root-conditions of contextuality upon which organic synthesis depends ? Whitehead's answer is basically contained in this five-fold analysis :
1. Pure potentiality, which consists of the multiplicity of 'eternal objects' (the Platonic Forms) given in the 'primordial nature' of God, may be called the root-condition of character.
2. The Extensive Continuum, which forms the general system of relatedness of all eternal objects, may be called the root-condition of character.
3. Real Potentiality, belonging to the 'actual world' of past actual entities which in consummation are received into the 'consequent nature' of God, may be called the root-condition of heritage.
4. God, conceived both as the reservoir of potentiality (pure and real) and as the co-ordinator of achievement (through synthesis of his primordial and consequent natures), may be called the root-condition of concretion.
5. Actuality, which belongs to the 'living acts' of Creativity arising from the compulsion of power (what is the meaning of 'substance' for Whitehead) in the actual world, may be called the root-condition of agency.
According to Whitehead, objective or physical time has its origin in the temporalization of Creativity, that is, in the creative advance of actual entities.
The Whiteheadean idea of the extensive region finds its counterpart in the I Ching in the idea of 'wei' or 'position'. Just as in Whitehead the extensive region has a temporal as well as a spatial aspect, so 'wei' in the I Ching includes both the meaning of 'shih' or time and the meaning of 'fang wei' or 'wei' in the narrow sense, that is, spatial location or direction.
(WhiA29)

1978
Cheng Chung-ying : After becoming familiar with Whitehead's philosophy, particularly as embodied in Whitehead's book Process and Reality, many Chinese philosophers have made the suggestion that Whitehead's philosophy resembles Chinese philosophy to a great measure and therefore is highly comparable to Chinese philosophy. What the Chinese philosophers have in mind when they assess the resemblance between Chinese philosophy and Whitehead's philosophy is that Whitehead had developed a system based upon the fundamental notion of reality as a process of change which has always been the fundamental notion of Chinese philosophy, beginning with the I ching. Whitehead, even though he explicitly defines speculative philosophy as the attempt to frame a 'coherent, logical, necessary system of ideas' to 'interpret experience', his metaphysics of organism as a system of ideas should possess ontological significance of agency and efficacy and should form an important ingredient for the constitution of the world and life. Both, Whitehead's philosophy and Chinese philosophy have more than conceptual resemblance : both would agree that philosophy is real, not merely conceptual. The resemblance between Chinese philosophy and Whitehead's philosophy is not a matter of static comparison, but a matter of dynamic interaction.
Whitehead's position seems to approximate to the position which the great Neo-Confucianists from Chou Tun-I to Chu Hsi generally held. Specifically, Whitehead can be understood as reaching a position represented in the well-known Discourse on the Diagram of the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi T'u Shuo) as developed by Chou Tun-I and generally accepted by Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucianists. The organic unity among the Neo-Confucian categories we do not seem to find in Whitehead's system of creativity. It appears that all the Whiteheadian categories are given in confunction and there is no specific effort explicitly to demonstrate or to assess their interdependence.
(WhiA30)

1979
Julia Ching : Whitehead has developed his thinking somewhat in opposition to that of Thomas Aquinas. It is not incorrect to assert that Chu Hsi shares common ground with both, Aquinas and Whitehead, agreeing, with the former, that God is in come respects above change, while also insisting, with the latter, that God is immersed in change itself. A comparative study of Chu Hsi and Whitehead is especially appropriate and useful for several reasons. Whitehead was personally conscious of possible resemblances between his philosophy and that of China or East Asia – of which Chu remains an important representative. Chu Hsi and Whitehead shared a common interest in the world of nature – the starting-point in their respective philosophies. Each is a systematic thinker, proceeding from where he is in the direction of a totality, consciously constructing a metaphysical doctrine as a manner of inheriting critically from the entire legacy of tradition and of opening new horizons to the future. Each evolves a philosophy which bears striking resemblances in structure and content to that of the other.
The final summary of Whitehead's philosophical views on God and the World is especially presented in a series of antitheses in each of which a shift of meaning converts the opposition into a contrast. The intended effect is the emphasis on relational significance rather than underlying substance. And this is the effect of the ideographic Chinese language, where the absence of a proper copula has made of metaphorical suggestiveness a substitute for equations, thus enforcing what is known as the logic of correlative duality, in which the dialectical opposition of terms has been put to maximum use.
Chu Hsi's metaphysical model – as given in his commentaries on Chou Tun-yi's Diagram of the Great Ultimate – is much less determinate, and therefore much more ambiguous one, than Whitehead's. Where both man make use of a paradoxical language, Chu Hsi's remains much more symbolic, by its reference to a Diagram which is itself a symbolical structure, and Whitehead's tends to be more rationalistic, by its reference to ideas taken from modern physics, and by its concern for making God simultaneously a supreme exemplification of most of its principles as well as a supreme exception from some of its principles. In this sense, Chu Hsi appears to represent a great degree of logical coherence than Whitehead.
Chu Hsi's metaphysical choice is similar to Whitehead's. He has rejected the anthropomorphic image of the deity as this is given in classical Chinese religion.
(WhiA32)

1979
Tong Lik Kuen [Tang, Liquan] : Whitehead was profoundly impressed by the English Romantic poets – especially Wordsworth and Shelley. These nature-intoxicated Romantics wrote at a time when there was in Western Europe a general appreciation of – and indeed admiration for – Chinese culture : its humanistic philosophy, its reasonableness in the form of government, its naturalism in the arts (including gardening) and poetry. And if Whitehead's philosophy was in fact influenced by Romantic poetry in its ultimate intuitions, some historical connection between Whitehead and Chinese though might perhaps in a roundabout way be established. Chinese philosophy has always been closely tied to poetry, to the language of the heart and feelings. The fact that both Chinese philosophers and Whitehead held fast to the notion of life as essentially an emotional activity can be clearly seen in their conception of mind or 'hsin' – in their emphasis on the non-cognitive over the cognitive and on the intuitive over the intellectual-conceptual. It is noteworthy that there is no elaborate theory of consciousness in either Whitehead or Chinese philosophy, with a consequent lack of epistemological or phenomenological interests so characteristic of the Western philosophical tradition – especially in the modern period.
Whiteadian emphasis on the 'aesthetic moment' or the vital here-and-now as the ultimate facts of Life is in perfect agreement with the spirit of Chinese philosophy which, in contrast to the eternalistic outlook of Indian and Western metaphysics, is always a philosophy of the Present. For both Whitehead and Chinese philosophy, the eternal, which consists in the infinite wealth of potentials graded in relevance to the world and thus forming the primordial nature of God or 'T'ai-Chi'. Both Whitehead's God and the Chinese 'T'ai Chi' refer to the field character of Nature responsible for the shifting character of 'sheng' or creativity.
In both Whitehead and Chinese metaphysics, the providential character of God or Heaven-and-Earth is often described symbolically in various images or metaphors. In so far as Chinese metaphysics is concerned, the most prevalent symbolism is that of parental care. The most outstanding imagery in Whitehead's conception of God is that of 'the poet of the world'. The conception of God and World as interdependent co-creaters of Life which Whitehead shares with Chinese philosophy certainly runs counter to the prevalent Western conception in which the God-World relation is marked by a one-sided dependence.
Both Chinese philosophy and Whitehead recognize the importance of polarities in an adequate understanding of Nature. In fact, the uniqueness of the Chinese and Whiteheadian world-views is best seen in the way polarities are conceived in them, that is, dialectically through the field concept.
From the Chinese philosophical standpoint, Whitehead's character-centered philosophy is neither sufficient nor adequate. It is not sufficient because his theory of character is too general : it fails to do justice to the uniqueness and complexity of human character. And it is inadequate because it fundamentally lacks the existential orientation : it fails to recognize the proper relationship between theory and practice, between the vision of character and its real-life achievement.
From the Whiteheadian standpoint, the preeminently symbolic approch of the I Ching with its characteristic vagueness and ambiguity of expression, must seem lacking in intellectual rigor, judged by the standard of rationalist thinking.
The key to understanding Whitehead really lies in the ambivalence and tensions of intuition and intellect, of the poetic and the logical-mathematical, of character and nature, of the aspectative and the entitative modes of thought, of one and many, of God and World, and a host of other pairs of polar opposites whose creative synthesis constitutes strategically the goal of his speculative endeavor. In comparing Whitehead to Chinese philosophy, we need to bring about a dialectic contrast with respect to each major pair of opposites.
(WhiA32)

1979
King, Winston L. : Basic presuppositions of (Western) Whiteheadeanism and (Eastern) Hua-yen philosophers : It is obvious that Western organicism will always take care that individuality be preserved. While the most overt form of this in the West has been the humanistic personal version, science too has had its own special variety in terms of precise quantifications and a generally atomistic viewpoint. Whitehead is very critical of this ; his organic emphasis is precisely a critique of such atomism. Yet his strong insistence on the independence and individuality of the basic building blocks of the universe, actual entities, is also notable. With him, therefore, it is a matter of providing for the reality of individuals within the larger order and as integrally related to other entities, but not so integrated as to lose their reality and integrity in any sort of Greater Reality, including the Universe and God.
The Hua-yen (Eastern) bias is somewhat different. It would be almost accurate to say that the trust here is to save the System at the expense of the individual, the Whole at the expense of the parts. To be sure, Buddhism rejects a substantive Absolute, and warns against substantializing Emptiness. Nonetheless, there is the same Indian-Brahmanical tendency to look with suspicion upon the particularity of time-space existence, and to distrust the perceptions of the personal individuality found therein. Human individuality in the long run is a misfortune ; it feeds on a diet of particulars, attributing ultimate significance to them – from which flows all human misery.
Comparison between Whiteheadean and Hua-yen immanentalism : it will be useful to distinguish four levels of immanence and to inquire as to the degree of acceptance and incorporation of this in the two systems of thought : a) immanence as influence, b) immanence as organic inclusion, c) immanence as partial identity, d) immanence as complete identity.
(WhiA56)

1979
Charles Hartshorne : The aspect of social order of which Confucius gives a special version for a particular society is taken into account by Whitehead when he says that order and love complement each other, love relating to individuals, taken one by one, and order to the need for pattern and predictability in social life. Mo Zhu's absolute ideal is included in what Whitehead calls 'peace' (in the chapter on that topic in Adventures of Ideas), as is Lao Tzu's sense of unity with the principle of all things. The technicalities of Whitehead's thought are not to be closely matched by anything in Chinese philosophy, whether that of Lao Tzu, Mao Tsetung, or some thinker between these two. The technicalities in question are responses to issues that arise sharply only in a culture that takes seriously and develops intensively mathematical knowledge, pure and applied, and in which theological isses are also carefully discussed.
(WhiA33)

1979
Fu Charles Wei-hsun : From the Chinese point of view, Whitehead's metaphysical language is not entirely liberated from the onto-theological fixation of language, thought, and reality. The Chinese conception of metaphysical language as a multi-functional and multi-dimensional enrichment and depending of everyday natural language can help us resolve the problem of Whitehead's metaphysical language.
(WhiA34)

1980
David Yu : The philosophical affinity between Whitehead and Chu Hsi has been an intriguing question for students of comparative philosophy ever since Joseph Needham referred to Chu Hsi's Neo-Confucianism as philosophy of organism bearing notable similarities with Whitehead's metaphysics. [Needham, Joseph. Science and civilization in China. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1957). Vol. 2 : History of scientific thought].
Is a comparative study between these two men justifiable ? My answer to this is positive for two reasons : 1. A common process tradition. There have been agreements among some Chinese and Western philosophers since the turn of the century that Chinese philosophy emphasizes changes and relations in its apprehension of reality and truth. This philosophical tradition is more akin to the organistic tradition of Leibniz, James, and Whitehead than to the 'substance' tradition as represented by Descartes, Locke and Hume. 2. Continuing interest of scholars. There have been some initial comparative works between Whitehead and Chinese/Asian philosophy in more recent years in the West which reflects a growth in quality and quantity. This can be taken as a sign that expository and critical works between Whitehead and Chinese/Asian philosophy can be pursued.
(WhiA35)

1989
Yu Yih-hsien : In his works, Chen Shih-chuan argues that the philosophical elements in the Yi jing are consonant with that of Whitehead's philosophy of organism. According to Chen, the authors of the Yi jing and Whitehead share the same view that all read existence is natural and self-creative ; it acts in accordance with natural order and leaves no room for supernatural intervention. Chen enumerates four instances of consonance between Hua Yan Buddhists and Whitehead's philosophy. First of all, the Hua Yan Buddhists and Whitehead both regard real existence as 'event', not as 'matter' or 'fact', which arises from the multiplicity and complexity of the universe in accordance with the principle of dependent-origination, nor in accordance with mechanical law. Whitehead's doctrine of the ingression of eternal objects into actual entities is very close to Hua Yan's teaching of the 'non-impediment between eternal principles (li) and transient events (shi) '. The Whiteheadian God is very close to Huan Yan's Buddha, since their characteristics indicate a pantheistic nature. Hua Yan's teaching of 'organic non-impediment' is close to Whitehead's doctrine of prehensions. They both argue for interrelatedness among things and against all kinds of mutual exclusive dualism.
(WhiA1)

1998
Jim P. Behuniak : If Confucius considered the Odes to behave like 'propositions' this sheds some light on his ethical and aesthetic thinking. It indicates that the introduction of verse was not intended to be morally instructive but rather emotionally evocative, and that emotion was admired as an effective ethical stimulus. I suggest that such stimulation of 'feeling' in the early Confucian tradition may have some affinity to aspects of Whitehead's thought.
(WhiA36)

1998
Jang Wang Shik : Whitehead's cosmology can shed some light on the clarification of Buddhist cosmology, but also Buddhist cosmology can become a more appropriate type of cosmology with the helf of Whitehead's cosmology.
(WhiA53)

1998
Gu Linyu : One of the unique contribution of Whitehead's process metaphysics is its potential tendency to develop an integrated view of time and emotion, which can be improved by appropriating the moralistic dimension on time and harmonization in Chinese 'Yi' philosophy.
(WhiA37)

1998
Brook Ziporyn : The similarities between Whitehead's process philosophy and the Chinese Buddhist schools of Tiantai and Huayan have often been noted. Li Rizhang calls Whitehead's philosophy a 'western version of the doctrine of dependent co-arising and emptiness'. These two Buddhist schools and Whitehead agree, he says, on the following points : the denial of simple location, the denial of the independence of objects, and the denial of the absolute division of subject and object. More essentially, both assert that every object is 'in a sense everywhere at once'. But then he points out what he considers the two greatest differences, for there are two points found in Whitehead which, he feels, have no corresponding notion in the Chinese Buddhist schools : Whitehead's notion of God and his idea of 'eternal objects'.
(WhiA3/WhiA55)

2001
Joseph Grange : Both, Whitehead and the Lotus Sutra refuse to grant dualistic thinking any metaphysical ultimacy. They condemn it for its abstractness and the way in which is saps intelligence of the strength needed to embrace the full range of our worldy experience. The Lotus Sutra offers the doctrine of 'sunyata' as the cure for dualism and its ailments. Whitehead offers a novel existential category that he terms 'contrast'.
(WhiA39

2001
Steve Odin : Whitehead's organic process cosmology based on the principle of 'universal relativity', the Hua-yen principle of 'interpenetration between part and whole', and the Lotus Sutra principle of 'three thousand worlds in each thought-instant'.
(WhiA40)

2001
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki : In Whitehead's thought, as in Buddhist thought, all existence is interdependent. For Whitehead, each momentary bit of existence is a process of integrating feelings of the past with some sense of what the future can be. To Whiteheadian eyes, there are illumining similarities between the Sutra and a process vision of the world. These parallels do not necessarily signify commensurate ways of thinking, for each rests within a context of radically different sensitivities built up within divergent cultures.
(WhiA41)

2001
Chen Shih-chuan : Whitehead's conception of 'creativity' is deficient from the standpoint of the Book of changes that takes 'creativity' as the fundamental function of the universe. Whitehead classifies 'creativity' together with the notions of 'many' and 'one' to the category of the ultimate. It is the ultimate truth behind individual facts of all creatures, while all creatures remain with it. In Whitehead's metaphysical system God assumes the highest position as 'the unconditioned conceptual valuation of eternal objects' and the introducer of order ad novelty. Got is not only the provider of the initial aims from which an actual occasion starts its self-creation, but also the aboriginal condition of creativity. 'Creativity' as 'the universal of universals' eventually does not create at all.
From the standpoint of the Book of changes a philosophy of organism could have a metaphysical system without appealing for God's help.
In his later writings Whitehead has suggested that language is the very factor that determines human civilization, 'human civilization is an outgrowth of language, and language is the product of advancing civilization. The metaphysical principles recorded in the Book of changes were conveyed by a system of diagrams that were appended in later years with a language full of metaphors and cosmological and axiological significance.
In his nature philosophy Whitehead fuses together time and space into a spatio-temporal continuum. In terms of events both space and time are the essential constituents. While in the Book of changes the 'Ch'ien' (time), and 'K'un) (space) are concrete existence of heave and earth, and they are the manifestations of the function of creativity as well.
Whitehead has once said, 'The universe is an ocean of feeling'. This is exactly what the Book of changes tried to tell us.
In contrast with Whitehead's speculative cosmology, the Book of changes provides a creative cosmology with both the anthropomorphic flavor and the naturalistic temper.
(WhiA42)

2002
Cheng Chung-ying : In a certain way, Whitehead followed Leibniz in constructing a system of metaphysical understanding in the same spirit of using a new logic and a new perspective on life and world derived from deep self-reflection and wide observation and knowledge of the world. Leibniz enjoyed his clear and logical vision of reason of existence in his essential monadology, whereas Whitehead was happily assertive of his grand system of the creative process of reality in his systematic concrescence theory. Both frameworks celebrate reason and speak of feelings, but it is Whitehead who came to make 'feelings' (positive prehensions of actual occasions), not reason, a universal principle ; in the Whiteheadian paradigm, it is in actual interchange and assimilation, not just conceptually, but physically, that the creation of actual entities (concrescence) take place. The crucial difference between Leibniz and Whitehead is this : Leibniz maintains a God of creation that can be regarded as transcendent, though world-inclining, whereas Whitehead discards such a principle of transcendence and regards God as a thorough-going principle of immanence, or immanence and transcendence in unity. In the light of Zhu Xi's system, one can see how Leibniz has primarily focused on the function of 'li', and thus developed a li-metaphysics of objects, whereas Whitehead has primarily focused on the function of 'qi', and thus developed a qi-metaphysics of actual entities.
(WhiA43)

2002
Gu Linyu : Whitehead supposes that the process of experience is a creative harmony within which a mutual movement of dipolar forces (both physical and mental) takes place. The implications of the yin yang theory in the Yi jing can be used to reconcile the Whiteheadian harmony of dipolar processes with the harmony of tai ji (Great Primal Beginning) formed by yin and yang forces. In yi thinking, the world is a trinity of heaven, earth, and man, and it is led by the mutual transformation of yin and yang, in order to gain a harmonized end in which man and the world are inseparable. Both Whitehead and the Yi jing agree that our primary experience lies in the mutual correspondence between dipolar powers and the attainment of a harmony of two opposites. Whitehead's understanding of the world of process as one dominated by the transmission of feelings. In Whitehead's description, the world is a state of emotion flux, which he terms 'feelings'. These feelings make up the really real things of the universe, which are termed actual occasions.
According to Whitehead, god supplies an initial aim that lures and guides the development of actual occasions. God's impact on the world of actual occasions is neither transcendent nor impersonal - rather, it is immanent and personal. For Whitehead, God creates the world and the world creates God ; God transcends the world and the world transcends God. For Whitehead, God is immanent in the world rather than above and beyond it. For Chan/Zen Buddhism, there is a fundamental goodness in the world that can be touched and experienced through right practice and right living. There also exist a fundamental agreement between Whitehead and yi Chan insofar as both postulate that a fundamental polarity exercises power throughout the cosmos : for Whitehead, it is the physical and mental dimensions of experience ; for Yi Chan, it is the yin yang methodology sourced from the Yi jing. Whitehead's God retains a transcendental dimension called the primordial nature, which harbors eternally all potentials for goodness. For Chan/Zen Buddhism, the Buddha is the nature of our own self.
(WhiA44)

2003
Cheng, Chung-ying : Whitehead has provided his own framework of accommodating all religions against a background of understanding and a new interpretation of being and human being. But I like to interpret his purpose in terms of three levels of understanding of pluralism as follows : 1. See the theoretical and practical differences of existing religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. 2. See the theoretical and / or practical complementarity of different religions in light of an underlying philosophy of being and becoming. 3. See all religions (including both present and future religions) as off-springs of a comprehensive philosophy of being and becoming and the related understanding of humanity and the world.
For the Yijing Onto-Cosmology the sense of time and the sense of temporal process are important for creativity is creativity in time and real in time and thus is related to the sense of becoming and transformation. The quality of harmonization in time is also a feature of Whitehead as we can see in the following quotation from Whitehead : "The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence – its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purpose, its phases of subjective aim – beyond the determination of these components there always remain the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe."
According to Whitehead, every actual being is a potential for every becoming of another actual being. In other words, any item of actuality is to be formed or concrescends from all actual and potential items in a process of becoming. The most clear statement from Whitehead is found in the following : "The principle states that it belongs to the nature of being that it is a potential for every becoming. Thus all things are to be conceived as qualifications of actual occasions."
All major existing world religions could be found to share an ontology of God as the creative force as made explicit the Yijing-Whitehead ontology of process and change, and their assertions about the creativity of God as a creator could also be interpreted and given a meaning in the Yijing-Whitehead system of understanding.
We could identify the religions sides of Confucianism and Daoism apart from their philosophical sides just as we need also make efforts to identify the philosophical sides of Christian theology and the Buddhist theology apart from their religious sides. I believe that this is precisely what Whitehead has intended to do and his process philosophy of organism could be said to embody his vision of a complementarily well-differentiated integration of Christianity and Buddhism as two major religions of the world, respectively representing the East and the West.
(WhiA57)

2004
Nicholas F. Gier : Whitehead nonetheless follows later Confucians in extending relationality to all parts of the cosmos. Like the Cofucians, Whitehead does not sacrifice rationality because of his emphasis on relationality. The neo-Confucians are just as cosmologically focused as Whitehead, so such a venture would distract from our attempts to construct a more personalist process ethics of virtue. Whitehead's ontology is both rational and social like the Confucians. Whitehead and the Confucians have strikingly similar notions about the fusion of subjectivity and objectivity – the fusion of the inner and the outer. When we contras the process self of Whitehead and Confucius to the substantial self, we immediately see the psychological and philosophical advantages of the former.
Neither the Confucian nor Whiteheadian view require us to put care of the self before care of others.
The fact that evil happens even to good people is a challenge to all ethical theories, and the Chinese and Whitehead offer the same innovative solution. They both conceive of evil as basically discord and a lack of harmony.
Whitehead's principle that if a thing is actual then it has some value precludes any separation of reality into the valuable and the valueless. He therefore joins the ancient consensus about the unity of being, goodness, and beauty. The Confucian concept of sincerity (cheng) proves to be a productive point of entry for a comparative analysis of these issues. When Confucians attribute sincerity to Heaven, which to them is essentially impersonal Providence, they mean that Heaven will always be true to itself. Heaven is not specifically moral and neither does any Confucian thinker say that its value is aesthetic. Whitehead is much more explicit : he holds that truth applies only to conformation to appearances, while beauty is 'realized in actual occasions which are the completely real things in the universe'. For Whitehead all order is ultimately aesthetic order.
In Confucius and Whitehead, the expanded soul does not limit itself to a fraternity of propertied males ; rather, it extends into the world of large. For them the goal of morality is the attainment of universal peace and love, the latter virtue most clearly laid out. For Confucius and Whitehead this extension is cosmic in scope.
Whitehead's distinction between the closed and open person finds an instructive parallel in the Confucian 'small or inferior person' and the 'junzi'. The latter thinks of virtue while the former thinks of possession and profit ; the 'junzi' seeks the Way and not a mere living ; and the 'junzi' brings the good things of others to completion' but the inferior man does just the opposite. Like Whitehead's person of 'great experience', the 'junzi' is expansive and other-regarding while the inferio person is self-regarding and restrictive.
Neither Whitehead's God nor Confucian Heaven is a being with sense perception, so Whitehead would agree with Mencius that 'Heaven sees as my people see ; Heaven hears as my people hear'. Whether the Confucians also agree with Whitehead that God knows the future only as it is actualized in human history and nature is not clear. The most significant difference between Whitehead's God and Confucian Heaven is that the latter is strictly nontheological. The Confucian Heaven is constant and sincere, the latter meaning 'being true to itself'. Heaven's constancy can be eminently applied to Whitehead's God as well.
Confucian, Aristotelian, and Whiteheadian ethics always aim at a personal mean that is a creative choice for each individual. Virtue ethics is emulative – using the sage or God as a model for virtue – whereas rule ethics is based on simple conformity and obedience.
(WhiA45)

2005
Gu Linyu : Whitehead seems very much in appreciation of the Chinese idea of the two forces 'yin' and 'yang' embracing each other in a primal oneness. In order to offer a more detailed canvass, Whitehead constructs a categoreal scheme to articulate the process thereby opposites relate to each other. He sees reality as a world of 'feelings' that express various modes of process. Whitehead's philosophy also shares another profound dimension of Chan thought, namely, that all things in the world are made up to feelings (qing). For Chan, to preserve pure feelings is to keep disturbances away and therefore lessen the illusions that beset our visions.
(WhiA48)

2005
John B. Cobb : Whitehead was critical of the modern world, and his followers pursue and extend that critique. But he wanted not just to tear down the ideas of the modern world, but also to replace them with more adequate ideas. His ideas are part of the movement of constructive postmodernism. Since Whitehead's understanding of reality is so close to that of traditional Chinese thought, the comments above about Whitehead's ability to act as a bridge between traditional ideas and the contemporary world are relevant. Whiteheadian thought could bring some traditional ideas to bear on contemporary problems.
(WhiA3)

2005
David Ray Griffin : Whiteheadian process philosophy emphasizes the idea that organism are internally related to their environments, with human beings as the chief exemplification of this universal characteristic. Whitehead's philosophy leads to a bpolitical ethic that is cosmopolitan as well as communitarian. His philosophy provides the basis for a constructive postmodern political ethic.
China is in a unique position to help overcome the world's self-destructive anarchy by taking a leadership role in the movement for global democracy. China's cultural heritage does not contain an imperialistic ideology. China is now in position to take a leadership role in determining the shape of human civilization as a whole. China has had abundant first-hand experience of the destructiveness of imperialism. China's indigenous religious-moral traditions have always been intimately related to political leadership.
Whitehead's philosophy, by incorporating traditional Chinese values, could provide Chinese citizens interested in promoting global democracy with a framework for relating these values to modern and postmodern modes of thought. The affinity between Whitehead's philosophy of organism and Chinese thought has received considerable discussion. His philosophy, like Chinese thought, 'makes process ultimate', whereas the other type of thought 'makes fact ultimate', there is much more that is implicit in this point. Whitehead reveals his affinity with Chinese thought, it is based on the idea that a truly civilized people emphasizes 'the aesthetic and end of all action'. Whitehead sees the 'creation of the world' as 'the victory of persuasion over force'.
(WhiA3)

2005
Fan Meijun ; Ronald Phipps : Chinese traditional thought and Whitehead's process thinking are alike in many ways. It is possible to integrate Chinese culture and the deeper Western cultures and philosophic process modes of thought found in strains of Western intellectual traditions. Whitehead's hope was that such integration would enrich and deepen that which is best in both traditions. According to Whitehead, process is conceived on the basis of mandates of movement and change. Chinese traditional philosophers observed the universe in fundamentally the same way as Whitehead. They also thought that process, development, movement, and change are omnipresent in all things.
Whitehead considered that appreciation of the relation of the whole and the part is central to understanding reality. According to his thought, it is impossible to understand human experience without referring to relations of relations and classes of relations or classes of classes of relations. The essential sense of community in Chinese traditional aesthetics is both intra-species and inter-species, both mental and material. The traditional sense of wholeness in Chinese aesthetics is mirrored in Whitehead's process thought which emphasizes 1) Harmony, 2) The broad beyond with the infinite background of being, and 3) The profound interdependencies inherent in all existence.
Chinese culture and aesthetics call for relation of compatibility, stimulation, and growth. Harmony-seeking expresses the Chinese traditional ideals of eternal peace and heavenly beauty. In the Whiteheadean terminology, actual entities must exist, function, and develop within open environments that promote mutual realization of the positive potentials of all beings, which are in community with one another. The ideal of harmonious community has given Chinese traditional arts a large and far-reaching influence in world culture. Chinese aesthetics seeks harmony of being. The mission of art is to represent this harmony and realize it in life. Such a mission is in conformity with the Whiteheadead thought that the very perception of beauty derives from the perception of conformal and harmonious integration of the positive potentials inherent in the perception of events comprising the world : 'The perfection of Beauty is defined as being the perfection of Harmony' [Adventures of ideas].
Whitehead's sense of the vital importance of the beyond vividly finds a parallel expression to the same sense in Chinese aesthetics as he writes : 'In the future, if human natures loses its most precious quality, it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent'.
Like Whitehead, Chinese traditional aestheticians have neber liked to talk abut individuals without considering community. The talk about individuals in a community, as individuals could exist and grow up only in a community.
There are numerous and profound ideas common to process thought and the traditional arts of China. Whitehead himself said that his philosophy has a strong kinship with Eastern philosophy. Hence he hoped to stimulate unity between Western culture and Eastern culture.
(WhiA3)

2005
Michel Weber : Whitehead's philosophical development has reached its acem with Process and reality : the move from a concept of creation to the concept of creativity is fundamental and is intrinsically pregnant with the concept of co-creation. Assessing the proximity between Whiteheadian and Taoist philosophies requires the questioning of the possible similarity between the co-creation advocated by the former and the eventfulness of the later. Process and reality renounces the mono-principal and adopts a bi-principal ontology so characteristic of Chinese thought : remember that Process and reality does not advocate dualism but operationalizes two 'archai' that are both independent and interdependent. There are not many signs to inducate that Whitehead had a deep, direct acquaintance with Indian, Chinese or Japanese thought. But Whitehead had various opportunities to meet Buddhist-inclined scholars (William Ernest Hocking and Joseph Needham). Although he might have been interested in the peculiarities of Buddhist logic, the field developed only later. In the Dialogues he confers about China with Walter B. Cannon and later refers to Confucius.
(WhiA3)

2005
Xie Xenyu : Whitehead recognized 'non-sensuous perception' in his experience, in which he conceived a subjects in terms of actual entity. In explaining his metaphysics, Whitehead treats the concept of actual entity as the fundamental concept.
(WhiA3)

2005
Wang Zhihe : The postmodern dimension of Whitehead's philosophy, can be helpful for both the West and China to overcome the dominant closed mentalities such as the 'imperialistic attitude' and Yelangism. The postmodern dimension of Whitehead's philosophy lies partially in the fact that he never regards his own philosophy as a final truth. Furthermore, in his emphasis on complexity, and in reminding us of avoiding the 'narrowness inherent in all finite systems', he underscored his empathy for postmodern thinking. Whitehead's postmodern philosophy paves the way for appreciating and affirming openness to other cultures, ever radically different ideas and insights. It provides a new forum from which Chinese philosophy can creatively engage in solving the core issue we face today with its own thought resources. Facing the powerful worldview and modern way of thinking, postmodern thinkers not only need to form coalitions with others, but also need to take advantage of traditional thought resources from different traditions and cultures.
(WhiA3)

2005
Han Zhen : The universe in Whitehead's thought is an infinite, open, dynamic, and becoming process, full of diversity, creativity, and life. As part of such a universe, human society contains all these characters. Conceiving the universe in term of process, Whitehead perceives adventure as a fundamental theme in his cosmology. It follows that human civilization is a creative process with abundant potentiality.
(WhiA3)

2005
Zhang Nini : Whitehead in his Sciene and the modern world offers some analyses into the modern concept of nature. He points out that the notion of simple location is the key principle in the modern concept of nature. Whitehead felt a similarity between 'rationalized faith' in the Medieval Ages and 'reason based upon faith' in 17th and 18th centuries. He was not satisfied with the mechanist concept of nature in modern science. In Whitehead's scheme, space and time mean not only limitation but also prehension. That is, material in spatial-temporary location should be thought as a thing containing in itself infinite components, gathering in inter-relation and constituting as a grasped unity. Every thing is a unity of a prehension. Nature in Whitehead's thought is the nature of an organic whole, which is possessed of innate vitality and needn't get any laws from alien force.
(WhiA3)

2005
Dirck Vorenkamp : As interest in Huayan thought among Western scholars has grown over the last few decades, a number of individuals have noted similarities between Whiethead's ideas of reality as a process of arising actual occasions and Huayan doctrines concerning the independent arising of dharmas. Whitehead's view requires temporal asymmetry such that the present arises as a creative advance toward an open future. In contrast, Huayan is well known for advocating a symmetrical view of reality, and the Huayan view of time, it has been argued, is no exception.
(WhiA51)

2005
Yu Yih-hsien : In Whitehead's view, in the history of human civilization there were two rational religions, Buddhism and Christianity, which exercised great influence on many peoples' religious life, though their influence may now be in decay. These two world religions have their separate sets of dogmas and give different answer to the questions of human suffering and evil. Buddhism finds evil arising from the very nature of physical and emotional experience, and the wisdom which it inculcates is meant to release us from such experience. This is to lay the foundation of its doctrines on a general speculation of human experience. Whitehead keenly observes that Buddhism is a religion developed from metaphysical doctrines, that is, Buddha's teachings, whereas Christianity is a religion based on religious facts from which its metaphysical doctrine is derived. He has not only an insight into the very essence of the Eastern Asiatic thought, but also the essence of rational religion. For the Confucians or the Buddhists, there had never been a supernatural, personal God in their religious experience. Their spiritual pursuit was directed to seek a harmonious relationship to men and nature, to universal principles of humanity, as well as to the aesthetic order of the universe. Whitehead suggests there are three main renderings of the concept of God. First is the Eastern Asiatic concept of an impersonal order to which the world conforms, which offers a doctrine of immanence with regard to the reality of a supreme being.
Whitehead was not a sinologist and his understanding of Chinese thought was spare and inseparable from that of Buddhism and Indian thought, he still has a great insight into the essence of Chinese thinking. He makes his philosophy attractive to Chinese philosophers and opens a channel for East and West dialogues.
Whitehead did not take serious consideration of Chinese thought in spite of his casual mentioning of it. The formidable difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy also made it impervious to most of the Chinese philosophers. For Whitehead, the Oriental thought of India and China gives an alternative to the metaphysical exposition of reality, which makes 'creativity' the ultimate instead of substantial God or brutal facts. Though he never came to understand the Yi jing and its philosophical implications, he has precisely characterized this essence of Chinese thinking and set up a most promising agenda for the dialogues of East and West. As Whitehead has shown his interest in Chinese thought at a time when Chinese culture was at its low ebb and discarded by most of the Chinese intellects, for those who sought to restore traditional Chinese culture and national confidence Whitehead's philosophy lent them a friendly hand.
(WhiA1)

2010
Wen Haiming : In reconstructing a proper understanding of Chinese cosmology, Whitehead's process theory on creativity helps, and vice versa, and Chinese perspectives in turn present that things and events are contextually creative as human beings are cocreative with the cosmos they are located. For Chinese philosophy, the cosmos is a process of 'creatio in situ', which is transformational : It is not that one thing comes after another, but one thing becomes another. From Whitehead's viewpoint, the cosmos is the con6tinuity of many actual beings, each of which is an expression of the whole. The major task of Whiteheadian cosmology is to elucidate the meaning of the 'Manyness'. Cosmology, for Whitehead, uncovers the contextual creativity between One and Many, which is another term for the common understanding on flux of myriad things. This defines a creative process of a novel unity which becomes 'One' in negating its past 'Many' occasions. Whitehead holds that things and events happen together with one another in an actual context. It is creativity that makes the One actualize its potentiality to become plurality ; likewise, in this contextual process of diversification, the Many is synthesized into One in creativity. For Whitehead, 'becoming' contains that the Many contextually creat the One, which is itself novel. The Whiteheadian cosmos is self-creative and everything is coexistent and interrelated to each other.
The Whiteheadian idea of creativity supports a cosmological view on change. Whitehead holds that creativity is a process in which Many become One, and are increased by One. From this perspective, the Chinese cosmological creativity might be rendered through mutually creative process, which is contextual in the sense that Many and One are different ways of looking at things, beings, and entities.
Like Whitehead, the Daodejing and the Yijing allege that both experience and the world are mutually creative in an unceasing process. The cosmological dao in Chinese philosophy, if interpreted through Whiteheadian sense, does not creat myriad individual things, but functions underdeterminately to become novel actualities – that is, any determinate being.
For Chinese thought, the genuine creative force is yinyang correlativity which conveys the significance of 'creatio in situ'. Whitehead describes how the feelings of plurality integrate into a continual oneness, and he has to use paradoxical language. Whitehead's metaphysical language not only indicates that the one cannot be separated from many, but also expresses a manifestation of a holistic underterminacy that metaphysicians cannot avoid. Like Whiteheadian indeterminacy, the common phenomenon of the Chinese idea of interterminacy is the duplication of key metaphysical terms.
For both Chinese and Whiteheadian cosmology, creativity makes the One transform into Many, and the Many into One. In other words, the world creates through mutual transformation. It concludes that contextual creativity is the key to understanding how One transforms into 'Many', and how the Many transform while maintaining plurality. Chinese philosophy tends to carry out mutual creativity from the perspective of continuous process of the yin and yang ; whereas Whitehead begins his analysis from the perspective of eternal entities, actualities, and God. Though there is a difference between Whiteheadian and Chinese cosmological rendering of the relationship between One and Many, there are many mutually informative and entailing enlightenment when taking Whiteheadian version of creativity to rethink the contextual creativity in Chinese cosmology.
(WhiA58)

2011
Yang Li ; Wen Hengfu : The research on Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism have started since 1920' in China. During 85 years, we can recognize four periods of our research on Whitehead's theory. From 1920' to 1940', it was the beginning as well as an important time that Chinese scholars did their study of Philosophy of Organism. Then, the next 30 years, from 1950' to 1980', was a 'depressing' period for this study. However, there was an increasing attention to Whitehead' study since 1990'. Especially, the research and application of Philosophy of Organism were most conducted in Education area. In the latest 10 years, the research is getting more on the comparison between Whitehead and Chinese and other philosophies. The scholars in science area have taken less participation in the research of Philosophy of Organism, which has influenced on the understanding of Whitehead's theory. As we concern, it is a great need to expand his theory to larger areas which definitely will benefit for both scientific discovery and the development of human civilization.
Among philosophers of 20th century, Whitehead is unique one, not only because he is a both mathematician and logician, but a scientific philosophy. He is independent of all philosophy but adopting Oriental philosophical thoughts.
(WhiA59)

A. Théophile Piry ist General Postmaster des Imperial Postal Service in China.

London, Jack. South sea tales. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1911).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1208/1208.txt
Mauki.
His most prized possession was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended from a ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn, was passed through the partition-cartilage of his nose. The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak…
When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but weak as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china cup handle, into his trade box…
He has many other things--rifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent collection of bushmen's heads…
The heaten.
The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half dozen…
The terrible Solomons.
On his chest, suspended from around his neck hung the half of a china plate…
Half the china on the table was shattered, while the eight-day clock stopped…
The seed of McCoy.
I am going to drive this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the Paumotus to China but what I find a bed for her…

London, Jack. When God laughs and other stories. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1911).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2545/2545.txt
A wicked woman.
She had the grace of a slender flower, the fragility of colour and line of fine china, in all of which he pleasured greatly, without thought of the Life Force palpitating beneath and in spite of Bernard Shaw--in whom he believed…
Just meat.
Matt grunted a laugh and went on with his cooking. Jim poured out the coffee, but first, into the nicked china cup, he emptied a powder he had carried in his vest pocket wrapped in a rice-paper…
The Chinago.
In China, as Ah Cho well knew, the magistrate would order all of them to the torture and learn the truth…
But the Chinese had not complained to the French devils that ruled over Tahiti…
Ah Cho was going to have his head cut off, but they, when their two remaining years of servitude were up, were going back to China…

Johan Wilhelm Normann Munthe ist Berater von Yuan Shikai und arbeitet als Berater der chinesischen Regierung.

Nach seinen Studien in China und an der Universität St. Petersburg wird Alexandr Vasil'evic Grebenscikov Professor für mandjurische Sprache.

Tolstoy, Leo. Surratskaya kofeinaya [ID D36255]. [The Coffee-House of Surat].
http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2737/.
Every one argued and shouted, except a Chinaman, a student of Confucius, who sat quietly in one corner of the coffee-house, not joining in the dispute. He sat there drinking tea and listening to what the others said, but did not speak himself.
The Turk noticed him sitting there, and appealed to him, saying:
"You can confirm what I say, my good Chinaman. You hold your peace, but if you spoke I know you would uphold my opinion. Traders from your country, who come to me for assistance, tell me that though many religions have been introduced into China, you Chinese consider Mohammedanism the best of all, and adopt it willingly. Confirm, then, my words, and tell us your opinion of the true God and of His prophet."
"Yes, yes," said the rest, turning to the Chinaman, "let us hear what you think on the subject."
The Chinaman, the student of Confucius, closed his eyes, and thought a while. Then he opened them again, and drawing his hands out of the wide sleeves of his garment, and folding them on his breast, he spoke as follows, in a calm and quiet voice.
Sirs, it seems to me that it is chiefly pride that prevents men agreeing with one another on matters of faith. If you care to listen to me, I will tell you a story which will explain this by an example.
I came here from China on an English steamer which had been round the world. We stopped for fresh water, and landed on the east coast of the island of Sumatra. It was midday, and some of us, having landed, sat in the shade of some cocoanut palms by the seashore, not far from a native village. We were a party of men of different nationalities.