China and the West

John Dewey received the notification from Columbia University that his leave of absence to China was approved. He did not promise to stay a year in China until he arrived there in person.

Letter from John Dewey to Sabino Dewey
Tuesday April 22. [1919]
Dear Sabino, You have probably heard more than we have that Lucy is coming sailing May 20, and Mr Barry too. The latter was great surprise. As soon as we heard we decided to leave for China right away so as to get back sooner; we sail from Kobe the 27th, next sunday. It takes one day to go thru the Inland Sea, between the Japanese Islands and about three more I think to cross to Shanghai. My former Chinese students seem to be making as elaborate plans for our reception as we have nejoyed here. The only trouble is that I shall have to lecture all the time to help even up. I dont know the program exactly, but I know it calls for lectures in Shanghai, Nanking and Peking and I presume other places. You look up your geography and you will see how far apart the places are. When the Chinamen were here I got the impression Nanking was a kind of suburb of Shanghai, they talked so about running over there, but I see from the time table it takes five hours or more. I hope we can go up the Yangste River to Hankow, by boat, but that doesnt seem to be on my paid schedule, and it may be better to postpone it till next fall if should stay over. I have had a letter from the President of a missionary colllge in Nanking, [Rev. Arthur John] Bowen by name, inviting us to stay at their house while we are there. I dont know whether he is of the Bowen family well known in the Islands. Mama has written Lucy full particulrs if only she gets the letter before she leaves. Anyway she understands to about going to the Nitobes. We have written them so that they [in ink w. caret] will be on the lookout for her, if we are not back. We have also written her about the possibility of stopping over one steamer in Honolulu. Of course we dont know how that will fit in with circumstances including Mr Barry's plans, bu and so we dont urge it except if if she wants to and it is convenient all around…
Tell Lucy to be sure to mail a letter postcard to us, care Dr Suh Hu [Hu Shi] Government University, Peking, to come [ink del.] by the Korea steamer, in case she stops over and a letter to mail in Yokahama when she leaves the steamer if she doesnt. In fact if she comes right thru she better cable us after she has got her mail at the Nitobes unless we write something different…
Dad
Professor Hu [Shi] is going to run down from Peking to Shanghai about a thousand miles to meet us when we arrive…

John Dewey arrived in Shanghai.
Letter from John Dewey : Shanghai, May 1 [1919]. "We have slept one night in China…"
[A lot of people say, that he arrived on May 1].

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 1. [1.5.1919].
We have slept one night in China, but we haven't any first impressions, because China hasn't revealed itself to our eyes as yet. We compared Shanghai to Detroit, Michigan, and except that there is less coal smoke, the description hits it off. This is said to be literally an international city, but I haven't learned yet just what the technique is; every country seems to have its own post office though, and its own front-door yard, and when we were given a little auto ride yesterday, we found that the car couldn't go into Chinatown because it had no license for that district.
I shall be interested to find out whether in this really old country they talk about 'ages eternal' as freely as they do in Japan; the authentic history of the latter begins about 500 A.D., their mythical history 500 B.C., but still it is a country which has endured during myriads of ages. In spite of the fact that they kept the emperors shut up for a thousand years, and killed them off and changed them about with great ease and complacency, the children are all taught, and they repeat in books for foreigners, that the rule of Japan has been absolutely unbroken. Of course, they get to believing these things themselves, not exactly intellectually but emotionally and practically, and it would be worth any teacher’s position for him to question any of their patriotic legends in print. However, they say that in their oral lectures, the professors of history of the universities criticise these legends. In the higher elementary school we visited in Osaka, we saw five classes in history and ethics, in each of which the Emperor was under discussion—sometimes the Emperor and what he had done for the country, and sometimes an Emperor in particular. Apparently this religion has been somewhat of a necessity, as the country was so divided and split up, they had practically nothing else to unite on—the Emperor became a kind of symbol of united and modern Japan. But this worship is going to be an Old Man of the Sea on their backs. They say the elementary school teachers are about the most fanatical patriots of the country. More than one has been burned or allowed the children to be burned while he rescued the portrait of the Emperor when there was a fire. They must take it out in patriotism in lieu of salary; they don't get a living wage, now that the cost of living has gone up.

Letter from John & Alice Chipman Dewey to Dewey children
May first Shanghai [1919]
Dear children,
We have slept one night in China, but we havent any first impressions of China, because China hsnt revealed itself to our eyes as yet. Mamma compares it to Detroit Mich, and except that there is less coal smoke, the descritpion hits it off, also like the suburban districts of London in the villa districts, where there is lots of land about every house. Certainly some foreigners have succeeded in making money out of China. This is said to be literally an international city, but I havent learned yet just what the technique is; every country seems to have its own postoffice tho, and its own front door yeard, and when we were given a little auto ride yesterday, we found that the car couldnt go into Chinatown because it had no license, for that district. We are haunted by a suspicion that t[h]e young men who have us in charge have more enthusiasm than wordly wisdom or official pull—in other words they belong to the younger generation who are trying to reform the established order, and are as popular as such people generally are. Howver we have little to go on so far. Altho the Univ of Peking cabled Butler three weeks ago, they havent had a reply yet, so we dont as yet know any more about our future than we doid in Japan I lecture here twice, saturday and sunday; monday we go to Hangchow which is said to be scencially one of the most beautiful places in Chin, and was I believe the capital during some one of the numerous dynasties that hve ruled over China…
May 2
Now we have seen something of China, so far as Shanghai is China at all, and to day we are to see more, going to Chinatown. Our reception committee here consists of Suh Hu [Hu Shi], who took a thirty six hour trip from Peking to meet us, a man from Nanking Teahcers College, and a local Shanghai teacher, named Chinang who took his Ph D at T C a year or so ago. The "returned student" is a definite category here, and if and when China gets on its feet, the American university will have a fair share of the glory to its credit, and T C its due share in the pie. They came with a frinds auto and took us to a Chinese newspaper office where we inspected the building and type-setting as per usual, ctea and cake as per ditto, photo the same, then were taken to the biggest printing house in the east, prints most of the textbooks and verything else, including money for the Republic, then to the house of Mr Nieh, the man who lent the care aforesaid, a big house with a big garden, full of people, his mother and sisters being brought and introduced, the mother evidently a character who cant speak English, but who is the daughter of the greatest statesmen, so we are told, of the last dynasty, and who has ten children or more, on being at Columbia now, and forty grandchildren. She has recently offered a prize for the best essay on the method of abolishing concubinage, in reply to which eight hundred were sent in. More tea and a funny Chinese dish, called meat pie, then we go to sea the cotton spinning and ewaving factory owned by theis family—who are Christians. There is not even the pretence at labor laws here there is in Japan, some children six years old, not many thot, and wages of the operatives mainly women in the spinning dept 3o cents a day at the highest, 32 cwnts Mex, while in the ewaving dept they have piece wrok and get up to 4o cents.
This is Papas and I cant take it out so I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon. First lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the Newspaper where we had tea and cake about four. From there to the h[o]use of the daughter of the leading statesman of the Manchus, she being the lady of the small feet and of the ten children who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich There we were given a tea or rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious, also cake. Then after the factory we went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into the wrong hotel and there while we were waiting they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we elft and thanked us for coming to the wrong place Then we went to the right hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of Broadway and 42nd st and it is that. There is a big roof garden besides the hotels and they are both run by the Department stores wich have their places underneath. The Chinese are as crazy about dept stores as Jap. It may be a sad commentary on the human character that one can eat more than he can remember, but that is what we did last night. First of all when we went into the room which was all Chinese furniture, very small round table in the middle and the rows of stools along one side for the singing birls who do not dance here. These stools we did not use as all thse young Chinese are ashamed of that institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds shelled, nice little ones different from ours and very sweet. and beside them dried watermelon seeds which I could not crack so I did not taste. All the Chinese nibbled them with relish. Two ladies came, both of them had been in N.Y. to study. All these people speak and understand English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard boiled eggs and look like dark colored jelly, and little dises of sweets shrimps etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chp sticks tho they insisted on Giving Pa and me little plates on which they spooned out some of each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced the boys taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the center of the table to which we helped ourselves. There was no special attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with such cooking and such expense and such as would have happened in Japan. We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs in soup and fish and little oysters that grow in the ground, very delicious and delicate, and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with the others, and we had shrims cooked and sharks fin and birds nest and this has no taste at all by itself but is cooked in Chicken broth to give it some and is a sort of very delicate soup but costs a fortune and that is its real reason for being, It is gelatine which almost all dissolves in the cooking We had many more things than these and the boy in a rather dirty white coat and an old cap om his head passing round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses and for desert we had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and other sweets, all very elaborated made and works of are to look at but with too little taste to appeal much to us, then we had fruits bananas and apples and pears cut up in pieces each with a tooth pick in it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fishes stomach, or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable made of a mould of rice filled in with eight different symbolic thinge that I dont know any thing about, but they dont cut much part in the taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made of powdered almonds. Into ths you put the pudding and it is so good that I regretted all that had gone before and I am going to learn how to make it. They say all the ladies in China learn how to cook and it is their business to look after the cooking and to know how to do it themselve and to do parts of it. They still have many children. We saw two little ones yesterday beisdes several bigger ones scampering out of sight. One little daughter of Mrs Chang of two and a half with a costume of crimson brocade made just like the suit of the small boy of four. We thought she was a boy as her hair was cut tight to her head. Also a baby of five months with the most wonderful costume of cap and shoes, slippers and socks, and some little trousers made with wide split in the middle, of a dark red plaid cotton. The baby was fat and cunning as could be and was already jumping on her feet. Well the little things that make up the interest here are endless. A Daughter
Friday May 3rd. [2nd]
This is pap again, and as I dont know about the daughter, I will return briefly to the factory. Mamma remarked that the manager was the only person in a fact[o]ry who had ever told the truth in answering questions, and Hu [Shi] replied that lying showed that a moral consciousness had begun to dawn, while here thatre was not even a consciousness of anything wrong yet. He and his firneds have given up politics I judge as a bad job, and are devoting themselves to what they call a litterary revolution, which isnt as purely literary as it sounds, since it means using the spoken current language for writing, and without this modern questions cannot really be discussed… We are going to see more of the dangerous daring side of life here I predict We are very obviously in the hands of young China. What it will do with us makes us laugh to anticipate— Evedently they are having the time of theri lives and evidently they do not see what it is exactly best to do. But nothing woies us. We are not getting rich, but we are to have our expenses and we ought to have a very good time. Here in Shanghai we are in the hands of some educatiional association of this whole region or districs or whatever they call it. There is a normal school in Hangchow but chiefly sightseeing they say. We saw big men with queus, they said they are from the north and every one scrambling and fighting for a job like N.Y. Quite unlike any thing in Japan. And a sp[?]al streets also smae. Our men are coming. [John Dewey]

Shen bao published a brief note : "Dr. Dewey arrives in Shanghai". [He arrived on April 30].

John Dewey : Lectures 'The real meaning of education in a democracy' at the Beijing National Academy of Fine Arts.
1) 'The natural foundations of education'.
2) 'The new attitude toward knowledge'.
3) 'The socialization of education'.

John Dewey : Lectures at Beijing National Academy of Fine Arts.
1) 'Trends in contemporary education'. = Xian dai jiao yu di chu shi. Han Lu, Tian Feng recorder. In : Xin Zhongguo ; vol. 1, no 3 (July 15, 1919).
2) 'The natural foundations of education'
3) 'The new attitude toward knowledge'
4) 'The socialization of education'

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 2. [2.5.1919].
We have been taken in hand by a reception committee of several Chinese gentlemen, mostly returned American students. The 'returned student' is a definite category here, and if and when China gets on its feet, the American university will have a fair share of the glory to its credit. They took us to see a Chinese cotton spinning and weaving factory. There is not even the pretense at labor laws here that there is in Japan. Children six years of age are employed, not many though, and the wages of the operatives in the spinning department, mainly women, is thirty cents a day, at the highest thirty-two cents Mex. In the weaving department they have piece work and get up to forty cents.
I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon. First, lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then after we went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into the wrong hotel and there, while we were waiting, they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we left, and thanked us for coming to the wrong place. Then we went to the right hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, and it is that. There is a big roof garden besides the hotels, and they are both run by the Department stores which have their places underneath. It may be a sad commentary on the human character that one can eat more than one can remember, but that is what we did last night. First of all we went into the room which was all Chinese furniture; very small round table in the middle and the rows of stools along one side for the singing girls, who do not dance here. Those stools were not used, as all the young Chinese are ashamed of that institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds shelled, nice little ones, different from ours and very sweet. Beside them were dried watermelon seeds which were hard to crack and so I did not taste them. All the Chinese nibbled them with relish. Two ladies came, both of them had been in New York to study. All these people speak and understand English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard-boiled eggs and look like dark-colored jelly, and little dishes of sweets, shrimps, etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chop sticks, though they insisted on giving us little plates on which they spooned out some of each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced, the boys taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the center of the table, to which we helped ourselves. There was no special attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with such cooking and such expense, and such as would have happened in Japan. We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs and soup and fish and little oysters that grow in the ground (very delicious and delicate) and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with the others, and we had shrimps cooked, and shark's fin and bird's nest (this has no taste at all and is a sort of very delicate soup, but costs a fortune and that is its real reason for being). It is gelatine which almost all dissolves in the cooking. We had many more things than these, and the boy in a dirty white coat and an old cap on his head passing round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses, and for dessert we had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and other sweets, all very elaborately made, and works of art to look at, but with too little taste to appeal much to us; then we had fruits, bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish’s stomach, or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable, made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things that I don't know anything about, but they don't cut much part in the taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good that I regretted all that had gone before, and I am going to learn how to make it.

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 3. [3.5.1919].
Some one told us when we were on the boat that the Japanese cared everything for what people thought of them, and the Chinese cared nothing. Making comparisons is a favorite, if dangerous, indoor sport. The Chinese are noisy, not to say boisterous, easy-going and dirty—and quite human in general effect. They are much bigger than the Japanese, and frequently very handsome from any point of view. The most surprising thing is the number of those who look not merely intelligent but intellectual among the laborers, such as some of the hotel waiters and attendants. Our waiter is a rather feminine, ultra refined type, and might be a poet. I noticed quite a number of the same Latin quarter Paris type of artists among the teachers whom I addressed to-day. The Japanese impressions are gradually sinking into perspective with distance, and it is easy to see that the same qualities that make them admirable are also the ones that irritate you. That they should have made what they have out of that little and mountainous island is one of the wonders of the world, but everything in themselves is a little overmade, there seems to be a rule for everything, and admiring their artistic effects one also sees how near art and the artificial are together. So it is something of a relaxation to get among the easy-going once more. Their slouchiness, however, will in the end get on one's nerves quite as much as the 'eternal' attention of the Japanese. One more generalization borrowed from one of our Chinese friends here, and I'm done. 'The East economizes space and the West time'—that also is much truer than most epigrams.

Letter from John Dewey to Nicholas Murray Butler
Shanghai, May 3 '19
President Nicholas Murray Butler, My dear Mr Butler,
I wrote Dean Woodbridge from Japan speaking among other things of the possibility of my being invited to remain in China for educational work next year, and my desire to do so, if it could be arranged. Later Dr Suh Hu [Hu Shi] cabled you, after writing me to secure my consent. On my arrival here I was met by him from Peking as well as by educators from here and Nanking. They all feel that the present in quite a critical time in the educational and intellectual development of China, and that a representative of Western and especially American thought can be more useful now than at any other time for a long period. As for myself, I prize highly the unusual opportunity to get some acquaintance with Oriental thought and conditions. I hope therefore that it will be possible to grant the official request which I understand the Minister of Education is about to make of you and the Columbia authorities. I shall be more useful in the future to Columbia because of this experience, and incidentally I hope my presence here will have the effect of increasing the number of students from Japan and China who go to Columbia. Of course you must hear frequently of the present great influence of Columbia in China particularly. There are is a Columbia Alumni Association here of about forty. Many persons have assured me that the present influence of Columbia men in China is greater than that of the graduates of any other American or European University.
In my visit here now I am giving lectures to the public schools teachers of Hangchow, Nanking, [ink comma] and Peking besides this city. In Japan beside giving philosophical lectures in the Imperial Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, I spoke to teachers in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe.
Sincerely yours, | John Dewey.
Permanent address Care Yokahama Specie Bank Tokyo; Till June 15th, Care Government University, Peking.

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 4. [4.5.1919].
I have seen a Chinese lady, small feet and all. We took dinner with her. She did not come into the room until after dinner was over, having been in the kitchen cooking it while the servant brought things in. She has one of those placid faces which are round and plump and quite beautiful in a way, a pretty complexion, and of course a slow, rocking, hobbling way of walking. Yesterday after the lecture we went there again and she showed us all over her flat. It is well kept, with not many conveniences from our point of view, but I think it is regarded as quite modern here. It has a staircase, and a little roof where they dry clothes or sit. The bath is a tin tub, warmed by carrying water from the little stove like our little laundry stoves. It has an outlet pipe to the ground, no sewers as usual in the Orient. The kitchen has a little stove of iron set up on boxes and they burn small pieces of wood. It has three compartments, two big shallow iron pots for roasting and boiling and a deep one in the middle for keeping the hot water for tea. Only two fires are needed as the heat from the two end fires does for the water in the middle.
There is no doubt that the Chinese are a sociable people if given a chance. Of course, men like the husband of our hostess are the extreme of ability and advanced ideas here. But it is remarkable that he shows us things as they are. When we visited schools he did not arrange in advance because he did not want us to see a fixed up program. When we went out to lunch he took us to a Chinese place where no foreigners ever go.
Yesterday we went to a department store to buy some gloves and garters. Gloves were Keyser's, imported, so were the stockings, so were the garters and suspenders, etc. The gloves were from $1 to $1.60 and the suspenders were a dollar. I bought some silk, sixteen inches wide, for fifty cents a yard. The store was messy and the floors dirty, but it is a popular place for the Chinese. We paid three dollars for a book marked 1sh. 6p. in England, and everything here is like that. Gloves and stockings are made in Japan, and good and cheap there; fine silken stockings $1.60 a pair. But still the Chinese do not buy of them, but from America. We have visited a cotton mill. The Chinese cotton and silk are now inferior, owing to lack of scientific production and of proper care of seed. In weaving, they sometimes mix their cotton with ours.

4. Mai Bewegung = May fourth movement : John Dewey was as sympathetic to the workers as he was to the students. His Chicago colleagues' disapproval of the strike correlated with Hu Shi's negative opinion about the student revolt. Hu insisted that the students should devote themselves to their studies rather than to politics ; Dewey endorsed the student's revolt as a gesture of righteous indignation. Dewey was glad for young China because it now realized, that it did not need to be saved from without. Nonetheless, Dewey knew that merely resorting to protests and rebellions would not bring about constructive change.
In the new press, all kinds of Western social and political theories were translated and discussed, including anarchism, liberalism, socialism, Marxism and Dewey's own pragmatism. Even though Dewey questioned the students' interest in Marxism, he acknowledged their overall intellectual enthusiasm.
Even though Dewey recognized the importance of cultural reform, he had doubts about such a single-minded approach. Unlike the Chinese intellectuals, he did not establish an arbitrary dualism between cultural and political reform. He acknowledged the importance of Western learning and sensed a more pressing need for China to develop her industry. He thought that Chinese intellectuals were too preoccupied with absorbing new thoughts and new theories to accomplish any effective political or practical change.
Dewey's dream for a true political revolution following the May fourth student demonstration did not materialize. He understood that the salvation of China depended not so much on the few intellectuals in the cities as on the ordinary men and women throughout China.

John Dewey : Lecture John Dewey : Lecture 'The essence of populist education' at the Zhejiang Association for Education in Hangzhou. Zheng Zonghai interpreter.

John Dewey : Lecture 'The real meaning of education in a democracy' at the Zhejiang Education Association in Hangzhou. = Ping min jiao yu zhi zhen di. Zheng Zonghai interpreter ; Zhu Yukui recorder. In : Jiao yu chao ; vol. 1, no 2 (June 1919).

John Dewey : Lecture 'The relation between democracy and education' at the Jiangsu Educational Association Building, Shanghai. = Ping min zhu yi, ping min zhu yi di jiao yu, ping min jiao yu zhu yi di ban fa. Jiang Menglin interpreter ; Pan Gongzhan recorder. In : Xue deng ; May 8-9 (1919) / In : Chen bao fu kan ; May 9 (1919).
Zhou Youjin : Dewey's speeches were so popular that there was barely enough room for the audience. The speeches have already been published in both Chinese and English newspapers to that those who were not able to attend the speeches for various reasons could learn about Dewey's ideas.

Alice Chipman Dewey : Lecture 'A new interpretation of women's education' in Hangzhou. Zhang Tianzuo interpreter.

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
May 9 [1919]
Dear children, Im writing from Hangchow, a city some four or five hours south from Shanghai, and the thermometer at half past four p.m stands in the house at 94, and I dont know that it has been much below this day or night for three days. Mamma is now speaking to the girls of various schools in the big hall here, and she hasnt slept much the aforesaid three nights Im afraid she will be too used up. We came here sunday and this p m is about the first free time Ive had; I use this paper because I havent any other and because you may learn seomthing from what's on the other side, and we are staying with the Barnetts, he being the Y M C A secy who wrote the appeal. Japan was rather baffling and tanatslizing. China is overpowering, and the size of the difficulties and obstacles to be overcome, in modernizing China and even in maintaining its continued existence as an independent nation are I think depressing to most, the educated Chinese who realize the situation included. One could write more easily in Japan, because in spite of the reserve over everything, the unlifted screen, things are more or less tied up in packages and ticketed, while here one only ctaches separet glimpses of a vast panoramic kaleidoscope. I doubt if the Chinese are personally as much as sealed mystery as reported sometimes, but the country is so vast, and the parts of it so different, and the accumulations from the past so enormous, and one would have to live here so long to begin to get hold of even the most important which are hneeded to understand things, that theit is easy to see how and where the idea of China as an impenetrable mystery came from. Here is one incident which personally concerns us, and also seems typical. The other day the Peking univ students started a parade in protest of the Paris Peace Conference action in turning the German interests in China over to the Japanese. Being interfered with by the police they got more unruly and beat up the Chinese minister to Japan who negotiated the treaties that sold China out, he having been bribed; they burned the house where he was staying,5 and he went to the hospital, in fact was reported dead. Well, in one sense this || was a kind of Halloween students spree with a somewhat serious political purpose attached. In another sense, it may be—tho probably not—the beginning of an important active political movement, out of which anything may grow. All the educated japanese [ink del.] Chinese [in ink] regard the beating not as lynching but as just expression of social disapprobation; they are sorry the man wasnt killed. Some twenty students were arrested; practically every organization in China is sending telegrams to the government requesting that they be not punished If they should be, [pencil comma] there may be a kind of revolution directed against the present government in form and the Japanese in reality. This way of going at things seems typical of the way China acts, and it is equally typical that no one will guess which way things are going to turn whether this ais a temporary excitement or the beginning of the new political movement China needs. And the most typical thing is that tho the Chinese have known the facts for some years, they have done nothing—except hate the japanese and hope that America and japan would get into war and the U S lick Japan. In fact during this time they have allowed things to go from bad to worse so far as internal division and disorganization are concerned, and so far as wholesale graft by the political authorities—not quite all—is concerned. The only reason for not believeing the stories along this line you hear of is because they come so far short of the fatcs. In fact if anyone put down the things that are alluded to in passing and taken as a matter of course no one in [pencil underline] America would believe them; he would think we had been gulled by some one—Governors [G in ink] who in the last few years who have got title to all the mines in their provinces as big and rich in coal as perhaps Penn—others who own onetenth of the land in a province bigger than NY and so on. Well, they stood by and allowed all this to go on, including the selling out to Japan, and did nothing—but the students row may set them off. If you can figure this out, you will understand the country better than I do. I am pretty sure however that China is the country of pure original human nature, just as Japan is the high-||ly cultivated, trained, over-trained, country. Well, where it affects [in ink] us is this. Accordinding to etiqueete here, the Chancellor of the University is "responsible" for the students action. If the government punishes them he will doubtless reisgn on the ground that he is the one really to blame. He is a liberal, and if he goes I think our invitation to the University will doubtleas be lost and forgotten. They were planning a conference of the chief educational officials in Peking for the last two weeks in June, and this will probably be called off to, if the liberals lose out. In that case we shall beack in Tokyo or Japan as according to recent letters, whereas according to this other plan, developed I think since we wrote last, we should be here two weeks longer than we expected. Our guide and friend who wrote had charge of us in Sh and who piloted ^us^ down here and was to have interpreted here, left suddenyl for Sh on receipt of the Peking news to see what had happenned, and how it was going to affect the plans made for us. We have been to two dinner parties here, and two lunch parties since we came Monday—nor Friday, almost all Chinese guests. There are fewer American returned students here, mostly the authorities here having been educated in Japan—which they hate, and whose educational system they have slavishly copied, in because of the hate, because they havent seen anything else and because they have an idea that it was Japan' system that has enabled Japan to put it over on them. But the scheme is as unfitted for big sprawling go as you please China as it is fitted for compact and obeyful Japan. The impressive thing about their hatred for Japan is that it isnt loud and boisterous; it is just as much a matter of fact as the weather, and it is combined with great moral contempt. There was a rumor in Sh sunday that Wilson was assisinated, Every Chinaman who spoke of it said the Japanese had started the story. When asked why, the answer was always because that is the way they do everything—the point being that here assasination is resorted to only when a man has become an object of universal detestation and only then.
Hangchow is a city of six or seven hundred thousand and the centre of both the best tea—which is much like the best green tea of Japan near Kyoto and of the best silks. We have been to a big silk filature,9 quite modrenized and run by Chinese and also a silk school where mamma was delighted by seeing absolutely everything in the line of worms, coconns the care of them—this is just the tail end of the season, and we had been told before we shouldnt see them feeding. But they had em, including the wild kind that makes the Pongee silk, brought from another district for experimentation. They live not on oak trees but on what seemed to be a kind of chestnut. They are experimenting crosing with japanese, french and Italian breeds. It is said the quality of their own coccons has deteriorated. In the factory we say the treads drawn the cocoons—girls in charge and very skilful.
Thank the Lord a rain has set in since we I began and perhaps the weather will change before we give up thr ghost. Hangchow is on a Lake known as West Lake, one of the most spots in China, scenically and historically, quite beautiful though not over three or four feet deep anywhere, hills and mts about. We have been taken out and around on it some three times, once to visit a missionary American college on the hills overlooking the big Hangchow river, the situation is wonderful when you get to itn like Pacific Heights in Honolulu as mamma pointed out after I had feebly compared it to the outlook from Berkeley hills. We go back to Shanghai sunday, then in a day or two to Nanking where we stay two weeks, unless everything is upset. I have given but one lecture to about eight or nine hundred, and had a conference with about fifty—called a conference, in fact a series of brief lectures on various topics—and another conference tomorrow. In many ways they are pathetic, so genuinely openminded and anxious to learn many of them, and yet so up gaainst conditions, that it seems hopeless to make suggestions and preach theories. It is significant that they thing they respond to most is the idea of making the child rather the lesson the centre. In Japan in spite of the uniform love of children, I doubt if they could grasp the idea.
[John Dewey]

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, Monday, May 12. [12.5.1919].
The Peking tempest seems to have subsided for the present, the Chancellor still holding the fort, and the students being released. The subsidized press said this was due in part to the request of the Japanese that the school-boy pranks be looked upon indulgently. According to the papers, the Japanese boycott is spreading, but the ones we see doubt if the people will hold out long enough—meanwhile Japanese money is refused here.
The East is an example of what masculine civilization can be and do. The trouble I should say is that the discussions have been confined to the subjection of the women as if that were a thing affecting the women only. It is my conviction that not merely the domestic and educational backwardness of China, but the increasing physical degeneration and the universal political corruption and lack of public spirit, which make China such an easy mark, is the result of the condition of women. There is the same corruption in Japan only it is organized; there seems to be an alliance between two groups of big capitalists and the two leading political 'parties'. There the very great public spirit is nationalistic rather than social, that is, it is patriotism rather than public spirit as we understand it. So while Japan is strong where China is weak, there are corresponding defects there because of the submission of women—and the time will come when the hidden weakness will break Japan down. Here are two items from the Chinese side. A missionary spoke to Christian Chinese about spending the time Sunday, making chiefly the point that it was a good time for family reunions and family readings, conversation and the like. One of them said that they would be bored to death if they had to spend the whole day with their wives. Then we are told that the rich women—who have of course much less liberty in getting out than the poorer class women—spend their time among themselves gambling. It is universally believed that the attempt to support a number of wives extravagantly is one of the chief sources of political corruption. On the other hand, at one of the political protest meetings in Peking a committee of twelve was appointed to go to the officials and four of them were women. In Japan women are forbidden to attend any meetings where politics are discussed, and the law is strictly enforced. There are many more Chinese women studying in America than there are Japanese—in part, perhaps, because of the lack of higher schools for girls here, but also because they don't have to give up marriage here when they get an education—in fact we are told they are in especial demand not only among the men who have studied abroad, but among the millionaires. Certainly the educated ones here are much more advanced on the woman question than in Japan.
'You never can tell' is the coat of arms of China. The Chancellor of the University was forced out on the evening of the eighth by the cabinet, practically under threat of assassination; also soldiers (bandits) were brought into the city and the University surrounded, so to save the University rather than himself, he left—nobody knows where. The release of the students was sent out by telegraph, but they refused to allow this to become known. It seems this Chancellor was more the intellectual leader of the liberals than I had realized, and the government had become really afraid of him. He has only been there two years, and before that the students had never demonstrated politically and now they are the leaders of the new movement. So of course the government will put in a reactionary, and the students will leave and all the honest teachers resign. Perhaps the students will go on strike all over China. But you never can tell.

John Dewey has dinner with Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai, accompanied by Hu Shi and Jiang Menglin. Sun wrote the book 'On psychological reconstruction', in which he advanced the theory that 'to know is difficult, but to do is easy'. Before publishing his book. In chapter 4 of his book, he referred to his meeting with Dewey, writing : "On the eve of the publication of the first edition of this book, Dr. Dewey happened to be in Shanghai. I confirmed my theory with him. He said, 'We Westerners only think to know is difficult, but no one would think to act is a difficult matter'."