China and the West

John Dewey : Lecture 'The concept of right in Western thought' at Chinese University, Beijing. = Xi fang si xiang zhong zhi chuan li guan nian. Hu Shi interpreter ; Wang Tongzhao, Xie Bing recorder. In : Xue deng ; Jan. 27-28 (1920).

John Dewey : Lecture 'The concept of right in Western thought' at Chinese University, Beijing. = Xi fang si xiang zhong zhi chuan li guan nian. Hu Shi interpreter ; Wang Tongzhao, Xie Bing recorder. In : Xue deng ; Jan. 27-28 (1920).

Letter from Alice Chipman Dewey to Evelyn Dewey
Peking Feb 8th [1920] Sunday.
Dearest Evelyn…
Pa and I have just been to an exhibition of Mr Liens pictures. They are said to be the best collection in China, tho not large they are all perfect…
There is nothing to tell you except that we are jumping out of boots now that we have heard from you and shall continue to jump till you get here which will be soon. I wish I could be in the Sontag Hotel when you get there. But the thought of all that travel is enough to take away the taste for a trip just to come right back. Peking weather is delightful again tho colder than at any time before… The students are going to work again tomorrow to keep the govt from shutting up the schools and also to fix the blame on the gvt where it belongs. The govft here is behaving as badly as the Japanese thems[elves] Now this must go if it gets to you on time.
Loads of love till we meet. Mama.

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
135 Morrison St Peking Feb 2 11
Dearest children,
We are expecting Ev to arrive here a week from to morrow, so says a telegram we recd from Tokyo; she gets to Seoul in Korea in two days... I feel free to mention the fact that Suh Hu [Hu Shi] asked us about staying over another year, to work on the educational dept of the university. Ev included, because I dont think there is anything in it, tho we havent given any answer yet, waiting for Evs arrival. There is only one good reason for staying and that's on mother's account, that is to say housekeeping. When things are so easy here it looks hard on her to subject her to the strains of the hcl and servants in N Y. But I think personally Ive got about all I can get from a stay here now. Id rather come back and go home by India or Russia a few years from now. Also I want to see the family, and not lose all track of my country—tho Suh Hu [Hu Shi] says I would get deported if I went back now. Fred seemed to be worrying about my connection with the new school, so I wrote them to announce my course there in such a way that it wouldn't seem as if I had given up there Columbia…
We are still waiting to hear what will happen when my work finishes here next month. Presumably I go to the Yangste valley in general and Nanking in particular to lecture, but whether for one month or three I don[t] know. If for one three we shant get south to Foochow and Canton till summer very hot weather, and little time in Japan on our return, earlier tho still hot enough, and have some weeks in Japan to complete our sightseeing there, Nikko etc. When we find out and Ev gets here we shall have to decide what the rest of the family will do when I go to Nanking—they wont want three mos there as it is not exciting. Another thing agt staying over another year is the uncertainty of this situation. Things have been badly broken up, no lectures last two weeks. No actual strike, but no regular classes either. They are meeting everyday to decide upon whether to strike, the more responsible ones trying to prevent it, the hot heads wanting to as a protest agt beating up of students and arests of students, and dissolution of union at demand of J govt; also the pro-oficial spies among them are urging a strike, as the govt would like to have them do it, to close schools, get students out of Peking and give them free hand to open direct negotiations with J about Shntung. The situation was very tense this last week, with the arrests and the police and lmilitary here and in Tinetsin taking the overt action agt the students. Its pretty clear that the first chapter in the movement is now ended, and what will happen next its too much to say. J has felt the boycott very much, and one hand is ready to make some concessions and on the other is forcing the Chinese military party to direct suppression by use of force of the boycott. They have taken Tientsin as the place of for an object lesson, Even if they break it, it wll be a long time before J wholly recovers, The movement toward native production especially in cotton has taken a big leap forward, tho there is great difficulty in importing machinery.
Tomorrow is another of the endless holidays here—this time the anniversary of the abdication of the Manchu dynsaty in 1912—tho it might as well be Lincolns birthday here as there. Thursday has been my Tsing Hua day and all the holidays have thoughtfully come on that day. Ev arrives here on Thursday tho, and Im hoping there will be a holiday next week as the 20th is the New Year day, and many schools have a three day holiday.
Lots of love to you all Dad.

Letter from Alice Chipman Dewey to Frederick A., Sabino, & Elizabeth Braley Dewey
Peking Feb 13th. [1920]
Dearest children, Fred, Bino and Elizabeth.
It seems by the records I have been making a very bad account in writing home lately. Things go the sme here as elsewhere tho I have not the same excuse of hard work and being tired, but we get domestic and nothing of new importance happens and I allow myself to get busy with the passing incidents and with taling to people. Today is a great day, for Evelyn is landing or has landed on the continent of Asia if she has carried out the plans she wired to us from Tokyo. It seems to put the freshness and the sensation back into the strange appearances that have now become familiar. You know she will get here the day before New years and if she is not tired or sick we ought to have a great time for ten days seeing the markets and the exhibitions. The weathe[r] here is sunny and not too cold, tho it is the coldest of the year. We may still have snow and then it will be hard work standing on the stone floors, looking. But it is all a matter of clothing and the Chinese know how to adapt themselves. The food I have already talked about, but the cl[o]thes ought to be seen to be understood. Lately I have been relieving my own distress as well as mitigating the pains of others a little by putting some little children in K.G. for the rest of this year. Lucy has one particular favorite and the first day this child went she was like a stuffed ball in appearance, her arms stuck out like the wadded dolls and were not much more movable. if the children fall down here there is nothing to worry about. The shoes are the most convincing of our vanities for they are made of felt with thick soles and wadded linings, no heels. The college girl here would not pass on the Smith or Brynmawr campus. All her clothes are made of cotton cloth like the ones I sent home, only in general the good old colors have gone. They wear fur lined coats, both small and over coats made of a dirty brown color and sometimes a long wool overcoat like a very narrow mans ulster with a cheap fur collar. In the house they all wear the thin silk skirts of black put on over several pairs of trousers, and at least four coats one on top of the other, one or two of them being lined with fur. I think they tell the truth when they say they are never cold. no cellars, stone floor, no rug if a little stove with fire they often open their door to get air.
I have just read a note from Joanna, came on the Russia I think, tho we ar[e] to get another mail today—if we do. I believe a cotton coat is about as costly for a girl here as a plain silk one would be. When they go out for company they wear the lovely brocade satins. We had a call from a bride yesterday afternoon, She was dressed all in splendid white borcade. This is the second white brocade suit we have seen on an afternoon caller. As for food, let me suggest this dish to you. Put into your chafing dish enough broth for your soup. Put on the table beside it vegetables either cooked or partly so, and thin sliced meat and fish of as many kinds as you wish, very thin, drop these slices into the boiling broth and take them out with your chopsticks and put them into your mouth. After you get enough of this, put all you have into the broth and then put the whol into your soup plates and finish with rice or without. We are h[a]ving it alone for tiffin [luncheon] today. Chinese have it for the last course at a dinner. They always have their sweet in the middle of the dinner. We have today broth well flavored, cabbage wgich is cut up and boiled first, thin sliced potatoes, lamb and I dont know what else for the cook always surprises us with things we know not…
As for politics here things move on in the same direction so far as I can see Japan and the interests that go with her seem to calmly press the heel harder all the time on the necks of the majority who are struggling to get loose. The students are doing very l[i]ttle work tho they are not striking nominally. The whole excitement has been very upsetting to them and they still feel they have work more important than studies, and the idle ones take advantage to be more lazy than ever, Mrs [Lois Miles] Zucker taeches English Lit in the govt University. She says she had three boys in one clss this week and that is the largest number, Those t[h]ree told her they came because they were sick and could not go out to speak. Yesterday we were about the town but saw no one speaking, It is said they are speaking on the shops. Meantime the Minister of Foreign affairs has left and his Vice minister has gone with hime and there is chaos in the foreign office. It is a time when I sho[u]ld like to see Mr [Bertram Lenox] Simpson and hear his view. He is in general hopeful but advisers in general have not much influence tho he is said to be listened to by the foreign office. Perhaps that is the reason they are out, I dont know. He is writing articles for the Leader showing how China may keep her advantages if she will and the students are following the lines of the information he gives them. In general no one dares to move and so every thing is outwardly calm, tho that is an atmosphere that suots Japan.
We are sending lanterns for New Years presents to our friends the children. They are the very most interesting cheap decorations I have ever seen, all the insects, fishes, birds, vegetables and some quadrupeds are wonderfully reproduc[ed] You put a light inside them, their legs and arms move in the air, they are colored, and they cost 25 cents each. The colors are varnished on so they are very durable. The deer is a sacred animal, brining good luck I saw a fawn life size standing on its feet. There are lovely ones of painted silk which are more expensive. We had a gift of lovely paintings, panels two by six inches The one I like best of our l[a]nterns is a red peach with a scarlet butterfly resting on thr leaf. I wish E.A. could have some of them, but if she did they would have to be made in the U.S. for they would not travel well. Some time may be we wll bring the lantern makers to us but their works will be much more expensive than they are here, like all art…
Our lillies are in full bloom and I fear will not make a good show when Ev arrives tho they were bought to celebrat her arrival. The Chinese are wonderful in forcing things and the flowers tho spafrce and very dear are delicious They take two or more liily bulbs abd bind them together in a straight line by running a splint of rattan thru them so you have a lovely flower bed out of two bulbs. I have one such with nine spikes of heavy bloom on it and the three bulb combinations have sometimes 15 others have 12. They produce very fots. and not such big leaves as when we put them in a lot of water, Change water every fay and keep but little in bowl. They are sold for 2½ cts per bloom so there is never any doubt. When you buy the buds are just ready to bloom and the leaves three inches long, Later they get tall, at least I cant prevent that
Tomorrow morning at seven oclock I am going to the silk and fur market. So far during the cold I have not had the nerve to do it. I think I shall buy a fur coat for next winter of grey squirrel. The cost about one sixth of the prices I see in the papers from N.Y. Furnishing the flat has so tzken up my intest tht we have not bought much to take home. mean time the prich of rugs has so soared since last summer that I am mad at not having made invesfments in them.
Peking is full of conventions, Methodist, Missionary, and Medical…
Lots of love, Mama.

Letter from Alice Chipman Dewey to Frederick A. Dewey
Peking, Feb 15th. [1920] Sunday.
Dear Fred…
I had my breakfast before the others and went to the fur market and I nearly bought a fur coat to make over for E.A. The little Am. children wear them here either made of spotted cat which is very pretty or striped cat, or of grey squirrel. If you had only been near to ask if you wanted that expense, they cost about fifteen dollars all made up. I am going to buy another and better for me, and some others, and I think Elizabeth might want one too, but I dont dare to go too far in a ting so perishable as some of them are. let me know I hd lovely sable coats offered to me for 250 and 400 depending on the size. One long coat coming to the feet may be had for 1000 or 1500 and they cost 4000 or more in the U.S. I am not thinkig of those but I like the grey squirrel ones. What I think I shall buy is oe made of fox legs which look like sable and wear a long long time cost about 75. The variety of fur here is greater than with us as they are fond of sewi[n]g little bits together to make handsome designs like the fox legs which are small but dark and handsome. There is one kind made of pieces less than an inch square. Well, so much for fur. Silk is sold at that morning market too, and as for pigs all in parts I necer saw so many in my life, You can buy furniture there and cotton cllth and brasses and dishes and spectacles and vegetables znd ol junk made of iron and all the rest besides the Chinese people. Since I wrote you yesterday there is more evidence that China is just drifti[n]g into the maw of Japan. The teachers and the Students Unions were suppressed day before yesterday and the fact is published today. The tendency has been steady, in spite of all the remonstrances of the people. It is curous to us to see what these people seem to depend upon in making up their minds, or not making them up, as you see it. Since reading more of their history I can see they have always been in a stae much like this. The Japanese have held parts of their coast in the past and then been forced to get out after century or more. They have always pirated the coa[st] and for the Manchu rule, and its downfall the effect of that seems to be to make the Chinese take things as they come trusting that after 300 years or so they will again drive out the Japs. They seem to rest on this great lazy fact that the Chinese nation is too big and too unwilling to be absorbed in any other; and as for this interference, why we have to stand about so moch that is disagreeabl any way and it is very disagreeable to fight the Japs and to hate them as we do but Govt is always bad any way, -like ours, - and we may as well make the best of it. A man named Que [Kuo] Tai Chi is here from Canton. He has just come back from Paris with the peace delegates and he is said to be saying strong tnings to the legations and to the Govt regarding Canton. No one can be surprised if the south breaks entirely with the north in case this govt does make the concessions direct to Japan in Shantung. There is also a strong probability that the whole of the intriguing is just to overthrow this present govt. That downfall happens to be a thing that the republicans want of course, as well as the Anfu Club since they too can not control it. There is not telling from day to day.
I have a charming little satin coat for E.A. which I think I can send over by Mrs Frame, and I shall try. She goes in about one week. The embroidery on it is quite rare, and shows the garment once belonged to a child of the highest rank, next to the imperial.
Pa has just come in from his lecture. Hu [Shi]says, suppression of the Unions is like the threat to close the schools, largely a threat to induce the students to make trouble. What the govt really wants is an excuse to close the schools and their spies keep coming to the students to urge them to bring legal action agnst the metropolitan police. They really know that the students idea has influen[ce] and agrees with the public sentiment and they want to close the schools for the next four months so as to be able to quietly get things back into their own hands. But the students are on to their tricks and have settled upon a quite policy which does not mean giving up. They mean to continue classes and to outwit the govt by nonresistance. The procalmation of Marial law will not alter anything. Meantime Peking look as if it were under martial law already so many guards every [w]here. Japanese goods have been put out for sale again and some shops which had only native goods have been closed by the police on the ground that they were supporting the boycott. Did you every hear of a contry punishing patriotism to such a degree?...
Travel is dear here, and especially when we go with the Chinese who think it necessary to have the highest priced things everywhere…
Lucy is feeling better today and Papa worse, That is to say he has the worst cold he has had for on the whole he has thrown off beginnings of colds easily and his lecturi[n]g has not been troublesome. Today however he is lying down tho he has no symptoms of fever or other expreme disconfort. It is quite wonderful how he adapts to all the changes without being upset and I hope this cold means nothing to worry about. There is the usual amount of cantagious diseas in the city among children. Our good friend and still better friend of Chinese education Mr Sam Dean has qite broken down. He is in bed, not allowed to se peple and it is feared the trouble is tuberculosis. He has not been well all winter and has gone on breaking all the laws of hygiene and now every body is mourning him. He is to go home soon any way and now it is a struggle to get him buil up to travel. If he does not come bck the loss to China will be immeasurable…
With lots of love to you and to all, Mama.

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
135 Morrison St Feb 17 [1920] | Peking
Dearest family, …
The J govt has stood in Korea in the way of persecution and propagand by missionaries etc—and as the lying missionaries of China she would never forgive them for hating Japan. That last is a good mor war moral, hate is so hateful you must be very careful to hate the right ones. The morning paper says Tom Lamont is on way over here—tho it didnt call him Tom, just like that. Some of the business people here say it wasnt true that the Morgans are going in with Japanese capital in Manchuria and Siberia, and think the Japanese gentlemen in Sf just an-||nounced it from nerve because it was piqued because the other crowd had just announced its cooperation with Chinese capital. Internal politics here are too much for me—I hae to admit it. The popular objection to Sha entering into direct negotiations with Japn about her return of Shantung is universal. Its so strong that it would seem unreasonable if it didnt give a measure of the existing distrust both of Japan and of their own officials. But the officials have gone straight ahead. No public decision has been announced but it is generally believed that the govt has decided to go ahead. In fact it is generally believed that private negotiation[s] have been going on thu the medium of some big Japanese financiers here, and that when it is announed that negotiations will be begun it will mean verything is settled. One well posted Chinese said that he thought that after it was fixed Japan would simply announce the terms, saying she would not insist upon direct negotiations in view of the opposition of the people. The terms in general will involve considerable concessions but will be quite general and the details will be fixed by private treaties including some generous "loans". Domestic politics is also miced up, the premier while a militaryist is a rival of little Hsu the head of the Anfu club, which controls the govt except him, and it is said they are playing for his scalp and to get complete control. The best evidence of something going ions is the campaign of the last few weeks against the students Adter suppressing the movement in Tientsin, they have stopped it here, really stoped it so far as external manifestations are concerned. They tried every possibe way to provoke the students to strike. At first the students fell in the trap, but and voted a strike, but they got wise and voted not to. Then the govt to provoke the more, dissolved both the teachers and students unions by main force, police. Still they keep quiet What the govt will do next to provoke them, I dont know. The govt wants to get an excuse to close up all the schools and send the students home. The supposition is that it wants them out of the way when direct negotiations with Japan are announced. Thats probably a part of it, but demands from Japan and money are probably a factor too. The students really won a moral victory over themselves in not striking. Their fellow students had bee[n] arrested and physically abused, over forty are in hospitals here, from beatings up by soldiers and about as many more leaders in prison, no one knows where, and their sense of honor was that they should all strike for their comrades sake. But other managed to persuade them that the Shantung issue was the important thing, and they reserve themselves for that, and their fellow students in prison were more interested in the cause than in themselves. Finally the vote not to strike was unanimous—you cant imagine what it means for them to change about, becuase this would be loss of face for those who had been in favor a strike. Then they also sent telegrams to all the other towns where they had sent emissaries to start strikes telling them not to, to wait. Reports from the Shanghai valley are that probably the southern vaprovinces will break loose and start a revolution oif the Peking govt begins direct negotiations Probably the Japanese discount this. If they can get control of the northern govt, it would give them Manchuria positive and Shantung and this province Chili, and they could get the north and south to fighting one another, without their having to use their own money and blood. Howver the revolution if it occurs wont be confined to the south. The suppression of organizations will lead to direct action by individuals. There is no doubt Bolshevism is growing very rapidly in China—not technical Svovietism, but a belief in revolution as the cure of both Japan and their won govt, and making use of the Russian revolutionary aid to bring it on—there is too much lamd owned by individualistic peasants for a real Russian Bolshevism and factory industry too undeveloped. But the militarists who have used command of the army to extort money have been pu[t]ting their money into banks, stores (that is the chief thing the boycott is up agt) and indutrial enterprises, and in that way an economic question is growing up, and class feeling which has never existed before as class feeling. Its no use trying to prophesy about China, but anywhere else in the world, if things go in the present direction, it would be safe to predict an era of terrorism, assassinations etc, and efforts at revolution. Mentime the Chinese have got pessimistic agin, as much so as when we landed last May. A large part of them predict complete Japanese control—they are so many of them fatalists at bottom. On the other hand they think in the long run fate is on their side and that after they have had fifty years ofr a century of Japan—a century or two more or less is nothing here—Japan will be completely destroyed. They have evolved so far next to no capacity for selfgovernment. As Ive probably said before if I were a historian of ancient times, amytime up to eighteenth century Id study China and see the thing before my eyes. And the financial mess is the worst, and the foreign govts and diplomats are primarily responsible for that. The govt exists from month to month simply by the favor of foreign loans. It is now borrowing twentyfive million—that is five million pounds, which by the time exchange is reckoned and the premium to baker paisd will net China ten million dollars. The reason for our govt going in is thaa toherwise Japan alone will laon the money. But verything is handled in this piecemeal pawnbroking style. They have paper assurane that some of the money will be paid used to pay off loans soldiers and disband the army, and that there will be foreign supervision of expeditures—but Lord. Well there doesnt seem to be anything but politcs to write about—the lanterns of fishes and fruits and bugs and grasshoppers that we get for twenty five cents, oiled paper, for new years are much more interesting—New Years is in three days, but how much we are going to see except the special markets and bazzaars I dont know. When Ev gets here there is to be another big banquet given us, a kind of farewell departure I think.
Lots of love Dad
Ill try to send this by Shanghai and Empress mail. Plese direct the next letters to me | Care Teachers College | Nanking. | Where the family will be I dont know, but try some of your letters direct to me there, and some to rest of family here.

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
Feb 20 [1920] Peking, the same being the first day of the lunar new year.
Dearest family,
We lived and dozed thru a night that on the whole has 4th of July beaten for noise; there were no explosions quite so rude as our big dynamite crackers, and thank God the tin horns were not. For uninterrupted cracking however the night was a sucess. This morning the boys have all been in and made their boys bows. Spite of age, they are all boys when you see how happy the New Years Day made them. I wish I knew enough Chinese to ask them why it made them so happy; I dont think it was entirely the cumshaws, sctho they seemed pleased and perhaps surprised at the amount they got; perhpas they had thought we were tightwads. It hardly seems possible as if a people as old and disillusionized as the Chinese could thibk New Years was going to make the world turn over a new leaf and behave decently for a change, but if [pencil del.] every [in pencil w. caret] day ought to be New Years if it can make people happy so easily. If you ever see Mr [possibly George] Hopkins (and I hope you do sometimes) tell him that tho China doesnt seem idyllic, I sympathize with his feeling about it. Mr Barry has taken to sending the Call lately. The red headlines and screaming type and break up into millions of unrelated paragraphs most of which cant have any interest except to the epople who in them are killed divorced and sued for breach of promise or knocked out, [pencil comma] brought back a picture Id about that had almost lapsesd [d in pencil] from consciousness. I had forgotten anyone could be so crazy, and yet I know very well before Ive been back two weeks it will seem to represent the normal curse of life (I started to write course of life, but I bow to the superior wisdom of the Typewriter)…
Suh Hu [Hu Shi] in suggesting to me that we stay over next year, said it probably wouldnt be safe for me to go home, as I would be deported. This wasnt all a joke on his part. It represents the impression our present doings in America make on an intelligent foreigner as they they get reported. Of course we are rich enough and big enough, to say nothing of being crazy enough, to care nothing for any what any dam fool foreigner cares about us, but I wonder how much of a headache we'll [pencil apostrophe] have when we wake up the morning after. After sveral million unskilled laborers take the advice of those who are telling them if you dont like this country go back to where you came from, and the labor market is cornered by the unions, and the prize boobs of the universe, the middle class has reaped the full reward of its asininity and servility, we shall certainly have some country. This sounds dyspeptic, but Im only too fate, and all that ails me physically is a bad cold. But Mr Hunt told last night about going back to his old home town in the country in Ill and the respectables of the village were brought out to do him honor, the hardware merchant, the lawyer and doctor and preacher and banker, and he said there wasnt one of them who wasnt ready to fight and die for for Mr [Elbert Henry] Gary. I only started out to say that he has begun to tell the facts about Siberia as practically everybody here knows them, but which have been systematically distorted by the propaganda press and the state dept along with the rest of the diplomatists. About one thing he differs from the others Ive heard talk who have been there. He says America isnt hated, that 90 per cent of our soldiers became sympathetic with the revolutionaries, and that the Russian common people know it, as our soldier[s] generally let the revolutionaries escape as fast as the Kolchak people captured them—the train that went to Vladivostock tand back to dem and the surrender of the latter city to the revolutionaries went under an escort of armed American soliders. Mr Morris ofur minister in Tokyo understod the whole situation he says which bears out the impression I got in Tokyo, but felt bound to be loyal to the state dept which had instructed him to find reasons for recognizing Kolchak. I didnt dare ask Mr Hunt how much Russian he speaks, for as he tells about his experiences it seems to make a little difference whether he is telling literal facts, or whether he is an artists and facts meet him more than havelf way. I suspect something of the latter. Anyway I had him here at dinner last night to meet the man who probably knows the most about the student movement from within, as the Chinese student is at least as much entitled as the Siberian peasant to figure picturesquely in the American newspapers. There is a certain kind of lie which only predicts the future in such a way as to help it come true, and if Hunt lies, which Im not at all sure of, it's [pencil apostrophe] that kind. Anyway he has brains and is an artist. He must also be a newspaper man, for I think he is the man who got the Peace treaty for the Chicago Tribune when the Senate couldnt get it. Mama and Ev must be together by this time; they are supposed to come back here next tuesday but I hae my doots. I just started out to wish you another Happy New Years, under the influence of the spontaneous happiness of our servants, moved especially by Fred's letter of Jan 176 [6 in pencil] || which looks as if mails were to be more regular agin. If it were of any use Id tell him not to work so hard, but nobody ever takes that advice But wall street isnt unlike other places and in taking everything a man will give even if uses himself up doing it, and then saying afterwards what a fool he was to let himself be used…
Laotze over here in China was another one Be [in pencil w. caret] a useful citizen and somebody will use you; be worthless and useless, and youll do something, [pencil comma] because you will be let alone and have a chance. This isnt advice, merely a net quotation from Mr Laotze who is the real philosopher of China as Confucius is of the ruling class…
Here are two or three little glimpses of China—draw your own morals. There is perfect and complete censorship here. Students unions and teachers suppressed. The last number of the students union paper comes out with an article advsing the soldiers to turn on their officers and divide the property of the latter among themselves. The soldiers ran into alot of inoffensive soldiers with the butts of their guns and sent about forty to hospitals and as many more to jail. The soldiers who guard the students in jail go in and listen to them talk in jail ad then when they are relieved of guard duty carry the letters back and forth from [pencil del.] between [in pencil w. caret] the prioners and the friends—nor for money either. The premier who of China had a talk wthe other day with some men from Shantung province who told him about the actual treaty nd legal status of Shantung. He got very hot and said he had never known the facts before—his subordinates had misrepresented and suppressed them. However the last is not distinctively Chinese—probably every important poilitical decision of the last few years has been made in just this way. So maybe the other things arent distinctively Chinese either.
Anyway love to all, and a very Happy lunar new year— I think Ill transfer my allegiance from sun to moon and see if it wont be as cheering as with the Chinese.
Dad

Dewey, John. The sequel of the student revolt [ID D28475].
As I write, in late November, the Sino-Japanese fracas in Foo¬chow (in which several Chinese students lost their lives and in consequence of which the Japanese landed marines who have stationed themselves in the Chinese city as well as in the foreign concession), is inflaming public feeling in China as it has not been stirred since last May. The students are again engaging in public demonstrations, and are joining with Chinese Chambers of Commerce in demanding that the people cease all social and economic intercourse with the Japanese until the latter change their course. The waning boycott is revived. It is demanded that the government declare a policy of economic non-intercourse and an embargo on imports and exports, until Japan has radically altered its policies. It is impossible to forecast the outcome. Pessimists declare that Japan is taking advantage of the situation to bring Fukien directly within her sphere of influence—an intention expressed in the Twenty-one Demands, but temporarily held in abeyance.
There are no optimists in China in the extreme sense, but the more hopeful assert that in the present state of affairs, with the Shantung question unsettled, the Consortium in its bearing upon Manchuria under discussion, and with an acute Siberian trouble on hand, the Japanese government is not looking for more trouble—especially with the eyes of the world in general upon it, and those of the American Senate in particular. Pessimists counter with the remark that it is precisely the growing influence and prestige of the United States in China that has forced the hand of the Japanese militarist expansionists to take an aggressive step, and face the world with a fait accompli; that Japan will make use of the difficulty to demand that the Chinese government put a stop, once for all, to the boycott movement; that Japanese troops, once having obtained a footing, will never be withdrawn, and that Fukien is now to go the way of Manchuria and Shantung.
Perhaps the most sinister feature is the semi-official report from Tokyo that the disturbance was deliberately started by the Chinese in order to force the Japanese to land troops, and thereby increase the prejudice against them now existing throughout the world. Official reports from the American consulate agree with Chinese reports that unarmed Chinese students were attacked by armed Japanese and Formosans under conditions which give an appearance of a planned and organized movement with at least the connivance of local Japanese authorities. Judging from the past, the chief outcome will not be immediately to establish Japan in the Province of Fukien, but to strengthen her hands in other controversies by injecting an element to be reckoned with in making a 'compromise'. Such is Oriental diplomacy. The gathering, as I write, of ten thousand Pekingese students for a demonstration, after a period of quiescence, gives a good opportunity to take stock of what the Student Movement has accomplished in the six months of its existence. As an immediate political movement it has accomplished nothing beyond preventing the signing of the Peace Treaty by China. The reasons for the relative political failure are not hard to see in retrospect, however difficult it was to perceive them in the excitement and stir of last May and June. The youth and inexperience of the students; the fear of some excess which would undo what had been effected; the fear in Peking, where the movement began, that government officials (who regarded the movement not as patriotic but as a pestilential disturbance headed toward Bolshevism) would make demonstrations an excuse for abolishing the University and the Higher Schools that are the centres of liberal thought; the difficulty in maintaining continuous organized cooperation with the mercantile guilds; the natural waning of enthusiasm when the crisis was past—all these things entered in.
But it would be a great mistake to think the movement died. The active current was diverted from breaking against the political and militaristic dam. It was drawn into a multitude of side streams and is now irrigating the intellectual and industrial soil of China. In Canton and Foochow the economic boycott has been active; in Tientsin, the political ferment has retained its vitality. Otherwise the students' organizations have gone into popular education, social and philanthropic service and vigorous intellectual discussion. China has never been anything but apathetic towards governmental questions. The Student Revolt marked a temporary exception only in appearance. The hopelessness of the political muddle, with corrupt officials and provincial military governors in real control, is enough to turn the youth away from direct politics. In addition a universal feeling operates that the comparative failure of the Revolution is due to the fact that political change far outran intellectual and moral preparation; that political revolution was formal and external; that an intellectual revolution is required before the nominal governmental revolution can be cashed in. Patriotism in China has centered about the maintenance of the existence of the nation against external aggression. The Student Revolt holds that national existence can best be secured by building up China from within, by spreading a democratic education, raising the standard of living, improving industries and relieving poverty.
The external phase of the movement centres in the creation of new schools supported and taught by the students, schools for children and adults; popular lectures and direct 'social service' movements; cooperation with shops to supply technical advice and expert assistance in improving old processes and introducing new arts. These activities protect the intellectual movement in getting away from all practical affairs, in getting away from politics, and guarantee it against becoming a cultural and literary side-show.
What is termed the literary revolution was under way before the Student Revolt. It aimed at a reform of the language used in books, magazines, newspapers, and public discussion. The outsider will jump to the conclusion that this means an attempt to encourage a phonetic substitute for ideographic characters. Not at all. There is a movement to supplement ideographs with phonetic signs to show their pronunciation, the aim being quite as much to standardize pronunciation as to make it easier to learn to read. But this movement arouses no such interest and excitement as the literary revolution. The latter is an attempt to make the spoken language the standard language for print. Literary Chinese is as far away from the vernacular as Latin is from English, perhaps further. It is the speech of two thousand years ago, adorned and frozen. To learn it is to learn another language. The reformers were actuated by the practical impossibility of making education really universal when in addition to the difficulties of mastering the ideographs, children in the elementary schools are compelled to get their education in terms of a foreign language. They are actuated even more by the belief that it was not possible to develop a literature which shall express the life of today unless the spoken language, the language of the people, is used. Apart from employing and enriching the vulgar tongue, it is not possible to develop general discussion of the issues of today, social, moral, economic.
Fortunately the new movement was 'advertised by its loving enemies'. The literary classicists saw in it the deathblow to the old moral classics, upon which China was built. They argued that the history of China is the history of its literary classics. Its unity resides in acceptance of the moral traditions they embody. To neglect them is to destroy China. The fight merged into one between conservatives and liberals in general, between the representatives of the old traditions and the representatives of western ideas and democratic institutions. Young China rallied as one man to the support of the literary revolution. It is stated that whereas two years ago there were but one or two tentative journals in the vulgar tongue, today there are over three hundred. Since last May the students have started score upon score of journals, all in the spoken tongue and all discussing matters in words that can be understood by the common man. In the columns of one of the older Chinese dailies in Peking there has lately been a discussion carried on by voluntary correspondents about a single particle that is used freely in colloquial speech—a discussion already running into ten thousands of words.
Those who know what the change from a learned language to the vernacular meant for the transition from medieval to modem Europe will not despise this linguistic sign of social change. It is more important by far than the adoption of a new constitution. Conservatism in China is not native or natural. It is largely the product of an inelastic system of memoriter education. This education has its roots in the use of a dead language as the medium of instruction. A national education conference held in October last passed a resolution in favor of having all text-books hereafter composed in the colloquial language. After this course has been followed for a generation, the judicious historian may see in it an event of greater importance than the downfall of the Manchu dynasty.
According to published summaries, social questions are uppermost in the new press. Eloquent testimony to the new-found unity of the world is seen in the amount of discussion devoted to economics and labor questions, which as yet do not exist in any acute form in China itself. Although Marx is hardly more pertinent to the present industrial situation in China than Plato, he is translated and much discussed. All the new 'isms are discussed. Ideal anarchism has many followers partly because of the historic Chinese contempt for government, partly because of the influence of French returned students who came in contact with communistic ideas in Paris. A friend who made a careful study of some fifty of the students' papers says that their first trait is the question mark, and the second is the demand for complete freedom of speech in order that answers may be found for the questions.
In a country where belief has been both authoritatively dogmatic and complacent, the rage for questioning is the omen of a new epoch. More than westerners realize, the interest of the Orient in the west has centered in the material progress of Europe and America, in machines for industry and war. There was no belief that the west was superior in other respects. Only within the last year or two has the idea become general that western ideas and modes of thought are more important than western battle-ships and steam-engines. This belief is concentrated in the intellectual side of the Student Movement, though it shows itself not in any great zeal for western ideas, as such, but in a desire for such knowledge of them as will facilitate discussion and criticism of typical Chinese creeds and institutions. One incident out of a multitude must suffice to show that the demand for freedom of thought and speech has a definite practical significance. China took over from Japan the law for assemblies which Japan had taken over from Germany. A discussion club applied to the Peking police authorities for a permit, stating that the object was consideration of the newer currents of world thought. The authorities refused the permit on the ground that newer currents must mean Bolshevism, anarchism and communism and that consideration of such topics was dangerous.
As is always the case, official opposition stimulates the movement of ideas. The menace of autocracy from within and without gives edge and fire to the hunger for new ideas. The eagerness grows for knowledge of the thought of liberal western countries in just the degree in which the powers near at hand in Tokyo and Peking seem to symbolize an intellectual creed which the world has outgrown. The more the so-called political revolution exhibits itself as a failure, the more active is the demand for an intellectual revolution which will make some future political revolution a reality. The thing that time makes stand out most in the Student Revolt is its spontaneity. The students met discouragement on all sides. Even their teachers and advisers among the returned students from America were inclined at first to wet-blanket their ardor. Its spontaneity is the proof of its genuine and inevitable nature. When most political in its outward expression, it was not a political movement. It was the manifestation of a new consciousness, an intellectual awakening in the young men and young women who through their schooling had been aroused to the necessity of a new order of belief, a new method of thinking. The movement is secure no matter how much its outward forms may alter or crumble.

John Dewey attends the Annual meeting of Zhili-Shanxi Educational Association in Beijing.

Dewey, John. Shantung : as seen from within [ID D28476].
I
American apologists for that part of the Peace Treaty which relates to China have the advantage of the illusions of distance. Most of the arguments seem strange to anyone who lives in China even for a few months. He finds the Japanese on the spot using the old saying about territory consecrated by treasure spent and blood shed. He reads in Japanese papers and hears from moderately liberal Japanese that Japan must protect China as well as Japan, against herself, against her own weak or corrupt government, by keeping control of Shantung to prevent China from again alienating that territory to some other power.
The history of European aggression in China gives this argument great force among the Japanese, who for the most part know nothing more about what actually goes on in China than they used to know about Korean conditions. These considerations, together with the immense expectations raised among the Japanese during the war concerning their coming domination of the Far East and the unswerving demand of excited public opinion in Japan during the Versailles Conference for the settlement that actually resulted, give an ironic turn to the statement so often made that Japan may be trusted to carry out her promises. Yes, one is often tempted to say, that is precisely what China fears, that Japan will carry out her promises, for then China is doomed. To one who knows the history of foreign aggression in China, especially the technique of conquest by railway and finance, the irony of promising to keep economic rights while returning sovereignty lies so on the surface that it is hardly irony. China might as well be offered Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on a silver platter as sovereignty under such conditions. The latter is equally metaphysical.
A visit to Shantung and a short residence in its capital city, Tsinan, made the conclusions, which so far as I know every foreigner in China has arrived at, a living thing. It gave a vivid picture of the many and intimate ways in which economic and political rights are inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret treaties during the war, could be naive enough to believe that the promise to return complete sovereignty retaining only economic rights is a satisfactory solution. It threw fresh light upon the contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced in the latter’s arrogations we had no call to make a fuss about Japan. It revealed the hollowness of the claim that pro-Chinese propaganda had wilfully misled Americans into confusing the few hundred square miles around the port of Tsing-tao with the Province of Shantung with its thirty millions of Chinese population.
As for the comparison of Germany and Japan one might suppose that the objects for which America nominally entered the war had made, in any case, a difference. But aside from this consideration, the Germans exclusively employed Chinese in the railway shops and for all the minor positions on the railway itself. The railway guards (the difference between police and soldiers is nominal in China) were all Chinese, the Germans merely training them. As soon as Japan invaded Shantung and took over the railway, Chinese workmen and Chinese military guards were at once dismissed and Japanese imported to take their places. Tsinan-fu, the inland terminus of the ex-German railway, is over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao. When the Japanese took over the German railway business office, they at once built barracks, and today there are several hundred soldiers still there—where Germany kept none. Since the armistice even, Japan has erected a powerful military wireless within the grounds of the garrison, against of course the unavailing protest of Chinese authorities. No foreigner can be found who will state that Germany used her ownership of port and railway to discriminate against other nations. No Chinese can be found who will claim that this ownership was used to force the Chinese out of business, or to extend German economic rights beyond those definitely assigned her by treaty. Common sense should also teach even the highest paid propagandist in America that there is, from the standpoint of China, an immense distinction between a national menace located half way around the globe, and one within two days’ sail over an inland sea absolutely controlled by a foreign navy, especially as the remote nation has no other foothold and the nearby one already dominates additional territory of enormous strategic and economic value—namely, Manchuria.
These facts bear upon the shadowy distinction between the Tsing-tao and the Shantung claim, as well as upon the solid distinction between German and Japanese occupancy. If there still seemed to be a thin wall between Japanese possession of the port of Tsing-tao and usurpation of Shantung, it was enough to stop off the train in Tsinan-fu to see the wall crumble. For the Japanese wireless and the barracks of the army of occupation are the first things that greet your eyes. Within a few hundred feet of the railway that connects Shanghai, via the important centre of Tientsin, with the capital, Peking, you see Japanese soldiers on the nominally Chinese street, guarding their barracks. Then you learn that if you travel upon the ex-German railway towards Tsing-tao, you are ordered to show your passport as if you were entering a foreign country. And as you travel along the road (remembering that you are over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao) you find Japanese soldiers at every station, and several garrisons and barracks at important towns on the line. Then you realize that at the shortest possible notice, Japan could cut all communications between southern China (together with the rich Yangtze region) and the capital, and with the aid of the Southern Manchurian Railway at the north of the capital, hold the entire coast and descend at its good pleasure upon Peking.
You are then prepared to learn from eye-witnesses that when Japan made its Twenty-one Demands upon China, machine guns were actually in position at strategic points, throughout Shantung, with trenches dug and sandbags placed. You know that the Japanese liberal spoke the truth, who told you, after a visit to China and return to protest against the action of his government, that the Japanese already had such a military hold upon China that they could control the country within a week, after a minimum of fighting, if war should arise. You also realize the efficiency of official control of information and domestic propaganda as you recall that he also told you that these things were true at the time of his visit, under the Terauchi cabinet, but had been completely reversed by the present Hara ministry. For I have yet to find a single foreigner or Chinese who is conscious of any difference of policy, save as the end of the war has forced the necessity of more caution, since other nations can now look China- wards as they could not during the war.
An American can get an idea of the realities of the present situation if he imagines a foreign garrison and military wireless in Wilmington, with a railway from that point to a fortified seaport controlled by the foreign power, at which the foreign nation can land, without resistance, troops as fast as they can be transported, and with bases of supply, munitions, food, uniforms, etc., already located at Wilmington, at the sea-port and several places along the line. Reverse the directions from south to north, and Wilmington will stand for Tsinan-fu, Shanghai for New York, Nanking for Philadelphia with Peking standing for the seat of government at Washington, and Tientsin for Baltimore. Suppose in addition that the Pennsylvania road is the sole means of communication between Washington and the chief commercial and industrial centres, and you have the framework of the Shantung picture as it presents itself daily to the inhabitants of China. Upon second thought, however, the parallel is not quite accurate. You have to add that the same foreign nation controls also all coast communications from, say, Raleigh southwards, with railway lines both to the nearby coast and to New Orleans. For (still reversing directions) this corresponds to the position of Imperial Japan in Manchuria with its railways to Dairen and through Korea to a port twelve hours sail from a great military centre in Japan proper. These are not remote possibilities nor vague prognostications. They are accomplished facts.
Yet the facts give only the framework of the picture. What is actually going on within Shantung? One of the demands of the 'postponed' group of the Twenty-one Demands was that Japan should supply military and police advisers to China. They are not so much postponed but that Japan enforced specific concessions from China during the war by diplomatic threats to reintroduce their discussion, or so postponed that Japanese advisers are not already installed in the police headquarters of the city of Tsinan, the capital city of Shantung of three hundred thousand population where the Provincial Assembly meets and all the Provincial officials reside. Within recent months the Japanese consul has taken a company of armed soldiers with him when he visited the Provincial Governor to make certain demands upon him, the visit being punctuated by an ostentatious surrounding of the Governor’s yamen by these troops. Within the past few weeks, two hundred cavalry came to Tsinan and remained there while Japanese officials demanded of the Governor drastic measures to sup-press the boycott, while it was threatened to send Japanese troops to police the foreign settlement if the demand was not heeded.
A former consul was indiscreet enough to put into writing that if the Chinese Governor did not stop the boycott and the students’ movement by force if need be, he would take matters into his own hands. The chief tangible charge he brought against the Chinese as a basis of his demand for 'protection' was that Chinese store-keepers actually refused to accept Japanese money in payment for goods, not ordinary Japanese money at that, but the military notes with which, so as to save drain upon the bullion reserves, the army of occupation is paid. And all this, be it remem-bered, is more than two hundred miles from Tsing-tao and from eight to twelve months after the armistice. Today's paper reports a visit of Japanese to the Governor to inform him that unless he should prevent a private theatrical performance from being given in Tsinan by the students, they would send their own forces into the settlement to protect themselves. And the utmost they might need protection from, was that the students were to give some plays designed to foster the boycott!
Japanese troops overran the Province before they made any serious attempt to capture Tsing-tao. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that they 'took' the Chinese Tsinan before they took the German Tsing-tao. Propaganda in America has justified this act on the ground that a German railway to the rear of Japanese forces would have been a menace. As there were no troops but only legal and diplomatic papers with which to attack the Japanese, it is a fair inference that the 'menace' was located in Versailles rather than in Shantung, and concerned the danger of Chinese control of their own territory. Chinese have been arrested by Japanese gendarmes in Tsinan and subjected to a torturing third degree of the kind that Korea has made sickeningly familiar. The Japanese claim that the injuries were received while the men were resisting arrest. Considering that there was no more legal ground for arrest than there would be if Japanese police arrested Americans in New York, almost anybody but the pacifist Chinese certainly would have resisted. But official hospital reports testify to bayonet wounds and the marks of flogging. In the interior where the Japanese had been disconcerted by the student propaganda they raided a High School, seized a school boy at random, and took him to a distant point and kept him locked up several days. When the Japanese consul at Tsinan was visited by Chinese officials in protest against these illegal arrests, the consul disclaimed all jurisdiction. The matter, he said, was wholly in the hands of the military authorities in Tsing-tao. His disclaimer was emphasized by the fact that some of the kidnapped Chinese were taken to Tsing-tao for 'trial'.
The matter of economic rights in relation to political domination will be discussed in part two of this article. It is no pleasure for one with many warm friends in Japan, who has a great admiration for the Japanese people as distinct from the ruling military and bureaucratic class, to report such facts as have been stated. One might almost say, one might positively say from the standpoint of Japan itself, that the worst thing that can be charged against the policy of Japan in China for the last six years is its immeasurable stupidity. No nation has ever misjudged the national psychology of another people as Japan has that of China. The alienation of China is widespread, deep, bitter. Even the most pessimistic of the Chinese who think that China is to undergo a complete economic and political domination by Japan do not think it can possibly last, even without outside intervention, more than half a century at most.
Today, at the beginning of a new year (1920), the boycott is much more complete and efficient than in the most tense days of last summer. Unfortunately, the Japanese policy seems to be under a truly Greek fate which drives it on. Concessions that would have produced a revulsion of feeling in favor of Japan a year ago will now merely salve the surface of the wound. What would have been welcomed even eight months ago would now be received with contempt. There is but one way in which Japan can now restore herself. It is nothing less than complete withdrawal from Shantung, with possibly a strictly commercial concession at Tsing-tao and a real, not a Manchurian, Open Door.
According to the Japanese-owned newspapers published in Tsinan, the Japanese military commander in Tsing-tao recently made a speech to visiting journalists from Tokyo in which he said: The suspicions of China cannot now be allayed merely by repeating that we have no territorial ambitions in China. We must attain complete economic domination of the Far East. But if Sino-Japanese relations do not improve, some third party will reap the benefit. Japanese residing in China incur the hatred of the Chinese. For they regard themselves as the proud citizens of a conquering country. When the Japanese go into partnership with the Chinese they manage in the greater number of cases to have the profits accrue to themselves. If friendship between China and Japan is to depend wholly upon the government it will come to nothing. Diplomatists, soldiers, merchants, journalists should repent the past. The change must be complete. But it will not be complete until the Japanese withdraw from Shantung leaving their nationals there upon the footing of other foreigners in China.
II
In discussing the return to China by Japan of a metaphysical sovereignty while economic rights are retained, I shall not repeat the details of German treaty rights as to the railway and the mines. The reader is assumed to be familiar with those facts. The German seizure was outrageous. It was a flagrant case of Might making Right. As von Buelow cynically but frankly told the Reichstag, while Germany did not intend to partition China, she also did not intend to be the passenger left behind in the station when the train started. Germany had the excuse of prior European aggressions, and in turn her usurpation was the precedent for further foreign rape. If judgments are made on a comparative basis, Japan is entitled to all of the white-washing that can be derived from the provocations of European imperialistic powers, including those that in domestic policy are democratic. And every fairminded person will recognize that, leaving China out of the reckoning, Japan’s proximity to China gives her aggressions the color of self-defence in a way that cannot be urged in behalf of any European power.
It is possible to look at European aggressions in, say, Africa as incidents of a colonization movement. But no foreign policy in Asia can shelter itself behind any colonization plea. For continental Asia is, for practical purposes, India and China, representing two of the oldest civilizations of the globe and presenting two of its densest populations. If there is any such thing in truth as a philosophy of history with its own inner and inevitable logic, one may well shudder to think of what the closing acts of the drama of the intercourse of the West and East are to be. In any case, and with whatever comfort may be derived from the fact that the American continents have not taken part in the aggression and hence may act as a mediator to avert the final tragedy, residence in China forces upon one the realization that Asia is, after all, a large figure in the future reckoning of history. Asia is really here after all. It is not simply a symbol in western algebraic balances of trade. And in the future, so to speak, it is going to be even more here, with its awakened national consciousness of about half the population of the whole globe.
Let the agreements of France and Great Britain made with Japan during the war stand for the measure of western consciousness of the reality of a small part of Asia, a consciousness generated by the patriotism of Japan backed by its powerful army and navy. The same agreement measures western unconsciousness of the reality of that part of Asia which lies within the confines of China. An even better measure of western unconsciousness may be found perhaps in such a trifling incident as this:—An English friend long resident in Shantung told me of writing indignantly home concerning the British part in the Shantung settlement. The reply came, complacently stating that Japanese ships did so much in the war that the Allies could not properly refuse to recognize Japan's claims. The secret agreements themselves hardly speak as eloquently for the absence of China from the average western consciousness. In saying that China and Asia are to be enormously significant figures in future reckonings, the spectre of a military Yellow Peril is not meant nor even the more credible spectre of an industrial Yellow Peril. But Asia has come to consciousness, and her consciousness of herself will soon be such a massive and persistent thing that it will force itself upon the reluctant consciousness of the west, and lie heavily upon its conscience. And for this fact, China and the western world are indebted to Japan.
These remarks are more relevant to a consideration of the relationship of economic and political rights in Shantung than they perhaps seem. For a moment’s reflection will call to mind that all political foreign aggression in China has been carried out for commercial and financial ends, and usually upon some economic pretext. As to the immediate part played by Japan in bringing about a consciousness which will from the present time completely change the relations of the western powers to China, let one little story testify. Some representatives of an English missionary board were making a tour of inspection through China. They went into an interior town in Shantung. They were received with extraordinary cordiality by the entire population. Some time afterwards some of their accompanying friends returned to the village and were received with equally surprising coldness. It came out upon inquiry that the inhabitants had first been moved by the rumor that these people were sent by the British government to secure the removal of the Japanese. Later they were moved by indignation that they had been disappointed.
It takes no forcing to see a symbol in this incident. Part of it stands for the almost incredible ignorance which has rendered China so impotent nationally speaking. The other part of it stands for the new spirit which has been aroused even among the common people in remote districts. Those who fear, or who pretend to fear, a new Boxer movement, or a definite general anti-foreign movement, are, I think, mistaken. The new consciousness goes much deeper. Foreign policies that fail to take it into account and that think that relations with China can be conducted upon the old basis will find this new consciousness obtruding in the most unexpected and perplexing ways.
One might fairly say, still speaking comparatively, that it is part of the bad luck of Japan that her proximity to China, and the opportunity the war gave her to outdo the aggressions of European powers, have made her the first victim of this disconcerting change. Whatever the motives of the American Senators in completely disassociating the United States from the peace settlement as regards China, their action is a permanent asset to China, not only in respect to Japan but with respect to all Chinese foreign relations. Just before our visit to Tsinan, the Shantung Provincial Assembly had passed a resolution of thanks to the American Senate. More significant is the fact that they passed another resolution to be cabled to the English Parliament, calling attention to the action of the American Senate and inviting similar action. China in general and Shantung in particular feels the reenforcement of an external approval. With this duplication, its national consciousness has as it were solidified. Japan is simply the first object to be affected.
The concrete working out of economic rights in Shantung will be illustrated by a single case which will have to stand as typical. Po-shan is an interior mining village. The mines were not part of the German booty; they were Chinese owned. The Germans, whatever their ulterior aims, had made no attempt at dispossessing the Chinese. The mines, however, are at the end of a branch line of the new Japanese owned railway—owned by the government, not by a private corporation, and guarded by Japanese soldiers. Of the forty mines, the Japanese have worked their way, in only four years, into all but four. Different methods are used. The simplest is, of course, discrimination in the use of the railway for shipping. Downright refusal to furnish cars while competitors who accepted Japanese partners got them, is one method. Another more elaborate method is to send but one car when a large number is asked for, and then when it is too late to use cars, send the whole number asked for or even more, and then charge a large sum for demurrage in spite of the fact the mine no longer wants them or has cancelled the order. Redress there is none.
Tsinan has no special foreign concessions. It is, however, a 'treaty port' where nationals of all friendly powers can do business. But Po-shan is not even a treaty port. Legally speaking no foreigner can lease land or carry on any business there. Yet the Japanese have forced a settlement as large in area as the entire foreign settlement in the much larger town of Tsinan. A Chinese refused to lease land where the Japanese wished to relocate their railway station. Nothing happened to him directly. But merchants could not get shipping space, or receive goods by rail. Some of them were beaten up by thugs. After a time, they used their influence with their compatriot to lease his land. Immediately the persecutions ceased. Not all the land has been secured by threats or coercion; some has been leased directly by Chinese moved by high prices, in spite of the absence of any legal sanction. In addition, the Japanese have obtained control of the electric light works and some pottery factories, etc.
Now even admitting that this is typical of the methods by which the Japanese plant themselves, a natural American reaction would be to say that, after all, the country is built up industrially by these enterprises, and that though the rights of some individuals may have been violated, there is nothing to make a national, much less an international fuss about. More or less unconsciously we translate foreign incidents into terms of our own experience and environment, and thus miss the entire point. Since America was largely developed by foreign capital to our own economic benefit and without political encroachments, we lazily suppose some such separation of the economic and political to be possible in China. But it must be remembered that China is not an open country. Foreigners can lease land, carry on business, and manufacture only in accord with express treaty agreements. There are no such agreements in the cases typified by the Po-shan incident. We may profoundly disagree with the closed economic policy of China, or we may believe that under existing circumstances it represents the part of prudence for her. That makes no difference. Given the frequent occurrence of such economic invasions, with the backing of soldiers of the Imperial Army, with the overt aid of the Imperial Railway, and with the refusal of Imperial officials to intervene, there is clear evidence of the attitude and intention of the Japanese government in Shantung.
Because the population of Shantung is directly confronted with an immense amount of just such evidence, it cannot take seriously the professions of vague diplomatic utterances. What foreign nation is going to intervene to enforce Chinese rights in such a case as Po-shan? Which one is going effectively to call the attention of Japan to such evidences of its failure to carry out its promise? Yet the accumulation of precisely such seemingly petty incidents, and not any single dramatic great wrong, will secure Japan’s economic and political domination of Shantung. It is for this reason that foreigners resident in Shantung, no matter in what part, say that they see no sign whatever that Japan is going to get out; that, on the contrary, everything points to a determination to consolidate her position. How long ago was the Portsmouth Treaty signed, and what were its nominal pledges about evacuation of Manchurian territory?
Not a month will pass without something happening which will give a pretext for delay, and for making the surrender of Shantung conditional upon this, that and the other thing. Meantime the penetration of Shantung by means of railway discrimination, railway military guards, continual nibblings here and there, will be going on. It would make the chapter too long to speak of the part played by manipulation of finance in achieving this process of attrition of sovereignty. Two incidents must suffice. During the war, Japanese traders with the connivance of their government gathered up immense amounts of copper cash from Shantung and shipped it to Japan against the protests of the Chinese government. What does sovereignty amount to when a country cannot control even its own currency system? In Manchuria the Japanese have forced the introduction of several hundred million dollars of paper currency, nominally, of course, based on a gold reserve. These notes are redeemable, however, only in Japan proper. And there is a law in Japan forbidding the exportation of gold. And there you are.
Japan itself has recently afforded an object lesson in the actual connection of economic and political rights in China. It is so beautifully complete a demonstration that it was surely unconscious. Within the last two weeks, Mr. Obata, the Japanese minister in Peking, has waited upon the government with a memorandum saying that the Foochow incident was the culminating result of the boycott; that if the boycott continues, a series of such incidents is to be apprehended, saying that the situation has become 'intolerable' for Japan, and disavowing all responsibility for further consequences unless the government makes a serious effort to stop the boycott. Japan then immediately makes certain specific demands. China must stop the circulation of handbills, the holding of meetings to urge the boycott, the destruction of Japanese goods that have become Chinese property—none have been destroyed that are Japanese owned. Volumes could not say more as to the real conception of Japan of the connection between the economic and the political relations of the two countries. Surely the pale ghost of 'Sovereignty' smiled ironically as he read this official note. President Wilson after having made in the case of Shantung a sharp and complete separation of economic and political rights, also said that a nation boycotted is within sight of surrunders. Disassociation of words from acts has gone so far in his case that he will hardly be able to see the meaning of Mr. Obata's communication. The American sense of humor and fairplay may however be counted upon to get its point.

1920.03.8-27 (publ.)
John Dewey : Lectures 'Three contemporary philosophers ' in Beijing. = Xian dai di san ge zhe xue jia. Hu Shi interpreter ; Fu Lu recorder. In : Chen bao fu kan ; March 8-19, 22-27 (1920).
1.-2. 'William James'
3.-4. 'Henri Bergson'
5.-6. 'Bertrand Russell'

Zhang, Shenfu. Ji bian zhe. In : Chen bao ; 16. März (1920). [Letter to the editor about John Dewey].
"The night before last, Mr. Dewey talked about Bertrand Russell as a despairing pessimist. In fact, Russell stands for ethical neutrality (lun li zhong li). Russell stands beyond judgement in all categories of thought. Furthermore, Dewey is thoroughly mistaken when he describes Russell's philosophy as elitist. This leads us to think of him as somehow anti-democratic. In fact, Russell is a thorough realist who upholds logical atomism (duo li yuan zi lun) and the principle of absolute pluralism (duo yuan lun). Russell's philosophical method is to dissect all categories of thought, be they political, scientific or philosophical. To make this clear I have translated his piece on Dreams and facts which appeared first in the January issue of Athenaeum and was reprinted again in the February, 1920 issue of Dial."

Letter from John Dewey to Albert C. Barnes
135 Morrison St, March 28 [1920] Peking
My dear Barnes, …
Im leaving here this week to go to Nanking which will be my headquarters for the three spring months, care Higher Normal School. Nanking isnt very thrilling per se. It has been the battle ground between the [nort]h and south and was almost destroyed at the Taiping rebellion, in [the] middle of the last century. However, I shant be there all the time, as it will be the headquarters offor various journeys to other towns, especially on the Yangste. The family will stay in Peking three or four mor weeks longer before coming down, [a]s this is of course the most interesting single place and Evelyn hasnt exhausted it yet.
Im afraid I have neither the time nor the technical skill to get a line on Chinese paintings, that would enable me to turn the semitic trick. People who are here for years, some of them, become experts. But the fake market is as large here as anywhere, and a westerner is at a great disadvantage. A Chinese expert knows the the details of silk, of color as well as the details of style and the countless other things. Westerners generally begin by buying poorer things and gradually educate themselves thru experience in buying and discarding. They also get a reputation established so that pictures come to them. The best for sale never get into the open market. Old families that have to dispose of pictures put the matter in the hands of the go-betweens who seek out the twnety or thrity or so good buyers there are in China. We saw another good collection a few days ago, that of General Munthe, a Norwegian collector who has been the military trainer of Peking police. He has pictures and porcelain both. Many of the collectors never show their collections not even in private, they are so afraid of risks. Also the secretive spirit seems to be imbibed from the Chinese collectors who are generally averse to having it known they have collections, as they may then be looted at some opportune moment.
The University has asked me to stay over another year, but I find it hard deciding. They have asked Evelyn to give some courses next year also, but she feels as if teaching werent her line and by staying over s[o] long she might cut herself out of some things at home.
With regards to Mrs Barnes and yourself from us all,
Sincerely yours, John Dewey

Farewell dinner for John Dewey with Cai Yuanpei.

Letter from John Dewey to Dewey children
PEKING APRIL ONE [1920]
Dearest children, This is myb first last day here, for the present. I cabled to Columbia the other day asking whether they would give me leave of absence another year, but cables are slow. Lucy is going home anyway and Ev has declined the job they offered her, and will probably go too. China is too slow for the young but it is goes easy on old folks. I often wonder whether it wouldnt be a good thing to leave while the leaving is good. I cant repeat this years success, such as it is, because I have done all the general lecturing I can, said all that can be said of a general sort I mean, and as they have been published all over China—remember the four hundred million, I cant say the same thing over again next year very well. Some people say Ive stirred up considerable interest, but when you are entirely outside the fuss interest, if any, you stir up, its about as exciting to your vanity as pouring hot water on the Arctic ice would be. Its much as if you were told that something you had said had aroused interest in Mars when you had never been in Mars, never expected to be there and had no share of any kind in what is doing there. I dont suppose I convey the idea; its a curious experience, and until youve been thru a similar one you cant get it, for ordinarily one's vanity is a part of the reverberations—if any, and you cant help imagining yourself having something to do with what you are said to accomplish. But there is no more kick to this than there would be if you had a pole which happenned to touch something in Marthe moon—to try once more. Its Nanking Im going to. The rest of the family will abide here a few weeks more, we have the flat rented till July one but there is said to be a new medical family anxious to take over, including our furnsihings. Tehy want it till Oct one however. Its been weeks and weeks since Ive written, but everything seems to rather flat just now. Perhaps a new place will give me a fresh start…
I am giving a farewell dinner tonight at a Chinese restaurant, chinese food, about twenty people including ourselves, mostly Chinese educators, Chancellor Tsai the chief guest. He gave us a family dinner at the University the other evening with three or four of the Univ profs we know best. Professor Levy Bruhl who has been exchnaging at Harvard was here last week and I went to two dinners given for him, one at the French legation. He seems to have enjoyed his stay in America. Im going home to Nanking the same way we came up, the trip the other way, buy Hankow, having been given up. Partly too much disturbance along the line, partly because Dr Tao [Hsing-chih] of Nanking cam up and is taking me down, Mr Hu not going along. However later on we are to go up the Yangste river as far as Hankow, stopping along at several towns. We wont get up to the gorges tho, takes too long and costs too much and also will be too hot. We havent any summer plans yet, but I shant stay in Peking a[n]other summer whatever happens. Id lonkie to go up to Harbin, and get an impression at least of the Siberian situation. The Soviets are reported to be offering back to China everything in the way of railway and mining etc concesssions the old imperial govt stole; the story is they offerred this in 18 but the Allies prevented China accepting, I suppose Russia wanted recognition in return. I enclose a copy of letter I wrote flat agents. I dont seem to see any way to fix any limit sum. If there is any chance of subletting if we dont come back at good figure we can pay accordingly. I certainly should hate to go above two, and it seems to me that 24 ought to be above the limit unless you can turn around and rent at good advance…
The next report is that the Japanese Chinese govt doesnt like the terms proposed. The next one will be, if history repeats itself, that Japan having squared itself by going in is now using her influence in China to keep the thing from consummation—not that the rumor will necessarily be true The extract from Mr Onos letter is very interesting, and it wouldnt be well to subject itthe logic of consecutive sentences to too much scrutiny. The soldiers etc who are coming back will throw some light on the desire to cooperate in Siberia; China certainly, if American bankers furnish the money, and Japanese manage it, as they will certainly do, unless Americanr are more on the job than they ever have been before.
Lots of love to everybody, and send a carbon to Nanking—no, by the time you get this everybody will be there, Care Higher Normal College.
Dad

Dewey, John. The new leaven in Chinese politics [ID D28477].
To the student of political and social development, China presents a most exciting intellectual situation. He has read in books the account of the slow evolution of law and orderly governmental institutions. He finds in China an object lesson in what he has read. We take for granted the existence of government as an agency for enforcing justice between men and for protecting personal rights. We depend upon regular and orderly legal and judicial procedure to settle disputes as we take for granted the atmosphere we breathe. In China life goes on practically without such support and guarantees. And yet in the ordinary life of the people peace and order reign.
If you read the books written about China, you find the Chinese often spoken of as the 'most law-abiding people in the world'. Struck by this fact, the traveler often neglects to go behind it. He fails to note that this law-abidingness constantly shows itself in contempt for everything that we in the West associate with law, that it goes on largely without courts, without legal and judicial forms and officers; that, in fact, the Chinese regularly do what the West regards as the essence of lawlessness—enforce the law through private agencies and arrangements. In many things the one who is regarded as breaking the real law, the controlling custom, is the one who appeals to the 'law'—that is, to governmental agencies and officers. A few incidents of recent history may illustrate the point.
The Peking Government University students started the agitation last May which grew into that organized movement which in the end compelled the dismissal of some pro-Japanese members of the cabinet and forced the refusal to sign the peace treaty. The movement started with a procession. The parade passed by the house of an offensive member who was ordinarily referred to as 'traitor'. And the Chinese equivalent of the word traitor literally means thief-who-sells-his-country. In a fit of absent-mindedness the policeman on guard opened the gate into the compound. The leading students took this as a hint or an invitation. They rushed in. During the following scrimmage, the offender was beaten severely and his house was set afire.
This incident is now ancient history. What is not so well known is that public opinion compelled the release of the students who were arrested. To have tried and condemned them for crime would have had more serious consequences than the government dared face. The heads of the schools gave assurance the students would not engage in further disorder; and they were let go, nominally subject to summons later. But when in the autumn the government, having recovered its nerve somewhat, made a demand upon the heads of the schools to submit the students for trial, their action was regarded as a breach of faith. When the school officials replied that the students had not returned to their respective schools, nothing further happened. There was a general feeling that the summons for trial did not represent the real wish of the officials, but was taken because of pressure exercised by some vengeful person.
To western eyes, accustomed to the forms of regular hearings and trials, such a method seems lawless. In China, however, the moral sense of the community would have been shocked by a purely legal treatment. What in western law is compounded felony is frequently a virtue in China. The incident also illustrates the principle of corporate solidarity and responsibility which plays such a large part in Chinese consciousness. The school group to which the students belonged assumed liability for their future conduct, and gave guarantees for their proper behavior.
As the Peking students were the authors of the movement, they were regarded as its chief abettors. It was desirable for the militaristic reactionaries to discredit them. A meeting of a few actual students, together with some old students and some who intended entering the University, was planned. Resolutions had been prepared which stated that a few noisy, self-seeking students, anxious for notoriety, had fostered the whole movement, coercing their weaker fellows. The resolutions declared, in the alleged name of a thousand students, that the real student body was opposed to the whole agitation. The liberal students got wind of this meeting, entered with a rush, took the thirty dissenters prisoner, obtained from them a written statement of the instigation of the meeting by the reactionary clique, and then locked them up as a punishment. When they were released from confinement by the police, warrants were sworn out and the ringleaders of the invading liberal students were arrested. Great indignation was aroused by this act, which was regarded as highly unsportsmanlike—not playing the game. An educational leader, a returned student, said to me that officials had no business interfering in a matter that concerned only the students.
Yet this seeming absence of public law—this apparent lack of concern for the public interest in peace and orderly procedure— does not mean that opinion would support any individual in starting out to redress his own wrongs. It means that troubles of importance are regarded as between groups, and to be settled between them and by their own initiative.
It is easy to imagine the denunciation of lawlessness that a report of such acts may excite in clubs and editorial rooms. They are here related, however, neither to condemn nor to approve. They are illustrative incidents, fairly typical. They show that the entire legal and judicial background which we take for granted in the West is rudimentary in China. Law and justice, as they should be, are not deliberately challenged in such episodes. There is merely a recurrence to traditional methods of settling disputes. The incidents are also instructive because they suggest the underlying cause. There is no confidence in government, no trust in the honesty, impartiality or intelligence of the officials of the state. Families, villages, clans, guilds—every organized group—has more confidence in the willingness of an opposed group to come to some sort of reasonable settlement than it has in the good faith or the wisdom of the official group.
The following incident illustrates one reason for the lack of confidence in the government. One of the new liberal weeklies in Peking was a thorn in the side of the reactionary officials. Not that it was a political journal, but it was an organ of free discussion; it was connected through its editorial staff with the intellectual element in the Government University which the reactionaries feared, and it was serving as a model for starting similar Journals all over the country. The gendarmerie in Shanghai complained to the Provincial Military Governor in Nanking that the journal was creating unrest. Bolshevism has become the technical term in China as well as elsewhere for any criticism of authority. The Military Governor reported this statement to the Minister of War in Peking, who reported it to his colleague the Minister of Justice, who reported it to the local police, who took possession of the newspaper office and shut down the paper.
Note the official House That Jack Built, and the impossibility of locating responsibility anywhere in any way that would secure the shadow of legal redress. Vagueness, overlapping authority, and consequent evasion and shifting of responsibility are typical of inherited governmental methods. Back of the incident lies, of course, the fact that government in China is still largely personal—a matter of edicts, mandates, decrees, rather than of either common or statute law. If we in the West sometimes suffer from the extreme to which the separation of administrative from legislative and judicial powers has gone, a slight study of oriental methods will reveal the conditions which created the demand for that separation. A few days ago, for example, the Minister of Justice in the Peking Cabinet issued a decree that all printed matter whatsoever must be submitted to the police for censorship before publication. There was no crisis, political or military. There was no legislative enabling act. It suited his personal wishes and his factional plans. The order was calmly received with the comment that it would be obeyed in Peking, because the government controlled the Pekingese police, but no attention would be paid to it in the rest of China. In many cases, the Republic's writ does not run beyond the city walls of the capital.
It has been repeatedly pointed out that the acute problems of Chinese existence and reconstruction are due to the fact that methods which worked well enough in the past are now sharply challenged by the changes that have linked China up to the rest of the world. China faces a world that is differently organized from itself in almost every regard; a world, for example, that prizes the forms of justice even when it neglects its substance; a world in which governmental action is the source and standard of redress of wrongs and protection of rights. The habitual method of China, though it has accomplished a great measure of law-abidingness among the Chinese in their own affairs, appears from without as total absence of law, when foreign relations come under consideration.
This is true of China's relations to practically all foreign nations. But Japan lies closest and has the most numerous and varied contacts, and hence has the most sources of complaint. She has borrowed and improved the technique of other nations in making these causes of friction the basis for demands for all sorts of concessions and encroachments, to the constant bewilderment and growing resentment of China. In enforcing the boycott against Japan, for example, the student unions have frequently taken matters into their own hands. They have raided stores in which Japanese goods are sold, carried the stocks off and burned them. When these things are reported in Japan, there is no scrupulous care taken to say that the goods are always the property of Chinese dealers, and that the Japanese themselves are not interfered with.
A succession of such incidents skilfully handled by the Japanese government through the press has bred among the mass of the Japanese people a sincere belief that the Chinese people are lawless, irresponsible and aggressively bumptious in all their dealings with the Japanese, who, considering their provocations, have acted with great forbearance. Thus the Imperial Government assembles behind it the public opinion that is necessary to support a policy of aggression. The feeling that China is in a general state of lawlessness is used, for example, as a reason for keeping Shantung.
The matter is further complicated by the large measure of autonomy enjoyed by the provinces, which historically are principalities rather than provinces. A well-informed English resident writing shortly before the downfall of the Manchu dynasty said: 'Each of China's eighteen provinces is a complete state in itself. Each province has its own army and navy, its own system of taxation, and its own social customs. Only in connection with the salt trade and the navy do the provinces have to make concessions to one another under a modicum of Imperial control'. In spite of nominal changes, the situation is not essentially different today. The railways and telegraphs have brought about greater unity; hut on the other hand the system of military governors, one for each province, has in some respects increased the effective display of States' rights.
During the last few months there have been repeated rumors of the secession of the three Manchurian provinces, of the Southern provinces, and of the Yangtze provinces. These rumors, like the threats of governors here and there to withdraw when matters are not going to suit them, are largely part of the game for political prestige and power. But we know in the United States how our measure of independent action on the part of one state in the Union may complicate foreign relations. Given a greater measure of independence and a weak central state, it is easy to see how many cases of foreign friction may arise which give excuse for an aggressive policy.
Moreover, there is a constant temptation for an unscrupulous foreign power to carry on intrigues and bargains with provincial officials and politicians at the expense of the National State. The recent history of China is largely a history of this sort of foreign intervention, which naturally adds to dissension and confusion and weakens the national government still more. Whether justly or not, the Chinese believe that militaristic Japan has deliberately fomented every movement that would keep China divided. As I write, rumors are current of an attempt to restore the monarchy with Japanese backing.
The bearing of neglect of legal process and judicial forms upon the problem of extra-territoriality is obvious. At present, if commercial and other relations between China and foreign powers are to continue, some kind of extra-territoriality is a necessity, and this involves the existence of 'concessions'. Nevertheless, their existence is galling to national pride. Returned students have brought the idea and the word 'sovereignty' home with them. No word issues more trippingly from the lips.
Yet the existing system has its present advantages for the Chinese themselves. The concessions in Shanghai and Tientsin, which are under foreign jurisdiction, are veritable cities of refuge for Chinese liberals and for political malcontents. As censorship and suppression of newspapers have increased under the present reactionary Ministry of Justice, there is a marked tendency for newspapers to form corporations under nominal foreign ownership and with foreign charters in order to get legal protection. Progressive Chinese business houses flock to the concessions. At present, without the Chinese element they would be mere shells. It is said that 90 per cent of the population of the International Settlement in Shanghai is Chinese and that Chinese pay 80 per cent of its taxes. Tares proverbially grow with the wheat. Corrupt officials protect their funds from confiscation by keeping them in foreign banks. As you ride through the Tientsin concessions, you have pointed out to you the houses of various provincial governors and officials who have thoughtfully provided a place of safety against the inevitable, though postponed, tide of popular indignation.
A Chinese friend said to me that one of the next patriotic movements on the part of the Chinese would be a wholesale exodus from foreign concessions. Except for investors in foreign real estate, it will be amusing to watch when it occurs. The concessions will be left a mere shell. The foreign interest in the maintenance of concessions would completely disappear in this contingency were there some other way of maintaining consular jurisdiction.
I would not give the impression that nothing is going to change the legal situation. The contrary is the case. There is a competent law codification bureau, presided over by a Chinese scholar whose works on some aspects of European law are standard texts in foreign law schools. A modem system is building up. An effort is being made to secure well trained judges and to reform and standardize judicial procedure. The desire for the abolition of extra-territoriality is hastening the change. But it is one thing to introduce formal changes and another to change the habitudes of the people. Contempt for politics and disregard of governmental jurisdiction in adjusting social and commercial disputes will die hard.
It is to be doubted whether China will ever make the complete surrender to legalism and formalism that western nations have done. This may be one of the contributions of China to the world. There is little taste even among the advanced elements, for example, for a purely indirect and representative system of legislation and determination of policy. Repeatedly in the last few months popular opinion has taken things into its own hands and, by public assemblies and by circular telegrams, forced the policy °f the government in diplomatic matters. The personal touch and the immediate influence of popular will are needed. As compared with the West, the sphere of discretion will always be large in contrast with that of set forms. Western legalism will be short-circuited. Along with apathy on the part of the populace at large to political matters, there is extraordinary readiness to deal with such questions as a large number are interested in, without going through the intermediaries of political formality.
The liberals in the existing national Senate and House of Representatives make no pretense of attending meetings and trying to influence action by discussion and voting. They make a direct appeal to the country. And in effect this means appeal to a great variety of local organizations: provincial educational associations to reach scholars and students, industrial and mercantile guilds, chambers of commerce (whose powers are much larger than those of like bodies in our country), voluntary unions and societies, religious and other.
It is not at all impossible that, in its future evolution, China will depart widely from western constitutional and representative models and strike out a system combining direct expression of popular will by local group-organizations and guilds with a large measure of personal discretion in the hands of administrative officials as long as the latter give general satisfaction. Personal government by decrees, mandates and arbitrary seizures and imprisonments will give way. Its place will be taken by personal administration such as already exists in the railway, post office, customs, salt administration, etc., where the nature of the constructive work to be done furnishes standards and tests, rather than by formal legislation.
Roughly speaking, the visitor in China is likely to find himself in three successive stages. The first is impatience with irregularities, incompetence and corruptions, and a demand for immediate and sweeping reforms. Longer stay convinces him of the deep roots of many of the objectionable things, and gives him a new lesson in the meaning of the words 'evolution' and development'. Many foreigners get stranded in this stage. Under the guise of favoring natural and slow evolution, they become opponents of all things and of any development. They even oppose the spread of popular education, saying it will rob the Chinese of their traditional contentment, patience and docile industry, rendering them uneasy and insubordinate. In everything they point to the evils that may accompany a transitional stage of development. They throw their weight, for example, against every movement for the emancipation of women from a servile status. They enlarge upon the dignity and power some women enjoy within the household and expatiate upon the evils that will arise from a relaxation of present taboos, when neither the old code nor that existing in western countries will apply. Many western business men especially deplore the attempts of missionaries to introduce new ideas. But the visitor who does not get arrested in this second stage emerges where he no longer expects immediate sweeping changes, nor carps at the evils of the present in comparison with an idealized picture of the traditional past. Below the surface he sees the signs of an intellectual reawakening. He feels that while now the endeavors for a new life are scattered, yet they are so numerous and so genuine that in time they will accumulate and coalesce. He finds himself in sympathy with Young China. For Young China also passed through a state of optimism and belief in wholesale change; a subsequent stage of disillusionment and pessimism; and, in a third stage, has now settled down to constructive efforts along lines of education, industry and social reorganization.
In politics, Young China aims at the institution of government by and of law. It contemplates the abolition of personal government with its arbitrariness, corruption and incompetence. But it realizes that political development is mainly indirect; that it comes in consequence of the growth of science, industry and commerce, and of the new human relations and responsibilities they produce; that it springs from education, from the enlightenment of the people, and from special training in the knowledge and technical skill required in the administration of a modem state.
The more one sees, the more one is convinced that many of the worst evils of present political China are the result of pure ignorance. One realizes how the delicate and multifarious business of the modem state is dependent upon knowledge and habits of mind that have grown up slowly and that are now counted upon as a matter of course. China is only beginning to acquire this special experience and knowledge. Old officials brought up in the ancient traditions, and new officials brought up in no traditions at all, but who manage to force themselves into power in a period of political break-up, will gradually pass off the scene. At Present the older types of scholars, cultivated, experienced in the archaic tradition, are usually hesitant, if not supine. They are largely puppets in the hands of vigorous men who have found their way into politics from the army, or from the ranks of bandits; men without education, who know for a large part no law but that of their own appetite, and who lack both general education and education in the management of the complex affairs of the contemporary state.
But in the schools of the country, in the Student Movement, now grown politically self-conscious, are the forces making for a future politics of a different sort.

John Dewey leaves Beijing.

John Dewey goes up to the Taishan mountain.

Letter from John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey
Sunday—on train [April 4, 1920]
Dear Alice,
We stopped at Tai-an [Shandong] and went up Taisahn [Tai Shan, Shandong] after all, but not Chu fu. When Mr Tao went to Tientdin Mr Lu was on the train doing to Tsinan, and he said he wanted to go to Taishan and would make arrangements. So he met us at Tsinan. Ill write particulars later, we stayed at Chinese hotel, but got some Tai-an addresses.
Mr H S Leitzel, Methodist Mission
Mr Mauson, Anglican Mission
Mr Connely, Southern Baptist.
Probablt the first is the best to write to. Write long enough in advance to ensure getting in, as they are often crowded. The train gets to Tai an a[b]out ten oclock in evening, and you will have the pleasure of a wheelbarrow ride. I couldnt learn of any missionary at Chufu, but the methodist mission has a chinese branch there, and the pastor Liang En Po takes in people sometimes, probably Mr Leitzel would arrange it if you asked him when you write. Be sure and get a letter of intriucion from the ministry of edn. Mr Lu said he would get it if asked, as then you can get in and see the Dukes and the sacred relics. You better stay at Tai an two nights. You will be glad of the rest after the mt trip, and will can get to Chu fu about noon instead of after midnight, with six miles in a Peking cart to the city of the temple and tomb. Then you have about a day and a half there The sta[t]ion master will take you in if written to, but you have to bring your bedding, clothes that is. You will save about 16 apiec[e] on second class. But buy a berth ticket, five dollars, one ticket will do for the three I think. You wont use the berth to sleep in, but the accmodations are much better than the regular second class car and you will be sure of seats, a nice neat compartment. You have to buy express tickets from Tientsin on, to Tai-an beside the berth ticket. You can get the latter in Peking. Dont buy your regulr ticket beyond Tai-an unless sure tht second class allows time for stop overs. To make sure of berths from Che fu or Tai an you p[r]obably will have to buy first class from there to Nanking Dont have sunday in Tain an on acct of mi[s]sionary place
Lots of love to all John