China and the West

Letter from Bertrand Russell to Zhang Shenfu. 10. Nov. 1920.
I am very sorry your are going away so soon. I would have made more attempts to see you, but was persuaded you hated me on account of my criticism of Bolshevism.
Letter from Zhang Shenfu to Bertrand Russell.
Many thanks for your reply. I will see you tomorrow at the time requested. I am delighted very much by your so estimable reply. Its last sentence surprises me also very much. Not only I never hated you at all, but I hope eagerly that there would be no hatred at all. Even Mr. Anatole France's saying 'to hate the hatred', for me, is not quite right. Your criticism of Bolshevism are all right, and valuable, I believe. Even if not so, there would be no reason for me to hate only on account of this. You said, 'If I be a Russian, I would defend the socialist gov't' (cited from memory). This attitude, I quite admire. Though I consider Russia as the most advanced country in the world at the present, and though I believe in communism, I am not a Bolshevik. This is of course also your opinion. I believe I agree with you at nearly every point and believe myself I can almost always understand you quite correctly.

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on "The analysis of mind" at Beijing University.
He meets Zhang Shenfu at the Continental Hotel in Shanghai.

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on "The problems of philosophy" at the Normal School in Beijing.

Banquet for Bertrand Russell in the Beijing Hotel.

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on "Bolshevik thought" at the Women's Higher Normal School in Beijing.

Bertrand Russell speaks to the Anarchist Mutual Aid Society in Beijing.

Formation of the Bertrand Russell Study Group in Beijing.

Letter from John Dewey to Walter S. Drysdale [military attaché of the American Legation to China in Beijing, 1917-1921].
Bolshevism in China.
Peking, China, December 1, 1920.
My dear Col. Drysdale:
"In reply to your inquiry, I would say that I have seen no direct evidence of Bolshevism in China. I landed in Shanghai the first of May last year. In the year and a half since I have been in nine provinces, including the capitals, though much the greater part of the time has been spent in Peking. I have been in Shanghai four times, however, Hangchow twice, and spent two months in Nanking having been there twice. I feel the surer of my belief that Bolshevism is lacking in China because I have been in close contact with the teachers, writers and students who are sometimes called Bolshevists, and who in fact are quite radical in their social and economic ideas.
The student body of the country is in the main much opposed to old institutions and existing political conditions in China. They are especially opposed to their old family system. They are disgusted with politics, and while republican in belief have decided that the Revolution of 1911 was a failure. Hence they think that an intellectual change must come before democracy can be firmly established politically. They have strong and influential leaders among the younger teachers. The great majority of the teachers are still, however, rather conservative in their ideas. The student body in China is proverbially undisciplined, taking an active hand in running the school, striking and demanding dismissal of teachers, etc. This is no new thing and is found in only slightly less degree in Japan, in spite of the great political docility there.
All of these things make the students much inclined to new ideas, and to projects of social and economic change. They have little background of experience and are inclined to welcome any idea || provided it is new, or is different from what actually exists. They are practically all socialists, and some call themselves communists. Many think the Russian revolution a very fine thing. All this may seem more or less Bolshevistic. But has it not been inspired from Russia at all. I have never been able though I have tried to run down all rumors to hear of Bolshevist propagandists. In the south they are said to be in the north; in the north they are said to be in the south. I do not doubt there are some in China, but I am sure they are not many. And I am absolutely certain they have nothing to do with the general tone and temper of radical thought in the country. A student was arrested two months ago in Peking for circulating "Bolshevist" literature. I investigated and found it was truly anarchistic, advocating the abolition of government and the family, but no Bolshevist.
However if the movement were practically dangerous it wouldn't be much matter whether it was inspired or directed from Russia or not. As matter of fact, it is the effervescence of school boys, being intellectual and emotional rather than practical. It is stimulated by the corruption and inefficiency of the government, and by the pro-Japanese character of the former cabinet. It is a symptom of the change of China from old conditions to new. Much of it is rather silly and superficial, but it is a sign that the students have begun to think about social and economic matters, and is a good sign for the future, because it shows that they have awakened to a realization that a mere paper change in constitution and government is not going to help China any. Radical thought has been accentusted in consequence of the war, but it has been an accompaniment of the new movement for twenty years. The first platform of the Chinese revolutionaries, adopted in 1901 or 1902 was socialistic, and so was the program of the Kou Ming Tang, the Sun Yat Sen revolutionary party, till it was dissolved by Yuan Shi Kai. But there is no leverage in the country to bring about a social revolution or anything approaching it. The farmers are still highly conservative, and they form ninety per cent of the population. There are a good many tenant farmers, but there is much more family proprietorship. A country of peasants that will stand the famine the north is passing through now with no rioting or outbreaks of disorder is loss in danger of Bolshevism than any country on the globe. Also industrialism is only just beginning. As yet it is confined to Shanghai and about a half dozen other cities. There isnt outside of these few cities any discontented "proloterist" to appeal to. In these cities unions are forming etc., but the men are mostly interested in their wages. They are not capable of being reached by ideas of great economic changes. In Changsha a few weeks ago I was invited to attend a meeting to organize a branch of a labor association. There wasnt on actual day laborer at the meeting, mainly merchants with some students. It was much more like some civic welfare or philanthropic organization at home than any labor party, though it had been called by a national organizer sent out from Shanghai. Thus the students have no material to work upon even it they wanted to start a practical movement. Also they are still too theoretical to engage successfully in practical movements. They were quite successful in attacking some of the corrupt Anfuites two years ago, but popular opinion was strongly with them. But at present even their influence in politics where they would have a practical effect if anywhere is very slight. Most foreigners who have any contact with them wish, I think, that they were more active, and more likely to start something than they seem to be.
The sum of the whole matter is that the intellectual class is radical in its beliefs and much interested in all plans of social reform. But it is a small class, practically with little influence, and not concerned to organize itself to get more. The whole social and economic background of Bolshevism as a practical going concern || is lacking. Pick ten Chinese who are educated at random and who are outside the official class (which during the Anfu regime tried to block the student movement by calling them Bolshevists) or ten foreigners in contact with the Chinese and you will get the same reply. Many hope that a political revolution is coming to throw out the present class of officials and to get a new start. There may be an upheaval of this sort which those who dont like it will call Bolshevist. But I'm afraid it wont come very soon, and when it does come it will be confined to doing over again the things that were pretended to be done in 1911."
Very sincerely yours, (signed) John Dewey.
Colonel Walter S. Drysdale forwarded John Dewey's report to the State Department, he added the following:
"Bolshevism in China | Service Report | December 2, 1920.
Your attention is especially called to the following report written for us by Dr. John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University and Exchange Professor in China.
Dr. Dewey has made a special study of this subject in China and has had unusual opportunity of getting into touch with this element in China that may be considered as radical. I know of no one any where, better qualified to report on this important matter than Dr. Dewey."

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on "Industry in undeveloped countries" to the Chinese Social and Political Association in Beijing.

Letter from John Dewey to Albert C. Barnes
Dec 5, [1920] 135 Morrison St Peking
Dear Barnes,
We had expected to spend the time this year settled down here, except for a possible trip to Canton, which however has been in too unsettled a condition to permit educational meetings to take place. But we had an invitation to go to the central yangste provinces, and spent about four weeks in the capitals of three of them. With the exception of the region about Hankow they are the freest from foreign influence of any places we have been in, also interesting as the centr[e]s of the old porcelain industry, grass cloth and old Chinese cottons with the blue prints, very simple and artistic…
I have written too much about myself in this letter, but the situation here is awful and its a relief to get away from it, and one has to pump up optimisms to keep going. The overthrow of the Anfu crowd makes it impossible to lay all the ills off on Japan any more, but they are much aggravated by the long period of Japanese control. And its impossible to see anyway out. And the gloomy thing is that the ills seems to go back so much to just lack of character. Of course one cant indict a nation, but its exasperating to see so many thoroughly attractive traits, and some much sweet reasonableness, so bound up with plain lack of character. The most consoling thought, and one needs all the consolation he can get, is that after all the social habits which breed these defects are economic at root due to the struggle for existence, and that a new industrial development will in time crowd them out. But meantime its almost certain they will take on many western wvices, and lose many of their old virtues, by carrying love of money, intrigue, mutual suspicion and calumny into the new situation. There is but one end logically to the present political situation, and thats complete international foreign control of finance which means of course practically all governmental administration. Nothing happens logically in China however. On is often inclined to think that would have been better if China had been allowed to go to pot in thits own dway, and no foreigner had ever set foot in it. But 'ifs' that assume the non-existence of steam and electricity dont go far. Perhaps next time I write Ill be quite hopeful—I hope so.
I met Russell first on our trip as he was also giving lectures at Changsha, in Hunan. He then came up to Peking where he is now giving two lectures a wekk, on strictly special subjects, one on analysis of mind and the other problems of phil, along the lines of his little book. He declined to give any lectures on social reconstruction in China until he had studied the subject more, quite sensibley. [y in ink] His criticisms of Bolshevism rather weakened the attachment of students, who are socialists and to whom all socialists look much alike, except that Bolsheviks are to them really carrying it out. He is accompanied with by a young woman, a Miss [Dora] Black, one of his former students. The situation has produced a number of social complications quite naturally, which do not bother him becuae he came to China to see the Chinese not foreigners, but it may be a little hard on her before the year is out as educated and interesting Chinese women are arfew especially in Peking. The Chinese dont bother about the complication which seems to many quite admirable and advanced. but on the other hand many of them have been attacking the existing system in China and clai demanding a monogamous system and they dont quite to know what to make of it. Its rather petty writing personal gossip rather than about his work, but the truth is I havent fgot to any of his lectures yet, and conversations havent yielded much except that he is very amiable and an very interesting conversationalist, but avoiding shop as all the English do. He said that philosophically he had come nearer the pragmatist position than when we met last fsix years ago, but circumstances didnt admit of following the matter up. They have a fund for foreign lecturers one every year and want suggestions. In my opinion they are surfeited with theories, that includes me, and want somebody who can present definite knowledge about specific subjects which have a practical bearing, either on specific educational reforms, administrative measures etc, while being, in order to get a hearing rather radical in his ideas. They seem to want a German next time, and had the carzy idea of inviting Eucken, but I hope theyve dropped that. If you think of anybody mention him. The students are very receptive but rather uncritical, and also too disposed to vague generalities, any Ism as long as its uptodate. Im rather glad Im doing specific class teaching this year, not general lec-||turing, in fact made that condition of staying last spring. Im giving two courses, at two institutions, on D & E [Democracy and education] trying to simplify to make it intelligible, a course on Ethics and one on history of western phil; they appear the most interested in that. There is no interpreter and Im not sure about the english of many of them, and its hard to get questions and discussion from them. The have good minds but there is a general complaint they dont like to work. I mean the student class generally. A japanese who was over here gave the students a good talking to, told them some wholesome truths, contrasting their general atttitude with the spratan atttitude of the Japanese students thirty and forty years ago when J was in a precarious position and advised them to work heard and keep out of political rows. Yet the intelligent ones might have answered that hile Japanese students were keeping out of politics, the country had Shintoism and imperialismtic militarism put over on them. Its a hard question, and on the whole my sympathies are with a certain amount of superficial study due to outside interests, but they need to be training a good number of leaders in special subjects, [a]nd whether enough hard work is done for that is doubtful. However on the whole I dont consider the present situation bad if it isnt kept up too long; its an almost necessary stage of development that there be a period considerable intellectual fickleness, that is instability and attendant superficiality. Mentime the returned students come in for all kinds of criticisms, the gist being that they are out of touch with China while they havent really absorbed western culture and science, and also arent willing to begin at the botton, but want important jobs from the start. All natural enough too. The chief difficulty I think is that they have gone toabroad too young and now now there is a tendency to prepare them better before sending them, and send them for some special work planned in advance. The attitude of our govt in keeping them out of money earning pursuits has had a very bad influence. Theres a scheme for sending students who shall also work in factories and r[a]ilways etc, but Im told our dept of labor in Washington is holding it up—a very stupid policy from the standpoint of American business interests to say nothing of larger concerns…
Sincerely yours, John Dewey

Dewey, John. Industrial China [ID D28481].
Nowhere in the world is the difference between industrious and industrial as great as in China. The industriousness of the Chinese is proverbial. Industrially, they are in the earliest stages of the revolution from domestic to machine production, and from transportation on the necks of men (and women and children) to the freight car. The necks of men:—for while the bulk of goods in central China is doubtless carried by its marvellous system of water-ways, yet whenever winds fail the boats are towed with ropes attached to the shoulders of men—and women and children. On the Grand Canal, you can sometimes count forty persons from ten years up tugging at a rope attached to the mast of some clumsy junk. Even a Ruskin if abruptly placed in strictly mediaeval economic conditions might be forced to admit that there are two sides to the humanity of the steam locomotive. And the indiscriminate admirers of the mediaeval guild might learn something from a study of the workings of its Chinese counterpart.
My last six weeks have been spent in travelling through the Province of Kiangsu. Shanghai is located in this province and it is industrially and commercially the most advanced in China, the one with the most mills, railways and foreign trade. For details and statistics the reader may go to consular reports, trade journals, etc. This article has a humbler task. Its aim is merely to record impressions which seem to me to be indicative of the problems China has to face during the years of its oncoming accelerated industrial transformation.
The fifteen towns visited are scattered from the extreme north to the extreme south of the province; strictly speaking, two of them lie in the Province of Chekiang to the south. The towns fall into four groups. The first contains the treaty ports, where foreign merchants have come in, where foreign capital is concentrated, and where foreign methods, though usually subjected to Chinese conditions in the form of acceptance of the compradore as a middleman, set the pace. For technical commercial purposes, from a statistical point of view, these towns of which Shanghai is the most important, are doubtless the most interesting. From a social point of view they are the least interesting, except as one may want to make a study of the contact of two civilizations meeting with but one common object—the making of money.
Otherwise they are chiefly significant as revealing an increasing ability of the Chinese to adopt the joint-stock and managerial system without coming to grief—as did most of the early companies that were exclusively Chinese. The reasons are worth recording, because they affect the entire problem everywhere of the introduction of modem industrialism. The speculative element, the promoter element, was at first most marked. The general psychology was that of gold mine promoting. After an early furore in which most 'investors' lost their money, the bitten became wary, and even legitimate enterprises could not secure attention, except in the case of a very small number of persons who had made a success of their joint-stock mills. In the next place, the Chinese family system with the obligation it puts upon the prosperous member of the family to carry all his relatives who wish to be carried made nepotism so common as to be an impossible burden. And in the third place, most of the earlier enterprises scorned the technique of putting aside reserve funds in a prosperous season, and of writing off for depreciations. A short life and a merry one was the usual motto. Now, however, business methods have developed to the point where many Chinese mills are successfully competing with foreign capital and foreign management. In fact many Chinese think that the latter will soon be at a disadvantage because of the diversion of profits to the compradore, and the lack of personal contact with workmen. But upon this point it is not possible to get facts that can be depended upon.
The second class includes towns at the opposite extreme of development, towns that are not only non-treaty ports but that are only beginning to be touched. The northern part of the province, for example, is almost as primitive as it was five hundred years ago. The building of a railway has created some flour mills, and since the war egg-factories have made a new market. Eggs that used to sell for a third of a cent apiece now bring three times that, and the producer gets most of the increase. In all of the towns and villages, the number of hens any one family can keep is limited by communal action, as otherwise hens would poach. The extraordinary cumulative effect of large numbers so characteristic of China is nowhere better demonstrated than in the hundred thousands of eggs that nevertheless are daily brought by hand, or rather by neck, to the factories. Such an impression may seem too slight to be recorded. But it is typical of the kind of happening that is still most significant for the larger part of industrial China. Even this fact is increasing the value of land, raising the standard of living so that rural families that had only one bedding now have two, and is changing the attitude toward railways from one of hostility to one of favor.
In these primitive districts one realizes also the immense odds that have to be overcome. There are districts of a million population that a few years ago had no public schools whatever, no public press, no postoffices, and where these facilities are still most scanty. The great positive obstacle is the activity of bandits. Being a robber is a recognized profession like being a merchant. The well-to-do live in constant fear of being looted so that their homes are almost as bare as those of beggars and in fear of being kidnapped for ransom. The professions of soldier and bandit are interchangeable, and upon the whole the peasants prefer the latter. One hears the story of the traveller who met a whole village in flight with their household goods on mules and in wheelbarrows, because the soldiers were coming to protect them from bandits.
It is such facts as these that lead many to assert that any genuine industrial development of China must wait upon the formation of a strong and stabilized government. The significance of the political factor is evidenced in the province of Anwhei which juts into the northern part of Kiangsu. Here is seen the perfect flower of militarism. The military governor recently closed all schools in the province for a year in order to spend the money on his army. He has been getting personal possession of all the mines in the province and recently diverted a river from two cities in order to make a canal to some of his mines. This is only an extreme case of the effect of present political conditions upon the industrial growth of China. Almost everywhere officials use their power, based on control of soldiers, to exact tribute. They levy blackmail on mills and mines; use the control of railways to manipulate the supply of cars until they can force an interest to be given them. Then they reinvest their funds in pawn shops, banks and other agencies of economic domination. Thus a new kind of feudalism is growing up in which militarism is a direct adjunct to capitalism. These men keep their spare millions in foreign banks and have places of refuge in foreign concessions. The control of the Ministries of Communications and of Finance is equivalent to an economic overlordship of China, and the effects ramify everywhere. The station master has to pay several thousands of dollars to get his job, and he recoups by charging fifty or a hundred dollars when a shipper wants a car. Yet industry and commerce are advancing, and there is probably as much reason for thinking that in the end their growth will reform government as that a stabilized government will permit the normal growth of industry.
The third class of towns consists of cities that also represent old China, but the prosperous and cultivated side of old China, cities that are now lazy, luxurious and refined along with extreme poverty and ignorance; towns that are slowly degenerating, for they want none of the new methods while at the same time the new methods are diverting industry and trade from them. To these cities go many retired officials with their stolen funds. As one moves about near the clubhouses and gilded house boats one hears everywhere the click of the gambling dominoes. There is money for dissipation and opium, but little for new industrial developments. Surplus funds are invested in neighboring rice lands; old small owners are crowded out, and a large class of tenant farmers is being created where family ownership has been the rule. Where the northern towns are merely primitive and backward, these once rich cities of the southern part of the province are reactionary and corrupt.
Finally there are industrial towns where foreigners cannot own land or trade, and where the chimneys of cotton and flour mills and silk filatures are as numerous and smoky as in the factory districts of Shanghai—a development mostly of the last ten years, and indeed largely post-war. As it happens, the two most important of these towns present opposite types. In one of them the entire development has been in the hands of a single family, two brothers. And the leading spirit is one of a small group of men who vainly and heroically strove for the reformation of the Manchu dynasty from within. Finding his plans pigeon-holed and his efforts blocked, he retired to his native town and began almost single-handed a course of industrial and economic development. He has in his record the fact that he established the first strictly Chinese cotton mill in China and also the first normal school. And since both were innovations, since China had never had either of these things, he met with little but opposition and prophecies of disaster to himself and the district. Now the district is known popularly as the model town of China, with its good roads, its motor buses for connecting various villages, its technical schools, its care of blind and deaf, its total absence of beggars. But the method is that of old China at its best, a kind of Confucian paternalism; an exhibition on the small scale of the schemes for the reformation of the country which were rejected on the large scale. The combination of the new in industry and the old in ideas is signalized in the girl and woman labor in the factories, while the magnate finds it 'inconvenient' that boys and girls should be educated together after the age of ten years, with the usual result that most of the girls receive no schooling. The other town represents a go-as-you-please competitive development. There is less symmetry but more vitality. Many deplore the absence of cooperation and organization in developing civic life. But it is characteristic of young China that it regards the greater individualism with all its lack of system as more promising than what it terms the benevolent autocracy of the model town.
But all of the industrial towns have one problem in common, and it is the problem of China. Is the industrial development of China to repeat the history of Great Britain, the United States and Japan until the evils of total laissez faire bring about a labor movement and a class struggle? Or will the experience of other countries be utilized and will the development be humanized? China is the land of problems, of problems so deadlocked and interlocked that one is constantly reminded of the Chinese puzzles of his childhood days. But for China and for the whole world this problem of the direction to be taken by its industrial evolution is the one of chief importance. Outwardly all the signs as yet point to movement in the inhuman direction, to blind repetition of the worst stages of the western industrial revolution. There are no factory laws, and if there were, no government capable of admin¬istering and enforcing them. You find silk filatures in which chil-dren of eight and ten are working fourteen hours a day for a pit¬tance, and twelve hours is the regular shift in all the mills. And these establishments have many of them for the last few years paid dividends of from fifty to two hundred and fifty per cent a year. Superficially China looks at the outset of its industrial career like the paradise of the socially unrestrained exploiter. The case however is not so simple or so certain. It is still conceivable that the future historian will say that the resistance of China to the introduction of the agencies of modern production and distribu¬tion, the resistance which was long cited as the classic instance of stupid conservatism, was in truth the manifestation of a mighty social instinct which led China to wait until the world had reached a point where it was possible for society to control the industrial revolution instead of being its slave. But the tail of an article is no place even to list the conditions and forces which make such a history conceivable, and only conceivable at the best.

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on Albert Einstein at the Qinghua University in Beijing.

Letter from Bertrand Russell to Clifford Allen. 2 Sui an Po Hukung, Peking, 13 Dec. 1920.
Dear Allen… Dora and I have taken a house (address as above) and furnished it in Chinese style. It is very pleasant, built round a courtyard as they all are. Peking treats us as if we were married – the legation calls and asks us to dinner. It makes Dora furious to find herself respectable against her will. But she enjoys furnishing, and she is going to lecture at the University. I find the students lazy and stupid. Most of them are Bolsheviks, but they don't know what that means, and are timid and comfort-loving. The Japs of course are wicked, but I have hopes that their reformers also are vigorous, and therefore better than the Chinese. I enclose a letter from one of them who is arranging for me to lecture there next summer. Please send it to Colette. The Chinese are exceedingly cordial and make a lot of fuss about me, but one remains on terms of politeness – they are hard to get to know well. I find there are very few whom I can like. They say they are socialists but complain of foreigners for over-paying the coolies so that life becomes a little less comfortable for the rich. The Government is corrupt ; usually it takes money from the Japs and is then turned out by a revolution but succeeded by a new Government which is just as bad. I think 50 years of foreign domination is the only hope.
Dora sends her love. We are very happy, though we have fits of home-sickness, but we are too busy to notice them much.

Russell, Bertrand. First impressions of China. In : The Peking Leader ; 16. Dez. (1920).
He traveller arriving in China from Europe for the first time is struck to begin with by the great artistic beauty of all that is traditional, and the aesthetic ruin wrought by modern industrialism wherever it has penetrated. If he is a man whose main interest is art and beauty, he will probably continue to deplore the influence of Europe : he will observe the decay of Chinese painting and poetry, the substitution of (to him) commonplace Western furniture for the stiff tables and chairs of the old tradition. He will perhaps go even further, and carry his conservatism into the domain of ideas. He will find an old-world charm in Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist thought ; he will rejoice to find that there are men of high education in their own line, whose whole outlook and knowledge is utterly different from that of learned Europeans. And he will wish such peculiarities preserved, in order to increase the interest and diversity of the spectacle which the world offers to studious contemplation.
But if he takes the trouble to consider China in itself, not merely as a spectacle, hi is not likely to remain content with this conservative attitude. He will realize that the old beauty no longer has any vitality, and that it can only be preserved by treating the whole country as a museum. He will find that many of the most vigorous and intelligent of the Chinese are entirely unappreciative of all ancient excellence in China, and distinctly impatient when foreigners praise it. He will quickly discover that progress is only possible by abandoning the old, even when it is really good. Industrialism, democracy, science and modern education do not have the statuesque beauty of traditional and unchanging civilizations ; Europe at the present day lacks the charm which it had four or five centuries ago, yet hardly any European would wish to revert to the Middle Ages. And similarly what is most vital in China wishes to press forward, without too much tenderness for the aesthetic losses that must be involved.
One is struck, on arriving from Europe, by the tremendous eagerness for ideas, for enlightenment, for guidance, which exists among those who have lost faith in the old traditions. Something of the old Confucian's belief in the value of learning and the importance of the sage survives even among the most iconoclastic. China has been governed for many ages very largely by men chosen, at least nominally, on account of their literary eminence. There has come to be a scholarly caste, of whom the younger ones now look to America (or, in some cases, Europe) for intellectual guidance. Their desire is usually not for facts to much as for what may be called wisdom. It is impossible not to be surprised by the general belief that a sage must be able to give moral advice by which a nation's difficulties can be solved. We in the West have lost our belief in Wise Men. This is part of the general diminution of belief in the individual, which has been brought about by organization, by the vast size of our States, our business enterprises, and our political parties. But in China there is still an expectation that a wise man may play the part of Solon or Lycurgus. There is a willingness and desire to follow, but there is, apparently, no correlative ability to lead.
What China has achieved in the last twenty years is quite amazing. I have no doubt that the most important thing for China now is education, not only of the present class, but of the whole people. China is traditionally aristocratic in its social organization, and this tradition is still very dominant. Life in China reminds a European of the eighteenth century ; the cheapness and abundance of labour, the multitude of servants, the survival of handicrafts, produce and economic situation such as Europe experienced before the industrial revolution. And the mental atmosphere, too, is not dissimilar : the skepticism in regard to traditional beliefs, and the eager search after some new gospel, are just what was characteristic of France a hundred and fifty years ago. I do not think any new gospel which is to be of value to China is possible without a more democratic spirit, and I think this spirit will have to be displayed first of all in the provision of education for the working classes. I am of course very conscious of the difficulties and obstacles that stand in the way, but I believe they can be overcome in time by patience and determination.
The problem of relations with other Powers and with Western ideas and methods is obviously a very delicate one. If it were possible, I suppose a patriotic Chinese with a modern outlook would desire to have the greatest possible benefit from Western science and industrial methods, with the least possible political and economic domination by foreign nations. But probably the ideas and the domination are difficult to dissociate. Probably any steps that might be taken to resist foreign capital and foreign aggression would only be successful, at present, if they were part of a great patriotic campaign, which would inevitably extend also into the region of ideas and economic methods and social organization. Under these circumstances, it seems difficult to obtain the good without the bad. At any rate, a newly-arrived foreigner feels puzzled, and does not know exactly what he should desire.
It is clear, in any case, that industrialism must profoundly change China during the next twenty years. One could wish that industrialism might develop here without the bad features which have proved inseparable from its growth everywhere else, but perhaps that is too much to hope. I have no doubt that by foresight and method the transition to industrialism could be effected without any evils of a serious kind ; but no nation hitherto has shown foresight and method in the transition, and there is no reason to suppose that China will prove an exception.
The hopeful features in China, on a superficial acquaintance of only a few weeks, seem to me to be the great eagerness for ideas on the part of the educated minority, and the great willingness to accept leadership towards some better political and social system. I fully believe that, given patience and a willingness to traverse the necessary stages, these qualities can lead to a wonderful national awakening if wise leaders can be found. But I do not yet know what likelihood there is of these conditions being fulfilled.
One thing, at any rate, I can praise with complete confidence, and that is Chinese hospitality. I have been welcomed with a warmth which has surprised and touched me, and have been treated everywhere with a quite extraordinary kindness. It is natural to wish that I could make some return for this kindness in the form of help in China ; but I am impressed by the complexity and difficulty of these problems, and by the impossibility of understanding them when one is a recent arrival ignorant of the Chinese language. So long as this remains the case, anything that I may find to say must continue to suffer from superficiality and ignorance.

Letter from Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell. 2 Sui an Po Hutung, 17 Dec. 1920.
Dearest O. … We have settled down to a regular life here, very hard working, and most of the work very futile. A great deal of lecturing (by both of us) to students who are eager and enthusiastic, but ignorant and untrained and lazy, expecting knowledge to be pumped into them without effort on their part. A good deal of writing articles in Chinese and Japanese papers. Less social life than at first, but still too much. The Europeans here are mostly old-fashioned and boring, polite to us because they are afraid of what I may say to the Chinese (the Bolsheviks are in touch with them, not very far from Peking), but of course really hating us and furious at having to condone our flouting of conventions and decencies. It makes an odd situation. The Chinese are infinitely polite and flattering, but one always feels they have secrets, and that they say things to each other of which we get no hint. However, on the whole we live a quiet life. Our house is near the walls, which are immensely broad and go all round the City (14 miles) and are said to have been built under the Ming dynasty. We walk on the walls in the afternoons, and get a wonderful view of the whole town and the Western hills.
The news from home in the papers is the worst part of the day… Last night for the first time we had visitors to dinner in our house. One of them a man named Johnston, who writes on Buddhism with praise and on Christianity with censure. He finds that the missionaries still preach that every heathen 'Chinee' must go to hell, and he writes amusing blasphemies on the subject – he is a belated Voltairian. In the middle of dinner, while we were listening to these blasphemies, there was an earthquake ! So we changed the subject. I never was in an earthquake before – it was slight, and at first we each thought we were taken suddenly ill – it felt like sea-sickness. Then we saw the lights swaying about and we realized what had happened… All love. Your B.

Lecture by Bertrand Russell on Russia to the Learned Friends Society in Beijing.

Letter from Bertrand Russell to Colette O'Niel. 24. Dez. 1920.
Letter from China (1920).
You say you find it difficult to imagine me here, so I will try to describe the world in which I am living. I have a Chinese house, built round a courtyard, with only the ground-floor. The front door opens into a small street ; as one walks along the street, one sees only one continuous wall with an occasional door, because the houses are hidden. Ten minutes' walk from my house are the City Walls, which go all round the City (fourteen miles). They are high and broad, and the best place for an afternoon walk, because one sees the whole of Peking and the Western Hills beyond. The region between Hankow and Peking, when I came through it in the train, seemed to me very like Southern Russia : vastness, unbounded plains, and primaeval peasants. Southern China, from the Yangtse to Hongkong, is utterly different – tropical or sub-tropical, very beautiful in a straightforward fashion, fertile, populous, and gay. But this northern land is tragic. The sand blows over from the desert of Gobi in great yellow storms, and makes moving sand-hills which engulf whole villages. The rivers are cruel, always either dried up or in flood. Owing to drought last summer, twenty million peasants are starving ; they offer their little girls for sale as slaves at three dollars, and if they don't get that price they bury them alive. The Chinese don't care ; whatever is being done for relief is European or American. There are many rich Chinese, but they won't lend to their government, because they know the money would be spent in corruption. The Chinese politicians take Japanese money, while Japan steals Shantung and behaves in Korea even worse than we are behaving in Ireland. Japan and England smuggle opium into the country by corrupting the customs officials. The provincial governors even each his own army, usually unpaid, but making money by looting unoffending towns, bayonetting shopkeepers who try to keep something back. Meanwhile the intellectuals prate of socialism or communism, pretend to be very advanced, and sit with folded hands enjoying inherited wealth, while the Japs, the Russians, the English and the Americans are all trying to get pickings off the corpse. There was until lately a native art which was very beautiful, and a native poetry of exquisite delicacy. But the palseying touch of industrialism has killed all that. The common people are the best ; they are good-natured children, full of laughter, physically tough, and mentally less effete than the people of inherited culture. I feel as if they would be quite good material for education, whereas the pupils I get are incurably lazy and soft. Peking is very beautiful, full of broad open spaces, trees, palaces, streets of water, and temples. The climate is delicious, bright and dry, always freezing in winter, but with almost no snow. Europeans dash about in motor-cars, Chinese men make a more stately progress in carriages with footmen standing behind, humbler folk go in rickshas, and your correspondent on his feet for the sake of exercise. Walking here has the drawback of the beggars : shivering men and women and children in rags which scarcely secure decency, who run after one for long distances repeating 'da la yeh' (great old sire !). Some are fat and evidently make a good living ; others look terribly poor and hungry and cold. There are many dogs in the streets, but they are despised ; some are covered with sores, others one sees dying in the ditch.

Letter from John Dewey to Albert C. Barnes
135 Morrison St Dec 39 [29, 1920] | Peking
Dear Barnes, …
I dont wonder that you are suspicious of the Consortium, but you can judge of the situation here if I say that so far as I can see it is the best thing in sight for China, in fact the only thing in sight politically. Its very questionable however whether it will ever really function, but its failure will be more due to its good points than its bad ones. There are three great things agt its operation. Its a combination of finance and politics. Politically it is distinctly anti-japanese in the sense of being a measure to check the japanese aggressions which have been going on so uninterruptedly for the last six years. Apart from the Monroe doctrine, China is the only country so far as I can see where the U S has had a continuous foreign policy—the socalled Open Door, no further parttitions, no further spheres of influence. The Consortium politically speaking is a tool of this idea But at the same time it is financial ad must give an attractive opening to American money. Its doubtful whether these two things can be made to lie down together; certainly there is something of a campaign agt the C already as being too "idealistic." The second force agt is international jealousies. Of course the Japanese know it will curb their designs, but the France and Gt Britain know also it is in pursuance of the distinctly American policy, John Hay etc, and will add to American prestige and influence in China, and if successful will destroy in the end the whole sphere of influence of partitition. Also they are now too hard up to have money to invest and their obvious policy is to stall, and prevent the thing working till they can come back. So they will work together with Japan more or less to put monkey wrenches into the machine. The third reason agt is is in-||ternal. Aside from the natural general fear of foreign control, there is the opposition of corrupt officials to the fact that all expenditures under the loans will be subject to expert foreign auditing, and opposition of Chinese bankers, since by making hand to motuh loans as at present they get from twenty to forty per cent interest—in some extremely corrupt cases even more—but two per cent a month is considered quite legitmate. How the Consortium can survive all these difficulties its hard to see. There is one thing in its favor—the desperate condition of things here. I doubt [a]fter seeing things here the generalizations of fluent radicals about finance being internationalized. Maybe it would be here if there were a common agreement to do it at the expense of China, but as long as the interest of the U S is against a break up of China, finance cant be internationalized here—unless the U S is powerful enough and der emined enough to lay down the law. Probably the Steel trust will control the next administration and that is mainly pro-Japanese, as industrialism is do much further advanced there. The Morgan interests for some reason arent tied up with Japan, At least they havent been, and I suspect T L [financier Thomas Lamont] is somewhat influenced by a little oldfashioned American patriotism which in this case brings him out on the comparatively right side.
Thank you for the c[o]pies of the correspondence you sent. Her letter was too brief for me to get a clear insight, but there were certainly plenty of signs of poetic spirit, and your reply was a rare combination of friendliness and straightforwardness. The journals came with your Cezanne article and we were glad to see it in print.
I was awfully glad about you[r] suggestion of Hobson [probably John A. Hobson] for China; I dont know why his name had escaped me. The Chinese have a fatuous devotion to their old teachers—which accounts for a good deal of my own reception here—and unfortunately there is a man—I never met him—with a good deal of influence who once studied in Germany under Eucken, and they seem bound to invite that mass of flabby decay. ItHe is so dam old maybe he cant come; no one of the men I know take any stock in him, but the man who is booming him has influence with theose who put up the money. Then there is a strong pro german feeling in China, so they want a German. I belive they asked Einstein, but he declined. Intellectually of course he is as respectable as Eucken is the reverse, but he would have been clear over their heads. Russell gave a public lecture on Relativity the other day, and while like everything he does it was a masterpiece of cl[e]ar[n]ess yet no one in the audience || except two or three professors of math and physics knew what any of it was about. Hobson is the right combination of theory and practise for them; as I wr[o]te before they are a little crazy now on the[o]ry, What is truth? What is religion? What is democracy? these are typical questions, and then right in the middle will be a fairly specific question like [w]hat is instinct? and apparently they dont see why one question cant be disposed of as well as another in a paragraph. I was invited to speak on religion and declined and the secy of the student society which invited me came around to see me and naively said they wanted to get the question settled while Russell and I were in the country. Of course it isnt all as bad as this, but in a way its typical. Russell gave out an interview in which he remarked that in the Western world no one had any faith any longer in the "wise men" but China was still in the stage where it beleived that a wise man could come along and settle its difficulties and questions. He got ion to the weak points of the Chinese in much shorter time than I did. He is extremely s[e]nsitive, as his Russian articles show, since he was only there six weeks and had never been before and didnt know the language. However he is constitutionally in opposition; he could write a wonde[r]ful critique on either heaven or hell after a short stay in either. A young Chinese expressed what I called his mathematical detachment by saying he gave very simple reasons for very complicated conditions. I fancy thisat is the mathemetical psyhcology—the ability to ignore contexts and select just what is directly relevant to the point in hand. If you meant that I envy him this gift you are right, for to my own psychology in spite of my shematic logical tendencies everything comes complicated end first, and I have to proceed consciously thru a tot of negations to untangle anything—to him it comes fairly clearly at the beginning I think. But if you mean that what is nearest my hearts desire it his ability to reach the liberal masses, why it only shows [ in ink] you dont get the psychology of the specialist. Even Wm James who is as much greater an artist than R as R is than me, says somewhere that he thinks when he writes of some twenty men, [ink comma] whose approval he would like—I havent the exact number but that makes no difference. Russell soon begins a new course on Analysis of Matter to go with his Analysis of Mind course. He told some one that Einstein had largely upset his prior phil of matter—that is one wonderful thing about R, he gets in opposition to himself as easily as to the rest of the world—this doesnt mean he is grouchy personally, on he contrary, he unusally agrreable. But he has simple intellectual tests and nothing naturally comes up to themir requirements. The war and Russia have affected such a senstive mind naturally. He thinks civilization is doomed to go to sleep like the old Roma world, he gives it only two centuries more of existence at the outside. Maybe hes right, but I cant see or feel it, but I can see how differently the world must look to one who seen at first hand the European debacle. He says Russian civilization which was tenuous and exotic, but still the finest in quality in the world has been destroyed, he seems to think permanently whoever comes out on top. He has a kind of dillemma, either aristocracy and injustice and civilization, or equality, (justice) and no civilization. That carries his simplification a little further than he does. But apparently he knows what justice is, namely equality, and I cant even fancy anything being as simple as that…
Sincerely, [John Dewey]
Wytter Bynner the poet has been over here. He is taking back a lot of cheap Chinese paintings, the kind that can be bought for a few dollars apiece, Mex. I cant imagine he wants them all for himself, and it made me wonder whther there was a business market for such things. If there is maybe I would try a venture to help pay expenses For a thousand dollars Mex I could esaily get two hundred pcitures, none very old, and none by masters of course, but having a certain Chinese charm and a technique as far as it goes. Do you know whether such things sell now in U S? The real Sungs are hard to get and up in the thousands.

Lily Abegg studiert Volkswirtschaft und Staatswissenschaften an den Universitäten Genève und Hamburg.

Ludwig Bachhofer promoviert in Kunstgeschichte an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.