China and the West

Film : Shao nai nai de shan zi = 少奶奶的扇子 [The young mistress's fan] in der Übersetzhung von Hong Shen, unter der Regie von Zhang Shichuan nach Wilde, Oscar. Lady Windermere's fan. (London : Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893). (Kline/Roethke collection). [Erstaufführung 1892 St. James Theatre London].
Hong Shen was not satisfied with the several versions of translation as 'they were not appropriate to the Chinese theatre'. He translated it again, and made many changes according to his own taste. As one critic observes, "All the place names and the names of persons are given in common Chinese names, and the details of everyday life are also adapted to Chinese custom and convention. Only the main theme and the general spirit of the play, plus the plot and setting, remained with the original style". Mao Dun : "Five hundred tickets were sold out immediately, and they had to issue two hundred extra tickets. After the first night personages of various circles in Shanghai strongly demanded extra performances."

Film : Lu Binhua = 卢鬓花 unter der Regie von Dan Duyu nach der englischen Legende Robin Hood.

Film : Fei xing xie = 飞行鞋 [The flying shoes] unter der Regie von Pan Chuitong nach einem Märchen von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm.

Frans Hoogers ist als Missionar in Xijiadou (Shanxi) tätig.

Feier zum 100. Geburtstag von Henrik Ibsen in China.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Nankai zhong xue (Nankai Middle School) in Tianjin unter der Regie von Zhang Pengchun mit Cao Yu als Nora.

Jiao, Juyin. Lun Yibusheng [ID D26218].
Jiao schreibt : "Ibsen was a thinker, a satirist, and last but not least an artist. If you study carefully his ideas, you may find that in many places Ibsen deviated from modern ideology, yet his greatness lies in his art. Even he himself admitted that he as a poet and not a sociologist. In recent years there have been many discussions of Ibsen in China. Many people have taken Ibsen primarily as a thinker. Of course we need thoughts, but we also need art. Our choice of art works surely may take on Soviet Russia's politcy towards foreign films, but we cannot deny a person's art because we deny his thought. By the person's thought because of his art.
Whether or not Ibsen's philosophy is suitable for China, I cannot tell. At least I can conclude that present-day China does not need egotism - nevertheless, the kind of individualism Ibsen believed in is beneficial to our society because it means exactly the spiritual liberation and purification of the self. In China, there are many people who have lost their souls. Without a spirit, there cannot be a liberation, a purification of the self."

Tam Kwok-kan : Jiao's essay covers Ibsen's Scandinavian background, biography, plays, and ideological inclinations. Jiao affirms that Ibsen is greater than his Norwegian contemporaries and that his success and popularity all over the world are due to the universal significance of his plays. Jiao stresses the philosophical, artistic, and satiric aspects of Ibsen’s drama. He regards Ibsen as a master who contributes to the perfection of realism as a dramatic technique in his problem plays, in which there is an effort to present the social issues rather than to provide a solution for them. According to Jiao, Ibsen as a thinker wrote his plays as an emotional relief of his own personal obsessions. Jiao recapitualtes the social evils rooted in the family, law, religion, traditional morals, and society.

Liu, Dajie. Yibusheng yan jiu [ID D12433].
Liu schreibt : "Disappointed by the illusions of life, Ibsen gabe up his dreams and regretted his failures at love. The difficulties in life brought him close to society and nature. He began to turn to the ordinary people immediately before him. Be they pastors, merchants, soldiers, beautiful girls, or young poets, he put all of them in his works. His purpose was to reflect faithfully the sorrows of life and wickedness of society. Thus he gave up verse and took up the prose form in his play.
Tam Kowk-kan : In discussing Ibsen's plays, Liu Dajie follows the usual tripartite scheme in grouping the works into the romantic, realistic, and symbolist.

Ding, Ling. Sha fei nü shi de ri ji [ID D16504].
Roman, beeinflusst von Nora von Henrik Ibsen.

Yu, Shangyuan. Yibusheng de yi shu [ID D26243].
Tam Kwok-kan : Yu states that Ibsen is basically an artist rather than a philoospher, thinker, and idealist. He points out Ibsen's achievements in dramatic tehnique. The greatness of Ibsen lies in his artistic presentation of a complex idea. He accounts for Ibsen's success by his realistic treatment of contemporary issues. Ibsen's realism in characterization, dialogue, and setting is particularly powerful. "Ibsen's greatness lies in his use of life as subject-matter and realism as a means for artistic achievement, and the use of technique as a medium to blend and balance thought and art." "In modern China, Ibsen is among those who have had the bad luck of being misinterpreted."

Yuan, Zhenying. Yibusheng de nü xing zhu yi [ID D26262].
Yuan schreibt : "Ibsen was a feminist. He wanted to create strong, pure women, but within this corrupt society there is no place for them. In order not to succumb to attack women need an impenetrable fortress of principles and knowledge."

[Roberts, R. Ellis] Yibusheng. Mei Chuan yi. [ID D26235].
Roberts schreibt : "[Ibsen's] prose plays shocked Europe because here once more were live people on the stage. This is certain, and yet all the time the theatres of Europe were all familiar to live people of Shakespeare, and their intense problems. Why did the situation in Ghosts seem so much more terrible than the situation in Measure for measure ? Why did Rosmer stun and shame audiences which could smile and yawn at the agony of Hamlet ? Why should Hedda Gabler appear heartless to a generation familiar with Iago, or Rebecca West ruthless to people who knew Macbeth, or Mrs. Allmers indecently sensual to playgoers who admired Cleopatra ? First, most people cannot listen intelligently to poetry, even when it is intelligently spoken ; secondly, the whole presentation of Shakespeare's plays under the Lyceum tradition tended to make actors and audiences alike treat them as belonging to some remote and long-dead past. Ibsen is too hard, too certain, too religious for an age which is soft, and vague and frivolous. Also he is, except for those who like the east wind and the mountain top, a bleak author."

Lu, Xun. Pian jiao hou ji [ID D26359].
Lu Xun schreibt : "Why did we specially choose Ibsen ? Because we had to build up a kind of Western-style new drama, to elevate our drama to use the vernacular to promote prose drama. And furthermore, because it was a task to urgent, we could only use practical examples to stimulate the senses of our intellectuals. These reason are all correct. But I still think that it was also because Ibsen dared to attack society and to fight against the majority. Probably, at thet time, people who introduced Ibsen also had the feeling that they were an isolated army surrounded in an old fortress. When we now look at their tombstones, we still feel the solitude, yet its spirit was great."

Xu, Zhimo. Tang mai shi Hadai [ID D27729].
Er schreibt : "With his four novels (Jude the obscure, Tess oft he D'Urbervilles, The return oft he native, Far from the madding world) alone, Hardy has secured a lofty status in the literary world comparable to Shakespeare and Balzac. In the history of English literature, Hamlet and Jude the obscure stand out like two fiery trees shining on each other. A large amount of good writings has indeed been produced in the three centuries in between, yet none of them measures up to these two poles which will give off their sacred sheen forever in the realm of literature and art."
"Hardy is not an arbitrary pessimist though he could not check his anger and melancholy sometimes. He never gave up his resolve to seek a way out for his personal ideal and the prospects of humanity as well, even during the darkest and most tiresome hours of his life. His realism and his pessimism reflect exactly his mental faithfulness and bravery."
"The act of imagination is the starting-point for the creation of a universe. But only a select few, possessed of 'complete imagination' or 'absolute imagination', have the capacity to create a complete universe : Shakespeare, for example, or Goethe or Dante. Hardy's universe also is a whole. If some should suggest that in that universe the climatic variation was altogether too monotonous, the aspect always that of autumnal or wintry gloom, that no gay blaze of the sun ever came bursting through the clouds and mists, then Hardy's answer would be that the age he represented was not, unfortunately, that of Elizabeth I, but that era of the fullest development of self-consciousness which began with the closing years of the nineteenth century : a most stern season in the history of man...
Even in the moments of the greatest distress, the blackest darkness, Hardy never abandoned his determination to find a way out for his thinking, to find a way out for the future of mankind. His realism, his so-called pessimism, are names for nothing but the honesty and courage of his thought."
"No one else could gauge as closely as Hardy the pulse-beat of his age ; under his fingers the slightest movement was made to divulge its inner secret.
The death of Thomas Hardy properly concludes an important historical era. The era opens with the thinking and the character of Rousseau, in whose words and deeds there was realized the formal birth of the 'liberation of the self' and the 'consciousness of the self' of the modern age. From the Confessions to the French Revolution, from the French Revolution to the Romantic movement, from the Romantic movement to Nietzsche (and Dostojevsky), from Nietzsche to Hardy – through this hundred-and-seventy-year span we watch the struggles of human feeling as it emerges from the grip of Reason, bursting forth like flame, and in the bright blaze shooting out its various movements and doctrines, meanwhile in the embers nourishing the 'modern consciousness', pathological, self-analytical, questioning, weary ; and even as the flying sparks diminish, so does the heap of ashes beneath broaden out until a sense of disillusionment tones down all the throbbings of energy, crushes feeling, paralyzes intellect, and mankind suddenly discovers that its footsteps have strayed to the brink of despair, that if it does not hold back then the future offers only death and silence. When Hardy began the writing of his novels the days of Victoria were at their most flourishing, the indications of evolutionary theory and the achievements of the doctrine of laissez-faire had thrown up a high tide of optimism which within a short time blotted out all inequalities and mysteries. By the time he ceased writing fiction a fin-de-siècle melancholy had replaced the hollow hopes of the early years. When Hardy first published a volume of his verse the forces of destruction, gathering for a century past, had formed a hidden current which might at any moment burst its banks. As he was publishing his later volumes this current broke out in the Great War and the Russian Revolution."

Chang, Hsin-hai [Zhang, Xinhai]. A Chinese estimate of Hardy's poetry [ID D27877].
"Poetry heightens our appreciation of beauty through its appeal to the imagination and to the emotions, and Hardy's poetry seems to offer us very little delight in these realms. The fact is, not that Hardy fails to give us an imaginative or emotional appeal, but the quality of his imagination and emotion is different from the usual kind. It is charged with profound intellectual significance…
There is thus ample reason why Hardy's poetry will perhaps remain unpopular, but for those who have deep intellectual interests and who are willing to see human existence in crude and barbarous realism without the sweetness and the glamour which some of us in all times and all of us in some time find necessary to humour ourselves, there is very adequate compensation in the fair collection of poetry which Hardy has given us…
The leading and, at the same time, the most characteristic thought underlying all of Hardy's works is that life is a tragedy, and that it is a tragedy because of the eternal and inevitable conflict between the human will on the one hand and the immanent will on the other. We shall therefore consider what Hardy means by destiny or fate which underlies all human existence, and its relationship to his religious views and his general philosophic outlook upon life…
Hardy is one of the greatest of our modern poets, because in him more than in anyone else are reflected the manifold aspects of our modern consciousness. Hardy is, if anything, fundamental ; and if he seems to emphasise misery and suffering, it is because they are the great realities of our modern existence. We should be grateful to have one reveal to us the truth of our being, but it perhaps requires a still greater soul to exalt and ennoble it. Hardy, in any case, is among the immortals of English literature."

Xu Zhimo saw Russell again in September 1928.
Brief von Xu Zhimo an Elmhirst. Sept. 1928.
I have found the Philosopher [Bertrand Russell] as pungently witty and relently [sic] humorous as ever. They are out here, once again, looking after the moral welfare of their two kids. We have had a jolly good time together since last evening. Since I was only to stay overnight we were very jealous of the little while we had with each other, so we sat up chatting last evening till, before we were aware, it was almost 2 a.m.

Dewey, John. To the Chinese friends in the United States [ID D28464].
From time to time cases of our Chinese friends seriously involved in difficulties with the authorities here have come under the notice of individual members of this Committee. Not infrequently a good deal of hardship and at times no little injustice have been worked upon these people because of the discrimina¬tory acts and attitudes of those charged with the administration of the laws. A real need was felt, therefore, for some organized effort to meet the situation. The direct outcome of this sentiment was the formation of the committee known as THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR LEGAL DEFENSE OF CHINESE. Its purpose is Specifically to secure to the Chinese of all classes in this country their full legal rights by providing access to adequate counsel and by any other related type of assistance it can give. The Committee also regards efforts to change discriminatory attitudes in the administration of the law as entirely within its scope.
It is plain that the Committee has a real task on its hands, because of both the difficult nature and the very large scope of its work. It is plain, too, that successful furtherance of its purposes must depend upon the combined support of every Chinese and every American who is interested in this new effort.
We have engaged Mr. John T. Find as executive secretary, and we earnestly hope that all our Chinese friends throughout the United States will cooperate with him and the members of this Committee either as individuals or as a group, to make this orga¬nization an effective instrument for promoting the legal interests of the Chinese people in this country and thereby strengthening the friendly relations between the United States and China.

Dewey, John. China and the powers : intervention a challenge to nationalism [ID D28467].
General Crozier has furnished us with an interesting essay on the conditions in China which make it difficult for that country to establish a unified, stable and efficient Government. He has supplemented this account with a briefer essay on the comparative ease with which military conquest of that country could be accomplished. The two statements form the foundation for what is in effect a plea for intervention in China to be undertaken by preferably concerted action of several Great Powers. This intervention is to be wholly altruistic in character, based on desire to help China find her own unity, assist her in development of civil law and administration, free her from the rapacious interference by militarists and officials leagued with them, and is to terminate in turning over a smoothly running Government to the Chinese people. It reads like a dream. If tried, it might turn out a nightmare.
His account of conditions in China, even if once substantially correct as far as it goes, leaves out a fundamentally important fact. He fails to give weight in estimating the probable reception of benevolent intervention by the Chinese to the extraordinary development of national sentiment in recent years. I should not have believed it possible to write about Chinese political affairs and make as little reference as he has done to this feature of the situation. It is quite true that it is not sufficiently strong or well organized to create a unified Government. It may well be years before that goal is reached. But it is powerful enough to bring to naught any such scheme as that proposed.
The probability and the effectiveness of organized resistance to a Government resting upon foreign force is immensely under-estimated. It is true the Chinese still lack ability in positive and constructive combination. They have, however, an enormous capacity for negative organization, for resistance. The agitation against foreign interferences carried on in the last few years has already aroused that power into action. Increase of interference would render it an irresistible force. The Chinese are factional; but foreign intervention would weld them into a solid unit, as long as the foreigner was there. General Crozier thinks, apparently on the basis of reports from Hongkong, that they could not successfully unite for even a boycott without assistance from governmental powers, which naturally could not be had with the Government in the hands of foreign agents. Well, I happened to be in China eight years ago at the time the boycott against the Japanese was started. It was started by students. Instead of having support from the Government, the latter was pro-Japanese and set out to suppress the movement by force. In a few short weeks the Cabinet was overthrown; and it is commonly understood that the boycott was so harmful to Japanese interests that it is responsible for the change in Japan's attitude toward China.
Since then things have moved fast and far. The merchants, as well as students, are now organized, while in all industrial cen¬'tres the workingmen are an organized power. Quite aside from boycotts and means of passive resistance, the proposed scheme of government would be brought to naught by Chinese noncooperation. Its success would depend upon enlisting Chinese so that they might be educated in modern administrative and legal procedures. The only Chinese that would engage in service in a Government conducted by foreigners, having armed support, would be from the corrupt, self-seeking class. These would be regarded as traitors by their countrymen. The foreign Government would be a mere shell. It might last for years and the Chinese be no nearer self-government than they are today In fact, with irritation, hatred and union on the basis of hostility to the foreigner it would produce, the last state would be worse than the first.
General Crozier has himself stated so candidly the difficulties in the way of cooperative foreign intervention and of establishing an honest and intelligent Government really managed for the sake of the Chinese people, that it is not necessary to say much about that phase of the matter. As General Crozier says: "The only justification we admit for making use of our strength is the defense of our interests, of the lives and property of our nationals." He regards this as selfish. But it is the only recognized ground, and it is so because the political sense of nations knows how fantastic is the idea of a genuinely benevolent, self-denying, intelligent intervention. At that, interventions already conducted have too often been the causes of predatory aggression and exploitation of peoples subject to it. In the world in which we live General Crozier's ideal of a union of great and imperialistic Powers having the sole purpose of assisting another nation, a nation so unlike in customs and traditions as is China, is a dream.
It took centuries for Western nations to emerge from political conditions not unlike those of China into our present semblance of honest and efficient self-government. It will take time for China to make the transition. She needs our help. But it must come by patience, sympathy and educative effort, and the slow processes of commerce and exchange of ideas, not by a foreign rule imposed by military force.

Wang, Duqing. Guo qing qian yi ri. In : Chuang zao yue kan ; vol. 2, no 4 (1928). [Before the national day]. 国庆前一日
The play is indebted to Eugene O'Neill's Before breakfast. The main difference between this play and its American model lies, as their titles suggest, in motifs : while O'Neill's play treats a domestic theme of love and hate between a married couple, its Chinese adaptation deals with a social and revolutionary subject. The basic form is exactly the same as that of Before breakfast : a monologue addressed to a non-speaking, unseen character in the next room. It borrows the form but tells a different story, and it lacks the passion, irony and psychological insight we find in O'Neill's play.

Liang, Shiqiu. Wang'erde de wei mei zhu yi [ID D27721].
Liang appraised Oscar Wilde, who had previously been his favorite writer, from a new perspective. He maintained that Wilde pursued 'absolute independence of the arts', in which the latter not only were isolated from the ordinary audience, but were also divorced from 'universal and common human nature'. This essay indicates that Liang had divorced himself from romanticism.