China and the West

Ye, Lingfeng. Abola yu Ailüqisi de qing shu [ID D14244]. [Advertisement for Lettres d'Héloïse et d'Abailard ; transl. by Liang Shiqiu. In : Xin yue ; vol. 1, no 7 (1928).
"This is a love story which happened 800 years ago. A nun and a monk have written a bundle of love letters. No love letters, whether in China or in a foreign country, are more grief-stricken, more sadly touching and more sublime than those found in this volume. The beautiful and ingenious lines have become popular quotations of lovers in later generations, showing the greatness of their influence. The most admirable point is that there is nothing frivolous in these poems, and the translator considers this anthology a 'transcendent and holy' masterpiece."

Lu, Xun. Wen xue de jie ji xing [ID D28834].
Liang cited Shakespeare's Macbethas a great literary work, notwithstanding that class differences were of minor importance in the portrayal of the main characters and for interpreting the play. He asserted that 'class nature is only a superficial phenomenon' and that 'the essence of literature is the expressing of human nature'.

Confucius. Ta Hio : the great learning. Newly rendered into the American language by Ezra Pound. [Da xue]. [ID D29064].
http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices].
Pound, Ezra. Typescript (1928) : "If Pauthier invented the sane and beautiful things in his translation, then Pauthier was a very great man, and we shd. perhaps reverence Pauthier in place of Confucius. But as Pauther [sic] has presented this matter as a translation of Kung, we may at least suppose that his ideas arose from the contemplation of the original, and are on that count not utterly alien to it."
Pound, Ezra. Kung [MS of Ta hio] : "The idea that anyone gains anything by turning the pp. of a dictionary, especilayy [sic] a Chinese dictionary is imbecile. The prejudice against interlinear and page to page translation bas been consitucted [sic] by ignorant teachers who were afraid their students wd. learn too fast for the teacher's convenience. What one wants is to understand the text."

Sekundärliteratur
1970
Akiko Miyake : Pound, the Confucian humanist tried to civilize America through translating Da xue and through writing cantos on American history. One can read Pound's translation as if it were a kind of Medieval contemplation whose aim is not to reach a vision of God but to reach knowledge of secular truth. For his translation, Pound depended entirely on Pauthier's French version and not on Legge or the original Chinese text. He tells in the opening passage that the aim of this Confucian classic is to renew mankind through manifestation of "the luminous principle of reason". That 'luminous reason' is somehow like the ultimate cause of all beings and actions which scholastic philosophers identified with the Christian God, because one can manifest it through 'a profound examination of actions and their motivations'. Pound must have believed to be the greatest difference between Christian philosophy and Confucianism was that Confucians never recommended asceticism. He finds with Ta Hio an ideal version of a poet's secular contemplation : the humanistic 'luminous principle of reason' as its destination to replace the Jewish God ; secular researches on human society and history as its means to replace the study of the absurd Bible ; the glorification of human senses as its special agent for discovering the sources of light instead of the denial of sensuous pleasure in asceticism. For Pound Ta Hio was a book of secular contemplation, in which one pursues the metaphysical knowledge of transcendental reason and thereby aims at the renovation of mankind through this metaphysical pursuit. He approached the Song School's metaphysical interpretation of Confucianism first through Fenollosa and then through Pauthier without ever knowing the fact. Pound takes the 5th chapter to be Confucius' assertion that man is capable of knowing the ultimate cause of human actions and knowing it through objects of senses.
Pound discovered in Pauthier many factors that he had already pursued through his poetry. First, he found therein man's fundamental aspiration to see the source of all being, which aspiration is symbolized in the Cantos in the Odyssean voyage homeward. Second, he believed that Ta Hio teaches the way to such a source of all being or 'the luminous principle of reason' through secular knowledge of the world ; and third, he thought that Ta Hio affirms the adequacy of human natural inclinations for leading man to an ultimate source of all being. Fourth, he even read in Ta Hio a confirmation of his ideogramic method. Fifth, Ta Hio includes some advice to princes and rulers on finance.

1976
Monika Motsch : Der 'Text von Konfuzius' zu Beginn des Da xue war die Passage in den konfuzianischen Schriften, die Pound am meisten bewunderte, liebt und über die er am längsten meditierte.
Wie die Ordnung in der Familie zur Ordnung im Staat führt, zeigt das IX. Kapitel : The K'ang Proclamation says : "As if taking care of an infant". If the heart sincerely wants to, although one may not hit the mark precisely in the center, one won't go far wrong. No girl ever yet studied suckling a baby in order to get married.
Pounds Version schliesst den Gedanken völlig aus, den Frieden in der Familie und in der Menschheit als eine mechanische Folge von Ursache und Wirkung zu verstehen, wie dies im chinesischen Text geschieht. Statt dessen zeit er die Möglichkeit auf, dass sich aus natürlichen, arterhaltenden Instinkten, wie z.B. der Liebe zwischen Mutter und Kind oder Mann und Frau, durch Metamorphose neue Verhaltensweisen entwickeln können, die eines Tages zum Frieden unter den Völkern führen würden.
1997
Mary Paterson Cheadle : Ta hio is not based on the Chinese text, it is a direct retranslation of the French translation by Guillaume Pauthier.
2003
Sun Hong : Pound regards Da xue as something to believe in, for it tells us of our duty of 'developing and restoring to its primitive clarity our reason. Like Confucius, Pound would trace from branches to roots to grasp the essence of matters. The root of social order, as Da xue indicates, lies in men themselves. In Da xue, he finds a system of perfection. He believes that peace and harmony can be maintained in the world so long as we adhere to the order provided by this text. Da xue's gradations is the harmony and smoothness in its proceeding, a quality in agreement with the orderly system that Pound believes in. Pound looks upon this gradations of order not as rigid dogmas but as profound philosophical principles.
Pound's adoption of both, Da xue's gradations of order and the Confucian outlook of history doesn't designate him as merely a transmitter, however. He is an inventor in poetry. His use of ideograms as an exemplar is perhaps the most significant invention he brought into poetry in English.
What Pound sees in the natural Chinese signs is the realization of an old Western dream of a universal language. If he said that he believed in Da xue, he also believed in the ideograms, which composed the book, and shared the Confucian concern and affection for the visible things in nature.
He sees in Da xue's system an unceasing spiral of movement upward toward a celestial perfection, starting from the basic order at the personal level. He sees in the succession of dynasties a cycle and bad rulers. And he sees in the ideograms bustling nature in motion.

Pound, Ezra. The literary essays of Ezra Pound [ID D29121].
"I merely insist that without this minimum the critic has almost no chance of sound judgment. Judgment will gain one more chance of soundness if he can be persuaded to consider Fenollosa's essay or some other, and to me unknown but equally effective, elucidation of the Chinese written character. Before I die I hope to see at least a few of the best Chinese works printed bilingually, in the form that Mori and Ariga prepared certain texts for Fenollosa, 'a crib', the picture of each letter accompanied by a full explanation."

Letter from Ezra Pound to René Taupin ; May (1928).
"Je viens de donner un nouveau version du Ta Hio [Da xue] de Confucius, parce que j'y trouve des formulations d'idées qui me paraissent utile pour civilizer l'Amérique."

Pound, Ezra. Selected poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. with an introd. by T.S. Eliot. [ID D29133].
Introduction.
"As for Cathay, it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. I suspect that every age has had, and will have, the same illusion concerning translation, an illusion which is not altogether an illusion either. When a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been 'translated' ; we believe that through this translation we really at last get the original… His [Pound's] translations seem to be – and that is the text of excellence – translucencies ; we think we are closer to the Chinese than when we read, for instance. Legge. I doubt this : I predict that in three hundred years Pound's Cathay will be a 'Windsor Translation', as Chapman and North are now 'Tudor translations' : it will be called (and justly) a 'magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry' rather than 'a translation'. Each generation must translate for itself. This is as much to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a Chinese poetry-in-itslef, waiting for some ideal translator who shall be only translator…"

Ezra Pound and Zeng Baosan.
Ezra Pound received a Chinese book from his parents some time before March 1, 1928.
Miss Thseng [Zeng Baosan] visited Pound in Rapallo before May 17 and helped him to 'decipher' the poems.
Letter from Ezra Pound to Isabel Weston Pound ; 1st March, 1928.
"Dorothy is up a mountain with a returned missionary. Yes, Chinese book arrived, very interestin' [sic], returned missionary promises us a descendant of Confucius in a month or so, who will prob. Be able to decipher it."
Letter from Ezra Pound to Glenn Hughes ; May 17, 1928.
"Conferred with descendant of Kung and Thseng-Tsu just before leaving Rapallo. "
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; May 30, 1928.
"Translation of Chinese poems in picture book is at Rapallo. They are poems on a set of scenes in Miss Thseng's part of the country. Sort of habit to make pictures and poems on that set of scenes."
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; July 22, 1928.
"Will try to copy out those Chinese poems for you sometime, when thermometer is lower."
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; 1st August, 1928.
"I copied out these Chinese poems two days ago, but don’t know whether I can trust you to return copy, you have horrible habit of taking copies etc. If I fix up a printable version later I DON'T want rough draft left about. "
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; 1st September, 1928.
"Given infinite time I MIGHT be able to read a Chinese poems, thass [sic] to say I know how the ideograph works, and can find 'em in the dictionary or vocable. BUT I shd. scarcely attempt it unless there were urgent reason. Also some of the script in that book was fairly fancy… Four you book, Miss Thseng, descendant of Kung read out the stuff to me. Am perfectly able to look up an ideograph and see what shade it can give, etc. BUT it iz a matter of time. Wd. be no point in it. No I am not a Sinologue. Don't spread the idea that I read it az easy as yourapeann langwudg."

Zhao, Jingshen. Manshufei'er ri ji [ID D30052].
"Mansfield was not taken much notice of at first. But her beautiful writing attracted fervent adulation for her later on. Now her brilliance is shining again in her journal. Those who have read her fiction should read it in order to understand her better. Although she did not write much, she wrote beautifully."

Fan, Zhongyun. Zhe bian shi ren sheng [ID D30029].
"Katherine Mansfield's language is simple and easy, except for some colloquialisms rather difficult to translate. Her writing is rich in meaning always leaving a great deal for readers to savour, and her characterization always aims at a faithful representation of objective reality."

Ye, Gongchao. Manshufei'erde xin zha [ID D30053].
"… The two collections of her letters newly published have helped to make on us a deeper impression of Mansfield's personality. The most unusual thing is that her most profound and affectionate letters were all written after she had acknowledged her fatal disease. Reading some of her letters, we see that she is a person who emits rays of light or makes things shine. I believe that her stories are also like rays of sunshine falling upon those things in our garden that have never been noticed by other people."

Moore, Marianne. Guide-posts to Chinese painting. In : The Dial ; no 84 (April 1928). [Review of Guide-posts to Chinese painting, by Louise Wallace Hackney, edited by Dr. Paul Pelliot (Houghton Mifflin)]. [ID D30326].
That a delighted consideration of art should be less than delightful ; that as writing and as thinking it should be occidentally 'promt' is in this survey compensated for by illustrations such as 'Winter Landscape', 'Narcissus', a 'Ming Ancestral Portrait' ; and one is as attentive as the author could wish one to be, to the 'ideals and methods' of Chinese painting, to 'influences and beliefs reflected in it', and the influence exerted by it. Any lover of beauty may well be grateful to a book which commemorated the blade of grass as model for the study of the straight line, the skill of calligraphers, with 'hog's hair on finely woven silk', 'methods of treating mountain wrinkles', 'tones of ink to give color', 'the thought of genii, winged tigers, and Emperor crossing' 'weak waters' on a 'bridge made of turtles', 'or a theme so romantic as that of Yang Kuei-fei' [Yang Guifei] going, 'lily pale, between tall avenues of spears to die'.

Moore, Marianne. Thomas Heriot. In : The Dial ; no 85 (Aug. 1928). [Review of The divine origin of the craft of the herbalist by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge].
Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian herbals are her shown to be the foundation of Greek herbals – disseminated also, by way of Arabic, through Asia, Turkestan, and China…

Thornton Wilder trifft bei seiner Theaterforschung auf seiner Europareise Alfred Döblin, Klabund und Richard Wilhelm in Berlin und Wien.

William Henry Donald ist Berater von Zhang Xueliang.

Wells, H.G. What is happening in China ? : does the Kuomintang foreshadow a new sort of government in the world ? [ID D31300].
Where is history being made most abundantly at the present time ?
One may doubt whether any of the events of the last twelve months either in America or in Europe will figure very conspicuously in the histories of the future. Political futilities and a slow economic contraction in Great Britain, phases in the process of superabundance in America, government by rhetoric and outrage in Italy, the sluggish recognition at Geneva that Germany is after all in the middle of Europe, and the arrest of the franc at the very moment when its plunge seemed definitive—these and the steady progressive reconstruction of a modem-spirited trading and manufacturing life upon the wide foundations of Russia, mark no turning point in the course of human affairs. All these things are, so to speak, merely Fate carrying-on. But when we look to China there seems to be something more than carrying-on in progress. There seems to be something new there, something which has at any rate, so far as the Western observer is concerned, only become credible and important in the last eight or ten months. It is a change in the rhythm. It is
the clear onset of a new phase, of a new China, like nothing the world has ever seen before, a challenge, a promise to all mankind.
Let us try to realise in the most general terms the significance of this new movement in China. It is not an easy thing to do. Our world is densely ignorant of things Chinese. At school few of us learnt anything of the slightest importance about China, except that it had a population so immense that you could kill Chinamen by the hundred and they scarcely noticed it, that they ate rice, rats, and puppies, and that they possessed two long rivers that seriously challenged the records of the Nile and the Mississippi.
We learnt less formally that Chinamen of all ages wore highly decorative skirts and flew kites, whereas we knew perfectly well that the only proper amusement for gentlemen is hitting expensive little balls about golf links until they are lost, and that the only proper wear for a dominant race is chromatic pull-overs and highly-illuminated plus fours. Moreover, we were given to understand that die Chinese of all ages and sexes preferred work to any other form of enjoyment, and found an almost infantile pleasure in living exactly on the margin of subsistence. And they were cruel, very cruel. Their artistic productions amused us very greatly; they were so unlike the great masters, Victorian art and British Academy pictures. Of beauty in the proper sense of the word they knew nothing. So furnished forth upon this matter of China, our minds rested and were content.
Bight up to the present time we have been as satisfied with the pre-eminence of our civilisation and the worthlessness of theirs as were the Chinese about their own perfections a hundred years ago. But since then the Chinese have suffered blow after blow and humiliation after humiliation, until the need of learning has been forced upon them. Students came from China to America and Europe, and come in increasing numbers. Never a Western student, except for some eccentric, goes to China. Traders go, the European Governments send battleships to back up their traders, and missionaries are despatched by various denomina¬tions to advise the Chinese of the chief sorts of salvation practised among us and available for their use. The traders send back news with an eye to their privileges, and the missionaries with an eye to their paymasters. A bright young man of position at Oxford or Harvard would as soon think of leaving his ball games and his "rags" and all the pleasant procedure that lead to preeminence as lawyer and legislator in our world, for two or three years of study in China, as get into a shell and be shot off to the moon. So that the Chinese may even have crept ahead of us in breadth of outlook during the past few years. Many of them now seem to know most of what we know and to know also quite a lot about their own country. If one wants to know about China nowadays, it is best to ask a Chinaman.
And now with a sense of surprise we find ourselves confronted by a modem self-conscious Chinese nationality, consolidating its power very rapidly and demanding to speak on equal terms with the American and European. A living Chinese nation has appeared in the world.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the present Chinese situation is this, that it is not apparently the work of any single man ; the consolidation and recon-struction of China that has made such rapid progress in the last twelve months has not gone on under the direction of some strong-jowled hero of the Diaz or Mussolini type. When the long-tottering Manchu dynasty fell, and China became a republic and fell into all the violent diversions and dissensions inevitable after so extreme a change of régime, we Westerners, with our antiquated ideas, looked at once for the strong man who was either to foist a new dynasty on China or restore and bolster up the old—just as we looked for a Napoleon to emerge in Russia. That marked how far the Western intelligence had got in these matters. And just as the Western Powers of Europe, follow¬ing out dreary foreign policies they ought to have scrapped ten years ago, muckered away an enormous amount of war gear and money in supporting crazy "white hopes" against the nascent new thing in Russia, ugly and queer and incomprehensible to them, so they have wasted their prestige and resources upon this or that Chinese brigand and general who was to play the rôle of Diaz in Mexico and make China safe for the European investor.
No such "hero" has emerged either in Russia or China. It marks a new age. Hie days of great adventurers seem to be past in any country larger than Italy, and even in Italy it is possible to regard Mussolini less as a leader than as the rather animated effigy of a juvenile insurrection. What has happened in these wider, greater lands is something much more remarkable, something new in history, a phenomenon that calls for our most strenuous attention—namely, government, effective government, competent military control, and a consistent, steady, successful policy by an organised association. This Kuomintang in China in so far as it is an organised association is curiously parallel to the Communist Party which, standing behind the quasi-parliamentary Soviets, has now held Russia together, restrained such dangerous adventurers as Zinovieff, and defended its frontiers against incessant foreign aggression for nine long years. We shall be extraordinarily foolish if we do not attempt to realise the significance of this novel method of controlling government which has broken out over two of the greatest political areas of the globe. We have now two governments through organised associations, governments which are neither limited monarchies, dictatorships, nor parliamentary republics, on the American and French models,—one in Russia, and now another over the larger half of China, which md fair to spread over the entire breadth of Asia until they are in complete contact.
When I say that the Communist Party and the Kuomintang are similar, I mean only in so far as regards organisation. They have profound differences in origin, and aim and profession, and to those I will give a word later. But first I want to point out the complete novelty of their method.
Some twenty years or more ago I wrote a fantastic speculation about government, called "A Modem Utopia", in which I supposed all administrative and legislative functions to be monopolised by an organisation called the Samurai, which any one could join by passing certain fairly exacting tests and obeying the rules of an austere, disinterested, and responsible life. One was free to leave the organisation and drop power and responsibility when one chose. The organisation ran the world. There were no great heroes and leaders, and there were no representatives nor parliaments nor elections. Any one who chose to face the hardships of the job could have a hand in control, but there was no room in the direction of public affairs either for the adventurer or for appeals to the oafish crowd.
Now this fantasy seems to have been one of those odd guesses that hover dose to latent possibilities. If the "Modem Utopia" were published now, every-body would say I had taken a leaf from the book of the Communist Party or the Kuomintang, or even (though this is rather a different animal) the Fascisti. But indeed this anticipation sprang only from an early recognition that modem means of communication, the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of co-operating centres, of getting quick replies and effective discussion, has opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality, and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstandings. So it is that both New Russia and this New China that has hatched itself out so astonishingly in the last year are things as new and different structurally from any preceding political organisms as mammals were from the great reptiles that came before them.
Directly we turn to their origins we note a wide difference. New Russia is the creation of the Communist Party, based upon and knit closely together by the economic dogmas of the Marxists. It was a cosmopolitan party with more than half a century of insurrectionary and revolutionary activity behind it before it secured power. It was a party of antagonism to the current system, it captured Russia as a war-shattered ruin, and for a time it showed itself very poor in constructive ideas and economic organisation. Its habits were habits of opposition and sabotage. But from the outset it had immense political resistance and strength, and it persists and learns, and is now manifestly building up a new social and economic order tentatively and experimentally, that is neither communistic nor individualistic on Western lines. The Kuomintang seems to owe its origins and inspirations to that valiant man, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who so nearly escaped decapitation in the Chinese Legation in London a quarter of a century ago. Its vital element is the student class, and especially the students fired by Western ideas but by no means overwhelmed by them. It has come mam rapidly to power against suppression. Its centre of origin is Canton; it is the creation of the South. Perhaps it was inevitable that the New China should arise far away from the ancient imperial traditions of Peking, far away from the foreign Legations and the military memories of the North. And while the Russian movement was primarily social and only secondarily Russian, the Kuomintang started apparently with the idea of "China for the Chinese" and accepted most of the established traditions of property.
We remain, I say, still largely ignorant of the true quality of the Kuomintang. Three-quarters of the information we get from China is untrustworthy on account of its commercial or antiquated bias. Obviously the Chinese want to secure a free hand in the control of their own political and economic life, to levy tariffs according to their needs and extinguish the injustice of extra-territorial rights, and as obviously these simple and reasonable aspirations are deeply resented by the inadaptable Europeans who have lived in and profited by the old régime. But in spite of the manifest eagerness of a large section of the Western press to make capital out of any outrage upon Europeans in South China, they have had very little to record, and on the other hand the tale of European violence against the Chinese is a heavy one. The "fool behind the gun" who has been so busy in recent years shooting away the links of confidence and good feeling that hold together the British Empire in Ireland, in India, and elsewhere, seems to have had a glorious time out of bounds in China. He has blazed away at unarmed processions of students and shot into crowded towns. The English illustrated papers have offered us the most damning evidence of obstructive junks rammed and sunken and of the general high-handedness of British procedure.
Since the Bolshevik Government is still a useful bogey for American and European scaremongers, the Kuomintang is declared to be Bolshevist in origin and sympathy. This is just the common abuse natural in the situation. The Kuomintang seems to be unencumbered by the Marxist dogmas that still clog the feet of Russian development. It is probably a decade or so more modem and flexible in its ideas.
Our illustrated papers have published photographs of Kuomintang leaders grouped with Borodin and other Bolshevist representatives in support of the "Red" accusation. But that no more commits China and Russia to a hand-and-glove alliance than the photographs in circulation of the poor little Manchu emperor boy with a British "tutor" standing like a keeper beside him commit Great Britain to a restoration of the Son of Heaven's sacrifices in Pekin. There seem to be far more Russians with the brigand generate of North China than among the Cantonese armies, but these Pekin Russians are Russians of the "white" persuasion and useless for the purpose of creating prejudice. I do not hear of any attempts on the part of the Cantonese Government to expropriate any one, Chinese or foreigner, or to restrain trading, or to confiscate or nationalise industry. If anything of the sort did occur, we should certainly have all the reactionary European press proclaiming it, and so it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no tendency whatever in that direction. The social and economic life of China has never run strictly parallel to ours, and the Kuomintang develops in its own way—but that is a different story from the establishment of Communism.
And also it is a different story if, under similar necessities, the new social trading and industrial experiments of the Chinese presently come to display some sort of similarity to Russian developments, as the dogmas of the Marxists are shaken off or sterilised as pious sentiments by the latter people, and as both races settle down to work in the face of realities. Surely no man in his senses can believe that the financial, trading, and industrial methods of America and Europe to-day are the ultimate triumph of human wisdom, and it is as probable that successful innovations of system may spring from the desolated and renascent economic life of Russia and China as amidst the jungle of interests in our more prosperous but more encumbered world.
The disposition to call the Cantonese Government "red" and to force it into association with the Russian Government, which seems to be the aim of a large section of the Atlantic press, may prove a very dangerous disposition to our Western civilisation. Manifestly China is not so afraid of Russia as she is of Japan and the Powers whose warships pervade her great rivers. Soviet Russia is further off and milder. And anxious to be helpful.
But the rubbish that is written in some papers does not always perish there. It goes to China ; it goes to Russia. Suppose we Westerners succeed in persuading the Chinese and the Russians that we regard them with a common animosity, and that for us they are all one— Reds altogether. Suppose we insist on treating diem both as outcasts. Suppose that as the United Soviets and the Knnmintang work out the problems of economic and political construction before them, they find they have problems very much in common, and that the irrational hostility of the older civilisations obliges them to turn more and more to each other. Suppose they take up scientific work more vigorously than our fatuous self-satisfaction allows us to do. Suppose they decide to make the pace for us. Europe and America are not so blindingly brilliant and progressive that it would not be possible to press them hard.
Suppose Russia and China chose to put in tens of thousands of scientific workers against our thousands. The average Chinese brain is said to be rather richer in grey matter than the average European. From the Baltic to the Chinese coasts there is a population of more than five hundred millions even now, and lands of a richness far surpassing all the resources of North America. They are poor countries as yet, but potentially they are very great countries. They have still to develop effective railway links, but they can do that now with all the lessons of our older system to warn and guide them. And no other countries in the world are so happily placed for the promotion of aviation services. It would not be difficult to argue that the backbone lines of the air services of the future must pass over Russia and China anyhow. Before we dismiss as incredible the development of a powerful and even dominating civilisation in the federated Soviets of Russia and Asia, let us recall the contemptuous superiority with which Europe regarded the United States during the strain of the Civil War.
At any rate it seems to me that this Hew China, whose brain and nervous system is the Kuomintang, is the most interesting thing by far upon the stage of current events, and the best worth watching and studying.
23 January, 1927.

[Carroll, Lewis]. Alisi Zhongguo you ji. Shen Congwen zuo [ID D32102].
Hu Rong : Shen picked Alice and the rabbit (Nuoxi) out of the original, and made another dream for them, where they traveled in China together. The journey of oriental exoticism turns out to be a nightmare for the two visitors from the west, for wherever they go around China, famine, ignorance and superstition prevail. The gentlemen in the town all worship the west blindly, and are busy fighting each other along with a group of mean and snobbish servants. Alice and her partner then come to the west of Hunan province, a mountainous residence for Miao people, one of the minorities of China, and they witness a number of uncivilized customs, including a ruthless slave trade. Finally they suddenly wake up and end their extremely uncomfortable 'adventures' at a loss.

William Leonard Schwartz : Amy Lowell is less important as a mere interpreter of the Far East than as a propagandist, practitioner and theorizer who drew attention to the poetry and art of China and Japan. She had a genius for catching the public eye.

Ren, Qiu. [The art of short fiction]. [ID D34945].
Account of the growth of short fiction beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, in the course of which various aspects of Poe's theories on short fiction are closely examined in raltion to his best-known tales. Ren suggests that Poe's tales are intended to three kinds of "narrative effects" : "the effect of action, the effect of character, and the effect of environment".

Kurt Wulff ist Professor für Ostasiatische Sprachen an der Universität Kopenhagen.

Orvar Karlbeck reist nach China und macht drei Expeditionen um Objekte für Museen und Sammler zu sammeln.