“Transforming the mind of China” (Publication, 1919.10)
Year
1919.10
Text
Dewey, John. Transforming the mind of China. In : Asia ; vol. 19, Oct. (1919). In : Dewey, John. The middle works. Vol. 11 : 1918-1919. Ed. by Jo Ann Boydston. (Carbondale, Ill. : Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-1983). (DewJ4)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Dewey, John
(Burlington 1859-1952 New York, N.Y.) : Philosoph, Pädagoge, Psychologe
Subjects
History : China
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Periods : China : Republic (1912-1949)
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Philosophy : United States of America
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
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| 1 | 1919.10 |
Dewey, John. Transforming the mind of China [ID D28459]. The beginning of the modem age in China dates from that bloody episode, the Boxer Convulsion. Its outbreak signalized the supreme endeavor of old China to have done once for all with the unwelcome intruder, so that it might return untroubled to its self-sufficiency. Its close marked the recognition that the old China was doomed, and that henceforth China must live its life in the presence of the forces of western life, forces intellectual, moral, economic, financial, political. With its usual patience China set out to adapt itself to the inevitable. But in this case, something more than a patient passivity was necessary. China learned in 1900 that she had to adjust herself to the requirements imposed by the activities of western peoples. Every year since then she has been learning that this adjustment can be effected only by a readjustment of her own age-long customs, that she has to change her historic mind and not merely a few of her practices. Twenty years have passed and the drama does not seem to be advancing. China seems to be marking time. As with the drama of the Chinese stage, the main story is apparendy lost in a mass of changing incidents and excitements that lack movement, climax and plot. But the foreign interpreter comes to the scene with a mind adapted to the quick tempo of the West. He expects to see a drama unfold after the pattern of the movie. He is not used to history enacted on the scale of that of China. When he hastily concludes that nothing is doing, or rather that although something new and unexpected happens every day, everything is moving in an aimless circle, he forgets that twenty years is but a passing moment in a history that has already occupied its four thousand years. How can a civilization that has taken four thousand years to evolve, that has crept about and absorbed every obstacle hitherto encountered, that has countless inner folds of accumulated experience within itself, quickly find itself in new courses? We talk glibly about the importance of the problem of the Pacific, and even the school boy can quote Seward, Hay and Taft. But what do we suppose this problem to be? One that concerns a superficial waste of mobile waters? No, the real problem of the Pacific is the problem of the transformation of the mind of China, of the capacity of the oldest and most complicated civilization of the globe to remake itself into the new forms required by the impact of immense alien forces. Analogies, especially when they are obvious, are as deceptive in the field of political thinking as they long ago proved in natural science. The tempting comparison of the future of China, in its reaction to western ideas and institutions, to the record of Japan is misleading. The difference of scale between a small island and a vast continental territory makes the correspondence impossible. China emerged from feudalism two thousand years ago, but without at the same time becoming a national state in the sense familiar to us. Japan's emergence coincided with its opening to the West, so that its internal condition and the external pressure from other nations enabled it to take the form of an absolute state (with certain constitutional trimmings) externally similar to states produced in the evolution out of feudalism of modem Europe. The development of a strong centralized state, with unified administration and militaristic protection, was as easy for Japan as it is difficult for China. More fundamental is the difference in national psychology. Something over a thousand years ago Japan took on Chinese civilization via Korea and yet remained essentially Japanese. For the past sixty years it has been taking on western civilization. Yet the writers and thinkers most characteristically Japanese tell you that Japan is not westernized in heart or mind. Though it borrows wholesale western technique in science, industry, administration, war and diplomacy, it borrows them with the deliberate intention of thereby strengthening the resisting power of its own traditional policies. It acknowledges without reserve the superiority of western methods, but these superior methods are to be used to maintain eastern ideals intrinsically superior to the foreign. This may seem to the foreigner an evidence of the conceit often associated with Japan, but the retort is easy: Is the European complacent conviction of superiority anything more than the conceit of prejudice? At all events, this doubleness of Japanese life, its combination of traditional aims and moral ways with the externals of foreign skill and specialized knowledge, accounts for the impression of duplicity which so many carry away from contact with contemporary Japan. It is to be doubted whether such a dualism, such inconsistency of inner and outer life, can be long kept up. Yet its successful achievement marks the record of Japan in its relations to western civilization. And it is precisely this sort of thing which cannot happen in China. She has evolved, not borrowed, her civilization. She has no great knack at successful borrowing. Her problem is one of transformation, of making over from within. Educated Chinese will already tell you that if you wish intact survivals of old China, you must go to Japan—and Japanese tell you much the same thing, though with quite a different accent and import. The visitor is struck by the fact that it is in the public buildings and schools of Japan, not of China, that the eye everywhere sees the old Confucianist mottoes, especially those of the reactionary and authoritative type. China with all its backwardness and its confusion and weakness is more permeated today with western contemporary thought than is Japan. There is some significance in the fact that while the circulation of President Wilson's war speeches was legally forbidden in Japan, they have furnished for the past two years China's best seller. There will be many to say that Japan's retention of the ideas that she took from China in the best days of the latter's history, and then protected against deterioration, is the cause of Japan's strength, and that China's decay is precisely because she has permitted the infiltration of ideals and ideas that are foreign and consequently destructive. This may be true. I am not here concerned to deny it. In any case, it illustrates our proposition: China must run a course radically different from that of Japan. There will either be decay and disintegration, or thoroughgoing inner transformation. There will not be adoption of western external methods for immediate practical ends, because the Chinese genius does not lie in that direction. Japan's influence upon China has been enormous. The westerner who has not studied the situation is quite unaware of the extent to which China after the Russo-Japanese war in particular took over Japanese administrative and educational methods. But it is already obvious that they are not working here as they worked in Japan. A large part of the present intellectual and moral crisis in China is due to reaction against this factor in Chinese life. Doubtless it is artificially strengthened just now by immediate political causes. But beneath this surface there is a general intellectual ferment, and a belief that China must resort not to Japanese copies of western forms, but to the original sources of western moral and intellectual inspiration. And the recourse is not for the sake of getting models to pattern herself after, but to get ideas, intellectual capital, with which to renovate her own institutions. National conceit, national vanity, is a sealed book to the outsider. We are sure that our own is only just pride and self-respect, and that the foreigner's is either ridiculous or a mark of offensive contempt and dangerous hostility to our own cherished ways of life. But dubious as is generalization on such matters, one is struck by certain differences in the group self-consciousness of Japan and China. Its quality is perhaps suggested in certain comments which they pass not infrequendy upon each other. A Japanese will tell you that the Chinese do not care what other persons think of them. A Chinese says that Japan has no sense of its 'face'. The two criticisms are enough alike to be intriguing. But it may be suggested in explanation that Chinese complacency is the deeper seated and hence is not so acute. It is fundamental and taken for granted. It does not need to be asserted in special instances. As long as the Chinese retain unimpaired their own judgment of themselves, their own reputation with themselves, their face is saved, and what others think is negligible. On the other hand, it is humiliating to them to borrow as Japan does. It would be a confession of absence of inner resources. When Japan engages foreign experts, she is interested in results, and so gives them a free hand till she has learned what they have to give. China engages the foreign expert—and then courteously shelves him. The difference is typical of a difference in attitude toward western life. It is a large part of the cause of Japan's rapid progress and of China's backwardness. The Japanese naturally places himself in the stead of the western spectator and is acutely conscious of the criticisms the beholder might pass upon what he sees. He tries to make over the spectacle to satisfy the demands of the western onlooker. He reserves his deeper pride for his national ideals. The Chinese scarcely cares what the foreigner may think of what he sees. He even brings the skeletons in his closet cheerfully forward for the visitor to gaze at. The complacency or conceit involved in this attitude has enormously retarded the advance of China. It has made for a conservative hugging of old traditions, and a belief in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization in all respects to that of foreign barbarians. But it has also engendered a power of objective criticism and self-analysis which is rarely met in Japan. The educated Chinese who dissects the institutions and customs of his own country does it with a calm objectivity which is unsurpassable. And the basic reason, I think, is the same national pride. His institutions may not stand the criticism very well, but the people who produced these institutions are intrinsically invulnerable. They produced them, and when they get around to it they will create some new ones better adapted to the conditions of present life. The faith of the Chinese in the final outcome of their country, no matter what the despair about the current state of things, reminds an American of a similar faith abounding in his own country. We are brought around to our main contention. China's slack¬ness with respect to borrowing the technique of the West in civil administration, public sanitation, taxation, education, manufacturing, etc., is quite compatible with an effort on her part to bring about a thoroughgoing transformation of her institutions through contact with western civilization. In this remaking she will appropriate rather than borrow. She will attempt to penetrate to the principles, the ideas, the intelligence, from which western progress has emanated, and to work out her own salvation through the use of her own renewed and quickened national mind. The task is an enormous one. Time is of the essence of the performance. Just because the task is to effect an inner modification rather than an outward adjustment, its execution will take a long time. Will the forces that are playing upon China from without, forces that have contemplated its territorial disintegration, that are desirous of dominating its policies and exploiting in their own behalf its natural resources, permit a normal evolution? Will they stand by to assist, or will they invade and irritate and deflect and thwart till there is a final climax of no one knows what tragic catastrophe? These are some of the elements in the great drama now enacting. The baffling and 'mysterious' character of China to the West is genuine enough. But it does not seem to be due to any peculiarly dark and subtle psychology. Human nature as one meets it in China seems to be unusually human, if one may say so. There is more of it in quantity and it is open to view, not secreted. But the social mind, the political mind, has been subjected for centuries to institutions which are not only foreign to present western customs, but which have no historic precedent. Neither our political science nor our history supplies any system of classification for understanding the most characteristic phenomena of Chinese institutions. This is the fact which makes the workings of the Chinese mind inscrutable to the uninitiated foreigner, and which makes it necessary to describe so many things in contradictory linguistic terms. The civilization itself is not contradictory, but in its own self-consistency it includes things which in western life have been sharply opposed. Then there are intermediate forms, political missing links, which to our grasp must prove elusive; they are vague because we have no comparable forms by which to define and interpret them. Yet the Chinese mind thinks, of course, as naturally in terms of its customs and conventions as we think in ours. We merely forget that we think in terms of customs and traditions which habituation has engrained; we fancy that we think in terms of mind, pure and simple. Taking our mental habits as the norm of mind, we find the ways of thinking that do not conform to it abnormal, mysterious and tricky. We can get the key to mental operations only by studying social antecedents and environment, and this truth holds pre-eminendy in an old civilization like the Chinese. We have to understand beliefs and traditions to understand acts, and we have to understand historic institutions to understand beliefs. It is clear enough that the Korean question is quite pivotal in many of the most urgent external political questions of Asia. Yet Mr. Holcombe has told how the question was complicated in earlier days by the misconceptions which formed the basis of dealing with it by western nations. They knew that there was something of a relation of dependency of Korea upon China. They assumed the kind of relationship with which the West was acquainted, that of suzerain and vassal. When China declined to bear the responsibility of enforcing certain demands upon Korea as being out of her authority, the western nations thought that China was either insincere or else disclaimed all political jurisdiction. That there should be a genuine relationship of dependency, but of an advisory, homiletic, grandfatherly type, was beyond the scope of western precedent and understanding. The early relations of western diplomacy with the Imperial Court at Peking are a record of simi¬lar misunderstandings. There were all the insignia of royalty over China, extending even to despotic power. In relation to happenings in the provinces, therefore, it was natural to endow the 'Government' at Peking with all the attributes of sovereignty as that is constituted in Europe. That the central government (beyond certain well-established relations of taxation and appointment of civil service) sustained mainly a ceremonial and hortatory connection with a large part of China was beyond conception. These grosser misunderstandings could be multiplied in considering almost every detail of Chinese institutional life. It has to be understood in terms of itself, not translated over into the classifications of an alien political morphology. The story of the difficulties that had to be overcome in the introduction of railways into China is perhaps the best known of Chinese incidents. But it bears retelling because it affords a typical illustration of the fact that the chief obstacle in the effective contact of West and East is intellectual and moral. Opposition to railways was not a matter of routine conservatism, blind sluggish opposition to the new just because it was new. The Chinese have the normal amount of curiosity, and perhaps even more than the normal amount of practical sense of the advantage to be gained by a novelty which does not conflict with traditional beliefs. A difficulty presented itself in getting a clear right of way for railways, on account of the graves, which, from the western standpoint, are scattered at random. But from the Chinese standpoint, they are located with the utmost science, and to disturb them is to throw out of balance the whole system of environmental influences that affect health and good crops. Moreover, the graves are the centre of the system of ancestral worship, and that is the centre of civic organization. The tale might have been invented to show how completely the forces to be reckoned with are intellectual and moral, and how completely they are bound up with the structure of life. Without a change of national mind it is hopeless to suppose that China can go forward prosperously because of intercourse with the West. It is a rash enterprise to form a generalization about the factors of the Chinese popular psychology that count most, whether positively or negatively, in the task of regenerating China. But the strong points of a people, as of individual character, lie close to its weak ones. So perhaps it is safe to say that the promise of China's rebirth into full membership in the modem world is found in its democratic habits of life and thought, provided we add to the statement another: the peculiar quality of this democracy also forms the strongest obstacle to the making over of China in its confrontation by a waiting, resdess and greedy world. For while China is morally and intellectually a democracy of a paternalistic type, she lacks the specific organs by which alone a democracy can effectively sustain itself either internally or internationally. China is in a dilemma whose seriousness can hardly be exaggerated. Her habitual decentralization, her centrifugal localisms, operate against her becoming a nationalistic entity with the institutions of public revenue, unitary public order, defence, legislation and diplomacy that are imperatively needed. Yet her deepest traditions, her most established ways of feeling and thinking, her essential democracy, cluster about the local units, the village and its neighbors. The superimposition of a national state, without corresponding transformation of local institutions (or better without an evolution of the spirit of local democracies into national scope) gives us just what we now have in China: A nominal republic governed by a military clique, maintained in part by foreign loans made in response to a bartering away of national property and power, and in part by bargainings with provincial leaders whose power rests upon their control of an army and the ability this control gives them to levy on industry and wealth. In fact, we have a state which, if it were taken statically, if it were frozen, would reproduce the evils of the old despotism with new ones added, and which can be saved only because it has released popular forces that make for something better. But it remains to organize these popular forces, to give them play, to build for them regular channels of operation. Up to the present western thought has confined itself to the more obvious, the more structural, factors of the problem. These are naturally the problems most familiar in occidental political life. They are such things as the adjustment of the power and authority of the central government to that of local and regional governments; the problem of the relations of the executive and legislative forces in the government; the revision of legal procedure and law to eliminate arbitrariness and personal discretion. But after all, such matters are symptoms, effects. To try to reorganize China by beginning with them is like solving an engineering problem by skilful juggling. The real problem is how the democratic spirit historically manifest in the absence of classes, the prevalence of social and civil equality, the control of individuals and groups by moral rather than physical force—that is, by instruction, advice and public opinion rather than definitive legal methods—can find an organized expression of itself. And the problem, I repeat, is unusually difficult because traditionally, in the habits of beliefs as well as of action, these forces out of which the transformation of China must grow are opposed to organization on a nation-wide scale. Take a conspicuous example. To maintain itself as a nation among other nations of the contemporary world, China needs a system of national finance, of national taxation and revenues. But the effort to institute such a system does not merely meet a void. It has to meet deeply entrenched local customs, so firmly established that to interfere with them may mean the overthrow of all central government. To put another system of taxation into force requires the operation of the very national organs which depend upon a national system of public revenues. This is a fair example of the vicious circles that circumscribe all short-cut systems of reform in China. It is another evidence that the development must be a transforming growth from within, rather than either an external superimposition or a borrowing from foreign sources. There are many, including a rather surprising number of Chinese as well as foreigners, who think that China can get set on her feet and become able to move for herself only by undergoing a period of foreign guardianship or trusteeship. The feeling is sedulously fostered by some persons in a neighboring island, and there is some undoubted response in China, though much less than there would be had the point of view not been unduly identified with the point of a bayonet. There are others who look to some western democracy or to the League of Nations to exercise the needed guardianship. We may waive the question whether at the present time there exists in the world a sufficient amount of disinterested intelligence to perform such a job of trusteeship. We stay on safe ground if we confine ourselves to saying that to be successful such a guardian would have to confine his efforts to stimulating, encouraging and expediting the democratic forces acting from within. And since such a task is almost entirely intellectual and moral, the guardianship is not necessary provided that China can be guaranteed time of growth protected from external attempts at disintegration. All that is necessary is a sufficient international decency and sufficient enlightened selfishness to give China the ad interim protection. She may have to sink deeper yet into the slough of confusion before she can get upon firm ground and move about freely. There is only harm in underestimating the seriousness of the task. The evolution of Japan, as I have already said, offers no fair precedent. The problem is even more perplexing than that of the change of feudal into modem Europe. For medieval Europe was not civilized in the sense in which old China is civilized. There was not the inertia and weight of institutions wrapped up in the deepest feelings and most profound thoughts of the people that is found in China. Moreover, the European transition could take its own time to work itself out. That of China has to be accomplished in the face of the impatient, mobile western world, which, if it brings aid, also brings a voracious appetite. To the outward eye roaming in search of the romantic and picturesque, China is likely to prove a disappointment. To the eye of the mind it presents the most enthralling drama now anywhere enacting. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zentralbibliothek Zürich | Organisation / ZB |
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