by Carl Crow
XVII
Hatred for the foreigner
“The word ‘forbearance’ is the treasure of the household.”
TALES of travelers as well as works of fiction created throughout the world a mental picture of a China in which the 400 million yellow-skinned natives could only be satisfied by wholesale and barbarous slaughter. It was easy to find a textbook justification for this hatred in the so-called “opium war” and many other acts of foreign aggression against China. Stories of the role foreigners had played in China didn’t make pleasant reading to anyone with conscientious scruples about the rights of the weaker nations although the worst that the European nations ever did in China was as nothing compared to the methods of present day conquerors. The British government had compelled China to sign treaties in the cabins of gunboats which had reduced Chinese forts and killed many Chinese soldiers. China had suffered the humiliation which is always the fate of the vanquished. But the sense of humiliation and the feeling of resentment was confined to the Manchu court circles around the Forbidden City and the Chinese officials who served the Manchus. To the vast majority of the Chinese people it was just another war that the Manchus had lost.
There was no resentment among the masses of the Chinese over the fact that the foreign troops had looted and burned the beautiful summer palace in Peking. The Taiping rebels would have looted it themselves if they had been given the opportunity, and the greater part of China would have called it a good day’s work. Hatred for the Manchus was a constant factor; hatred for the foreigner would flare up suddenly in some section and then slowly subside. Manchu tax collectors thrust their hands into everyone’s pockets, from the lowest chair coolie to the richest banker. The foreigner was not seen by the average Chinese as frequently as the traveling showman with his trained dog and monkey; the one-man circus, who made periodical rounds of all of the villages. Probably 90 per cent of the Chinese did not see a foreigner once a year, and he was often a missionary who spoke Chinese and dressed in Chinese clothing and was often mistaken for a Chinese from some distant province. Of course in places like Shanghai the foreigner was inescapable and notorious for his bad manners. He might threaten the ricksha coolie with violence and offend the Shansi banker by his lack of breeding, but his business transactions, whether with banker or coolie, were always profitable.
No matter what might be said about the foreigner, he was a source of wealth for almost all who had dealings with him. Criticism of methods by which he made his money might come from other foreigners but not from Chinese. No foreigner ever used the unscrupulous methods or amassed the millions piled up by practically all officials of the Manchu government. The wealth of Silas Hardoon and Henry Lester was small change compared to that of Sheng Kung Pao, the great poo bah of the lower Yangtze Valley, the guardian of the heir apparent, who levied tribute on the rich and poor alike. Foreigners appeared to be wealthier than the Chinese but they weren’t. In the security of their extra-territorial rights they displayed their wealth in the form of fine houses and strings of racing ponies, motorcars, and luxurious houseboats. Chinese who could afford these things much better than the foreigners lived in unpretentious houses and bought secondhand cars because of the fear of both officials and kidnapers either of whom looked on any evidence of wealth as an incentive to action.
In the few years before the Japanese invasion the growing confidence in the National government and the success of the municipal police in rounding up gangs of kidnapers were making it possible for the first time in its history for the Chinese to enjoy prosperity without the restraints of fear. The kind of homes Chinese had always wanted to build were going up all over Shanghai and set new standards in pretentiousness and luxury. A Chinese neighbor of mine had all the hardware in his new house gold-plated at a cost of $50,000, in U. S. currency. A few blocks away another had spent even more money for Italian marble stairways and wainscoting. If security in China had continued for a few more years, the luxurious homes owned by foreigners would have been outnumbered and outluxuried by the homes of the Chinese.
The Boxer uprising in fact originated in a hatred for the Manchus as represented by the avaricious tax collectors. As the anti-dynastic movement began to gather dangerous strength, the wily plotters in the Forbidden City turned it into an anti-foreign movement, thereby preserving their tax monopoly for another decade. The Boxer uprising had run its brief course of terror only a little more than ten years before I went to China, yet there was not a trace of anti-foreignism to be seen. The foreigner could, and many of them did, travel from one end of the country to the other unarmed and in perfect safety. The few who did get into trouble usually asked for it rather insistently. It was always surprising to me that more of them were not maltreated.
In fact it always seemed to me that as a class we suffered very much less animosity than we deserved. There were hundreds of Chinese who had every reason to hold in their hearts a bitter hatred for all foreigners because of some act of cruel injustice. For example, members of the Wu clan living at a port on the Yangtze would have been justified in hatred for all foreigners in general and Americans in particular because of the ruthless way in which a great oil company destroyed an ancient fish pond on the Wu ancestral estate. The company was in need of more land and attempted to buy an adjoining piece from the venerable Mr. Wu who declined to sell. The local manager of the company finally learned that Vu’s great attachment to the place was because of a fish pond in his garden where he would amuse himself sitting in the sun and watching the fish swarm toward him to be fed. Buddhist friends would buy live fish and bring them to the pond, thereby preserving life and storing up credits in the Buddhist heaven.
The young American manager worked out a plan to destroy the pond and his scheme received the approval of his superiors. A deep well was dug as close to Mr. Wu’s property as possible and power pumps brought from Shanghai kept the well drained. As the water level fell the pond got shallower. One morning Mr. Wu found the pond was nothing but a mud hole and his beloved fish were dead. The oil company was able to buy the land, and the manager was promoted. A fiction writer could probably build a good plot out of that, culminating in an act of terrible vengeance. But the story ended with the killing of the fish.
The Germans set a new record for encroachment in China in 1898 when they seized the important port of Kiaochow (Tsingtao) and established a German sphere of influence over the province of Shantung. The alleged murders of two German missionaries provided the flimsy pretext. When the Germans took over the administration of Tsingtao little attention was paid to Chinese susceptibilities. They set up a residence section for themselves from which Chinese were excluded just as Jews were excluded from certain sections of German cities in a later generation. German action did not arouse any lasting hatred on the part of the Chinese. To the vast majority the seizure of the port was simply a transfer of Manchu authority to German hands. The restriction as to residence was theoretically humiliating, but no Chinese made a personal application of it because he did not want to live in that section of the town.
The German occupation brought improvements and increased wealth. They carried out the first much needed afforestation work ever done in China. They painstakingly taught the Chinese new household industries and in general added to the prosperity and raised the standard of living throughout Shantung province. Unlike the early British traders in Shanghai the Germans did not come to China to make quick fortunes and then return to their homes. Tsingtao was developed as a German naval base which they hoped would be a permanent toe-hold on the Asiatic continent. Germans came out to live there permanently and remained until the Japanese drove them out in 1914. Their seizure of the territory was one of the acts that enabled the Manchu plotters to turn the Boxer uprising against the foreigners, but when that bloody chapter of history was closed there was no hatred for the Germans in Tsingtao or Shantung.
It was not until the Chinese had thrown off the Manchu yoke and become politically conscious that they began to q
uestion the justice of the treaties which had been forced on the country by foreign insistence on the right of trade. I don’t suppose the idea that extraterritorial rights should be abolished or foreign concessions surrendered had ever occurred to the average Chinese until with the end of the Manchu regime they slowly came to a realization of the fact that the destinies of China were now in Chinese hands. They were without experience in government and made many blunders. For more than three centuries the Chinese had with a certain amount of justice been able to blame the ills of the country on Manchu rule. Now with much less justice they threw the blame on the fact that foreigners held territorial concessions and enjoyed special rights.
The revision of the treaties and the recovery of her full sovereign rights was one of the least important of the many problems an independent China had to face. But attacks on foreign rights provided an issue behind which popular support could be gathered, and Chinese who had forgotten the Boxer affair were again told that the foreigner in their midst was to blame for most of the ills the country suffered. On foreigners of this generation was inflicted the animosity that should have been visited on their fathers or grandfathers. Americans came in closer contact with it than any other nationals and for a curious reason. The American government had set aside its share of the Boxer indemnity as a fund to provide courses in American universities for Chinese students, and each year graduates came back to their homes in China. Instead of being ambassadors of good will for America as had been hoped, they were the leaders in stirring up anti-foreign sentiment.
In trying to find their way about in a world their fathers had had little hand in shaping, the citizens of the New China stumbled and wandered; and the recurrent phases of anti-foreignism were only one of the manifestations of that period. The ones who shouted loudest for revisions of the treaties and abolition of the settlement were war lords whose own positions were by no means secure or who hoped, by some military good fortune, to seize Shanghai and the wealth of that city. Chiang Kai-shek was the only one who ever seriously threatened the International Settlement. After camping at its gates for several months he wisely decided that the domestic problems of the country were far more important than anything else. He led his army to Nanking to establish his National government which a few years later had a much more effective rule of China than had ever been enjoyed by the Manchus. By peaceful negotiation and without any serious disturbance of trade China regained many of her sovereign rights and was on the way toward recovery of all of them when the Japanese invasion changed the entire picture.
Agitation about the treaties created new Boxer movements in many parts of the country. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops murdered American missionaries in Nanking. Very probably they would have massacred a large part of the American community had it not been for the prompt action of the commander of an American gunboat. He was uncertain what the official repercussions would be, but he put down a protective barrage which held the Chinese troops inactive until the American consul and his charges could escape and be lowered over the city wall by ropes. About the same time we foreigners in Shanghai had a suitcase apiece packed and waited momentarily for orders to congregate at a point where we would be under the protection of the gunboats. There were a great many occasions when some flare-up would cause a wave of anti-foreign feeling and women and children kept off the streets. These rarely lasted more than a few days and then life returned to normal.
But during and after the civil war days which followed the downfall of the Manchus there were always some spots in the country where the foreign traveler faced a certain amount of danger. The war lords armed their soldiers with rifles, and when they were not paid they deserted with their arms and turned bandit. At first they confined their attention to their own countrymen. Unluckily they soon discovered that if a foreigner were kidnapped and held for ransom the chances were that either the friends of the man or the Chinese government itself would pay a very high price to secure his release. After that the kidnapping of foreigners became a regular business. Like many other new enterprises it was never as profitable as its promoters hoped it would be but there was always the chance that a huge amount of money might be paid over. The number of individuals engaged in the racket was probably never any greater than the number affiliated with any one of the many underworld rackets that flourished in America at the same time.
The most ambitious kidnapping enterprise came in 1923 when several hundred well-organized bandits wrecked and captured the Shanghai-Peking express train and took most of the passengers both Chinese and foreign to their bandit fortress in the mountains of Southern Shantung. There were more than forty foreigners among the captives but the bandits allowed the women and children to escape. About twenty men were held for more than six weeks before the Chinese government managed to secure their release by paying the bandits $100,000. Half of the captives were Americans but other nationals involved were British, French, Italian and Mexican.
During this period there were many foreigners, including a number of American missionaries, who were attacked and killed by mobs which resembled Southern lynching bees. In a great many cases the victims had placed their trust in Providence rather than follow the advice of the American authorities to get out of troubled areas. The faith which brought about the martyrdom of many Christians was strongly tinctured with stubbornness.
In spite of the somewhat sanguinary record of foreigners molested, assaulted, tortured and killed I find it impossible to believe that the foreigner was the object of universal Chinese hatred. In theory that may have been true. At the moment I hate all followers of Herr Hitler which would include almost all Germans. But my hatred does not embrace my good friends Mr. Breuer and the other members of the Shanghai staff of Mechers & Co., nor Julius Eigner, the German journalist who extolled Nazi policies to me, nor even the chieftain of the Nazi party in South China who gave a cocktail party for me in a French club in Kumming. It does not include the mellow old German consul who gave me a marvelous luncheon in French Indo-China nor when I come to think about it a single one of the hundreds of Germans I have known either intimately or casually in many parts of the world.
That, I feel sure, was the attitude and feeling of the Chinese including many of the most violent of the anti-foreign agitators. Any one of them might feel an intense hatred for all foreigners as a class but that hatred did not extend to the foreigners that he knew or even to the strange foreign devils from the houseboats who wandered about his village, bought cigarettes and eggs and tossed coppers in the collection box at the temple. An insatiable curiosity led me to visit as many unfrequented parts of China as I could, not only in times of peace but in war. My wife and I, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, have spent days and nights on undefended houseboats where the villagers, if they felt any great urge to do so, could have wiped us all out without the least difficulty. We never thought of danger and as a matter of fact were always treated with much more courtesy and consideration than a similar party of Chinese travelers would receive in any part of America with which I am familiar.
On the occasions that civil wars were fought around Shanghai I never overlooked an opportunity to watch them. McCloskey and I gave up many a Sunday golf game because it was much more interesting to watch a battle. We rescued tethered goats from burning villages, listened to the cannon-like bang of burning bamboo as the expanding air burst the joints, saw wounded soldiers fall and die, followed advancing armies and were engulfed by the mad retreat of others. Several times we crossed from one army to the other and on one memorable occasion we spent an hour crouched behind what was fortunately a high and long grave mound while bullets whistled over us. What a tame thing a golf foursome was by comparison! All of this time there were hundreds of opportunities for any foreigner-hating Chinese soldier to take a shot at us and there wouldn’t even have been an official protest because we had no business being where we were.
The Chinese attitude toward foreigners was determined by his contact with them and these were
pleasant or irritating, depending on the individual. In few cases were they so irritating as they might have been. One of the outstanding reasons why life in China was always so pleasant for the foreigner was that his Chinese friends usually had sufficient good breeding to overlook his bad manners. The fact that the Chinese looked on all foreigners as barbarians was extremely irritating to the early foreign resident and added a novel angle to the problems which confronted the diplomats, but it has made for cordial and friendly relations. The standards of conduct Chinese set for the foreigners were very low, being the same as those set for the aboriginal Chinese hillbillies who squat on their haunches and eat rice with their fingers. No foreigner ever had any difficulty living up to these standards, and the Chinese were often delighted to see that some of them showed genuine evidence of good breeding. As for the general run of the foreign population, they were never severely censured, no matter what they did; because they would not be presumed to know any better.