As for southern China, it is a mountainous country and, although it cultivates tea and silk and cotton, it has always been a comparatively poor region. Once upon a time it was covered with forests, but the forests were cut down and the soil was washed away by the rain, and the bare rocks remained. Hence wholesale emigration to all parts of the world which have not yet passed laws restricting the number of Chinese immigrants.
The most important city in southern China is Canton, which is the main harbour of import into China, just as Shanghai is the most important centre for exporting to Europe. At the mouth of the Canton river (the city itself is a few miles inland) lie two foreign possessions. On the right bank, Macao, all that remains of the Portuguese possessions in China and now merely a sort of Oriental Monte Carlo, and Hong-Kong, an island which the English took during the Opium War and have kept ever since.
Of the two islands off the coast of southern China, Hai-nan is still Chinese, but Formosa, an old Dutch colony, has belonged to Japan since the Chinese-Japanese war of 1894-95.
Ninety per cent. of the Chinese are, always have been, and probably always will be farmers who live on their own products and starve when there, is a bad season. But forty-eight harbours have been opened up for foreign trade and their main exports are silk and tea and cotton. Curiously enough, there is no export of opium. Chinese emperors have tried to protect their people against this unfortunate habit-forming drug which began to be used in the seventeenth century. Their objection to its importation from India led to the war with Great Britain in 1840. After a second war fifteen years later China was compelled to legalize the importation of opium, and the cultivation of the poppy was permitted. In 1907 she entered into an agreement with India whereby she undertook that within ten years the cultivation of the poppy and the consumption of opium should cease throughout China, and India agreed to forbid the export of opium to China within the same period. As a result, China had almost freed herself from the noxious habit by 1917, but unfortunately as a result of political laxity in recent years the production of opium in China has again become a national and international problem.
As for railways, the Chinese fought the idea longer than any other nation because, with their respect for the memory of their parents and ancestors, they feared to upset the peaceful slumbers of these departed worthies when the engines should come thundering down the roads of iron. The few miles built in 1875 between Shanghai and Wu Sung, its harbour, caused such a storm of protest that they were immediately discontinued. And even to-day the Chinese railways describe wide circles round all cemeteries. Still, there are now over 7000 miles of railway in actual use, and the bridge across the Hwang-Ho near Tsi-nan is one of the biggest railway bridges in the world.
As for China’s foreign trade, almost 30 per cent. is still in the hands of England and her colonies.
When the earliest ancestors of the Chinese dimly emerged from the nebulous realm of the past, they were already living on the yellow earth along the banks of the Hwang-Ho, north-west from the heart of the present China. The fertile loess fields must have been very desirable in the eyes of an agricultural people. Furthermore it also settled the housing problem, for it allowed a man to dig himself a comfortable little home in the side of a convenient hill and not bother about draughty walls or a roof that leaked.
According to reliable accounts of travellers who are familiar with that part of the world, there are spots which are known to be densely populated but where one fails to see a single vestige of human habitation until the first rays of light tell of the coming of another day. Then, like so many rabbits who swarm out of their holes to enjoy the sun, those men, women, and children begin their endless tasks of gathering food until eventide, when they disappear once more into the bowels of the earth.
Having occupied the mountains, the Chinese then spread eastward. The turbulent Hwang-Ho carried millions of tons of mountain loess into the plains and thereby fertilized them until they were able to support further millions of human beings. The Chinese followed in the wake of the river, and twenty centuries before the beginning of our era (1500 years before the founding of Rome) they had wandered as far as the Yang-tee, and the centre of their empire had been moved from the Hwang-Ho region to the great plain of central China.
During the fifth and fourth centuries before the birth of Christ three great moral teachers arose among them, Kung-fu-tsze or Confucius, Mang-tsze or Mencius, and Lao-tsze, whose name has not been latinized. What the religious conceptions of the Chinaman were at the time these three prophets made their appearance we do not know. Nature apparently was worshipped as the forces of Nature will always be worshipped by those who depend upon them for their living, and not Confucius nor Mencius nor Lao-tsze was a religious founder in the sense of the word as applied to Christ or Buddha or Mohammed.
They merely taught a code of morals based upon the acceptance of man as an inferior and not very brilliant product of creation, but capable of great development provided he fell into good hands and was willing to listen to the precepts of his elders and betters. From our own Christian point of view, these three can of course be accused of preaching a very worldly and decidedly materialistic doctrine. None of them preached that we must return good for evil. They did not believe that the average man was capable of such noble and elevated deeds, and furthermore they seem to have doubted whether such a rule of conduct was really for the ultimate good of the community at large. Wherefore they suggested such things as that evil should be answered with justice, and that one should pay one’s bills and keep contracts, and honour the memory of honourable ancestors.
These three Chinese philosophers spread their morality pretty thin but every one got at least a smear of it. I don’t say that this was a better system than ours, or a worse one. But it was a system not devoid of certain very definite advantages. It gave a people consisting of 400,000,000 different individuals, speaking a couple of dozen different dialects (a Chinaman from the north finds as much difficulty in understanding a brother Chinaman from the south as a Swede does in trying to make conversation with an Italian) and living under entirely different circumstances, at least one thing in common—a decidedly Chinese attitude towards the ups and downs of life, a practical philosophy of existence which will pull the humblest of coolies through hardships that would either kill the average European or American or drive him to commit suicide.
And these ideas were sufficiently simple to be understood by almost every one. As a proof whereof I refer you to the miracles of assimilation performed by the Chinese during the 4000 years of their history. They are preposterous and at the same time fabulous. During the tenth century China became part of the greatest empire that ever existed, that Mongolian commonwealth that reached from the Baltic to the Pacific. But all those Mongolian rulers were like Kublai Khan. They ended by becoming Chinamen. After the Mongolians came the Mings (1368–1644), the last purely Chinese dynasty to rule the country. They were succeeded by a Tartar prince who came from Manchuria and who was the founder of the Manchu dynasty. But although the Chinese, as a token of submission to their Manchu masters, were forced to grow their hair long and wear a pig-tail and shave the rest of their heads, the Manchus soon became even more Chinese than the Chinamen themselves.
After the last Manchu invasion the Chinese were left completely to themselves, and by merely guarding their harbours against all foreign visitors from the West the civilization of China had a chance to settle down for a little rest. But the moment it did this it petrified more completely than any other country of which we have ever heard. Its political system became even more rigid than that of the old Russia of pre-revolutionary days. Literature froze, even their incomparable art became as stereotyped as that of the Byzantine mosaic makers of ancient Constantinople. Science no longer made any progress. If nevertheless by chance some one happened to invent something new it was at once discarded as foolish and undesirable, just as many medical men in the West tried to discourage the use of chloroform because it was bo
th new and foolish. Because they were cut off so completely from the rest of the world and never had a chance of finding out what other nations were doing, it was easy for the Chinese to convince themselves that their own methods were best, that their own army was invincible, that their own art was the most sublime art ever wrought by the hands of human beings, and that their own customs and habits were so superior to those of all other nations that it was ridiculous to compare the two. Many other countries have in a mild way tried such a policy of exclusion but it has always ended in disaster.
Since the early half of the sixteenth century the Chinese had allowed a few ‘foreign devils,’ hailing from Portugal and England and Holland, to settle in two or three of their Pacific ports for the sake of the profits that were to be derived from the trade with Europe. But the social status of those unfortunate foreigners had been most unsatisfactory. They were treated like a respectable coloured doctor who by chance is obliged to travel on the same boat on the Potomac river with a delegation of the descendants of Virginia’s first settlers.
When England in 1816 sent Lord Amherst to ask the Son of Heaven to mitigate the hardships from which the English merchants suffered in Canton, he was told that an interview with the Celestial Majesty depended upon his willingness to kow-tow before the imperial throne. The kow-tow, which literally meant ‘knocking the head nine times upon the ground before the sacred throne,’ was something which a Dutch sea-captain could afford to do, for once he had kow-towed himself out of the reception room he knew that he could take home enough tea or spices to be comfortable for the rest of his life. But the representative of his Britannic Majesty was somewhat differently placed. Lord Amherst curtly refused, and as a result was not even allowed to enter the gates of Peking.
Meanwhile Europe, growing rich in consequence of the invention of James Watt and the application of steam for the purpose of exploiting our little planet, was clamouring for new worlds to conquer. China of course was No. 1 on the list. The direct excuse for the outbreak of hostilities was not exactly flattering to the pride of the white race, least of all for that part of it which since 1807, when Dr Morrison had reached Canton as the first Protestant missionary, had been telling the Chinese what a fine thing Christianity really was and why they should give it a chance. Even those pedantic and narrow-minded Mandarins (merely a Chinese title for administrator) who then ruled China were still sufficiently steeped in the teachings of Confucius to refuse to let their people be exposed to the unlimited importation of opium. But the British East India Company was making millions of pounds out of the sale of poppy-seed to the people of the Yang-tze and the Hwang-Ho. The British East India Company insisted upon importing opium into China and the Chinese authorities refused to let the stuff be landed. Opium and hurt feelings then led to the war of 1839-42 in which the Chinese, to their dumbfounded surprise, discovered that they were absolutely no match for the despised foreigners, and that during the centuries of voluntary seclusion they had dropped so far behind the rest of humanity that it was doubtful whether they would ever be able to catch up.
IF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN SHOULD RUN DRY
IF THE PACIFIC OCEAN SHOULD RUN DRY
This fear bids fair to come true. Ever since the disastrous days of the Opium War China has been completely at the mercy of the West. The Chinese people, who are apt to go on ploughing and harvesting, no matter who is fighting in the adjacent fields, have at times shown signs that they are beginning to realize that something is wrong with their country. The first outbreak of discontent occurred eight years after the British treaty which ended the Opium War when a fanatical revolt against the Manchu dynasty, known as the Taiping rebellion, broke out in the south. Three years later, in 1853, rebels captured Nanking and threatened Shanghai. The citizens hastened to raise a mixed force, largely of Europeans, for the defence of their city, and an American engineer called Frederick Ward took command. Ward, however, was killed in an engagement, and Charles George Gordon, who had been assisting Ward, was appointed Generalissimo of the now grandiloquently termed “Ever-victorious Army.”
The rebels were eventually broken and their leader, dubbed by his followers “The Heavenly King,” committed suicide in 1863, Nanking was retaken, and the Emperor gave Gordon the Yellow Jacket, the most coveted decoration in his gift. He offered also a large sum of money, but this Gordon refused.
In 1875 there was a slight difference of opinion between the Manchus and Germany, and Germany sent a squadron to purify the Chinese coast of pirates. During 1884 and 1885 there was a war with France, which cost the Chinese Annam and Tongking, and in 1894 there was a war with Japan, now thoroughly Europeanized, which ended with the cession of the island of Formosa.
Then began the great European rush for armaments and strategic points. The Russians took Port Arthur, the English took Wei-hai-wei, the Germans took Kiao-Chow, and the French took Kiang Hung on the left bank of the Mekong river. America, which has thus far always mixed sentiment (and often, alas, sentimentality) with its foreign policies, talked vaguely about “maintaining the open door,” and the European nations were turning the territory they had stolen into impregnable fortresses and closing the door whenever their uncle from across the ocean was not looking.
The Chinese people, patient and plodding though they are by nature, began to grasp the fact that they were being cheated right and left. Once more holding the foreign Manchu dynasty responsible for all their humiliations and misery, they started the unfortunate Boxer rebellion of 1900. They began their operations by murdering the German ambassador (their plausible excuse was that he had first struck a Chinaman) and then besieged the foreign legations in Peking. As a result, an army of Russians, Japanese, Englishmen, Austrians, Germans, Italians, French, and Americans marched to the relief of the sorely beset foreign quarter, saved the ministers and their families from an untimely end, and then by way of retribution plundered Peking as that rich city had never been looted before. The Forbidden City, the heart of the imperial residence, was broken into. Nothing was spared, no matter how holy it might be to the Chinese, and the German commander-in-chief, who arrived with an extra 20,000 men (when the shooting was already over but the plundering still in full swing), had been instructed by his imperial master to “follow in the footsteps of the Huns”—an unfortunate expression which came home to roost a little over a dozen years later.
Condemned to pay enormous indemnities and humiliated in every possible way by their ever more aggressive European neighbours, the Chinese people once more rose in rebellion in 1911, and this time they were successful, for the Manchu dynasty was abolished, and China became a republic.
By this time, however, the Chinese had learned the lesson that the nations of the West are not primarily interested in chapters from the writings of Confucius, but care much more for coal concessions and iron concessions and oil concessions, and that therefore those possessed of these valuable raw materials must either know how to defend their property or sink it to the bottom of the ocean if they want it to be absolutely safe. In short, China began to recognize the necessity of following the example of Japan by taking a short course in ‘Westernization.’ Foreign teachers were engaged from all over the world, but principally from Japan, which was nearby and handy.
In the meantime Russia had started upon its ambitious plan to convert one-sixth of the world into an industrial State, administered according to the gospel of Saint Marx; and Russia, being a very close neighbour of China, could whisper strange words into the ears of the long-suffering coolies who had been born to sweat and work, no matter who ruled them or whether they were being exploited by the English or the French or the Japanese.
The result of all these conflicting ideas, plans, and emotions is the chaos which has descended upon China since the end of the Great War, during which it was forced to take the side of the Allies in a quarrel in which, as usual, it had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose.
I am no prophet. I don’t know what will happen during the next ten or fiftee
n years. Conditions probably won’t change very much, for poor China tried too late to catch up with the procession. But may the good Lord have mercy upon us if she ever does, for, oh, what a bill we shall then have to pay!
Chapter XXXVIII
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KOREA, MONGOLIA, AND MANCHUKUO, WHICH MANY WILL CONTINUE TO CALL ‘MANCHURIA’
Let us begin with a short and elementary lesson in practical economics.
The Japanese, cooped up on their little island, and as prolific as Italians, need more land. All the pretty words in the world and all the treaties in the world and all the well-meant speeches of all the well-meaning old ladies and gentlemen in the world won’t change this fact. For it is really a law of Nature which states that when I am strong but hungry and find myself on a raft somewhere in mid-ocean in the company of somebody else who is weak but who has a pocket full of ham sandwiches, I will in the end get my share of those ham sandwiches, or I shall have died in the attempt. Being a decent sort of person, carefully brought up by God-fearing parents, I may resist the temptation for one day or for two days or even three days. But the hour will come when I will say: “Give me some of those sandwiches or I will throw you overboard—and be quick about it!”
My early training may assert itself sufficiently to let me treat the owner of the sandwiches more or less generously and allow him to keep part of the supplies, but I am going to still that terrible gnawing feeling in my entrails if I have to commit murder to do so. Multiply the case, of the man on the raft by a millionfold or ten million-fold, and you will begin to appreciate the problem that faces the Japanese people.
They live in a country that is only a little larger than the British Isles (120,879 square miles for the British Isles and 145,024 square miles for Japan), and only 16,000,000 acres can be used for agriculture, whereas the cultivated area in the British Isles is 44,000,000 acres. And yet there are sixty-five million people to feed in Japan, compared with forty-nine millions in the British Isles. You will see at a glance what sort of problem it is that faces these poor island folk. Living so near the sea-shore they would of course fish; but although they have now reached the point where they are breeding certain sorts of fish in the muddy water of their rice fields, the difficulty remains unsolved and unsolvable in view of the fact that the population increases by more than 650,000 people a year.
The Home of Mankind Page 30