love my own country, but I take care to conceal it before them, for one may wear the
cloak of patriotism to tatters, and in these tatters be paraded through the city streets to
death, in China or the rest of the world.
I am able to confess because, unlike these patriots, I am not ashamed of my country.
And I can lay bare her troubles because I have not lost hope. China is bigger than her little patriots, and does not require their whitewashing. She will, as she always did,
right herself again.
Nor do I write for the patriots of the West. For I fear more their appreciative
quotations from me than the misunderstandings of my countrymen. I write only for
the men of simple common sense, that simple common sense for which ancient China
was so distinguished, but which is so rare today. My book can only be understood
from this simple point of view. To these people who have not lost their sense of
ultimate human values, to them alone I speak. For they alone will understand me.
My thanks are due to Pearl S. Buck who, from the beginning to the end, gave me kind
encouragement and who personally read through the entire manuscript before it was
sent to the press and edited It, to Mr. Richard J. Walsh who offered valuable criticism
while the book was In progress, and to Miss Lillian Peffer, who styled the manuscript,
read the proofs and made the index. Acknowledgements are also due to Mrs. Selskar
M. Gunn, Bemardine Szold Fritz and Baroness UngernSternberg, who, sometimes
singly and sometimes in chorus, nagged me Into writing this book. Lastly, I am
Indebted to my wife who patiently went through with me the less pleasant aspects of
authorship, which only an author's wife could appreciate.
THE AUTHOR.
June, 1935
ShanghaiPROLOGUE
I
WHEN one is in China, one is compelled to think about her, with compassion always,
with despair sometimes, and with discrimination and understanding very rarely. For
one either loves or hates China. Perhaps even when one does not live in China one
sometimes thinks of her as an old, great big country which remains aloof from the
world and does not quite belong to it. That aloofness has a certain fascination. But if
one comes to China, one feels engulfed and soon stops thinking. One merely feels she
is there, a tremendous existence somewhat too big for the human mind to encompass,
a seemingly inconsequential chaos obeying its own laws of existence and enacting its
own powerful life-drama, at times tragic, at times comical, but always intensely and
boisterously real; then after awhile, one begins to think again, with wonder and
amazement. This time, the reaction will be temperamental; it merely indicates whether
one is a romantic cosmopolitan individual or a conceited, self-satisfied prig, one either,
likes or dislikes China, and then proceeds to justify one's likes or dislikes. That is just
as well, for we must take some sort of attitude toward China to justify ourselves as
intelligent beings. We grope for reasons, and begin to tell one another little anecdotes,
trifles of everyday life, escaped or casual words of conversation, things of tremendous
importance that make us philosophers and enable us to become, with great equanimity,
either her implacable critics, allowing nothing good for her, or else her ardent,
romantic admirers. Of course, these generalizations are rather silly. But that is how
human opinions are formed all over the world, and it is unavoidable. Then we set
about arguing with one another. Some always come out from the argument supremely
satisfied of their Tightness, self-assured that they have an opinion of China and of the
Chinese people. They are the happy people who rule the world and import
merchandise from one part of it to another, and who are always in the right. Others
find themselves beset with doubts and perplexities, with a feeling of awe and
bewilderment, perhaps of awe and mystification and they end where they began. But
all of us feel China is there, a great mystical Dasein.
For China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world, and that
not only because of her age or her geographical greatness. She is the oldest living
nation with a continuous culture; she has the largest population; once she was the
greatest empire in the world, and she was a conqueror; she gave the world some of its
most important inventions; she has a literature, a philosophy, a wisdom of life entirely
her own; and in the realms of art, she soared where others merely made an effort to
flap their wings. And yet, to-day she is undoubtedly the most chaotic, the most
misruled nation on earth, the most pathetic and most helpless, the most unable to pull
herself together and forge ahead. God 梚 f there be a God 梚 ntended her to be a
first-class nation among the peoples of the earth, and she has chosen to take a back
seat with Guatemala at the League of Nations; and the entire League of Nations, with
the best will in the world, cannot help her 梒 annot help her to pull her own house in
order, cannot help her to stop her own civil wars, cannot help her to save herself from
her own scholars and militarists, her own revolutionists and gentry politicians.
Meanwhile梐 nd this is the most amazing fact 梥 he is the least concerned about her
own salvation. Like a good gambler, she took the loss of a slice of territory the size of
Germany itself without a wince. And while General Tang Ytilin was beating a world
record retreat and losing half a million square miles in eight days, two generals, an
uncle and a nephew, were matching their strength in Szechuen. One begins to wonder
whether God will win out in the end, whether God Himself can help China to become
a first-class nation in spite of
heiself,
?
And another doubt arises in one's mind: What is China's destiny? Will she survive as
she so successfully did in the past, and in a way that no other old nation was able to
do? Did God really intend her to be a first-class nation? Or is she merely "Mother
Earth's miscarriage"?
Once she had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to
be merely to exist, to survive, and one cannot but have faith in her ability to do so,
when one remembers how she has survived the ages, after the beauty that was Greece
and the glory that was Rome are long vanished, remembers how she has ground and
modelled foreign truths into her own likeness and absorbed foreign races into her own
blood. This fact of her survival, of her great age, is evidently something worth
pondering upon. There is something due an old nation, a respect for hoary old age that
should be applied to nations as to individuals. Yes, even to mere old age, even to mere
survival.
For whatever else is wrong, China has a sound instinct for life, a strange supernatural,
extraordinary vitality. She has led a life of the instinct; she has adjusted herself to
economic, political and social environments that might have spelled disaster to a less
robust racial constitution; she has received her share of nature's bounty, has clung to
her flowers and birds and hills and dales for her inspiration and moral support, which
alone have kept her heart whole and pure and prevented the race from civic social
degeneration. She has chosen to live much in the open, to bask in the sunlight, to
watch the evening glow, to feel the touch of the morning dew and to smell the
fragrance of hay and of the moist earth; through her poetry, through the poetry of
habits of life as well as through the poetry of words, she has learned to refresh her,
alas! too often wounded, soul. In other words, she has managed to reach grand old age
in the same way as human individuals do by living much in the open and having a
great deal of sunlight and fresh air. But she has also lived through hard times, through
recurrent centuries of war and pestilence, and through natural calamities and human
misrule. With a grim humour and somewhat coarse nerves, she has weathered them all,
and somehow she has always righted herself. Yes, great age, even mere great age, is
something to be wondered at*
Now that she has reached grand old age, she is beyond bodily and spiritual sorrows,
and one would have thought, at times, beyond hope and beyond redemption. Is it the
strength or the weakness of old age, one wonders? She has defied the world, and has
taken a nonchalant attitude toward it, which her old age entitles her to do. Whatever
happens, her placid life flows on unperturbed, insensible to pain and to misery,
impervious to shame and to ambition梩 he little human emotions that agitate young
breasts梐 nd undaunted even by the threat of immediate ruin and collapse for the last
two centuries. Success and failure have ceased to touch her; calamities and, death
have lost their sting; and the overshadowing of her national life for a period of a few
centuries has ceased to have any meaning. Like the sea in the Nietzschean analogy,
she is greater than all the fish and shell- fish and jelly- fish in her, greater than the mud
and refuse thrown into her. She is greater than the lame propaganda and petulance of
all her returned students, greater than the hypocrisy, shame and greed of all her petty
officials and turncoat generals and fence-riding revolutionists, greater than her wars
and pestilence, greater than her dirt and poverty and famines. For she has survived
them all. Amidst wars and pestilence, surrounded by her poor children and
grandchildren, Merry Old China quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I
see her real strength. She quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I detect
at times a mere laziness to change and at others a conservatism that savours of
haughtiness. Laziness or haughtiness, which? I do not know. But somewhere in her
soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive.
What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!
II
But what price greatness? Garlyle has said somewhere that the first impression of a
really great work of art is always unnerving jto the point of painftdness. It is the lot of
the great to be misunderstood, and so it is China's lot. China has been greatly,
magnificently misunderstood. Greatness is often the term we confer on what we do
not understand and wish to have done with. Between being well understood, however,
and being called great, China would have preferred the former, and it would have
been better for everybody all round. But how is China to be understood? Who will be
her interpreters? There is that long history of hers, covering a multitude of kings and
emperors and sages and poets and scholars and brave mothers and talented women.
There are her arts and philosophies, her paintings and her theatres, which provide the
common people with all the moral notions of good and evil, and that tremendous mass
of folk literature and folklore. The language alone constitutes an almost hopeless
barrier. Can China be understood merely through pidgin English? Is the Old China
Hand to pick up an understanding of the soul of China from his cook and amah? Or
shall it be from his Number One Boy? Or shall it be from his compradore and shroff,
or by reading the correspondence of the North China Daily News? The proposition is
manifestly unfair.
Indeed, the business of trying to understand a foreign nation with a foreign culture,
especially one so different from one's own as China's, is usually not for the mortal
man. For this work there is need for broad, brotherly feeling, for the feeling of the
common bond of humanity and the cheer of good fellowship. One must feel with the
pulse of the heart as well as see with the eyes of the mind. There must be, too, a
certain detachment, not from the country under examination, for that is always so, but
from oneself and one's subconscious notions, and from the deeply imbedded notions
of one's childhood and the equally tyrannous ideas of one's adult days, from those big
words with capital letters like Democracy, Prosperity, Capital, and Success and
Religion and Dividends. One needs a little detachment, and a little simplicity of mind,
too, that simplicity of mind so well typified by Robert Burns, one of the most Scottish
and yet most universal of all poets, who strips our souls bare and reveals our common
humanity and the loves and sorrows that common humanity is heir to. Only with that
detachment and that simplicity of mind can one understand a foreign nation.
Who will, then, be her interpreters? The problem is an almost insoluble one.
Certainly not the sinologues and librarians abroad who see China only through
the reflection of the Confucian classics. The true Europeans in China do not speak
Chinese, and the true Chinese do not speak English. The Europeans who speak
Chinese too well develop certain mental habits akin to the Chinese and are regarded
by their compatriots as "queer." The Chinese who speak English too well and
develop Western mental habits are "denationalized/9 or they may not even speak
Chinese, or speak it with an English accent. So by a process of elimination, it would
seem that we have to put up with the Old China Hand, and that we have largely to
