depend upon his understanding of pidgin. The Old China Hand, or O.C.H.條et us stop
to picture him, for he is important as your only authority on China. He has been well
described by Mr. Arthur Ransome.1 But to my mind, he is a vivid personality, and
one can now easily picture him in the imagination. Let us make no mistake about him.
He may be the son of a missionary, or a captain or a pilot, or a secretary in the
consular service, or he may be a merchant to whom China is just a market for selling
sardines and "sunkist" oranges. He is not always uneducated; in fact, he may be a
brilliant journalist, with one eye to a political advisorship and the other to a loan
commission. He may even be very well informed within his limits, the limits of a man
who cannot talk three syllables of Chinese and depends on his English-speaking
Chinese friends for his supplies of information. But he keeps on with his adventure
and he plays golf and his golf helps to keep him fit. He drinks Lipton's tea and reads
the North China Daily News, and his spirit revolts against the morning reports of
banditry and kidnapping and recurrent civil wars, which spoil his breakfast for him.
He is well shaved and dresses more neatly than his Chinese associates, and his boots
are better shined than they would be in England, although this is no credit to him, for
the Chinese boys are such good bootblacks. He rides a distance of three or four
miles from his home to his office every morning, and believes himself desired at Miss
Smith's tea. He may have no aristocratic blood in his veins nor ancestral oil
portraits in his halls, but he can always circumvent that by going further back in history and discovering that his forefathers in the primeval forests had the right blood
in them, and that sets his mind at peace and relieves him of all anxiety to study things
Chinese, But he is also uncomfortable every time his business takes him through
Chinese streets where the heathen eyes all stare at him. He takes his handkerchief and
vociferously blows his nose with it and bravely endures it, all the while in a blue funk.
He broadly surveys the wave of blue-dressed humanity. It seems to him their eyes are
not quite so slant as the shilling-shocker covers represent them to be. Can these
people stab one in the back? It seems unbelievable in the beautiful sunlight, but one
never knows, and the courage and sportsmanship which he learned at the cricket field
all leave him. Why, he would rather be knocked in the head by a cricket bat than go
through those crooked streets again! Yes, it was fear, primeval fear of the Unknown.
* The Chinese Puzzle, especially the chapter on "The Shanghai Mind/'
But to him, it is not just that. It is his humanity that cannot stand the sight of human
misery and poverty, as understood in his own terms. He simply cannot stand being
pulled by a human beast of burden in a rickshaw 梙 e has to have a car. f His car is not
just a car, it is a moving covered corridor that; leads from his home to his office and
protects him from Chinese \ humanity. He will not leave his car and his civilization.
He tells Miss Smith so at tea, saying that a car in China is not a luxury but a necessity.
That three-mile ride of an enclosed mind in an enclosed glass case from the home to
the office he takes every day of his twenty- five years in China, although he does not
mention this fact when he goes home to England and signs himself "An Old Resident
Twenty-Five Years in China" in correspondence to the London Times. It reads very
impressively. Of course, he should know what he is talking about.
Meanwhile, that three-mile radius has seldom been exceeded, except when he goes on
cross-country paper hunts over Chinese farm fields, but then he is out in the oepn and
knows how to defend himself. But in this he is mistaken, for he never has to, and this
he knows himself, for he merely says so, when he is out for sport. He has never been
invited to Chinese homes, has sedulously avoided Chinese restaurants, and has never
read a single line of Chinese newspapers. He goes to the longest bar in the world of an
evening, sips his cocktail and picks up and imbibes and exchanges bits of sailors9
tales on the China coast handed down from the Portuguese sailors, and is sorry to find
that Shanghai is not Sussex, and generally behaves as he would in England.1 He feels
happy when he learns that the Chinese are beginning to observe Christmas and make
progress, and feels amazed when he is not understood in English; he walks as if the
whole lot of them did not exist for him, and does not say "sorry9* even in English
when he steps on a fellowpassenger's toes; yes, he has not even learned the Chinese
equivalents of "danke sehr" and "bitte schon" and "verzeihen Sie" the minimum moral
obligations of even a passing tourist, and complains of anti- foreignism and despairs
because even the pillaging of the Pekin palaces after the Boxer Uprising has not
taught the Chinese a lesson. There is your authority on China. Oh, for a common bond of humanity!
All this one can understand, and it is even quite natural, and should not be mentioned
here were it not for the fact that it bears closely on the formation of opinions on China
in the West. One needs only to think of the language difficulty, of the almost
impossible learning of the Chinese writing, of the actual political, intellectual and
artistic chaos in present-day China, and of the vast differences in customs between the
Chinese and the Westerners. The plea here is essentially for a better understanding on
a higher level of intelligence. Yet it is difficult to deny the Old China Hand the right to
write books and articles about China, simply because he cannot read the Chinese
newspapers, Nevertheless, such books and articles must necessarily remain on the
level of the gossip along the world's longest bar.
There are exceptions, of course 梐 Sir Robert Hart or a Bertrand Russell, for example
梬ho are able to see the meaning in a type of life so different from one's own, but for
one Sir Robert Hart there are ten thousand Rodney Gilberts, and for one Bertrand
Russell there are ten thousand H. G. W. Woodheads. The result is a constant,
unintelligent elaboration of the Chinaman as a stage fiction, which is as childish as it
is untrue and with which the West is so familiar, and a continuation of the early
Portuguese sailors' tradition minus the sailors' obscenity of language, but with
essentially the same sailors' obscenity of mind.
* A writer signing himself "J.D." says in an article on "Englishmen in China"
published in The New Statesman, London: "His life is spent between his office and
the club. In the former, he is surrounded by foreigners as equals or superiors and by
Chinese as inferiors梒 lerks and so forth. In the latter except for the servants, he sees
nothing but foreigners, from whom every night he hears complaints about Chinese
dishonesty and stupidity, interspersed by stories of the day's work, and by discussions
on sport, which is the one thinff that saves the Englishman in China. It is the only
alternative to abuse of the Chinese*
The Chinese sometimes wonder among themselves why China attracts only sailors
and adventurers to her coast. To understand that, one would have to read H. B. Morse
and trace the continuity of that sailor tradition to the present day, and observe the
similarities between the early Portuguese sailors and the modern O.C.H.s in their
general outlook, their interests and the natural process of selection and force of
circumstances which have washed them ashore on this corner of the earth, and the
motives which drove, and are still driving, them to this heathen c.ountry梘old and
adventure. Gold and adventure which in the first instance drove Columbus, the
greatest sailor-adventurer of them all, to seek a route to China.
Then one begins to understand that continuity, begins to understand how that
Columbus-sailor tradition has been so solidly and equitably carried on, and one feels a
sort of pity for China; a pity that it is not our humanity but our gold and our capacities as buying animals which have attracted the Westerners to this Far Eastern shore. It is
gold and success, Henry James's "bitch-goddess," which have bound the Westerners
and the Chinese together, and thrown them into this whirlpool of obscenity, with not a
single human, spiritual tie among them. They do not admit this to themselves, the
Chinese and the English; so the Chinese asks the Englishman why he does not leave
the country if he hates it so, and the Englishman asks in retort why the Chinese does
not leave the foreign settlements, and both of them do not know how to reply. As it is,
the Englishman does not bother to make himself understood to the Chinese, and the
true Chinese bothers even less to make himself understood to the Englishman.
III
But do the Chinese understand themselves? Will they be China's best interpreters?
Self-knowledge is proverbially difficult, much more so in a circumstance where a
great deal of wholesome, sane-minded criticism is required. Assuredly no language
difficulty exists for the educated Chinese,.but that long history of China is difficult for
him also to master; her arts, philosophies, poetry, literature and the theatre are difficult
for him to penetrate and illuminate with a clear and beautiful understanding; and his
own fellow-men, the fellowpassenger in a street car or a former fellow-student now
pretending to rule the destiny of a whole province, are for him, too* difficult to
forgive.
For the mass of foreground details, which swamps the foreign observer, swamps the
modern Chinese as well. Perhaps he has even less the cool detachment of the foreign
observer. In his breast is concealed a formidable struggle, or several struggles. There
is the conflict between his ideal and his real China, and a more formidable conflict
between his primeval clan-pride and his moments of admiration for the stranger. His
soul is torn by a conflict of loyalties belonging to opposite poles, a loyalty to old
China, half romantic and half selfish, and a loyalty to open-eyed wisdom which
craves for change and a ruthless clean-sweeping of all that is stale and putrid and
dried up and mouldy. Sometimes it is a more elementary conflict between shame and
pride, between sheer family loyalty and a critical ashamedness for the present state of
things, instincts wholesome in themselves. But sometimes his clan-pride gets the
better of him, and between proper pride and mere reactionism there is only a thin
margin, and sometimes his instinct of shame gets die better of him, and between a
sincere desire for reform and a mere shallow modernity and worship of the modern
bitch-goddess, there is also only a very thin margin. To escape that is indeed a delicate
task.
Where is that unity of understanding to be found? To combine real appreciation with
critical appraisal, to see with the mind and feel with the heart, to make the mind and
the heart at one, is no easy state of grace to attain to. Foi it involves no less than the
salvaging of an old culture, like the sorting of family treasures, and even the connoisseur's eyes are sometimes deceived and his fingers sometimes falter. It
requires courage and that rare thing, honesty, and that still rarer thing, a constant
questioning activity of the mind.
But he has a distinct advantage over the foreign observer. For he is a Chinese, and as a
Chinese, he not only sees with his mind but he also feels with his heart, and he knows
tha* the blood, surging in his veins in tides of pride and shame is Chinese blood, a
mystery of mysteries which carries withii its bio-chemical constitution the past and
the future of China bearer of all its pride and shame and of all its glories and it
iniquities. The analogy of the family treasure is therefore incomplete and
inadequate, for that unconscious nationa heritage is within him and is part of himself.
He has perhaps learned to play English football but he does not love football; he has
perhaps learned to admire American efficiency, but his soul revolts against efficiency;
he has perhaps learned to use table napkins, but he hates table napkins, and all
through Schubert's melodies and Brahms' songs, he hears, as an overtone, the echo of
age-old folk songs and pastoral lyrics of the Orient, luring him back. He explores
the beauties and glories of the West, but he comes back to the East, his Oriental blood
overcoming him when he is approaching forty. He sees the portrait of his father
wearing a Chinese silk cap, and he discards his Western dress and slips into Chinese
gowns and slippers, oh, so comfortable, so peaceful and comfortable, for in his
Chinese gowns and slippers his soul comes to rest. He cannot understand the Western
dog-collar any more, and wonders how he ever stood it for so long. He does not play
football any more, either, but begins to cultivate Chinese hygiene, and saunters along
in the mulberry fields and bamboo groves and willow banks for' his exercise, and
even this is not a "country walk" as the English understand it, but just an Oriental
