left' without constitutional protection at the mercy of the district magistrate. But if the
magistrate is kind, kindness is all the more keenly appreciated because it is something
gratuitous. There have been thousands of cases in which the village people
surrounded the departing magistrate's sedan-chair, kneeling on the ground with tears
of gratitude in their eyes. This is the best demonstration of Chinese gratitude, and of
Chinese official favour. For the people know it as favour and not as justice.
In such an atmosphere originated favour, which came from a personal relationship
between the man in power and the man in need of protection. It can, however, take the
place of justice, and it often does so. When a Chinese is arrested, perhaps wrongly, the
natural tendency of his relatives is not to seek legal protection and fight it out in a law
court, but to find someone who knows the magistrate personally and intercede for his
"favour.59 With the high regard for personal relationships and the importance attached to "face" in China, the man who intercedes is always successful if his "face"
is "big" enough. It is always easy, and infinitely less costly than a protracted lawsuit.
In this way, a social inequality arises between the powerful, the rich and the
well -connected, and the poor who are not so fortunately circumstanced.
Some years ago there occurred in Anhui the arrest and imprisonment of two college
professors for the ludicrously insignificant offence of some incautious remarks, and
the relatives had no better way than to go to the provincial capital and plead with the
military chief of the province for "favour." On the other hand, certain young men in
the same province, connected with a powerful political party, were arrested in
flagrante delicto for gambling, and after being released, went to the capital and
demanded the dismissal of the offending police. An opium house in a city on the
Yangtse was searched by the police and its store of opium confiscated two years ago,
but on the telephone message of an influential local person, the Bureau of Public
Safety not only had to apologize for the slip in manners, but had to send the opium
back with police guards. A certain dentist who had taken out a tooth for a powerful
general and was therefore invested for life with part of the latter's personal glory, was
once asked for on the phone by the operator of a certain ministry by his personal name
and surname and not by surname and official title. He went to the ministry, asked for
the operator and slapped his face in the presence of the ministry staff. In July, 1934, a
woman in Wuchang was arrested for sleeping outdoors with short trousers, because of
the heat, and died consequently in imprisonment a few days afterwards. The woman,
it turned out, was the wife of an official, and the offending policeman was shot. And
so on, ad infinitum. Revenge is sweet. But as there are women who are not wives of
officials but who may nevertheless be arrested, the consequence is not always sweet
revenge. Confucianism stands for this, because as early as the Book of Rites there
occurred the phrase, "Courtesy is not extended to the commoners, and punishment is
not served up to the lords."
Favour was then part and parcel of the Doctrine of Social Status, and the logical
consequence of the Confucian ideal ^ a "personal," "parental" government by
"gentlemen." And was Laotse not right in saying: "Sages no dead, robbers no end"?
Confucius was childishly naive in thinking there were enough gentlemen in a country
to go round ruling the people, and apparently he miscalculated. In an idyllically
simple stage of life this might work, but in the modern age of aeroplanes and motor
cars it must fail, and it has failed miserably.
The redeeming feature, as has been said, is the absence of caste and aristocracy in
China. And this brings us to Fate. The feature that makes such apparent social
inequality endurable is that no people are trodden down permanently, and the
oppressor and oppressed take turns. We Chinese believe that every dog has his day,
and "heaven's way always goes round." If a man has ability, steadiness and ambition,
he can always rise and climb high. Who can tell? A beancurd seller's daughter may
suddenly catch the eyes of a powerful official or a colonel, or his son may by a strange accident become the doorkeeper of a city magistrate. Or a butcher's son- in-law,
who may be a poor middle-aged village schoolmaster, may suddenly pass the official
examinations and, as we are told in the novel Julinwaishik, one gentry scholar from
the city asks him to come and stay in his mansion, another comes to "exchange
certificates" of sworn brotherhood with him, a third rich merchant presents him with
rolls of silk and bags of silver, and the city magistrate himself sends him two
maid-servants and a cook to relieve his peasant wife of her kitchen labour. The
butcher moves into the new mansion in the city, happy of heart, forgetting how he had
always bullied his son- in- law, says he has always believed in him, and is now ready to
lay down the butcher's knife and be fed by him for life. When this happens, his day
has come. We envy him but we do not call it unfair. For we call it fate, or his luck.
Fatalism is not only a Chinese mental habit, it is part of the conscious Confucian
tradition. So closely related is this belief in fate connected with the Doctrine of Social
Status that we have such current phrases as "keep your own status and resign yourself
to heaven's will," and "let heaven and fate have thenway." Confucius, in relating his
own spiritual progress, said that at fifty he "knew heaven's will." At sixty "nothing he
heard could disturb him." This doctrine of fatalism is a great source of personal
strength and contentment, and accounts for the placidity of Chinese souls. As no one
has all the luck all the time, and as good luck cannot apparently come to all, one is
willing to submit to this inequality as something perfectly natural. There is always a
chance for ambitious and able men to rise through the imperial examinations. And if,
through luck or through ability, a man rises from the unprivileged to the privileged
class, then it is his turn. Once in the privileged class, he is in love with it; a change of
psychology takes place along with the change in elevation. He begins to love social
inequality and all its privileges, and falls in love with it, as Ramsay MacDonald fell in
love with Downing Street. The latter went up the steps of No. 10, sniffed its air and
felt happy. Practically, this turn-about- face has been noticed in every modern
successful Chinese revolutionist. He clamps down his iron heel on the freedom of the
press more energetically than the militarist he denounced while in his revolutionary
apprenticeship.
For he has now got a "big face." He stands above the law and the constitution, not to
speak of traffic rules and museum regulations. That face is psychological and not
physiological. Interesting as the Chinese physiological face is, the psychological face
makes a still more fascinating study. It is not a face that can be washed or shaved, but
a face that can be "granted" and "lost" and "fought for" and "presented as a gift." Here
we arrive at the most curious point of Chinese social psychology. Abstract and
intangible, it is yet the most delicate standard by which Chinese social intercourse is
regulated.
But it is easier to give an example of Chinese face than to define it. The official in the
metropolis, for instance, who can drive at sixty miles an hour, while the traffic
regulations allow only thirty-five, is gaining a lot of face. If his car hits a man, and when the policeman comes round he silently draws a card from his pocket-book,
smiles graciously and sails away, then he is gaining greater face still. If, however, the
policeman is unwilling to give him face and pretends not to know him, the official
will begin "talking mandarin" by asking the policeman "if he knows his father" and
signalling to the chauffeur to go off, and thus his face waxes still greater. And if the
incorrigible policeman insists on taking the chauffeur to the station, but the official
telephones to the chief of police, who immediately releases the chauffeur and orders
the dismissal of the little policeman who did not "know his father," then the face of
the official becomes truly beatific.
Face cannot be translated or defined. It is like honour and is not honour. It cannot be
purchased with money, and gives a man or a woman a material pride. It is hollow and
is what men fight for and what many women die for. It is invisible and yet by
definition exists by being shown to the public. It exists in the ether and yet can be
heard, and sounds eminently respectable and solid. It is amenable, not to reason but to
social convention. It protracts lawsuits, breaks up family fortunes, causes murders and
suicides, and yet it often makes a man out of a renegade who has been insulted by his
fellowtownsmen, and it is prized above all earthly possessions. It is more powerful
than fate and favour, and more respected than the constitution. It often decides a
military victory or defeat,, and can demolish a whole government ministry. It is that
hollow thing which men in China live by.
To confuse face with Western "honour" is to make a grievous error. Chinese girls used
to die for face, if their bodies had been accidentally exposed to a man, as some
Western women were once willing to drown themselves for having an illegitimate
child. And yet in the West, the man who is slapped on the cheek and does not offer a
challenge for a duel is losing "honour9* but not losing face. On the other hand, the
ugly son of a taofai, who goes to a sing-song girl's house, is insulted and returns with
a company of police to order the arrest of the sing-song girl and the closing of the
house, is getting "face," but we would hardly say he is guarding his "honour."
Battles have been lost and empires have been sacrificed "because the generals were
bargaining for some honorific titles or some inoffensive way of accepting defeat
rather than proceeding according to military tactics. Hot controversies have raged and
protracted legal battles have been fought, in which the wise arbiter knows that all the
time nothing really prevents the parties from coming together except a nice way of
getting out of it, or probably the proper wording of an apology. A general split a
political party and changed the whole course of a revolution because he was publicly
insulted by a fellow-worker. Men and women are willing to drudge all the summer in
order to keep going a funeral celebration appropriate to the standing or face of the
family, and old families on the decline are willing to go bankrupt and live in debt for
life for the same reason.
Not to give a man face is the utmost height of rudeness and is like throwing down a gauntlet to him in the West. Many officials attend between three and four dinners in a
night and injure all their chances of a normal digestive system rather than make one of
their intended hosts lose face. Many defeated generals who ought to be beheaded or
rot in prison are sent on tours of "industrial" or "educational inspection" to Europe as
a price for their surrender, which saves their face and which explains the periodic
recrudescence of civil wars in China. A whole government ministry was abolished
four or five years ago in order to avoid the word "dismissal" and save the face of the
minister who ought to have been told in plain terms to get out and perhaps get a jail
sentence besides. (A dismissal would make the minister lose face, because there was
no change of cabinet at the time.) Human, all too human, this face of ours. And yet, it
is the goad of ambition and can overcome the Chinese love of money. It has caused a
schoolteacher infinite misery because the foreign principal insisted on increasing his
salary from eighteen dollars to nineteen dollars. He would rather take eighteen dollars
or twenty or die than be called a nineteen-dollar man. A father- in-law, by refusing to
ask his unworthy son- in-law to stay for supper and thus making him lose face, is
probably only wanting to make a man out of him, and very possibly that solitary walk
on his way back home may be the beginning of his making good.
It is safer on the whole, however, to travel with people who have no face than with
people who have too much of it. Two soldiers on a Yangtse steamer insisted on having
the face to go into a forbidden room containing cases of sulphur and sit on these cases
and throw cigarette ends about, against the entreaty of the compradore. Eventually,
the steamer was blown up, and the soldiers succeeded in saving their face but not their
charred carcasses. This had nothing to do with ignorance or education. An educated
Chinese general about five years ago thought his face entitled him to overweight
baggage when going up in an aeroplane at Shanghai, despite the remonstrations and
