pleadings of the pilot. Moreover, he wanted to have extra face before his friends who
came to see him off, and ordered the pilot to circle round. As he was a powerful
militarist the extra face was "granted." But the pilot became nervous, the plane
refused to go up evenly, it hit against a tree, and eventually the general paid for his
face by losing one of his legs. Anybody who think? face is good enough to
compensate for overweight luggage in an aeroplane ought to lose his leg and be
thankful for it.
So it seems that while it is impossible to define face, it is nevertheless certain that
until everybody loses his face in this country, China will not become a truly
democratic country. The people have not much face, anyway. The question is, when
will the officials be willing to lose theirs? When face is lost at the public courts, then
we will have safe traffic. When face is lost at the law courts, then we will have justice.
And when face is lost in the ministries, and the government by face gives way to a
government by law, then we will have a true republic.
VIII. THE VILLAGE SYSTEM
In the absence of the social mind, how is philanthropy possible in China, and what
forms have collective enterprises for public good taken? The answer is to be found in
the village system, which is the family raised to a higher exponent. The pastoral
background which developed the personal system of running National Museums also
developed a village consciousness, similar to the growing civic consciousness of a
New Yorker or a Chicagoan. From the love of the family there grew a love for the
clan, and from the love for the clan there developed an attachment for the land where
one was born. Thus a sentiment arose which may be called "provincialism," in
Chinese called funghsiang kuannien, or "the idea of being from the same native
place." This provincialism binds the people of the same village, or the same district,
or the same province together, and is responsible for the existence of district schools,
public grainage, merchant guilds, orphanages, and other public foundations.
Fundamentally, they spring from the family psychology and do not depart from the
family pattern. It is the family mind enlarged so as to make some measure of civic
co-operation possible.
In every big city on the coast or inland there are inevitably a number of provincial or
district guilds, like the Anhui Guild, the Ningpo Guild, etc. Whenever there are rich
merchants, these guilds are always liberally endowed. The ChangcKiian Guild of my
native town has in Shanghai a property valued at over a million dollars. It keeps a
school in which our native children may study free of tuition. The guilds may always
serve as hotels, like the Western club-houses, being very inexpensive, and sometimes
have a peculiar system of paying for board, besides providing the travelling merchant
with all the facilities of local guidance. In the Manchu days, when scholars from all
over the country had to go to Peking for the triennial examinations, there was not a
province or district that did not have its own guild-house in the capital. If one could
not find one's district guild, one could always find a provincial guild. In these guilds
the scholars and candidates for magistracies stayed, sometimes with their families, as
in permanent hotels. Certain provinces, like Shansi and Anhui, spread a network of
such guilds to enable their merchants to carry on trade all over the country.
Back at home, this village spirit enables the people to develop a system of communal
government, the only real government in China, the "central government" being
known only by its harassing yamen tax-collectors and its soldiers who always raise a
hullabaloo on their official descents into the country. The central government really
taxed the people very little in the good old imperial days, and from the villager's point
of view, "the heaven was high and the emperor far away." Conscription for military
service was unknown. When the country was at peace there was neither war nor
banditry, and only the riffraff of society ever thought of becoming soldiers. When the
country was not at peace, it was in any case difficult to distinguish between the
soldiers of the government and the bandits of the country, a distinction which is
totally unnecessary. In fact, no such distinction is logically tenable. As regards law
and justice, the people always fought shy of the law court, ninety- five per cent of village disputes being settled by the village elders. To be involved in a lawsuit was
ipso facto ignominious* Good old people often boasted that they had never entered an
official yamen or law court in their lifetimes. So of the three most important functions
of the central government, tax collection, maintaining peace and keeping justice, very
little came to bother the people. According to the Chinese political philosophy, that
government governs best which governs least. It was even so always. The real
government of China may be described as a village socialism. And what applies to the
village holds true in the general spirit for the town also.
The so-called village or town local government is invisible. It has no visible body of
authority like the mayor or councillors. It is governed really morally by the elders by
virtue of their great age, and by the gentry by virtue of their knowledge of law and
history. Fundamentally, it is governed by custom and usage, the unwritten law. In case
of disputes, the elders or patriarchs are invited to decide the right and wrong o f the
matter, according, as we have pointed out, not to reason alone but to "human nature
and eternal reason" combined. When there are no lawyers it is always easy to find out,
especially among parties weU known to each other and living under the same social
tradition, who is right and who is wrong. The absence of lawyers makes justice
possible, and when there is justice there is peace in the human heart. The village
gentry are as a class whiter than the town gentry, although their parasitic nature is
economically determined. There are good and upright scholars who do not make it
their profession to handle lawsuits, and who by their reputation for character and
learning share the general respect of the villagers with the elders. Under these elders
and scholars the people carry on. When disputes cannot be settled in this manner, as in
cases of crime and division of property, or when two parties are determined to fight
for face, then they go to the yamen. But it is only when both parties are prepared to
ruin themselves, for they avoid the yamen like a plague.
The Chinese people can always govern themselves, have always governed themselves.
If the thing called "government" can leave them alone, they are always willing to let
the government alone. Give the people ten years of anarchy, when the word
"government" will never be heard, and they will live peacefully together, they will
prosper, they will cultivate deserts and turn them into orchards, they will make wares
and sell them all over the country, and they will open up the hidden treasures of the
earth on their own enterprise and initiative. Opium will cease to be grown because no
one forces them to, and will become extinct automatically. And they will have saved
enough to provide against all temporary floods and famines. Let there be no tax
bureau with the signboard, "Enriching the nation and fattening the people," and the
nation will grow rich and the people will grow fat.
IX. "GOVERNMENT BY GENTLEMEN"
The most striking characteristic in our political life as a nation is the absence of a constitution and of the idea of civil rights. This is possible only because of a
different social and political philosophy, which mixes morals with politics and is a
philosophy of moral harmony rather than a philosophy of force. A "constitution"
presupposes that our rulers might be crooks who might abuse their power and violate
our "rights," which we use the constitution as a weapon to defend. The Chinese
conception of government is the direct opposite of this supposition. It is known as
a "parental government" or "government by gentlemen," who are supposed to look
after the people's interests as parents look after their children's interests, and to whom
we give a free hand and in whom we place an unbounded confidence. In these
people's hands we place millions without asking for a report of expenditure and to
these people we give unlimited official power without the thought of safeguarding
ourselves. We treat them like gentlemen.
There could be no finer, juster and more acute criticism of this government by
gentlemen than what was written twentyone hundred years ago by Hanfeitse, a
philosopher of the "legalist school" (fachia) who lived about three centuries after
Confucius. As the last and also the greatest of this school, he stood for a government
by law, instead of a government by persons. His analysis of the evils of this personal
government is so acute, and his pictures of Chinese political life of his day are so
strikingly appropriate for modern China, that he would not alter a word of it if he
were speaking to us to-day.
According to Hanfeitse, the beginning of political wisdom lies in rejecting all moral
platitudes and in shunning all efforts at moral reforms. I believe the sooner we stop
talking about moral reforms of the people, the sooner shall we be able to give China a
clean government. The fact that so many people persist in talking of moral reforms as
a solution for political evils is a sign of the puerility of their thinking and their
inability to grasp the political problems as political problems. They should see that we
have been talking moral platitudes continuously for the last two thousand years
without improving the country morally or giving it a cleaner and better government.
They should see that, if moraJizations would do any good, China should be a paradise
of saints and angels to-day. I suspect that the reason why moral reform talks are so
popular, especially with our officials, is because they know that such talks do nobody
any harm. Probably all our moral uplifters have a bad conscience. I find that General
Chang Tsungch'ang and others who want to restore Confucianism and uplift others'
morals generally keep from five to fifteen wives and were adepts at seducing young
girls. We say, "Benevolence is a good thing,95 and they echo, "True, benevolence is a
good thing," and no harm is done anybody. On the other hand, I do not hear any of our
officials talking about government by law, because the people would reply, "All right,
we will prosecute you by law and send you to prison." The earlier, therefore, we stop
talking about morality and switch over to the subject of the strict enforcement of law,
the sooner we make it impossible for these officials to dodge the issue and pretend to
read the Confucian classics in the foreign settlements.
Briefly, we may say, therefore, that there were two opposing conceptions of
government in Hanfeitse's times, as well as in our own times: the Confucian
conception of government by gentlemen and the legalist conception of government by
law rather than by persons. The Confucian system assumes every ruler to be a
gentleman and proceeds to treat him like a gentleman. The legalist system assumes
every ruler to be a crook and proceeds to make provisions in the political sys tem to
prevent him from carrying out his crooked intentions. Obviously the first is the
traditional view, and the second the Western view and also the view of Hanfeitse. As
Hanfeitse says, we should not expect people to be good, but we should make it
impossible for them to be bad. That is the moral basis of the legalist philosophy. In
other words, instead of expecting our rulers to be gentlemen and to walk in the path of
righteousness, we should assume them to be potential prison- inmates and devise ways
and means to prevent these potential convicts from robbing the people and selling the
country. One can readily see that the latter system is more likely to be effective as a
check for political corruption than waiting for a change of hearts in these gentlemen.
In China, however, we have been doing the reverse. Instead of assuming them to be
potential crooks, as we should have done long ago, we assume them to be gentlemen.
In the good old Confucian way, we expect them to be benevolent rulers and to love
the people as their own sons. We expect them to be honest, and we say, "Go ahead,
spend what you like out of the public funds, and we will not demand a public budget
or a rendering of public accounts." We say to our militarists, "Go ahead, we trust you
will love the people so much that we will let you tax us according to your
conscience." And we say to our diplomats, "Go ahead, we have implicit faith in your
patriotism, and will allow you to contract any and every sort of international treaty
without having to submit it to us for approval." And to all our officials we say, "In
