case you turn out to be gentlemen, we will erect stone pailou in your honour, but in
case you turn out to be crooks, we will not put you in prison." Never in other
countries was there such a gentlemanly treatment of officials. Now Hanfeitse says this
is all wrong: it is taking too many chances with their moral endowments. If Hanfeitse
were living to-day he would advise us to assume them to be crooks and say to them,
"We will not exhort you to the path of righteousness and we will not erect stone pailou
in your honour in case you turn out to be gentlemen, but in case you turn out to be
crooks, we will send you to prison." That seems to be a sounder and speedier way of
putting an end to our political corruption. I quote here a passage from Hanfeitse, in a
rather free rendering. He says: "You can expect generally about ten honest men in a
country (which is a pretty good average). But there are, on the other hand, probably a
hundred offices. As a result, you have more official positions than honest men to fill
them, so that you have ten honest men and ninety crooks to fill all of the positions.
Hence there will be more likelihood of a general misrule rather than a good
government. Therefore, the wise king believes in a system and not in personal talents,
in a method and not in personal honesty," Hanfeitse denied that a "parental
government" would ever work, because, he pointed out, even parents do not always
succeed in governing their children, and it would be unreasonable to expect rulers to love the people more than parents love their children. Hanfeitse coldly and
humorously asked how many disciples Confucius got with all his tremendous
benevolence and righteousness, and was not the fact that even Confucius could obtain
only seventy disciples among hundreds and thousands . of people a clear proof of the
futility of virtue? Was it not unreasonable to expect all rulers to walk in virtue like
Confucius and all their subjects to love virtue like his seventy disciples? There is a
kind of pleasing cynicism, dry humour, and sound sense in those words.
Hanfeitse's description of the ills of his country agrees to a fault with those of
present-day China. So similar was the character of the officials and people of those
days that, in reading him, we might easily forget that he was not depicting modern
China. He traced the corruption of the officials and the apathy of the people of his day
to the lack of legal protection, to the fault of the system. Instead of moralizing about it,
he preached that it was the system of government and the lack of public legal
protection that was at fault. He said all troubles lay in the lack of a "public or just
law." He hated the Confucianists of his day and called them a pack of gabbling fools,
which might be fittingly applied to so many of our "long-gown patriots" to-day. He
said of the officials of that time that they were encouraged in their corruption because
there was no punishment for them. He said in these very words: "Although their
national territory is sacrificed, their families have got rich. If they succeed, they will
be powerful, and if they fail, they can retire in wealth and comfort"梬 ords that might
have been written for a great part of the villadom that is living in retirement in Dairen
or the Shanghai Settlements. He said that because of the lack of a system, "people
were promoted according to their party connections, and were obliged to divert their
attention to social entertainments rather than the fulfilment of the law." How true
these words are to-day, only officials and official candidates themselves know.
There was an important passage which contained the very interesting phrase kungmin
("public citizen") and which tried to account for the general apathy and indifference of
the people toward their national affairs. He said in effect: "Now you send people to
fight. They will be killed whether they go forward or turn back. That is dangerous for
them. You ask them to forsake their own private pursuits and join the military service,
and when they are poor, those above do not pay them any attention. Of course, they
remain poor. Now who likes to be in danger and poverty? Naturally, they will try to
keep away from you. Therefore they will mind their own business and will be
interested in building their own houses and will try to avoid war. By avoiding war,
they will have security. But by practising graft and bribery, they can become rich and
secure themselves for life. Now who would not like to be wealthy and to live in peace?
And how can you prevent them from seeking peace and wealth? This is the reason
why there are so few public citizens and so many private individuals,"
It is still true to-day that we have too few public citizens and too many private
individuals and the reason is to be found in the lack of adequate legal protection. It has nothing to do with morals. The evil lies in the system. When it is too dangerous
for a man to be too public-spirited, it is natural that he should take an apathetic
attitude toward national affairs, and when there is no punishment for greedy and
corrupt officials, it is too much to ask of human nature that they should not be corrupt.
Hence Hanfeitse believed in the establishment of an "inviolable law which should
apply to both the ruler and the ruled alike." He believed that the law should be
supreme, that all people should be equal before the law, and that this law should be
applied in place of personal preferences and connections.
Here we have not only a conception of equality that is almost Western, but we have a
type of thinking that strikes me as being most un-Ghinese. It is strange that, in
contrast to the Confucianist dictum that "courtesy should not be extended to the
commoners and punishment should not be served up to the lords/9 we have here a
legalist who says that we should have a "law that does not fawn upon the mighty, and
statutes that should be applied rigidly, so that wherever the law applies, the clever will
submit and the powerful will not protest, the nobility will not be exempted from
punishment and rewards will not go over the heads of the humble." Hanfeitse
conceived of a law "before which the high and the low, the clever ones and the stupid
ones shall stand equal." He pushed the idea of a mechanistic rule of the law so far that
he believed it would not be necessary to have wise and able rulers 梐 mechanistic
notion which is totally un-Chinese.
Hence the Taoistic element in his system that "the king should do nothing." The king
should do nothing, because he saw the kings could not do anything anyway, as the
average run of kings goes, and there should be a machinery of government running so
justly and perfectly that it does not matter whether we have good or bad rulers. The
king, therefore, becomes a figurehead, as in the modern constitutional government.
The English people have a king to lay foundation stones and christen ships and blight
people, but it is entirely unimportant to the nation whether they have a good or bad
king, an intelligent king or a comparatively mediocre king. The system should run of
itself. That in essence is the theory of do-nothingism concerning the king, as
interpreted by Hanfeitse and practised also with great success in England.
It is a queer irony of fate that the good old schoolteacher Confucius should ever be
called a political thinker, and that his moral molly-coddle stuff should ever be
honoured with the name of a "political" theory. The idea of a government by virtue
and by benevolent rulers is so fantastic that it cannot deceive a college sophomore.
One might just as well regulate motor traffic on Broadway by trusting to the drivers*
spontaneous courtesy, instead of by a system of red and green lights. And any thinking
student of Chinese history should have observed that the Chinese government d la
Confucius with its tremendous moralizing has always been one of the most corrupt
the world has ever seen. The reason is not that Chinese officials are any more corrupt
than Western ones. The plain, inexorable political and historical truth is that when you
treat officials like gentlemen, as we have been doing in China, one-tenth of them will be gentlemen and nine-tenths of them will turn out to be crooks; but when you treat
them like crooks, with prisons and threats of prisons, as they do in the West,
considerably less than one-tenth succeed in being crooks and fully nine-tenths of them
succeed in pretending that they are gentlemen. As a result, you have at least the
semblance of a clean government. That semblance is worth having. That is what
China should have done long ago, and that was Hanfeitse's advice two thousand years
ago, before he was made to quaff poison.
Chapter Seven
LITERARY LIFE
I. A DISTINCTION
THE Chinese make a distinction between literature that instructs and literature that
pleases, or literature that is "the vehicle of truth" and literature that is "the expression
of emotion/' The distinction is easy to see: the former is objective and expository,
while the latter is subjective and lyrical. They all pretend that the former is of greater
value than the latter, because it improves the people's minds and uplifts society's
morals. From this point of view, they look down upon novels and dramas as "little arts,
unworthy to enter the Hall of Great Literature." The only exception is poetry, which
they not only do not despise but cultivate and honour more intensively and generally
than in the West. As a matter of fact, all of them read novels and dramas on the sly,
and the official who writes only of benevolence and r ighteousness in his essays will
be found, in private conversations, to be quite familiar with the heroes and heroines of
Chinfiinmi (Gold-Vase-Plum), the pornographic novel par excellence, or of P' inhua
Paochieny an equally pornographic homosexual novel.
The reason for this is not far to seek. The "literature that instructs35 is on the whole of
such low, second-rate quality, so full of moral platitudes and naive reasoning, and the
scope of ideas is so hemmed in by the fear of heresy, that the only Chinese literature
that is readable is literature in the Western sense, including the novels, dramas and
poetry, i.e., literature of the imagination rather than literature of ideas. Scholars who
were not economists wrote about taxation, literary men who did not know how to
handle a sickle wrote about agriculture, and politicians who were not engineers wrote
about "A Plan for Huangho Conservancy" (an extremely popular topic),
In the sphere of ideas the scholars were, as we say in Chinese, only turning
somersaults in the Confucian school and looking for cow's hair in the courts of the
Confucian temple. All of them denounced Chuangtse, the greatest writer of libels against Confucianism, and all of them read Chuangtse. Some of them even dared to
play with Buddhist classics, but their cult of Buddhism was dilettantish and their
vegetarianism half-hearted. The fear of heresy hung over their heads like the sword of
Damocles, and the fear of heresy could only mean the fear of originality. Literature
which lives only on spontaneity was harnessed with the classical tradition of ideas.
The "freeplay of the mind" was extremely limited in scope, and the "somersaults in
the Confucian school," however skilful they might be, were nothing but somersaults
within the Confucian precincts.
After all, a nation of scholars could not discuss benevolence and righteousness for two
thousand five hundred years without repeating themselves. Actually, an essay which
won the first place in the triennial imperial examinations, when rendered into plain
English, would stagger English readers by its puerility and childishness- The gigantic
literary feat produced by the gigantic brain-power gives one the impression of the
antics of a flea circus. A writer could therefore be original only in the sphere of novels
and dramas, where one could be comfortably oneself, and where imagination could be
creative*
As a matter of fact, all literature that is worth while, that is the expression of man's
soul, is lyrical in origin. This is true even in the literature of ideas: only ideas that
come straight from man's heart will survive. Edward Young made this point clear as
far back as 1795 in his Conjectures en Original Composition. Ch' in Shengt'an, a
distinguished critic of the seventeenth century, said repeatedly in his letters: "What is
poetry but a voice of the heart? It can be found in women's and children's hearts, and
it comes to you by morning and by night." The origin of literature is really as simple
as that, in spite of all the rhetorical and compositional technique that professors oi
literature try to encumber it with. Ch' in Shengt'an also says; "The ancient people were
not compelled to say anything, bu1 they suddenly said something purely of their own
accord. They spoke sometimes of events, and sometimes of their own feelings, and
having finished what they had to say, they took leave and departed." The difference
