and pining lovers and emaciated sweethearts. It was natural that a people given to this
kind of sentimental poetry should be conquered by a northern people who had but
short, naive lines of poetry, taken, as it were, direct and without embellishment from
the dreary northern landscape.
Down by the Chehleh river,
Beneath the Yin hills,
Like an inverted cup is the sky
That covers the wasteland.
Enormous is the earth,
And the sky is a deep blue;
The wind blows, the tall grass bends,
And the sheep and cattle come into view.
It was with this song that a northern general, after suffering a heavy defeat, rallied his
soldiers and sent them again to battle. And in contrast to the southern songs of love,
we have a general singing about a newly bought broadsword:
I have just bought me a five-foot knife,
I swing it with a gleaming cadence.
I fondle it three times a clay,
I won't change it for fifteen maidens!
Another song handed down to us reads:
In the distance I descry the Mengchin river,
The willows and poplars stand in silent grace.
I am a Mongol's son.
And don't know Chinese lays.
A good rider requires a swift horse,
And a swift horse requires a good rider.
When it clatters off amidst a cloud of dust,
You know then who wins and who's the outsider.1
Lines like these open up a vista of speculation as to the diflferences of northern and
southern blood that went into the make-up of the Chinese race, and seem to make it
possible to understand how a nation subjected to two thousand years of kowtowing
and indoor living and a civilization without popular sports could avoid the fate of
civic racial degeneration that overtook Egypt, Greece and Rome and the other ancient civilizations. How has China done it?
1 These songs are quoted by Dr. Hu Shih in support of the same thesis.
II. DEGENERATION
Degeneration is a highly misleading term, for it can only be relative in meaning. Since
the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems
to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly
civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly. I have heard
sympathetic foreigners talking of Chinese farmers "living like beasts,35 whose first
step of salvation would seem to lie in a generous disinfection of their huts and
belongings.
Yet it is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is
dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards. Actually,
the European man living in overheated apartments and luxurious cars is less fitted to
survive than the Chinese farmer living in his lowly and undisinfected hut. Nor is
cruelty, natural in all children and savages, a sign of degeneration; rather the fear of
pain and suffering is a sign of it. The dog which remembers only to bark and not to
bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf. Even
physical prowess of the type of Jack Dempsey's can lay no claim to human glory
outside the ring, but rather only the power to work and to live a happy life. Not even
a more highly developed animal whose body is a more sensitized and complicated
organism, with greater specialized powers and more refined desires, is necessarily a
more robust or healthy animal, when life and survival and happiness come into the
question. The real question of physical and moral health in man as well as in
animals is how well he is able to do his work and enjoy his life, and how fit he is yet
to survive.
If one takes merely the physical evidences, one can see clear traces of the effects of
thousands of years of civilized life, Man in China has adapted himself to a social and
cultural environment that demands stamina, resistance power and negative strength,
and he has lost a great part of mental and physical powers of conquest and adventure
which characterized his forebears in the primeval forests. The humour of the Chinese
people in inventing gunpowder and finding its best use in making firecrackers for
their grandfathers' birthdays is merely symbolical of their inventiveness along merely
pacific lines. The preference for daintiness over power in art has a physical basis in
man's lessened vitality and mellowed instincts, and the preference for reasonableness
over aggressiveness in philosophy may be actually traceable to the rounded chin and
the amorphous face.
So also have the contempt for physical prowess and sports and the general dislike of
the strenuous life intimately to do with man's decreased bodily energy, especially in
the cityliving bourgeois class. This is easily observable in a street car crowd or a
faculty meeting, where Europeans and Chinese are placed in a row side b y side.
Unhygienic forms of living and the general overeating on the part of the bourgeois
Chinese account, in many cases, for the drooping-shoulders and the listless eye. The
constitutional differences between European and Chinese children at school age are
unmistakable. On the athletic field, it is invariably found that boys who have a
European father or mother distinguish themselves by their greater swiftness, agility
and general exuberance of energy, while they seldom excel in tests of endurance and
never in scholastic attainments. The much vaunted bossing of the Hankow Nationalist
Government in 1927 by a man called Borodin is due to the simple fact that the
energetic Russian, who is taking merely a second-rate place at home, did three times
the work of a Chinese official, and could talk the Chinese leaders to sleep until the
latter had to give in in order to be let alone.
Many Europeans in Shanghai wonder why they are dropped by their Chinese friends
without realizing the simple reason that the latter are not able to stand the strain of a
long and exciting conversation, especially when it is in a foreign language. Many a
Sino-European partnership, matrimonial or commercial, has been wrecked on the
European's impatience with Chinese stodgy smugness and the Chinaman's impatience
with the European's inability to keep still. The way in which American jazz-band
conductors shake their knees and European passengers pace a steamship deck is, to
the Chinese> highly ridiculous* With the exception of Chiang Kaishek and T. V,
Soong, th< Chinese leaders do not "work like a horse"; they simply work like
civilized human beings, where life is regarded as not worth the bother of too much
human effort, and eventually if Chiang Kaishek and T. V. Soong come out on top, it
will be just on account of their greater stamina and capacity for drudgery. It was T. V*
Soong who, using a Chinese idiom, announced that he was "as strong as an ox" when
he resigned, and failed to give diabetes or hardened liver or tired nerves for his
political resignation, which all the rest of the Chinese officials unashamedly do. A list
of the physical and mental ailments, from wrecked stomachs and overworked kidneys
to shattered nerves and muddled heads, publicly announced by the officials during
their political sicknesses, most of which are genuine, would cover all the departments
and wards of a modern hospital.
With the exception of the late Sun Yatsen, the Chinese leaders, first-rate scholars all,
do not keep up their reading and do not write. A work like Trotzky's autobiography by
a Chinese leader is simply unimaginable, and even a manifestly lucrative first-class
biography of Sun Yatsen has not yet been written by a Chinese, almost a decade after
the great leader's death, nor are there adequate biographies of Tseng Kuofan or Li
Hungchang or Yuan Shihkai.
It seems the sipping of tea in the yamen and the interminable talking and eating of melon seeds at home have consumed all our scholars' time. Facts like these explain
why gem- like verses, dainty essays, short prefaces to friends' works, funeral sketches
of friends' lives and brief descriptions of travels comprise the works of ninety- five per
cent of the famous Chinese authors. When one cannot be powerful, one must choose
to be dainty, and when one cannot be aggressive, one has to make a virtue of
reasonableness. Only once in a while do we meet a Sstima Ch' ien or a Cheng Ch' iao
or a Ku Yenwu, whose prodigious labours suggest to us the indefatigable bodily
energy of a Balzac or a Victor Hugo. That is what two thousand years of kowtowing
could do to a nation.
A study of the hair and skin of the people also seems to indicate what must be
considered results of millenniums of civilized indoor living. The general lack or
extreme paucity of beard on man's face is one instance of such effect, a fact which
makes it possible for most Chinese men not to know the use of a personal razor. Hair
on men's chests is unknown, and a moustache on a woman's face, not so rare in
Europe, is out of the question in China. On good authority from medical doctors, and
from references in writing, one knows that a perfectly bare mons veneris is not
uncommon in Chinese women. The pores of the skin are finer than those of the
Europeans, . with the result that Chinese ladies, on the whole, have more delicate
complexions than have European ladies, and their muscles are considerably more
flabby, an ideal consciously cultivated through the institution of footbinding, which
has other sex appeals. The Chinese are evidently aware of this effect, for in Hsinfeng,
Kwangtung, keepers of poultry yards keep their chickens shut up for life in a dark
coop, without room for movement, giving us the Hsinfeng chicken, noted for its
extreme tenderness. Glandular secretions from the skin must have correspondingly
decreased, for the Chinese explain the foreigners* habit of talking their (imagined)
daily baths by their comparatively stronger bodily odour. Perhaps the most marked
difference is in the loss of the full, rich resonant quality in the Chinese vo ice,
compared with that of the Europeans.
While facts regarding the senses are not to my knowledge available, there is no reason
to suppose a deterioration in the fine use of the ears and the eyes. The refined
olfactory sense is reflected in the Chinese cuisine and in the fact that, in Peking, one
speaks of kissing a baby as "smelling" a baby, which is what is done actually. The
Chinese literary language has also many equivalents of the French odeur de femme,
like "flesh odour" and "fragrance from marble (a woman's body)." On the other hand,
sensitiveness to cold and heat and pain and general noise seems to be much more
blunt in the Chinese than in the white man. One is well trained for such hardness in
the Chinese family communal living. Perhaps the one thing that compels admiration
from Westerners is our nerves. While sensitiveness is often very refined along
specialized lines梩 he obvious proof of this is the great beauty of Chinese handicraft
products in general 梩 here seems to be a corresponding coarseness as regards
response to pain and general suffering.1 The Chinese capacity for endurance in suffering is enormous.
III. INFUSION OF NEW BLOOD
But the Chinese people, as a race, did not survive merely on the strength of coarse
nerves or of capacity for suffering. Actually, they survived on the sinolization2 of
Mongolian peoples. A kind of phylogenetic monkey-gland grafting took place, for
one observes a new bloom of culture after each introduction of new blood. The
brief sketch of the general constitution and physical condition of the Chinese people
shows, not that they have entirely escaped the effects of long civilized living, but that
they have developed traits which render them helpless at the hands of a fresher and
more warlike race. Life with the Chinese seems to move on a slower, quieter level,
the level of sedate living, not the level of action and adventure, with corresponding
mental and moral habits of a peaceful and negative character. This makes it easily
understandable why periodic conquests from the North were inevitable. Politically,
the nation has perished several times at the hands of these conquerors. The problem
is then how, in the midst of this political subjugation, the nation remained as a nation;
not how the nation warded off these military disasters, as Christendom stopped the
advance of the Moslems at the battle of Tours, but how it survived these disasters and,
in fact, profited from them by the infusion of new blood, without losing its racial
individuality or cultural continuity. The national life, it seems, was organised on
such a pattern that the loss of the pristine vigour did not mean the loss of racial
stamina and power for resistance. The key to this racial stamina and power for
resistence is the key to China's survival.
1 Arthur Smith's renowned Chinese Characteristics has a chapter on "The Absence of
Comfort and Convenience/' recounting his experience and observations of Chinese
dress, houses, pillows and beds, which all European readers find amusing. I wager it
is ten times more amusing to Chinese readers to learn of Arthur Smith's account of his
