shines over it, and its brow seems \vhite with reflections, but when the setting sun
touches it with an evening glow, it can still laugh cheerily. An early mountain breeze
brushes by and sends its shivering leaves dancing gaily to the ground, and you do not
know whether the song of the falling leaves is the song of laughter or of parting tears.
For it is the Song of the Spirit of Early Autumn, the spirit of calm and wisdom and
maturity, which smiles at sorrow itself and praises the exhilarating, keen, cool air 梩
he Spirit of Autumn so well expressed by Hsin Ch' ichi:
In my young days,
I had tasted only gladness.
But loved to mount the top floor,
But loved to mount the top floor,
To write a song pretending sadness,
And now I've tasted
Sorrow's flavours, bitter and sour,
And can't find a word,
And can't find a word,
But merely say, "What a gold autumn hour!"
II. REAL CHINA
[The following must not be taken as reflecting an the National Government, but rather
on the immensity of the task which the Government is faced with in its gigantic work
of evolving order out of chaos,]
But let us be honest* It would be easy for a sinologue to paint a picture of idealized
China, the China of blue porcelain bowls and the exquisite figures on the blue
porcelain bowls, and the China of silk scrolls and the happy scholars sitting under
pine trees on the scrolls. It would be easy to say with the sinologue: Even if Japan
should conquer China for a few centuries, what of it? A Chinese cannot say: What of
it? Foe we are living in a real China, not the China of blue porcdaia bowk and
exquisite silk scrolls, but a Ghiaa ia the midst of pangs and thn>es of labour, a China
facing the collapse of an empire and a civilization, a China of living millions of
toiling humanity, with a desire to work and to live,, struggling against floods and
famines and bandit-soldiers and a bandit-gentry, and living in a state of chaos without
meaning, turmoil without direction, unrest without change, verbiage without
conviction, action without purpose, and misery without hope. And if one is a Chinese,
one feels like saying with Hamlet that the time is sadly out of joint and cursed are we
born to set it right, or crying out with the Hebrews, CCO Lord! How long?" and it is a
cry of despair which is not mere petulance, but a despair based on an intimate
knowledge of present-day China as no foreigners know it.
Paint as one will a glorious picture of dream-China, the China of her classics and
philosophy and art, sooner or later one will have to face the puzzle of a real China,
and perhaps through a process of long and painful thought, demand of the past an
answer to the present, and demand of the present a meaning for the future. To glorify
the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light
and understanding is difficult. For between the glorious past and the possibly glorious
future there lies a valley, and one has to descend in order to ascend. There is need for
a robust realism more than for innocent faith, and more for an open-eyed wisdom than
for patriotic ardour; for patriotic ardour is a cheap commodity and can be had at so
many cents a catty in the form of printer's ink for the newspapers and blue paint for
the yamen walls.
There is a Chinese saying that it is better to be a dog in peaceful times than be a man
in times of unrest. All Chinese are wishing they were dogs in peaceful times, but they
have not that luck. For we are living in a period of complete and unmitigated
disillusionment, in a period of lack of faith, not only in the present revolution but in
all revolutions. Mencius has said that the greatest sorrow is the death of the heart, and
now truly the heart is dead. The optimism and cheerful idealism of 1926 have given
place to the cynicism and disillusionment of 1934, a rumbling cynicism visible in all
newspaper articles and private talks.
Slowly and laboriously has come the realization that the more we change, the more
we remain the same; that underlying the superficial changes of government system,
the essential state of things, the essential corruption, futility and incompetence remain,
and the essential hopelessness. To Western admirers of Marco Polo's Cathay, with its
magnificence and grandeur, real China comes as a bad shock, and to the Chinese it comes as an admission of defeat. Slowly and painfully one realizes that we are still
being ruled in the provinces by feudal chieftains \vith vulgar names and by their
illiterate -wives with sing-song names, and that the province is lucky which sees the
type of enlightened despotism of General Han Fuchil, despite his woeful
mediaevalism. Acting as governor, magistrate, judge, jury and lawyer at the same time,
he flogs the one and sends the other away with a hundred dollars according to his
intuition and knowledge of physiognomy, and gives the people some sort of a rough
justice and security. Then, all of a sudden, one realizes that we have but substituted a
dozen disguised monarchies for a genuine one, and that the Revolution of 1911 was a
success only in the sense of a racial revolution, that it only blew an empire into
powder and left some ruins and debris and choking dust behind. Sometimes one
wishes that China had remained a monarchy, and wonders with regret why Tseng
Kuofan did not march his soldiers on Peking after suppressing the Taiping Rebellion,
and found a Chinese dynasty^, as he could very well have done, and as someone had
advised him to do. But Tseng Kuofan was a Confucianist scholar with moral scruples,
and it took an unscrupulous imperial brigand to found an imperial dynasty* So much
the worse for the people of China!
Vain regrets. But how can one be blamed for these vain regrets, when one was
brought up in a China before her complete disintegration? I can still recall the China
of my childhood days, a China none too well ruled, it is true, but nevertheless a
peaceful China. The greed and corruption and incompetence of the Manchu
Government were the same, and some officials squeezed more than the others, but the
worst ones were impeached and deposed or sent to jail, for there was a system. There
were good governors and bad governors, but they were educated mandarins, and not
onion-eating, oath-* swearing, and hell-breathing war- lords, masters unto themselves
and ruling by the grace of their illiterate fists. There were good magistrates and bad
magistrates, some whom the people loved and some whom the people feared, but
those who overstepped their limits encountered "town strikes," and their case was
reported to the governor or the Emperor, and they were dismissed, transferred or
punished. Thus was there a system, however imperfect, and some sort of justice,
however qualified, and where there was justice, there was peace. There were no civil
wars, bandits were yet rare, and one could travel from one part of the province to
another with security.
For old China was not the topsy-turvydom it is to-day. If taxation was not based on
the consent of the people, it was based on custom and usage, which was the real law
of the land, and the farmers knew what they had to pay in spring and what they had to
pay in autumn. One had not yet heard of the cofEn tax, the wedding-sedan-chair tax1
and the pig- intercourse tax, the pig-birth tax, the young-pig tax, the pig-trough tax, the
pig-weighing tax, the pig-butchery tax, and the porkin- the-restaurant tax and finally
the pork-after-the-digestionand- in-the-toilet tax.2 One had not yet heard of the
righteousness tax and the benevolence tax and the civic welfare tax and the red-hot
patriotism tax, and the house-number tax, and there was no "laziness tax" to punish the farmers who failed to plant opium. The farmers of China did not have to sell their
wives and daughters to pay the tax, as some farmers of Kiangpei are doing; they were
not forbidden by soldiers to reap their harvest as a reprisal for failure to pay a new tax,
as the farmers of Fanyu hsien in Kwangtung were forbidden by their magistrate in the
autumn of 1934. People were not taxed thirty years ahead, as the people of Szechuen
now are;8 they were not subjected to farm surtaxes thirty times the regular farm tax,
as is being done in Kiangsi.4 The farmers were not compelled to pay taxes above their
means and then taken to prison for failure to turn in the money and flogged so that
you could hear their cries and moans all night, as you can hear the farmers of Shensi
being flogged and crying and moaning in jail at night now.1 The poor people of China,
the most misruled nation on earth, who are caught in a whirl of forces they cannot
understand, but who abide it all with an indomitable industry and patience and real
goodness which must eventually triumph. Let them turn bandits, when their last cow
is sold. Let them turn beggars, when their last chattel has been taken away from them.
The urge to work and to live rises indomitable, and they still keep their good humour,
and for their goodness and their good humour, God will still love them.
* In aoathem Fttkiea.
* These various taxes are known in Swatow and Hankow.
* See t&e various numbers of the Sxcckuen Monthly, 1934.
* "Wang CMngwei, speaking on the ninth anniversary of Dr. Sun's death,
March 12, 1934, **&** "Investigation conducted by the Rural Rehabilitation
Cotnmisskai last year showed that the farm surtax collected in different
provinces sometimes amounted to from. 25 to 31 times the regular farm tax.**
{?猾 JV*?
Surely there has been a dislodgement, a dislocation of national life and thought
somewhere in a country which has known national greatness, but which is to-day
ashamed of itself. Some maladjustment, or maladjustments, of a profound order,
which disturb the mental balance and produce a temporary delirium, as if the spirit
had left the body and the body made only futile, meaningless gestures. A madness
and a loss of restraint and all decency, produced by a loss of national selfconfidence,
as if there were a common foreboding of evil, and man's follies and evil passions are
let loose in an each-man- forhimself and scramble-as-one-scramble-can fight, the goal
of which is the buying of a house and a car to live in security in the foreign
settlements, and the holding of a large account in the Hongkong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation. For surely a country is mad when some high officials and guardians of the Peiping National Museum cannot take their eyes off those
national treasures until they have sold them to the highest bidders and converted them
into cash in their private pockets, and when these officials can safely reside
somewhere and defy the law court when they are publicly prosecuted. Surely a
country is mad when a general, who lost the whole Jehol territory without putting up
the pretence of a fight, but used two hundred military trucks to cart off his concubines
aad his treasures, is pardoned by the National Government; when so many generals
leave their arms and ammunition behind during a defeat, but take care to cart away
their store of opium, for with opium they can get gold, and with gold they can buy
themselves back into power; when the farmers are compelled to plant opium rather
than rice in order to maintain a rabble and never-paid army; and when a famed
agricultural country is compelled to import millions oftaek of rice and wheat from
abroad every year, and when in the midst of all this insanity the people, whose
interests are immediately affected, cannot say "no" to their rulers and oppressors.
Surely something is wrong with the body politic, and the nation, as a nation, must
have lost all its moral values and its sense of right and wrong.
* According to a report by Professor Hsft PingcVaBg, pabfisWi number of the
Independent Revism, edited by Dr, Ha
For it is apparent that a system of ideas has collapsed, ideas moral and ideas politica l.
Old China had a system of government and a system of moral ideas which were
adequate to maintain the national life, but which to-day are thrown out of their
bearings and perhaps do more harm than good. Who would buy patience? Let them
come to China, for patience in this country can be had for the asking. And who would
buy meekness and humility and all those nice Christian herd virtues that Christendom
has not learned after two millenniums of praying and psalm-singing and sermonizing?
Let them come to China, for in pagan China these Christian virtues are as abundant as
sands in the desert and as crocodiles in the Ganges, For a change of tempo has come
over the national life, and instead of the primitive, patriarchal heyday of peace and
leisure and courtesy, we are living in an age of haste and gold and self-assertion, and
all the patience and meekness and humility that adorned the ancient pattern of life
cannot retard, but rather must hasten, its collapse.
It seems the race cannot adjust itself to a new world, with healthier, more aggressive
people all around and demanding a new ethics to suit the new tempo of life; and,
fearful and angry with itself* has lost its calm and poise and good sense for which it
