was so renowned. It has, it seems only so recently, lost its ethos and its national
self-confidence, and from this loss of selfconfidence it has become freakish,
bad-tempered, oversensitive, and does and says many foolish things, like an unhappy
husband or an old man suffering from hardened veins. The nat ion frisks and frets, and
alternates between megalomania and melancholia, and easily becomes hysterical. This
is especially observable in the more articulate, I dare not say more intelligent, class,
who are wont to get into fits of excitability, quite natural because they are fits of an overwhelming sense of helplessness, and then settle down to a permanent depression
of spirits. Some of these scholars are ashamed of our own country, of our farmers and
coolies, and of our own customs and language and arts and literature, and would like
to cover China up with a huge shroud as if it were a stinking carcass, and allow
foreigners to see only white-collared, Englishspeaking Chinese like themselves,
whereas the common people merely suffer and carry on.
Then once in a while the subconscious leaps to the fore, and the ruling classes know
that someone, not themselves of course, is running the country to perdition, and they
turn moralists, and panaceas for "saving the country- " are offered. Some advocate
salvation by learning the use of machine-guns, another by frugality and the wearing of
sandals, another by dancing and wholesale introduction of Western life, another by
selling and buying national goods, another by physical culture through good old
boxing, another by learning Esperanto, another by saying Buddhist masses, another by
reintroducing the Confucian classics in school, and another by "throwing the classics
into the toilet for thirty years.5* To hear them discussing the salvation of the country
would be like listening to a council of quack doctors at a patient's deathbed. It would
be humorous if it were not so pathetic. Since a fundamental reform of the political life
would mean the abolition of militarism and militarist interference with politics, and
the weeding out of political corruption would mean the abolition of the privileges of
the ruling class and sending ninetyfive per cent of them to jail, both of which are
obnoxious to themselves, they have turned themselves into moral uplifters and
preached old morality which can injure and give offence to nobody. One sees
everywhere a tumult and chaos, a tumult and chaos of the spirit more than of the body,
a madness with* out method in its sham progressiveness as wdl as in its sham
nationalism. The highest officials of the Government alternate between initiating lama
prayers for the salvation of the country and suppressing the traditional boatrace of the
Dragon Festival by branding it as a superstition. The provincial governments, who
find it so difficult to make any real achievements in reconstruction, find themselves
very busy regulating the costumes of men and women, for the girls' sleeves are too
short in Kwangsi, and the men's gowns are too long in Szechuen ("because in this
period of national crisis, we must save more cloth"), and the women's hair should not
be curled in Shantung, and the boys' heads must be shaved close in certain schools in
Hunan, and the girls* breasts should not be bound in Chekiang, and high-collared
dress and high-heeled shoes should not be worn by the prostitutes in Nanking, and
women should not keep male dogs and lead them through the streets in Peiping.1
All this confusion, this busy triviality, this madness and hypocrisy, and these
exaggerations of pride and solicitude seem to indicate the existence of a wish
unfulfilled, and a conflict of will and character. Custom and convention, which are the
mainstay of any society, are no longer held in honour; the old can no longer command
the respect of the young, and the young grow over-critical of the old; a deep chasm
exists between the growing generation and mature age. Culture, which is the fruit of a
continuity of life and thought, is no longer possible, and criticism, which is the sole guardian of modern culture, and which should keep a watchful eye over the flux of
life, lies prostrate before a task too big for itself, while cheerful, robust good sense,
for which China was so distinguished, buries its head in shame, Man has something
undernourished and neurasthenic, something partial and incomplete and eternally
frustrated about him.
III. A QUEST FOR LEADERSHIP
Whoa. I ponder over ail this confusion, this meanness and insincerity* I fed like
Gabriel asking Lot: Where are the good men of China, and how many are they? Are
there a hundred? Are there fifty? Are there ten? Are there five? Or rather I wonder
how I would answer Gabriel myself. Are these mutilated examples of undernourished
neurasthenic half-men, so much in evidence with their busy triviality, all we have left
of man in modern China, so that a nation of four hundred million souls is condemned
to carry on like a flock without a shepherd? Where have the good men hidden
themselves, as if in shame? But I am reminded that the good men in China have
always hidden themselves, have in fact always wanted to hide themselves in wine and
women and song, or for the less emotional souls, in going back to the farm and living
a simple life of nature. I am led then to ponder over the lack of constitutional
protection in China, how much this tremendous fact alone has altered profoundly the
general outlook on life of the nation, has influenced its very philosophy of life, so that
the philosophy of life is an outcome of the social and political environment rather than
vice versa, and, through that change in philosophy of life from activity to passivity,
how much goodness and constructive endeavour have been lost to the nation, and real
progress thereby retarded.
i See the various 1933 numbers of the Anoints Fortnightly.
Man, it seems, has been more sinned against than sinning in China. For I remember
Sung Chiang and the host of good souls who turned bandits in the end of the Northern
Sung Dynasty. For these were brave glorious bandits, men who could afford to be
good and chivalrous because physically they did not need any constitutional
protection. And I remember how every great poet expressed his contempt for society
by taking to wine and nature, how Gh' ii YOan in a rage jumped into the Hsiang River,
and Li Po fell overboard in attempting to reach for the reflection of the moon, how
T'ao Yiianming satisfied himself that his door was seldom opened to visitors and grass
grew over his garden paths; how even great and upright Gonfucianists who retained a
sense of right and wrong always ended ia official banishment, how Su Tungp'o was
exiled to Huangchow, Han Y<1 was exiled to Gh'aochow and Liu Chungytian was
exiled to Uuchow. I remember how another class of truly great souls grew impatient
of the small official burden and retired to their poetry and the ir simple village home;
how Yuan Chunglang, Yuan Mei and Cheng Panch' iao, one and all, avoided politics
like poison and learned to live at peace with their bowl of hot congee on a winter morning and their bed-bugs and mosquitoes at night. I remember how in times of
national misrule and disorder the good scholars were hounded and their wives and
children and distant relatives were murdered en masse, as during the beginning of the
Manchu Dynasty, and I begin to see how they needed Buddhism, which some of them
espoused, and the negative philosophy of life, which all of them espoused.
Then I look over the modern times and see how the good men, as in all countries,
have abstained from politics; how Wang Kuowei jumped into the lake of the Summer
Palace, and K'ang Yuwei spent the last years of his life in lonely pride, and how Lusin
shut himself up in dark and unmitigated despair until the call for the literary
revolution came, and how Chang T'aiyen is to-day shutting himself up in Soochow,
and how Hu Shih, the student of Dewey and influenced by a more progressive outlook,
is pragmatizing and patching up the sores of the people, without great enthusiasm, but
still unwilling to give up and turn China to the dogs 桯 u Shih who, in a moment of
prophetic fury, cried out, "If China does not perish, God is blind!" These are the
good men of China who cannot help the country, for man has sinned against man, and
the bad men have sinned against the good men, and the good men need a simple
cotton gown for disguise. Yet there are other good men, not only five, not only fifty,
but millions of them suffering and carrying on, unsung and unheard of. The thought
wrings pity from the onlooker that there should be so many good men and not a leader
half the size of a Gandhi, that in China individually men are more mature, but
politically and nationally we are as mere children. And I begin to seek for the causes
and ask for the way out.
I push the question further and ask: Why are we individually mature but politically
and nationally mere children? And why, out of the millions of good men, are there so
few great leaders to lead the nation out of chaos? Have these potential leaders been
assassinated* caught the flu, or otherwise died an untimely death? Or have they
grown old and feeble at forty; have they run against a social background too powerful
and all -pervading for human reform, temporized, become frustrated and given
themselves up for lost, unhappy souls, like the beauty in Po Chuyi's song who became
a shopkeeper's wife in middle age? Then I realize that perhaps the other minority were
lucky, that they were indeed those God loved who died young and left a good name.
Yet history seems to deny this acceptance: history reveals and the Confucian theory of
imitation affirms that in times of national crisis it is the great men who change the
destiny of a nation. But then I remember that in the Chinese wheel of success, many
great men have been ground small. It would be easy to blame the system or the
collapse of a system, and not the men. It would be easy to expound with a
materialistic dialectic the logical outcome of militarism. It would be easy to
demonstrate that the militarists are all good men, made victims of an unhappy
environment, forced by the logic of their position to tax the people and strengthen
themselves against their rivals, and exposed to a temptation too much for any human
being to resist. Yet I remember how Japan passed through the same phase of
militarism, triumphantly led by a great man, Prince Ito. But then, you may say, Japan is small, and one can lay the blame to the size of our nation. Then I remember the
example of Russia, with the size of half a continent, and peopled with a peasantry just
as poor and illiterate as the Chinese people, and a bourgeoisie just as indifferent and a
gentry just as corrupt. Yet there was vigour in those old bones, and Old Russia shook
off its old carcass and emerged the youngest child of the family of nations, radiant
with hope and energy* And I say, Bah! with the materialistic dialectic! For if the
times have sinned against the great men in China, the great men have sinned more
against the times.
The search for causes always leads back to a search for leadership, for courageous and
honest leadership, for witi" Confucius I believe that great men, by their example, can
change the whole morale of a nation, as Prince Ito did in Japan* I remember how in
1926 the whole nation was set cm fire by faith in the memory of a great leader, when
a young party seemed to have emerged to lead the nation out of chaos and
despondency, how young men climbed over school walls and travelled a thousand
miles to join a revolutionary army and gladly laid down their lives for the cause of a
regenerated China; how only recently, in 1931, the guns of the Nine teenth Route
Army set the whole nation on fire once more, and the young and old gave unto their
last penny and showed a mettle that no one had dreamed existed in the nation. Old
China seemed in a moment to have found her soul again. Then the fire was dampened:
it flickered, went out and left a darkness behind, for want of someone to tend and
nourish it. If there were one, the smouldering ashes could be kindled into a glowing
fiaine again, even now.
IV. THE WAY Out
I turn my thoughts to other lines. It seems, then, that our steps are indeed caught in a
hopeless tangle of dark realities, but it also seems to be otherwise. For here is a nation
whose potential possibilities are yet unexplored, but lacking in something to let loose
these potential powers. Here is a nation of fine soldiers but bad captains, fine business
men but bad business policies, fine friends but bad clubhouses, fine citizens but
bad statesmen, and fine democratic men but a bad republic. It only needs a
system to put the nation in running order, a something which the nation woefully
lacks. What is that thing? Big words with capital letters shoot across my mind,
like Democracy, Morality, Grit, Spunk, Efficiency, A Good Executioner. . . . But
what is Democracy? The Chinese people are, and always have been, the most
democratic, the most casteless, the most self-respecting on earth. And what is
even Socialism? Have we not had the most advanced form of Anarchism, a
