sufferings and discomforts. The white man's nerves are undoubtedly degenerate.
n * Tte* Yord* tfrougk kere used for the first time, is preferable to the atrocious
Siniacation."
The infusion of new blood must explain to a large extent the racial vigour that the
Chinese people possess to-day. Historically, this occurs with such striking regularity,
at the interval of every eight hundred years, as to lead one to suppose that actually a
periodic regeneration of the race was necessary, and that it was the internal
degeneration of the moral fibre of the people that brought about these periodic
upheavals, rather than vice versa. Dr. J. S. Lee, in a striking paper on "The Periodic
Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China,"1 has made a statistical study of these
occurrences, which reveal an exact parallelism in these cycles of peace and disorder which "far exceeds the limit of probability" and is "perhaps too exact to be expected
from the proceedings of human affairs."
For the striking fact is that Chinese history can be conveniently divided into cycles of
eight hundred years. Each cycle begins with a short-lived and militarily strong
dynasty, which unified China after centuries of internal strife. Then follow four or five
hundred years of peace, with one change of dynasty, succeeded by successive waves
of wars, resulting soon in the removal of the capital from the North to the South. Then
came secession and rivalry between North and South with increasing intensity,
followed by subjugation under a foreign rule, which ended the cycle. History then
repeats itself and with the unification of China again under Chinese rule there is a new
bloom of culture.
The parallelism of events within each cycle unfolded itself with an unreasonable
mechanical exactness as to time and sequence. Dr. Lee mentions, for instance, the
undertaking of a great engineering feat which was repeated with fatal regularity and at
the exact stage in each cycle, namely, immediately at the beginning of a new bloom of
culture: for the first cycle, the building of the Great Wall under the Ch' in Dynasty and
the colossal palaces, the Ofangkung, which were soon subjected to a conflagration
lasting three months; for the second cycle, the building of the Grand Canal under the
Sid Emperor, who had also magnificent palaces, noted for their grandeur and luxury;
and for the third cycle, the rebuilding of the Great Wall, in which form it has survived
to the present day, the opening up of several new canals and dams, and the building of
the city of Peking under the Emperor Yunglo of the Ming Dynasty, who was also
famous for his great Yunglo Library.
1 The China Jownal of Science and Arts, March and April, 1931.
These cycles comprise: (i) from the Ch' in Dynasty to the end of the Six Dynasties and
the Tartar invasion (221 B.C.A.D. 588) covering about 830 years; (2) from the Sui
Dynasty to the Mongol invasion (589-1367), covering about 780 years; and (3) the
modern cycle from the Ming Dynasty to the present time, a cycle which is yet
uncompleted, but which has so far unfolded itself in the last six hundred years with
amazing fidelity to the previous pattern. The peace of five hundred years which was
granted us under the Ming and Manchu Dynasties seems to have run its due course,
and with the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850*8, which marked the first big wave of
internecine wars, we are on the crescendo of disorder and of internecine strife, which
so far has lived up to its tradition in the removal of the capital from Peking to
Nanking in 1927.
It is almost prophetic to note that a division between North and South and the
subjugation of Northern China by a foreign race for the outstanding two hundred
years have not yet come.1
The following diagrams are reproduced here partly for their intrinsic interest, and
partly because they are the best short summary of China's political history of over two
thousand years within the scope of a printed page. The curves represent the frequency
of wars in China proper.
Dr. Lee also mentions the fact that the same parallelism may be observed in the Chou
Period preceding the first cycle in the diagram. The Chou Dynasty, which represented
the first bloom of Chinese culture, lasted officially 900 years, beginning in the year
1122 B.C. After the first four hundred and fifty years of comparative peace and
expansion inside China, the capital was moved east owing to pressure from the
north-west in 770 B.C., from which date on we see increasing wars and strifes among
the kingdoms, with the central government steadily
1A mixture of Chinese and Japanese blood, though very rare, has already produced
two rather noteworthy Chinese, Koxinga, a good general, carrying on a losing
campaign against the Manchus, and Su Manshu, a delicate poet in the beginning of
the present century.
時^J National expansion
^ g1*" unification, peace, prosperity
~ cultural development
ir
^ 籢 ^? Secession and rivalry
*| J f ^ *1 between north and south
northern invasion
.* I
V~ ?
11
Jl
o .5
?I
* I
ZOO B.C. 100 B.C.
100 ZOO 300 400 .?0
600
' ?.?
sT-------------Ha-----------
Dynasties-
(221 B.C.-A.D, 588)
c. 830 years
E! Nat.ona! expansion
I*. unification peace, prosper.
|^ Secession flnd rk
ation peace, prosper.ty . |f between north a'nd south
ltural development B,?.rBo,rt..a 1 ? |S northern invas ion
7OO SCO <?OO IOOO
HOO I20O 1300
J k------------Tang------------^M-'i -H*- North Sung ~? South S 玭<j 昳 w-Yuan-*!
Second Cycle
(589-1367)
0. 780 years
MY COUNTRY AND MY PEOPLE
z^j National expansion
I**" unification, peace, prosperity
T cultural development
ii
*-------Ming------------j?J-----CRing---------
Modern Cycle
(1368 to the present)
losing its control over the feudal lords, giving us the CKuncKiu
Period of Confucius' Annals (722-481 B.C.) and the later
Chankuo Period or the Period of the "Warring Kingdoms"
(402-221 B.C.) with Ch'u constantly extending its territory
to virtually the whole southern part of the then civilized
China. The cycle was then closed with the conquest and
reunification of the whole of China by a tribe with a strong
mixture of barbarian blood and foreign customs, led by the
great Ch' in Emperor.
Facts like these call for an explanation, ethnological, economic or climatic.
Over-population, which in its nature can be regularly reached in four or five hundred
years of peace, seems to be an important factor. Peace and culture in any country in
the world for over five hundred years are unknown to history, and there is no reason
'why China should be an exception. Yet the review of China's literary history seems to
offer another obvious explanation. There was a decadence of moral fibre reflected in
poetry and literature during these periods of northern and southern secession and
rivalry, as already seen in the poems quoted above in this chapter. The period of
northern invasion in the first cycle, the so-called
Six Dynasties, from Eastern Chin to the unification of China under Sui, during which
North China was overrun with barbaric conquerors, and the period of northern invasion in the second cycle, from the Southern Sung Dynasty to the Mongol Dynasty
inclusive, seem to have corresponded with periods of effeminacy of living and
decadence of literary style, the first period noted for its artificial and flowery ssuliu
euphuistic prose, and the second for its effeminate sentimental poetry. One observes,
in fact, not a paucity but an over-abundance of words, played out to their finest
nuances, with no more the smell of the soil, but the decadent, cultivated, super-refined
flavour of court perfume. The Chinese showed a certain fin-de-sticle delight in the
sounds of words, and an extreme refinement in literary and artistic criticism, and in
aristocratic habits of living.
For it was in these periods that painting and calligraphy flourished, and aristocratic
families rose and established themselves to carry on the artistic tradition. Chinese
literary criticism first became conscious of itself in the Six Dynasties, and Wang
Hsichih, the first and greatest calligraphist, who was born of a great aristocratic family,
lived in this period. Political weakness and disgrace somehow coincided with artistic
refinement, and southern China was ruled in these periods by kings who could not
keep their thrones secure but could write exquisite verse. Such ruler-poets were Liang
Wuti, Nant'ang Houchu, and Ch'en Houchu, all of them kings of extremely short-lived
dynasties and writers of tender love lyrics. The Emperor Huichung of the Southern
Sung Dynasty was also a noted painter.
Yet it was in these periods that the germ for the racial revival was laid. For the
northern conquerors remained conquerors only in official power, the substrata
remaining Chinese. The great Northern Wei Dynasty, whose rulers were of the Sienpei
race, not only adopted Chinese culture but also freely intermarried with the Chinese.
So were the so-called Kin (Manchu) kingdoms in the Sung Dynasty largely Chinese.
A fermenting process was at work. Even culturally, these periods were periods of
penetration of foreign influence, notably that of Buddhism and Indian sculpture in the
end of the first cycle, and of Mongol drama and music in that of the second cycle. The
clearest effect of this ethnological mixture is perhaps to be found in the linguistic and
physical traits of the modern northern Chinese, \vith altered tones and hardened
consonants in the language, and a taller stature and a gay rustic humour in the people.
It was this amalgamation of foreign blood that accounted for, to a large extent, the
race's long survival.
IV. CULTURAL STABILITY
Yet this does not explain all. The question remains how it was possible for the nation
to survive these periodic political disasters and not be submerged by them, as old
Rome was submerged under the Lombards. Wherein does that racial stamina and
capacity for absorbing foreign blood consist? Only by going deeper into these
problems can one gain a real understanding of the situation as it stands to-day.
The so-called racial stamina and racial vitality, which in spite of the retrograde
character of the Chinese bourgeois class enabled the Chinese people to survive
political disasters and regenerate itself through foreign blood, is partly constitutional
and partly cultural. Among the cultural forces making for racial stability must be
counted first of all the Chinese family system, which was so well-defined and
organized as to make it impossible for a man to forget where his lineage belonged.
This form of social immortality, which the Chinese prize above all earthly possessions,
has something of the character of a religion, which is enhanced by the ritual of
ancestor worship, and the consciousness of it has penetrated deep into the Chinese
soul.
Such a well-organized and religiously conceived family system was of tremendous
force when the Chinese race was thrown into contact with a foreign people with a less
welldefined family consciousness. Barbaric tribes or children of mixed parentage
were all too anxious to join the family and claim part of the family immortality,
indulging in the luxurious feeling that when one dies, one does not die, but one's self
Uves on in the great stream of the family life. The family system also acted as a direct
incentive to quantitative reproduction, for in order that the Lin branch should survive,
it is necessary that many Lin babies should come into this world.
Perhaps it was due entirely to the family system that the Chinese were able to absorb
the Jews of Honan, who to-day are so thoroughly sinolized that their Jewish tradition
of not eating pork has become a mere memory. The race consciousness of the Jews
can be shamed into oblivion only by the greater race consciousness of the
family-minded Chinese, and it was no mean accomplishment in the ethnological field.
With a less race-conscious and race-proud people than the Jews, like the northern
Tartars, for instance, it is easy to see that the Chinese native inhabitants were placed
in a great advantage over their foreign invaders. It is in this sense that Manchuria will
remain Chinese in spite of all Japanese machinations; the political order may be
changed, and rulers may come and rulers may go, but the Chinese families will
remain Chinese families.
Another cultural force making for social stability was the complete absence of
established classes in China, and the opportunity open for all to rise in the social scale
