through the imperial examination system. While the family system accounted for their
survival through fecundity, the imperial examination system effected a qualitative
selection, and enabled talent to reproduce and propagate itself. This system, which
was started in the T'ang Dynasty and based on the ultimate Chinese belief that no man
is born noble,1 had its rudiments in the system of civil service and official
recommendations in the Han Dynasty. After the Wei and Ch' in Dynasties (third and
fourth centuries A.D.) a change in the control of selection for office brought about a
system favouring influential families, so much so that it was stated that "there were no
poor scholars in the higher classes and no sons of official families in the lower
classes."2 This favoured the growth of aristocratic families in the Ch' in Dynasty.
With the imperial examination system in the T'ang Dynasty (seventh to ninth
centuries inclusive) a system was put into effect which, however it was modified in
the following dynasties, maintained down to 1905 an open door for all to rise from
poverty to power and fame. While the tests were necessarily somewhat mechanical in
nature, and were not devised to attract real genius, they were suitable for selecting
talent, and might be regarded as intelligence tests. Such a system made possible a
constant infiltration of talent from the country to the cities, thereby making up for the
loss of racial vigour in the upper classes and maintaining a cycle of internal
regeneration so much needed for social health. Viewed across the centuries, it must
have had a selective effect on the quality of the ruling class that made for social
stability.
1 The Chinese for this is, "There is no blood in premiers and generals."
2 These refer to the "nine classes" of scholars in the Ch' in Dynasty.
What seems still more important is the fact that the ruling class not only came from
the country but also returned to the country, as the rural mode of life was always
regarded as the ideal. This rural ideal in art, philosophy and life, so deeply imbedded
in the Chinese general consciousness, must account in a large measure for the racial
health to-day. Did the creators of the Chinese pattern of life do more wisely than they
knew in maintaining a level between civilization and the primitive habits of living?
Was it their sound instinct which guided them to choose the agricultural civilization,
to hate mechanical ingenuity and love the simple ways of life, to invent the comforts
of life without being enslaved by them, and to preach from generation to generation in
their poetry, painting and literature the "return to the farm*'?
For to be close to nature is to have physical and moral health. Man in the country does
not degenerate; only man in the cities does. To scholars and well- to-do families in the
cities, persistently the call of the good earth comes. The family letters and instructions
of well-known scholars abound in such counsel, and reveal an important aspect of the
Chinese civilization, an aspect which subtly but'profoundly accounts for its long
survival. I select at random from the extremely precious family letters of Cheng
Panch' iao to his younger brother, letters that should be counted among the greatest in
the world:
The^ house you bought is well-enclosed and indeed suitable for residence, only I feel
the courtyard is too small, and when you look at the sky, it is not big enough. With my
unfettered nature, I do not like it. Only a hundred steps north from this house, there is
the Parrot Bridge, and another thirty steps from the Bridge is the Plum Tower, with
vacant spaces all around. When I was drinking in this Tower in my young days, I used to look out and see the willow banks and the little wooden bridge with decrepit huts
and wild flowers against a background of old city walls, and was quite fascinated by it.
If you could get fifty thousand cash, you could buy a big lot for me to build my
cottage there for my latter days. My intention is to build an earthen wall around it, and
plant lots of bamboos and flowers and trees. I am going to have a garden path of
paved pebbles leading from the gate to the house door. There will be two rooms, one
for the parlour, one for the study, where I can keep books, paintings, brushes,
ink-slabs, wine-kettle and tea service, and where I can discuss poetry and literature
with some good friends and the younger generation. Behind this will be the family
living-rooms, with three main rooms, two kitchens and one servants3 room.
Altogether there will be eight rooms, all covered with grasssheds, and I shall be quite
content. Early in the morning before sunrise, I could look east and see the red glow of
the morning clouds, and at sunset, the sun will shine from behind the trees. When one
stands upon a high place in the courtyard, one can already see the bridge and the
clouds and waters in the distance, and when giving a party at night, one can see the
lights of the neighbours outside the wall. This will be only thirty steps to your house
on the south, and will be separated from the little garden on the east by a small creek.
So it is quite ideal. Some may say, "This is indeed very comfortable, only there may
be burglars." They do not know that burglars are also but poor people. I would open
the door and invite them to come in, and discuss with them what they may share.
Whatever there is, they can take away, and if nothing will really suit them, they may
even take away the great Wang Hsienchih's old capret to pawn it for a hundred cash.
Please, my younger brother, bear this in mind, for this is your stupid brother's
provision for spending ahappyoldage. I wonder whether I may have what I so desire.
This is typical of the sentiment in Chinese literature. This rural ideal of Cheng
Panch' iao's is as much based on his poetic feeling of common brotherhood with the
poor peasant, which comes natural to a Taoistic soul, as the rural ideal of Tseng
Kuofan's is based on the desire for the preservation for the family, and closely
connected with the Confucian family system. For the rural ideal of life is part of the
social system which makes the family the unit and part of the politico-cultural system
which makes lie village the unit. It may be amusing to learn that Tseng Kuofan, the
great general and first minister of his times, in his family letters to his children and
nephews continually warned them against extravagant habits and advised them to
plant vegetables, rear pigs and manure their own farms, yet such advice on frugality
and industry was expressly given with the aim that the family prosperity might be
prolonged. If simplicity can keep a family integrity long, it should do the same for the
national integrity. For to Tseng Kuofan, it was plain that "the official families whose
children learn expensive habits of living, prosper only for a generation or two: the
merchant families who are industrious and frugal may prosper for three or four
generations, the families who till the ground and study books and have simple and
careful habits prosper for five or six generations, while the families who have the
virtues of filial piety and friendliness prosper for eight or ten generations."
It is therefore entirely easy to understand why Tseng regards "the keeping offish, the
keeping of pigs, the planting of bamboos and the planting of vegetables*9 as "the four
things which should not be neglected. On the one hand, we may thus keep up the
tradition of our forefathers, and, on the other hand, one will feel a sense of life and
growth when looking in over our walls, and a sense of prosperity when entering our
court. Even if you should have to spend a little more money and hire a few more
helpers, the money spent on these four things will be well spent. . . . From these four
things, you can see whether a family is prospering or is going down."
And somehow from the family instructions of Yen Chiht'ui (53i-59*)> Fan Chungyen
(989-1052), Chu Hsi (1130-1300), down to those of Ch'en Hungmu (1696-1771) and
Tseng
Kuofan (1811-1872), this family ideal of industry and frugality and living the simple
life persisted and was recognized as the soundest moral heritage of the nation. The
family system somehow wove itself into the rural pattern of life and could not be
separated from it. Simplicity was a great word among the Greeks, and simplicity,
shunp'o, was a great word among the Chinese. It was as if man knew the benefits of
civilization and knew also the dangers of it. Man knew the happiness of the joys of
life, but also was aware of its ephemeral nature, fearful of the jealousy of the gods,
and was willing to take the joys that were simpler but would last longer. For to enjoy
too many good things of life was, according to the Chinese, to chehfo, or decrease
one's lot of happiness in this life. Therefore "one should be just as careful in choosing
one's pleasures as in avoiding calamities." "Choose the lighter happiness," said a
scholar at the end of the Ming Dynasties, and somehow there was an echo of consent
in the Chinese breasts. For human ' lappiness is so precarious that the retreat to nature
and implicity is the best safeguard for it. It must be so, and the Chinese knew it by
instinct. They wanted survival for their amilies,, and they achieved it for their nation.
V. RACIAL YOUTH
It would seem, therefore, that the Chinese, as a people, ivoided the dangers of civic
deterioration by a natural distrust >f civilization and by keeping close to primitive
habits of life. This might suggest that the so-called Chinese civilization must >e
understood in a greatly modified sense, that it was a civilizaion in love with
primitivism itself and was not quite ready to ay good-bye to it. Certainly it was not a
civilization that had guaranteed the people peace without intermittent periods of
Joodshed and disorder, or that had made wars and famines ind floods impossible.
That a country after two thousand years of comparatively dvilized living could furnish
living material for such a story as ill Men Are Brothers, when the eating of human
flesh, though 昦 re, was still possible, certainly reveals in a measure the mystery of
this enigma of social continuity against the havoc of civilization. Sung Chiang, Li Kuei and the host of robust robbers on the top of Liangshanpo, although coming
almost fifteen centuries after Confucius, do not suggest to us representatives of an
outworn civilization, but rather happy children of a people in the twilight of a
dawning culture, when security of life was yet unknown. It seems as if the race,
instead of reaching full maturity with Confucius, was really enjoying a prolonged
childhood.
This brings us to the extremely interesting question of the racial constitution of the
Chinese race: whether, as an ethnological entity, it revea ls not so much the
characteristics of an old people as those of a people in many respects still in its racial
youth and far from reaching racial maturity. A distinction may be made by saying that
the Chinese are culturally old but racially young, a theory which has found support
among some of the modern anthropologists. Griffith Taylor1 thus classifies the
Chinese among the youngest strata in the evolution of the human race, according to
his migration-zone scheme. Havelock Ellis also characterizes the Asiatics as being
racially infantile, in the sense of retaining some of the adaptability, flexibility and
pristine all-round shunp'o nature of childhood before reaching specialized
development. Perhaps "a prolonged childhood" is the better term, for infantilism
and arrested development or stagnation are misleading terms.
Cultural stagnation of the Chinese is only a misconception of one looking at China
from the outside, without knowledge of her inner life. One needs only to think of the
late development of the Chinese porcelain, which did not come, as many foreigners
imagine, from the time of Confucius, but from as late as the tenth century, and was
then only slowly developed until it reached its perfection under K'anghsi and
Ch' ienlung in the seventeenth century, almost before our eyes. Progress in lacquer,
printing, and painting was slow, but each dynasty brought it a step forward.2 The
renowned Chinese style of painting did not come into being until the last thousand
years of the Chinese national life, a late period for an old civilization. And in literature,
one needs only to think of the lateness of the prose epic and tale of wonder, for the
Shuihu (All Mm An Brothers) and Hsiyuchi must be considered such, and they were
certainly perfected after the fourteenth century, almost two thousand years after
Confucius and Laotse had lived and died.
1 Environment and Race, Oxford University Press, 1927.
2 See the enlightening article by V. K. Ting: "How China Acquired Her
Civilization," in A Chinese Symposium (published by the Institute of Pacific
Relations),
Chapter Two THE CHINESE CHARACTER
