by Will Durant
An endless chain of circumstances helped them. For two generations the merchants and missionaries who had conquered China from the West had acted, willingly or not, as centers of foreign infection; they had lived in a style, and with such comforts and conveniences, as made the young Chinese about them anxious to adopt so promising a civilization; they had undermined, in an active minority, the religious faith that had supported the old moral code; they had set one generation against another by advocating the abandonment of ancestor worship; and though they preached a gentle Jesus meek and mild, they were protected in emergencies by guns whose size and efficacy offered the dominating lesson of Europe to the Orient. Christianity, which had been in its origin an uprising of the oppressed, became once more, in these Chinese converts, a ferment of revolution.
Among the converts was the leader of the Revolution. In 1866 a tenant farmer near Canton fathered a troublesome boy whom the world, with no conscious sarcasm, was to christen Sun Yat-sen—i.e., Sun, the Fairy of Tranquillity.10 Sun became so Christian that he defaced the images of the gods in the temple of his native village. An older brother, who had migrated to Hawaii, brought the boy to Honolulu and placed him in a school conducted by an Anglican bishop and offering a thoroughly Occidental education.11 Returning to China, Sun entered the British Medical College, and became its first Chinese graduate. Largely as a result of these studies he lost all religious faith;12 and at the same time the indignities to which he found himself and his fellow Chinese subjected at the foreign-controlled customs offices and in the foreign quarters of the treaty ports turned his thoughts to revolution. The inability of a corrupt and reactionary government to prevent the defeat of great China by little Japan, or the; commercial partition of the country by European powers, filled him with humiliation and resentment, and made him feel that the first step in the liberation of China must be the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
His first move was characteristic of his self-confidence, his idealism, and his simplicity. He boarded a steamer and traveled sixteen hundred miles north, at his own expense, to lay before Li Hung-chang, vice-regent of the Empress Dowager, his plans for reforming the country and restoring its prestige. Refused a hearing, Sun began a lifetime of adventure and wandering in the quest of funds for a Chinese revolution. He won the support of many mercantile guilds and powerful secret societies, whose leaders were envious of the imperial aristocracy, and longed for a government in which the new manufacturing and trading classes would play a rôle commensurate with their rising wealth. Then he traveled overseas to America and Europe, gathering modest sums from a million laundrymen and a thousand Chinese merchants. In London the Chinese Legation illegally arrested him, and was about to send him secretly to China in chains as a traitor to his government, when a missionary who had taught him in his youth aroused the British Government to rescue him. For fifteen years more he passed from city to city over the world, collecting all in all two and a half million dollars for the Revolution; and apparently he spent almost none of this money on himself. Suddenly, in the midst of his travels, a message informed him that the revolutionary forces had won the south, were winning the north, and had chosen him as Provisional President of the Chinese Republic. A few weeks later he landed in triumph at Hong Kong, where, twenty years back, he had been humiliated by the British officials of the port.
The Empress Dowager had died in 1908, having arranged the death of the imprisoned emperor Kuang Hsu the day before. She was succeeded by Kuang’s nephew, P’u Yi, now Emperor of Manchukuo. In the last years of the great Dowager and the first of her infant heir, many reforms in the direction of modernizing China were effected by the Government: railways were built, chiefly with foreign capital and under foreign management; examinations for public office were abandoned; a new system of schools was established, a National Assembly was called for 1910, and a nine-year program was laid down for the gradual establishment of a constitutional monarchy, culminating in universal suffrage growing step by step with universal education. The decree announcing this program added: “Any impetuosity shown in introducing these reforms will, in the end, be so much labor lost.”13 But the Revolution could not be halted by this deathbed repentance of an ailing dynasty. On February 12, 1912, the young Emperor, faced by revolt on every side and finding no army willing to defend him, abdicated; and the Regent, Prince Ch’un, issued one of the most characteristic edicts in Chinese history:
Today the people of the whole Empire have their minds bent upon a Republic. . . . The will of Providence is clear, and the people’s wishes are plain. How could I, for the sake of the glory and the honor of one family, thwart the desire of teeming millions? Wherefore I, with the Emperor, decide that the form of government in China shall be a constitutional republic, to comfort the longing of all within the Empire, and to act in harmony with the ancient sages, who regarded the throne as a public heritage.14
The Revolutionists behaved magnanimously to P’u Yi: they gave him his life, a comfortable palace, an ample annuity, and a concubine. The Manchus had come in like lions, and had gone out like lambs.
The new republic paid for its peaceful birth with a stormy life. Yuan Shi-kai, a diplomat of the old school, possessed an army that might have impeded the Revolution. He demanded the presidency as the price of his support; and Sun Yat-sen, only beginning to enjoy his office, yielded and retired magnificently to private life. Yuan, encouraged by strong financial groups native and foreign, plotted to make himself emperor and to found a new dynasty, on the ground that only in this way could the incipient break-up of China be stayed. Sun Yat-sen branded him as a traitor, and called upon his followers to renew the Revolution; but before the issue could come to battle Yuan took sick and died.
China has not known order or unity since. Sun Yat-sen proved too idealistic, too good an orator and too poor a statesman, to take the reins and guide his nation to peace. He passed from one plan and theory to another, offended his middle-class supporters by his apparent acceptance of communism, and retired to Canton to teach and inspire its youth and occasionally to rule its people.* China, left without a government that all sections would recognize, deprived of the unifying symbol of the monarchy, broken of its habit of obedience to custom and law, and weak in the patriotism that attaches the soul not to a district but to the country as a whole, fell into an intermittent war of north against south, of section against section, of property against hunger, of old against young. Adventurers organized armies, ruled as tuchuns over isolated provinces, levied their own taxes, raised their own opium,15 and sallied forth occasionally to annex new victims to their subject population. Industry and trade, taxed by one victorious general after another, fell into disorder and despair; bandits exacted tribute, stole and killed, and no organized force could control them. Men became soldiers or thieves lest they should starve, and ravaged the fields of men who, so despoiled, became soldiers or thieves lest they should starve. The savings of a lifetime or the modest stores of a thrifty family were, as often as not, appropriated by a general or looted by a robber band. In the province of Honan alone, in 1931, there were 400,000 bandits.16
In the midst of this chaos (1922) Russia sent two of its ablest diplomats, Karakhan and Joffe, with orders to bring China into the circle of the Communist Revolution. Karakhan prepared the way by surrendering Russia’s claims to “extra-territoriality,” and by signing a treaty that recognized the full authority and international status of the revolutionary government. The subtle Joffe found little difficulty in converting Sun Yat-sen to sympathy with communism, for Sun had been rebuffed by every other power. In an incredibly short time, with the help of seventy Soviet officers, a new Nationalist army was formed and trained. Under command of Sun’s former secretary Chiang Kai-shek, but guided largely by a Russian adviser, Michael Borodin, this army marched northward from Canton, conquered one city after another, and finally established its power in Peking.* In the moment of victory the victors divided; Chiang Kai-shek attacked the communist movement in Oriental style,
and established a military dictatorship realistically responsive to the will of business and finance.
It is as difficult for a nation as for an individual to take no comfort from a neighbor’s misfortune. Japan, which in the plans of Sun Yat-sen, was to be the friend and ally of China against the West, and which had stimulated the Chinese revolt by her swift and successful imitation of Europe in industry, diplomacy and war, saw in the disorder and weakness of her ancient teacher an opportunity for solving the problems that had arisen out of her very success. For Japan could not discourage the growth of her population without endangering her capacity for self-defense against obviously possible aggression; she could not support an increasing population unless she developed industry and trade; she could not develop industry without importing iron, coal and other resources in which her own soil was deficient, nor could she develop trade profitably unless she had a large share in the only great market left free by the European colonization of the globe. But China was supposedly rich in iron and coal, and offered, at Japan’s door, potentially the greatest market in the world. What nation, faced with the apparent choice between returning to agriculture and subjection, or advancing to industrial imperialism and conquest, could have resisted the temptation to snatch the prizes of prostrate China while the other imperial vultures were tearing one another’s throats on the fields of France?
So Japan, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, declared herself at war with Germany, and pounced upon the Kiaochow territory which Germany had “leased” from China sixteen years before. Then she presented to the government of Yuan Shi-kai “Twenty-One Demands” which would have made China a political and economic colony of Japan; and only the protest of the United States and the boycott of Japanese goods in China under the leadership of its enraged students prevented these commands from being enforced. Students wept in the streets, or killed themselves, in shame at the humiliation of their country.17 The Japanese listened with cynical humor to the moral indignation of a Europe that had been gnawing at China for half a century, and waited patiently for another opportunity. It came when Europe and America were engulfed in the debacle of an imperialist industry that had depended upon foreign markets for the absorption of “surplus” products unpurchasable by their producers at home. Japan marched into Manchuria, set up the former emperor of China, P’u Yi, first as president, then as emperor, of the new state of Manchukuo, and by political alliance, economic penetration and military control, placed herself in a favored position for the exploitation of Manchuria’s natural resources, employable population and commercial possibilities. The European world, which had proposed a moratorium on robbery after it had gathered in all available spoils, joined America feebly in protests against this candid plunder, but prepared, as always, to accept victory as justification in the end.
The final humiliation came at Shanghai. Angered by the successful boycott of her goods, Japan landed her undefeated troops at the richest port in China, occupied and destroyed the district of Chapei, and demanded the restraint of the boycott associations by the Chinese Government. The Chinese defended themselves with a new heroism, and the Nineteenth Route Army from Canton, almost unaided, held the well-equipped forces of Japan at bay for two months. The Nanking Government offered a compromise, Japan withdrew from Shanghai, and China, nursing its wounds, resolved to build from the bottom a new and more vigorous civilization, capable of preserving and defending itself against a rapacious world.
III. BEGINNINGS OF A NEW ORDER
Change in the village—In the town—The factories—Commerce—Labor unions—Wages—The new government—Nationalism vs. Westernization—The dethronement of Confucius—The reaction against religion—The new morality—Marriage in transition—Birth control—Co-education—The “New Tide” in literature and philosophy—The new language of literature—Hu Shih—Elements of destruction—Elements of renewal
Once everything changed except the East; now there is nothing in the East that does not change. The most conservative nation in history has suddenly become, after Russia, the most radical, and is destroying with a will customs and institutions once held inviolate. It is not merely the end of a dynasty, as in 1644; it is the moulting of a civilization.
Change comes last and least to the village, for the slow sobriety of the soil does not encourage innovation; even the new generation must plant in order to reap. But now seven thousand miles of railroad traverse the countryside; and though a decade of chaos and native management has left them in bad repair, and war has conscripted them too often for its purposes, yet they bind the eastern villages with the cities of the coast, and daily bear their trickle of Western novelties into a million peasant homes. Here one may find such foreign-devilish importations as kerosene, kerosene lamps, matches, cigarettes, even American wheat; for sometimes, so poor is transport, it costs more to carry goods from the Chinese interior to the marine provinces than it does to bring them to these from Australia or the United States.18 It becomes clear that the economic growth of a civilization depends upon transportation. Twenty thousand miles of dirt roads have been built, over which, with Oriental irregularity, six thousand buses travel, always full. When the gasoline engine has bound these innumerable villages together it will have accomplished one of the greatest changes in Chinese history—the end of famine.
In the towns the triumph of the West goes on more rapidly. Handicrafts are dying under the competition of cheaply-transported machine-made goods from abroad; millions of artisans flounder about in unemployment, and are drawn into the jaws of the factories that foreign and domestic capital is building along the coast. The hand loom, still spinning in the village, is silent in the city; imported cotton and cotton cloths flood the country, and textile factories rise to induct impoverished Chinese into the novel serfdom of the mill. Great blast-furnaces burn at Hankow, as weird and horrible as any in the West. Canneries, bakeries, cement works, chemical works, breweries, distilleries, power works, glass works, shoe factories, paper mills, soap and candle factories, sugar refineries—all of them have now been planted on Chinese soil, and slowly transform the domestic artisan into a factory hand. The development of the new industries is retarded because investment hesitates in a world disordered by permanent revolution; it is obstructed further by the difficulty and costliness of transport, by the inadequacy of local raw materials, and by that amiable Chinese habit which places the family above every other loyalty, and turns every native office and factory into a nest of genial nepotism and incompetence.19 Commerce, too, is impeded by inland tariffs and coastal customs, and the universal demand for bribes or “squeeze”;20 but it is growing more, rapidly than industry, and plays the central rôle in the economic transformation of China.*
The new industries have destroyed the guilds, and have thrown into chaos the relations of employer and employee. The guilds had lived by regulating wages and prices through agreements between owners and workers whose products had no rivals in local trade; but as transport and commerce increased, and brought distant goods to compete in every town with the handiwork of the guilds, it was found impossible to control prices or to regulate wages without surrendering to the dictates of foreign competitors and capital. The guilds have therefore disintegrated and divided into chambers of commerce on the one side and labor unions on the other. The chambers discuss order, loyalty and economic liberty, and the workers discuss starvation. Strikes and boycotts are frequent, but they have been more successful in compelling foreign concessions to the Chinese Government than in raising the remuneration of labor. In 1928 the Department of Social Affairs of the Chinese Municipality of Shanghai computed the average weekly wage of the textile-mill workers as varying from $1.73 to $2.76 for men, and from $1.10 to $1.78 for women. In flour mills the male weekly average pay was $1.96; in cement mills $1.72; in glass works $1.84; in match-factories $2.11; among the skilled workers of the electric power plants, $3.10; in the machine shops, $3.24; among the printers, $4.5 523 The wealth enjoyed by the printers was doubtless due
to their better organization, and the cost of suddenly replacing them. The first unions were formed in 1919; they grew in number and power until, in the days of Borodin, they proposed to take over the management of China; they were repressed ruthlessly after Chiang Kai-shek’s break with Russia; today the laws against them are severe, but they multiply nevertheless as the sole refuge of the workers against an industrial system that has only begun to pass labor legislation, and has not yet begun to enforce it.24 The bitter destitution of the city proletaires, working twelve hours a day, hovering on the margin of subsistence, and facing starvation if employment should fail, is worse than the ancient poverty of the village, where the poor could not see the rich, and accepted their lot as the natural and immemorial fate of mankind.
Perhaps some of these evils might have been avoided if the political transformation of eastern China had not been so rapid and complete. The mandarin aristocracy, though it had lost vitality and was dishonored with corruption, might have held the new industrial forces in check until China could accept them without chaos or slavery; and then the growth of industry would have generated year by year a new class that might have stepped peaceably into political power, as the manufacturers had displaced the landed aristocracy of England. But the new government found itself without an army, without experienced leaders, and without funds; the Kuomintang, or People’s Party, established to liberate a nation, found that it must stand by while foreign and domestic capital subjugated it; conceived in democrary and baptized with the blood of communism, it became dependent upon Shanghai bankers, abandoned democracy for dictatorship, and tried to destroy the unions.* For the Party depends upon the army, and the army upon money, and money upon loans; until the Army is strong enough to conquer China the Government cannot tax China; and until it can tax China the Government must take advice where it takes its funds. Even so it has accomplished much. It has brought back to China full control over her tariffs and—within the internationalism of finance—over her industries; it has organized, trained and equipped an Army which may some day be used against others than Chinese; it has enlarged the area that acknowledges its authority, and has reduced, in that area, the banditry that was stifling the nation’s economic life. It takes a day to make a revolution, and a generation to make a government.
