The Problem of China written by Bertrand Russell

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THE PROBLEM OF CHINA

BY

BERTRAND RUSSELL

O.M., F.K.S.

_London_
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1922
SECOND IMPRESSION 1966

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY PHOTOLITHOGRAPHY
UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

FOREWORD
I. QUESTIONS
II. CHINA BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
III. CHINA AND THE WESTERN POWERS
IV. MODERN CHINA
V. JAPAN BEFORE THE RESTORATION
VI. MODERN JAPAN
VII. JAPAN AND CHINA BEFORE 1914
VIII. JAPAN AND CHINA DURING THE WAR
IX. THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE
X. PRESENT FORCES AND TENDENCIES IN THE FAR EAST
XI. CHINESE AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION CONTRASTED
XII. THE CHINESE CHARACTER
XIII. HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA
XIV. INDUSTRIALISM IN CHINA
XV. THE OUTLOOK FOR CHINA
APPENDIX
INDEX

The Ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu (Heedless), the Ruler of
the Northern Ocean was Hu (Sudden), and the Ruler of the Centre
was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of
Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how
they might repay his kindness, and said, "Men all have seven
orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and
breathing, while this poor Ruler alone has not one. Let us try
and make them for him." Accordingly they dug one orifice in him
every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died.--[_Chuang
Tze_, Legge's translation.]

The Problem of China

CHAPTER I

QUESTIONS

A European lately arrived in China, if he is of a receptive and
reflective disposition, finds himself confronted with a number of very
puzzling questions, for many of which the problems of Western Europe
will not have prepared him. Russian problems, it is true, have important
affinities with those of China, but they have also important
differences; moreover they are decidedly less complex. Chinese problems,
even if they affected no one outside China, would be of vast importance,
since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the
human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by
the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive
factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries. This makes it
important, to Europe and America almost as much as to Asia, that there
should be an intelligent understanding of the questions raised by China,
even if, as yet, definite answers are difficult to give.

The questions raised by the present condition of China fall naturally
into three groups, economic, political, and cultural. No one of these
groups, however, can be considered in isolation, because each is
intimately bound up with the other two. For my part, I think the
cultural questions are the most important, both for China and for
mankind; if these could be solved, I would accept, with more or less
equanimity, any political or economic system which ministered to that
end. Unfortunately, however, cultural questions have little interest for
practical men, who regard money and power as the proper ends for nations
as for individuals. The helplessness of the artist in a hard-headed
business community has long been a commonplace of novelists and
moralizers, and has made collectors feel virtuous when they bought up
the pictures of painters who had died in penury. China may be regarded
as an artist nation, with the virtues and vices to be expected of the
artist: virtues chiefly useful to others, and vices chiefly harmful to
oneself. Can Chinese virtues be preserved? Or must China, in order to
survive, acquire, instead, the vices which make for success and cause
misery to others only? And if China does copy the model set by all
foreign nations with which she has dealings, what will become of all of
us?

China has an ancient civilization which is now undergoing a very rapid
process of change. The traditional civilization of China had developed
in almost complete independence of Europe, and had merits and demerits
quite different from those of the West. It would be futile to attempt to
strike a balance; whether our present culture is better or worse, on the
whole, than that which seventeenth-century missionaries found in the
Celestial Empire is a question as to which no prudent person would
venture to pronounce. But it is easy to point to certain respects in
which we are better than old China, and to other respects in which we
are worse. If intercourse between Western nations and China is to be
fruitful, we must cease to regard ourselves as missionaries of a
superior civilization, or, worse still, as men who have a right to
exploit, oppress, and swindle the Chinese because they are an "inferior"
race. I do not see any reason to believe that the Chinese are inferior
to ourselves; and I think most Europeans, who have any intimate
knowledge of China, would take the same view.

In comparing an alien culture with one's own, one is forced to ask
oneself questions more fundamental than any that usually arise in regard
to home affairs. One is forced to ask: What are the things that I
ultimately value? What would make me judge one sort of society more
desirable than another sort? What sort of ends should I most wish to see
realized in the world? Different people will answer these questions
differently, and I do not know of any argument by which I could persuade
a man who gave an answer different from my own. I must therefore be
content merely to state the answer which appeals to me, in the hope that
the reader may feel likewise.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not
merely as means to other things, are: knowledge, art, instinctive
happiness, and relations of friendship or affection. When I speak of
knowledge, I do not mean all knowledge; there is much in the way of dry
lists of facts that is merely useful, and still more that has no
appreciable value of any kind. But the understanding of Nature,
incomplete as it is, which is to be derived from science, I hold to be a
thing which is good and delightful on its own account. The same may be
said, I think, of some biographies and parts of history. To enlarge on
this topic would, however, take me too far from my theme. When I speak
of art as one of the things that have value on their own account, I do
not mean only the deliberate productions of trained artists, though of
course these, at their best, deserve the highest place. I mean also the
almost unconscious effort after beauty which one finds among Russian
peasants and Chinese coolies, the sort of impulse that creates
folk-songs, that existed among ourselves before the time of the
Puritans, and survives in cottage gardens. Instinctive happiness, or joy
of life, is one of the most important widespread popular goods that we
have lost through industrialism and the high pressure at which most of
us live; its commonness in China is a strong reason for thinking well of
Chinese civilization.

In judging of a community, we have to consider, not only how much of
good or evil there is within the community, but also what effects it has
in promoting good or evil in other communities, and how far the good
things which it enjoys depend upon evils elsewhere. In this respect,
also, China is better than we are. Our prosperity, and most of what we
endeavour to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread
oppression and exploitation of weaker nations, while the Chinese are not
strong enough to injure other countries, and secure whatever they enjoy
by means of their own merits and exertions alone.

These general ethical considerations are by no means irrelevant in
considering the practical problems of China. Our industrial and
commercial civilization has been both the effect and the cause of
certain more or less unconscious beliefs as to what is worth while; in
China one becomes conscious of these beliefs through the spectacle of a
society which challenges them by being built, just as unconsciously,
upon a different standard of values. Progress and efficiency, for
example, make no appeal to the Chinese, except to those who have come
under Western influence. By valuing progress and efficiency, we have
secured power and wealth; by ignoring them, the Chinese, until we
brought disturbance, secured on the whole a peaceable existence and a
life full of enjoyment. It is difficult to compare these opposite
achievements unless we have some standard of values in our minds; and
unless it is a more or less conscious standard, we shall undervalue the
less familiar civilization, because evils to which we are not accustomed
always make a stronger impression than those that we have learned to
take as a matter of course.

The culture of China is changing rapidly, and undoubtedly rapid change
is needed. The change that has hitherto taken place is traceable
ultimately to the military superiority of the West; but in future our
economic superiority is likely to be quite as potent. I believe that, if
the Chinese are left free to assimilate what they want of our
civilization, and to reject what strikes them as bad, they will be able
to achieve an organic growth from their own tradition, and to produce a
very splendid result, combining our merits with theirs. There are,
however, two opposite dangers to be avoided if this is to happen. The
first danger is that they may become completely Westernized, retaining
nothing of what has hitherto distinguished them, adding merely one more
to the restless, intelligent, industrial, and militaristic nations
which now afflict this unfortunate planet. The second danger is that
they may be driven, in the course of resistance to foreign aggression,
into an intense anti-foreign conservatism as regards everything except
armaments. This has happened in Japan, and it may easily happen in
China. The future of Chinese culture is intimately bound up with
political and economic questions; and it is through their influence that
dangers arise.

China is confronted with two very different groups of foreign Powers, on
the one hand the white nations, on the other hand Japan. In considering
the effect of the white races on the Far East as a whole, modern Japan
must count as a Western product; therefore the responsibility for
Japan's doings in China rests ultimately with her white teachers.
Nevertheless, Japan remains very unlike Europe and America, and has
ambitions different from theirs as regards China. We must therefore
distinguish three possibilities: (1) China may become enslaved to one or
more white nations; (2) China may become enslaved to Japan; (3) China
may recover and retain her liberty. Temporarily there is a fourth
possibility, namely that a consortium of Japan and the White Powers may
control China; but I do not believe that, in the long run, the Japanese
will be able to co-operate with England and America. In the long run, I
believe that Japan must dominate the Far East or go under. If the
Japanese had a different character this would not be the case; but the
nature of their ambitions makes them exclusive and unneighbourly. I
shall give the reasons for this view when I come to deal with the
relations of China and Japan.

To understand the problem of China, we must first know something of
Chinese history and culture before the irruption of the white man, then
something of modern Chinese culture and its inherent tendencies; next,
it is necessary to deal in outline with the military and diplomatic
relations of the Western Powers with China, beginning with our war of
1840 and ending with the treaty concluded after the Boxer rising of
1900. Although the Sino-Japanese war comes in this period, it is
possible to separate, more or less, the actions of Japan in that war,
and to see what system the White Powers would have established if Japan
had not existed. Since that time, however, Japan has been the dominant
foreign influence in Chinese affairs. It is therefore necessary to
understand how the Japanese became what they are: what sort of nation
they were before the West destroyed their isolation, and what influence
the West has had upon them. Lack of understanding of Japan has made
people in England blind to Japan's aims in China, and unable to
apprehend the meaning of what Japan has done.

Political considerations alone, however, will not suffice to explain
what is going on in relation to China; economic questions are almost
more important. China is as yet hardly industrialized, and is certainly
the most important undeveloped area left in the world. Whether the
resources of China are to be developed by China, by Japan, or by the
white races, is a question of enormous importance, affecting not only
the whole development of Chinese civilization, but the balance of power
in the world, the prospects of peace, the destiny of Russia, and the
chances of development towards a better economic system in the advanced
nations.

The Washington Conference has partly exhibited and partly concealed the
conflict for the possession of China between nations all of which have
guaranteed China's independence and integrity. Its outcome has made it
far more difficult than before to give a hopeful answer as regards Far
Eastern problems, and in particular as regards the question: Can China
preserve any shadow of independence without a great development of
nationalism and militarism? I cannot bring myself to advocate
nationalism and militarism, yet it is difficult to know what to say to
patriotic Chinese who ask how they can be avoided. So far, I have found
only one answer. The Chinese nation, is the most, patient in the world;
it thinks of centuries as other nations think of decades. It is
essentially indestructible, and can afford to wait. The "civilized"
nations of the world, with their blockades, their poison gases, their
bombs, submarines, and negro armies, will probably destroy each other
within the next hundred years, leaving the stage to those whose pacifism
has kept them alive, though poor and powerless. If China can avoid being
goaded into war, her oppressors may wear themselves out in the end, and
leave the Chinese free to pursue humane ends, instead of the war and
rapine and destruction which all white nations love. It is perhaps a
slender hope for China, and for ourselves it is little better than
despair. But unless the Great Powers learn some moderation and some
tolerance, I do not see any better possibility, though I see many that
are worse.

Our Western civilization is built upon assumptions, which, to a
psychologist, are rationalizings of excessive energy. Our industrialism,
our militarism, our love of progress, our missionary zeal, our
imperialism, our passion for dominating and organizing, all spring from
a superflux of the itch for activity. The creed of efficiency for its
own sake, without regard for the ends to which it is directed, has
become somewhat discredited in Europe since the war, which would have
never taken place if the Western nations had been slightly more
indolent. But in America this creed is still almost universally
accepted; so it is in Japan, and so it is by the Bolsheviks, who have
been aiming fundamentally at the Americanization of Russia. Russia, like
China, may be described as an artist nation; but unlike China it has
been governed, since the time of Peter the Great, by men who wished to
introduce all the good and evil of the West. In former days, I might
have had no doubt that such men were in the right. Some (though not
many) of the Chinese returned students resemble them in the belief that
Western push and hustle are the most desirable things on earth. I cannot
now take this view. The evils produced in China by indolence seem to me
far less disastrous, from the point of view of mankind at large, than
those produced throughout the world by the domineering cocksureness of
Europe and America. The Great War showed that something is wrong with
our civilization; experience of Russia and China has made me believe
that those countries can help to show us what it is that is wrong. The
Chinese have discovered, and have practised for many centuries, a way of
life which, if it could be adopted by all the world, would make all the
world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life demands strife,
exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. Efficiency
directed to destruction can only end in annihilation, and it is to this
consummation that our civilization is tending, if it cannot learn some
of that wisdom for which it despises the East.

It was on the Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how
profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks
are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as
Japan and the West are doing in China. Our boat travelled on, day after
day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy,
gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of
everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand
and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lay
at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the
indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of
loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a
great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed
that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so
insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the
endless information of the well-informed.

One night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there
were no houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of
poplars with the rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and
found on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads,
wandering from some remote region of famine, each family huddled
together surrounded by all its belongings, some sleeping, others
silently making small fires of twigs. The flickering flames lighted up
gnarled, bearded faces of wild men, strong, patient, primitive women,
and children as sedate and slow as their parents. Human beings they
undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier for me to grow
intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them. I knew
that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until a
boat came in which they could go to some distant place in which they had
heard--falsely perhaps--that the earth was more generous than in the
country they had left. Some would die by the way, all would suffer
hunger and thirst and the scorching mid-day sun, but their sufferings
would be dumb. To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia,
unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the little set of
Westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or reaction. Russia
is so vast that the articulate few are lost in it as man and his planet
are lost in interstellar space. It is possible, I thought, that the
theorists may increase the misery of the many by trying to force them
into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could not
believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of
industrialism and forced labour.

Nevertheless, when morning came I resumed the interminable discussions
of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a truly
popular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the
sleeping wanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen
them, since they were not material for propaganda. But something of that
patient silence had communicated itself to me, something lonely and
unspoken remained in my heart throughout all the comfortable familiar
intellectual talk. And at last I began to feel that all politics are
inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quickwitted to
torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or
theory. As we journeyed on, fed by food extracted from the peasants,
protected by an army recruited from among their sons, I wondered what we
had to give them in return. But I found no answer. From time to time I
heard their sad songs or the haunting music of the balalaika; but the
sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes, and left me with a
terrible questioning pain in which Occidental hopefulness grew pale.

It was in this mood that I set out for China to seek a new hope.

CHAPTER II

CHINA BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Where the Chinese came from is a matter of conjecture. Their early
history is known only from their own annals, which throw no light upon
the question. The Shu-King, one of the Confucian classics (edited, not
composed, by Confucius), begins, like Livy, with legendary accounts of
princes whose virtues and vices are intended to supply edification or
warning to subsequent rulers. Yao and Shun were two model Emperors,
whose date (if any) was somewhere in the third millennium B.C. "The age
of Yao and Shun," in Chinese literature, means what "the Golden Age"
mean with us. It seems certain that, when Chinese history begins, the
Chinese occupied only a small part of what is now China, along the banks
of the Yellow River. They were agricultural, and had already reached a
fairly high level of civilization--much higher than that of any other
part of Eastern Asia. The Yellow River is a fierce and terrible stream,
too swift for navigation, turgid, and full of mud, depositing silt upon
its bed until it rises above the surrounding country, when it suddenly
alters its course, sweeping away villages and towns in a destructive
torrent. Among most early agricultural nations, such a river would have
inspired superstitious awe, and floods would have been averted by human
sacrifice; in the Shu-King, however, there is little trace of
superstition. Yao and Shun, and Yue (the latter's successor), were all
occupied in combating the inundations, but their methods were those of
the engineer, not of the miracle-worker. This shows, at least, the state
of belief in the time of Confucius. The character ascribed to Yao shows
what was expected of an Emperor:--

He was reverential, intelligent, accomplished, and
thoughtful--naturally and without effort. He was sincerely
courteous, and capable of all complaisance. The display of these
qualities reached to the four extremities of the empire, and
extended from earth to heaven. He was able to make the able and
virtuous distinguished, and thence proceeded to the love of the
nine classes of his kindred, who all became harmonious. He also
regulated and polished the people of his domain, who all became
brightly intelligent. Finally, he united and harmonized the
myriad States of the empire; and lo! the black-haired people were
transformed. The result was universal concord.[1]

The first date which can be assigned with precision in Chinese history
is that of an eclipse of the sun in 776 B.C.[2] There is no reason to
doubt the general correctness of the records for considerably earlier
times, but their exact chronology cannot be fixed. At this period, the
Chou dynasty, which fell in 249 B.C. and is supposed to have begun in
1122 B.C., was already declining in power as compared with a number of
nominally subordinate feudal States. The position of the Emperor at this
time, and for the next 500 years, was similar to that of the King of
France during those parts of the Middle Ages when his authority was at
its lowest ebb. Chinese history consists of a series of dynasties, each
strong at first and weak afterwards, each gradually losing control over
subordinates, each followed by a period of anarchy (sometimes lasting
for centuries), and ultimately succeeded by a new dynasty which
temporarily re-establishes a strong Central Government. Historians
always attribute the fall of a dynasty to the excessive power of
eunuchs, but perhaps this is, in part, a literary convention.

What distinguishes the Emperor is not so much his political power, which
fluctuates with the strength of his personality, as certain religious
prerogatives. The Emperor is the Son of Heaven; he sacrifices to Heaven
at the winter solstice. The early Chinese used "Heaven" as synonymous
with "The Supreme Ruler," a monotheistic God;[3] indeed Professor Giles
maintains, by arguments which seem conclusive, that the correct
translation of the Emperor's title would be "Son of God." The word
"Tien," in Chinese, is used both for the sky and for God, though the
latter sense has become rare. The expression "Shang Ti," which means
"Supreme Ruler," belongs in the main to pre-Confucian times, but both
terms originally represented a God as definitely anthropomorphic as the
God of the Old Testament.[4]

As time went by the Supreme Ruler became more shadowy, while "Heaven"
remained, on account of the Imperial rites connected with it. The
Emperor alone had the privilege of worshipping "Heaven," and the rites
continued practically unchanged until the fall of the Manchu dynasty in
1911. In modern times they were performed in the Temple of Heaven in
Peking, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The annual
sacrifice in the Temple of Heaven represented almost the sole official
survival of pre-Confucian religion, or indeed of anything that could be
called religion in the strict sense; for Buddhism and Taoism have never
had any connection with the State.

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