"Ways That Are Dark: The Truth About China" (1933)

By Ralph Townsend

🍋 [...] An accurate survey of what is now going on in China necessarily includes much that is hideous and terrible, for the simple reason that a great deal of what the Chinese are doing is hideous and terrible.

[...] China for fifty centuries has moved glacier-like, ponderously and slowly, without serious deflection at any time, ever gathering its weight of population, ever settling towards its obscure destiny, its masses ever increasingly crushed by their own pressure upon themselves.

[...] The facts are repellent. But they exist, and we dwell in the same small world with them. Nothing useful can be accomplished by attempting to cover them up.

Despite the amount that has been recently written and spoken on the subject, China remains incomprehensible for most American readers [...]

We are still paying a severe penalty for failure to appraise at that time the character of some of the nations with which we were thrown suddenly into complex relations.

“Nobody trusts anybody else in China, for the excellent reason that he knows that under similar circumstances he could not be trusted himself.” - Arthur Smith

🍋 [...] This brings up a principle ever emphasized through all experience in China - that a Chinese is readily manageable by any definite allegiance to authority.

You do not tip the hotel coolies direct to individuals. You tip the No. 1 Boy for the lot. He settles with each according to some arrangement of their own.

They work for him and are responsible to him. He is responsible to the hotel, or whatever other organization the connection may involve.

The coolies are his own gang, generally relatives, and the system is a sort of clan system.

The No. 1 is the head man, the king. He keeps most or a large part of the takings, and a well-employed No. 1 is usually well-to-do for a low-class Chinese.

He exacts a percentage cut from curio dealers or other persons who sell to you in his domain. He demands that his under-coolies turn in to him any tips direct from an inexperienced stranger.

If they don’t, and are caught, they face dreaded penalties from him. He will search them when he likes for hidden money.

🍋 The “Squeeze”

The employment system in the hotel is a picture of the way much of the labor in China is managed.

Nobody relies altogether on his personal earnings for a livelihood. Nor can any one keep his personal earnings for himself.

Each strategically brings pressure to collect toll—squeeze as it is called in China—from somebody else.

And somebody else is ever waiting to collect from him.

Even the beggars are organized into guilds, with elaborate systems of squeeze and counter-squeeze upon one another, and the whole organization, in turn, must pay squeeze to other organizations.

Everybody pays to get a job and pays to keep it. And everybody is ferociously determined to make his collected squeeze as big as possible and his paid-out squeeze as little as possible.

🍋 Such a system has brought about a degree of skill in deception absolutely unimaginable to a Westerner. Survival depends upon out-deceiving competitors.

With the credentials of economic success a matter of deception, those who are at the top may be expected to be better at the game than those lower down.

Experience with “high class" Chinese, especially officials, bears out this proposition with sad frequency.

[...] the readiness of all classes of Chinese to say whatever will please your ear at the moment, altogether irrespective of its truth, will be impressively noted in dealing with them.

This trait is rather common among tradespeople all over the world, and particularly to be expected among certain classes of immigrants in America. But in China it is a cult.

🍋 The same experience will characterize dealings with Chinese high and low, from trifles to things of importance. […]

It is simply an almost absolute disregard of truth which prompts them to say what they estimate will be most pleasing to you and, incidentally, what will get rid of you most smoothly if you are unprofitable, or get your order if you are a possible customer.

In answering inquiries about time, distance or anything else, a Chinese will say what he thinks you want to hear oblivious to the fact that you may prefer accuracy, even though it is disappointing.

You may recall a moral that the Chinese have certainly learned to practice, to the effect that one should never refuse a request in an abrupt manner, but should grant it in form, though with no intention of fulfillment:

“Put him off till tomorrow, and then another tomorrow. Thus you comfort his heart," advised the ancient sage.

🍋 This characteristic of the Chinese, their cheerful indifference to truth, exasperates a foreigner perhaps more than any quality in their nature.

And as is natural, without any conception of truth as a principle among themselves, they seem frequently incapable of believing anything said to them by others.

And they are childishly naive, as a general thing, in disclosing what they intend to do.

We find them secretive in a sense, very much so, but before the fruition of any important plot they manage usually to let out a few unintended hints, so that marked victims are forewarned.

In boxing parlance this unconscious intimation of what is coming is called “telegraphing the punch.” The Chinese are very clumsy in telegraphing their punches. Hundreds of foreigners in China owe their lives to this clumsiness.

When the Chinese are mysterious, they are not ingenious. They resort to standardized pretenses that are so uniform that an experienced foreigner can actually read them as a code, the way a veteran sailor can read the approaching weather from learned symptoms.

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READ ALSO:

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• Why are Chinese people so stingy?

• ‘You can never be China’s friend’

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A Chinese may live in Shanghai’s International Settlement, or in the French Concession adjoining it, with the same civic protection for his life and property offered any foreigner there.

Compared with the hazards of existence outside a foreign area where Chinese must pay heavily for the privilege of holding on to their wealth, the foreign-administered territory is a paradise, and their eagerness to live in it reveals their attitude. [...]

In Shanghai, these great warehouses you see are safe from plundering war lords, extorting officials and ravaging armies; there are courts to proceed against defaulters, and there is recourse to law in legal liability. [...]

🍋 Were the Chinese able to get along with one another and were they possessed of constructive spirit, a second Shanghai could be built at any of several places not far from the mouth of the Yangtze, many of them more suitable than the site of Shanghai for a great metropolis.

You learn at once, upon consulting the data of their educational history, that for two generations they have had swarms of foreign-trained men theoretically competent for such an undertaking.

During the present century they have had thousands.

Every year for decades now they have had large numbers of Chinese architects, engineers, business graduates and other academically proficient experts in every line returned from the universities of America and Europe.

Plus this array of theoretically competent talent, they have an abundance of capital. There are many Chinese millionaires.

🍋 The truth is that they show a strange inability to make anything work under their own management when the project is larger than a one-man enterprise.

They have most of what it takes, in the modern world, to make things work.

They have a talent tor obedience, when well supervised. They have industriousness and intelligence.

But two other essentials, honesty and willingness to cooperate, they emphatically lack, and some deeply inner ingredient of character seems to militate against remedying this lack.

They simply cannot work among themselves in large undertakings.

And they do not have a satisfactory mental connection between academic ability and practical application.

But the worst of their deficiencies is their treacherous disloyalty. They seem ever prone to work against one another rather than cooperatively, though they are very fond of membership associations expressing a theory of cooperation, but never achieving it.

The frequency with which they betray one another is astounding.

To paraphrase a common proverb of American social usage, it may be said that in business, one Chinese is a company, two are a clique, and three are a plot.

It will be noted in China, as in large American cities, that almost any outstanding success of Chinese enterprise is run as a one-man-boss concern, patriarchally, with little if any administration delegated to subordinates.

A Chinese subordinate, under hourly scrutiny, is capable of efforts often surpassing, individually, those common in foreign companies.

🍋 But a Chinese subordinate out of light in a Chinese enterprise is a dangerous liability, an opportunist weighing the advantages of working for his employer or working coverdy against him.

It is little wonder, accordingly, that the Chinese are such frenzied gamblers, setdng aside for the moment other considerations in their character that probably tend to make them so.

Through many centuries there has been very little opportunity in China for safety in investments.

The character of the people has been traditionally such that to thrust money into anybody’s hands as an investment was always a gamble.

Hence a Chinese with money might as well gamble it over the gaming table as any other way, and have at least the thrill of exciting play instead of the long gnawing anxiety following the equal, if not greater, risk of investing it.

🍋 [...] In discussing the Chinese, nobody takes for granted any objectivity in their movements other than personal temporary advantage.

Speculating upon what this one or that one of the prominent figures will do is merely a sort of ask-me-another game.

[…]You will be told in Shanghai that the way to satisfy a ricksha coolie is to pay him exactly the standard fare and no more. […]

If you take pity on a ricksha coolie—and he will do his talented best to look pitiful—and pay him too much, he will shout that he is cheated. […]

He supposes that because you gave him more than you were obliged to, you are therefore a fool, and with a little exhibit of shouts and tears you can be made a bigger fool and induced to hand over a good deal more.

Nothing corresponding to sympathy exists in the world he knows, and the idea of some one desiring to set him up with a square meal after seeing him barefoot in the snow and slush is completely incomprehensible.

[...] The first thing every ricksha boy does when he is paid is to go to one of these vendors for a purchase of something to eat. […] The instant significance of every bit of money is food.

🍋 If the person is of the wealthier classes, he feels the infection of this nationally dominant thought all the same, and because he can afford it, he eats all the time.

The prosperous classes are eating the whole day long, from early morning till evening, in the street delicatessens.

And at night, as you glimpse them through an open window, they are still eating. They expand in it, they blend in it the deepest ecstasies of spiritual and physical delight. Their eyes shine at the prospect.

[...]All words in China are meaningless, and costing nothing, they are dispensed with profligate abundance everywhere on all occasions.

Chinese dearly love jabber, protracted harangues over trifles and endlessly gushing eulogies and contentions which upon their face are ridiculously untrue.

Foreigners, with a reverence for conciseness and accuracy, especially Americans and British, are of course decidedly out of their element in all this.

They feel the fatigue of the constant resistance to this unrelaxing combat in every negotiation, large or trifling; and with this fatigue there accumulates a rising exasperation at its needlessness, and a deep chronic inward contempt for the Chinese because of it.

But you soon find that where the Chinese have a genuine talent for exasperating you, they have a double talent for placating you when you exhibit anger.

No race approaches them in a talent for what we call handing out soft soap.

If you have gone out of a particular shop indignant at the proprietor, lo, the next day he will likely be lying in wait with a present, a trifle that he begs you to accept as a token of old friendship. No reference will be made to his former atrocities. [...]

🍋 This interprets in part what people mean when they say they like the Chinese. They mean they find them affable.

And it is true that large numbers of Americans do find the Chinese likable; for their unsurpassed amiability, gracious etiquette, spontaneous lying for the expediency of the moment, and other talented diminutions of face-to-face difficulties, all act as soothing lubrication in matters where we should risk friction for honesty.

Few Americans would express a lining for another American they could not respect in the matter of character.

But Chinese whose entire system of standards is anathema to our own are spoken of as being well liked, and correctly so, with this subtraction in mind.

[...] From personal experience with Chinese officials, observation of the Chinese at large, and drawing upon the experiences of many acquaintances whose service collectively has taken them all over China into areas no one person could know intimately, it is a reasonable conviction that there are not enough straightforward, honest Chinese available to man any kind of government there.

This is not a personal cynicism. It merely phrases common and competent foreign judgment on the scene.

Most thoughtful foreigners in China today believe that a monarchy would be best for the country in its present state.

Where trustworthiness is as scarce as it is in China, it is probably better to have a government highly centralized, requiring as few authoritative individuals as possible, in order to utilize most effectively the limited amount of honesty available.

But even with a highly centralized monarchy, or dictatorship, some delegation of responsibility in the lower official orders is unavoidable, and there are not enough reliable men in China to fill these posts.

[…] People in America who turn with disgust from the doings of Tammany Hall, the Boo Boo Hoff regime, and the Chicago gang, as the lowest possible in political corruption, simply fail to appreciate the real possibilities of corruption as it is seen in China.

Here, at least, we have a fairly numerous corps of honest citizenry, a sort of normally neutral vigilante reserve, who step in now and then where and when things become too bad and prevent extension of the more vicious excesses.

There is no such reserve of honest citizenry in China, and no sign on the horizon of any in formation for the future.

You do not think of Chinese communism or nationalism - you ponder which age-old Chinese traits may now be uppermost under that label.

It is the same with the other -isms. The implications are not the same as they are understood in other countries.

All movements reaching China from without appear to be chamelionized, Chinafied, and there remains little appropriateness in a name among agitations in China that have presumably originated elsewhere.

But most significant of all, you have found that Chinese do not fight for ideas, though they often give the impression of fighting under them, banner-wise.

🍋 [...] A great deal of our sentimentality and resultant indulgence is completely misconstrued by the Chinese, and in the end they appear to feel more resentment toward us for it.

[...] A sort of moldy desolation, withal surrounded by animation, stares at you everywhere in China.

In spite of their industry, in the sense of always puttering about, the Chinese are without doubt the most slipshod people on earth.

The common huts are always about to fall to pieces, a not infrequent occurrence. Their roofs leak, and the mud walls are usually cracked and pardy knocked to pieces.

Mending anything before the imminent danger of its falling upon his head, or upon his livestock (a more important concern), would be unthinkable to a Chinese.

Even the premises of the well-to-do are almost invariably in an advanced state of disrepair, though the family has an abundance of money for luxuries.

Many tourists who have fed their knowledge on vague ideas of Eastern splendors have failed to delimit the geographical applications, and expect to find in China the sort of man-made glories that belong to India.

China has no temples to compare with those to be seen elsewhere in the Orient. The pagodas are a little better, but most of them are crumbly affairs, with no stonework or decoration of any special quality. They are simply towers in the Chinese manner.

🍋 [...] One of the most surprising features of Chinese architecture is that outstanding permanent monuments of any kind are scarce.

Their temples in their heyday were rarely built for permanence, and accordingly no very old ones are to be seen.

Nothing in Chinese records indicates that any particularly fine ones ever existed. The traveler looking for signs of antiquity in China will not find many in their buildings.

Where Rome and Greece abound with really noble edifices standing recognizable after more than two thousand years, China has none. For a land where building stone was plentiful in areas of foremost culture, this is a strange inconsistency.

But it is odd, with their respect for graves, that no notable mausoleums were built in the past, as in India and Egypt, despite an equal abundance of cheap or free labor.

[...] The Chinese inherently love civic tranquility, and yet historically and at the present time they are among the bloodiest and most turbulent of nations.

Their language is chock full of proverbs about peace and good will, and yet a short walk through any native Chinese street will reveal more family rows, angry bickerings over trifles and more general quarreling than anywhere else in the world.

[...] They are famed for their prudence in money matters, yet their love of gambling amounts to such an insane passion that every year millions are ruined to become beggars or suicides.

They achieved certain principles of democracy long before any Western country, yet nowhere has tyranny been traditionally so fierce and oppressive, nor is it today anywhere else so outrageously crueL

They are the least warlike of nations, yet the constant bloodshed through the centuries in China appalls the historians, and China today has probably more soldiers under arms than all the rest of the world combined.

They are among the most ingenious of peoples in making the most out of their natural resources, yet tens of millions never get enough to eat.

[…] Occidentals are disposed to think of gratitude, for example, as an instinctive response to consideration and kindness, resulting in at least an impulse in the beneficiary to exempt the benefactor from malice that might be held toward other fellow men.

Not so in China.

Efforts in behalf of a Chinese do not mean that that Chinese will assuredly show any extra regard for the persons extending assistance. He may or he may not.

Historically, a few have, and a vastly greater number have not.

Gratitude, in the shape of reciprocated kindness and consideration, cannot be expected in the average run of experience with Chinese.

[...] What we see among them is complete indifference to supreme distress in any one not of their immediate family or associations, even where the most trifling effort would assist the afflicted person.

[...] Anywhere and at almost any time in China, you can see a cart fallen on a man or a horse, or some similar accident, plentiful in the crowded streets, with curious onlookers not stirring a hand to lift the injured out of his predicament.

🍋 This indifference to fellow suffering seems by all evidence to be distinctly Oriental.

The anecdote of the Good Samaritan in the Bible suggests that an unwillingness to aid a suffering stranger was the established etiquette around Palestine at that time, since the Good Samaritan who lent a hand, and did nothing more than almost any passing motorist would do in similar circumstances among us today, was looked upon as a highly exceptional chap.

At corresponding stages of civilization and culture, most Occidental races appear to have exhibited vastly greater advances in the cultivation of fellow-feeling than most Oriental races.

[...] The earliest records that survive of the Greeks, the Romans, Britons and other Europeans, indicate that ready assistance to a fellow creature was general where no enmity prevailed.

And we may gather from accounts of American Indian fighting that those forest savages would at times make strenuous efforts to rescue a wounded brave on a field of conflict, even when the brave was not a close family connection of the potential rescuers.

[…] African game hunters present well-authenticated accounts of such occurrences as a badly wounded elephant being assisted to cover by his comrades.

And any one who has witnessed the wailing grief of a herd of seals at the death of one of their number will never believe that the impulses of sympathy and sorrow, as distinct from a realization of personal loss, are absent among them.

But the Chinese appear to be one of the notable exceptions to the higher zoology. […] throughout their ancient centuries of advances in other particulars they failed to develop any credo of fellow-sympathy.

It is that they appear to have in the very crib and core of their molecules almost complete insulation against its infection.

Moral philosophers and religious propagandists have not been lacking through the centuries to urge upon them a more generous personal outlook.

But with deceptive initial successes here and there, quickly expiring, aims of altering Chinese character in the matter of engendering ideas of fellow-feeling have failed.

It is now maintained by thinking observers that the Chinese cannot be changed in this respect. It is simply that their resistance to such change has been shown to be victorious to date, and is still as stanch as ever.

[...] If the mood recommends, and it very commonly does, captured troops are butchered by the victors. With all the millions of soldiers engaged in intermittent conflict in China, it is worth noting that there are no military prison camps to mention.

No facilities exist for feeding captured forces. Food and shelter are too scarce to be wasted in such a fashion, and the idea of dispensing anything to a useless enemy would be absolutely incomprehensible to a Chinese, even if the supply were plentiful.

Furthermore, deception and treachery arc so usual, and so taken for granted by all contenders in China, that no army there could muster guards who might be trusted to see that the prisoners were not aided in escaping.

[…] Going back to the subject of Chinese cruelty, overwhelmingly evident every day everywhere in the country, a few samples of regular practices are illustrative.

For instance, a man who falls overboard from a boat not manned by members of his family or close associates need not expect to be picked up.

Falling overboard, it may be mentioned, is not an infrequent occurrence among Chinese, who are naturally careless.

Almost any veteran foreigner who has traveled up and down the rivers of China will be able to recount one or more cases where he has personally observed a man drown without efforts to save him by other Chinese a few feet away on shore or in a boat.

An American Consul related to me a personally witnessed occurrence at a place up the Yangtze where he was stationed, one that strikes a Westerner as incredible, but which would not impress a native Chinese as anything remarkable.

It happened that a sampan loaded down with a cargo of live pigs, and crowded also with Chinese, was caught in a treacherous current and overturned a little distance from the shore.

The Chinese and pigs aboard were spilled out into the water. A number of other Chinese along the shore, seeing the upset, immediately put out to the scene in their own boats, and began greedily picking up the live pigs swimming about.

The drowning and pleading humans who wailed to be taken aboard were knocked on the head as fast as they swam to the arriving boats, and were all washed downstream and drowned.

The Chinese minute men of the sampans returned in high glee with this unexpected catch of fresh pork, and life went on as usual.

[...] Elsewhere, among his varied experiences, Hue had occasion to note the evils of gambling, and the intensities of passion aroused in Chinese by games of betting.

In one place at the time he visited it, a city up near the Great Wall, he says, where the winters are very cold, an unusually frenzied epidemic of gambling gripped the populace.

Desperate players, having a run of ill luck, would begin to wager one personal possession after another, finally getting down to the clothes they wore. If his fortune was still bad, the winners would promptly strip these from the loser, then the bouncers would drag the unlucky wretch to the door and heave him out into the snow.

The winning players, watching from the door for a moment the fellow’s agonized running about to seek warmth before he succumbed to the deadly cold and curled up in the snow to freeze, would then go on with the game.

Hue relates also that the gambling halls there at that time commonly kept on the tables a hatchet, a block, and a bowl of hot oil.

This was for the particularly passionate fans who would in desperation wager a finger. The winner, according to the rules, had the privilege of cutting the finger off himself, evidently a powerful attraction against which money would be wagered. The hot oil was to cauterize the spot where the finger had been.

Incidents of similar savagery could be multiplied, with citation of names and dates, almost ad infinitum.

🍋 A Chinese is usually more intimidated by first outward appearances than anything else.

[...] Geography, climate and diet and any number of other things have been held to blame, separately and conjointly, for the Chinese being as they are, all without very satisfactory conclusions.

Accounting for their cantankerousness defies even the Darwinian hypothesis.

When it began nobody knows, because nobody knows when the Chinese began.

When it will disappear, nobody knows likewise, except to the extent of being convinced it will not disappear soon, for the reason that the Chinese have a talent for survival exceeding anything else in human form.

Our earliest records of contacts with the Chinese establish that they have not changed perceptibly in characteristics since such records began.

Their own records, throwing light on their characteristics back to the remote obscurities of forty centuries ago, force the melancholy conclusion that they were no different then.

They have bent in accommodation to certain material necessities intermittently, but under like circumstances their indigenous and seemingly ineradicable traits reassert themselves in a manner to distinguish them from the rest of mankind, and to keep the Chinese the Chinese.

[...] Their outstanding characteristics neither enable other peoples to deal satisfactorily with them, nor enable the Chinese to deal satisfactorily with themselves.

They have steadfastly resisted the introduction of other standards developed elsewhere and which, though far from ideal in practice, are of proven superiority to their own in enabling the average of mankind to derive the most from his environment in competition with his fellows.

The Chinese are themselves, and that is all. We do not attempt to judge them here by our standards.

[...] An interesting fact is that the Chinese are most puzzling to foreigners who have lived longest among them, and whose abundance of intimate experience might be best calculated to banish bewilderment.

Each day, in each successive experience, a foreigner senses progress toward a personal solution, by personal solution being meant a harmonizing of Chinese characteristics into some order of consistency.

But no foreigner on record has ever formed a really settled estimate of the Chinese in his own mind. It is unlikely that any ever will.

[...] But further on the subject of understanding the Chinese, it is clear that to do so we should be obliged to possess Chinese mental machinery.

We cannot grasp a system of values so in conflict with ours as the Chinese, however determined the effort at detachment.

[...] And religious priests from within and without changed the Chinese no more than the cavalry of Genghis Khan or the swarthy Manchu bowmen.

Confucius, a Chinese, who knew his people, and was overcome with sadness thereby, labored in vain a lifetime to change them.

After death he received innumerable tablets for his efforts, just as the pioneer Manchu conquerors might have looked out from their spirit world upon millions of dangling pigtails in reminder of futile aspirations. Both failed.

The priests of Buddhism and Mohammedanism and Judaism and Christianity made their inroads, and the unastute among them were elated by outward symbols of conversion.

Today in China, a Chinese is a Chinese first and last, and no significant differences are evident among those whose “religious” identities are widely divergent.

[...] And it is a good inference that John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Henry Ford and Josef Stalin will separately and collectively make no more dent in this inner adamantine core of Chineseness in a fifth the world’s population than prophets of the past.

In deviousness of thought, evasiveness, obstinacy and prevarication, the Chinese will likely be themselves when the last coolie wears a Hart Schaffner & Marx suit and dodges unwelcome reality on balloon tires.

ON PATHOLOGICAL LYING

In the West we scarcely know anything about lying. We are rank amateurs.

Of course, the majority of Americans will lie occasionally under the stress of social niceties and a few will not be dependable for the truth at any time.

Still, such a record comes nowhere near scratching the real possibilities in the matter. We have a host of recalcitrant die-hards who are every day and everywhere telling the truth.

And our recognized scholars have a strong pride of accuracy. The great majority lean to a conservatism of certainty in announcements, distinguishing between opinion and fact.

And even in such suspect classes as politicians and advertising men, lying is usually meditated to preserve if possible for the spokesman a share of the universal Western esteem for those within the pale of the truth.

Few will lie when the alternative of telling the truth would entail no disadvantage.

Very different traditions prevail in China.

When I was first on my way there, I was ordered to check in with the U. S. Immigration authorities at San Francisco, in order to familiarize myself further with problems of Chinese entering the United States, particularly in the matter of illicit entry.

A remark of one of the veteran inspectors at Angel Island sounded humorously cynical to me then, though he made it with reflective seriousness: “One time with another,” he said, “a Chinese would rather lie than tell* the truth.”

Within a few weeks I had to admit that I agreed with him. The conclusion is inevitable.

The hourly evidence piled up in dealing with your servants, with tradespeople, with the so-called “high class” Chinese, with the rank and file of Chinese government employees from generals to coolies, is too preponderant.

With absolutely no advantage to be gained by lying, in a thousand instances where the explanation is of no importance one way or the other, a Chinese will relate the most absurd sort of cellophane lie.

High and low, coolie or general, they will lie naively, reassuringly, always affecting surprised pain at your doubts, when within an hour or so the truth is certain to crop out.

[...] Persons of other countries living among the Chinese acquire rather quickly, if their contacts are varied and representative, a certain ability to interpret the probable realities out of the camouflage of deviousness and dissimulation with which about every thought and movement of a Chinese is cloaked.

They acquire in time, too, a certain ability to predict the consequences of situations in terms of customary Chinese reactions.

That is, they gain skill in that very emphatically essential art, in dealing with the Chinese, of reading between the lines.

For it is seemingly instinct with a Chinese to be obscure as to the true facts or his true intentions, and with the idea of assisting himself in this concealment he is commonly effusive in irrelevant or untrue particulars.

This tendency is so deep-rooted that a Chinese will exhibit it even where no imaginable objection could exist to a straightforward statement of the case.

From the smallest to the largest affairs, the aim always, among themselves and with foreigners, seems to be deception.

[...] It is necessary to recall that lying has not the disesteem attached to it among the Chinese that it has with us, and it is therefore a deficiency of character chiefly in our estimate of them, and not in their estimate of themselves.

But it becomes important to us when we have negotiations with them, and is for that reason worth noting.

Usually the introduction to it is in the shops, upon first arrival. This is the innocuous, Oriental bargaining variety, and is expected by any well-informed traveler.

It is not so much lying in the moral turpitude sense as mere play-acting, the mutually understood little exhibition of sales dramatics, almost a part of the etiquette of any commercial transaction.

Wang Lee swears that he tells the truth and that he has always been known to do so, that you can summon the foremost personages of the city to attest his scrupulous truthfulness, and that the price is positively ten dollars with never until doomsday a single penny of discount possible.

You edge toward the door a little and he leaps in front of you, redoubling his protests that he is known up and down the street as a strictly one-price dealer—but that you can have the article for nine seventy-five this once.

The business goes on for some minutes, until finally you have the article wrapped up and hand over what you both expected at the outset—three dollars and a half.

Yet if you show interest in another article the entire show will be repeated, and would be repeated were you to go in the same shop every day for a week.

It is the custom, and only a few of the somewhat Westernized dealers of the cities have adjusted themselves to a more time-saving dispatch of matters.

The majority of native dealers dislike the brusque take-it-or-leave-it attitude of Americans, and will even refuse a sum slighdy in excess of what they expected to receive if it means foregoing their favorite theatrical workout.

The next category of Chinese inexactitude likely to be encountered is that of complete misrepresentation of circumstances and motives in routine household and office business, and this the foreigner finds rather irritating.

It is soon enough manifest when he begins his dealings with the unexpectedly large staff of domestic help he finds himself employing.

Here the real core of the Chinese proneness to lying crops out, though still harmless.

It is accomplished with a readiness of wit that is surprising, even in a coolie or gateman you have previously found dull and slow of coordination.

The No. 1 boy, who is the generalissimo of the crew, lives with a few cardinal resolutions in his mind regarding his relations with the head of the house, and chief among these is that he should appear to have anticipated everything, however unexpected, that you may request.

“Tell the gardener to prune off those dead limbs from that tree,” you say.

The No. 1 boy instantly answers that he has just told the gardener to do that very thing, and he believes the gardener is at the moment looking for the saw.

“The cook should not put quite so much seasoning in the soup,” you remark.

And instandy again the No. 1 boy, who generally serves the table, will declare that but a few moments before he noted the cook’s error in respect to the soup and properly reprimanded him.

You know very well that the boy has never thought of the matter before, and he knows that you know it.

Of course, this trait is to a considerable extent an Oriental one, rather than specifically or endemically Chinese.

But it is so conspicuous there, and operates every hour of the day so uniformly, that in appraising the Chinese people at large it must be taken into account.

🍋 [...] To relieve the issue of the instant with words is an unfailing Chinese reaction.

It does not matter that the speaker will be caught up on points of accuracy a little later.

Such a development will not usually embarrass him, nor is it expected to be the occasion of a reopening of the matter by you.

It is almost a mental reflex, about as nearly automatic as anything not actually a physiological function could be.

And the Chinese are supremely competent in employing without hesitation words which will in some faint degree fit the occasion and supply some sort of intended deception.

Even with the most dull-witted coolies, it is extremely rare to see one hesitate.

This talent is invariably called into service when an employee has forgotten an instruction.

“Did the chair boy go to the Joneses and call for those books this morning, as I told him?” you ask the No. 1 boy at lunch time.

“He went and was told they would be ready this afternoon,” the No. 1 unhesitatingly replies, assuring you at the same time that he will dispatch the chair boy for the books forthwith.

Dropping in at the Joneses yourself a little later, you find that the books have been waiting for you since the evening before, and that nothing has been heard of the coolie calling for them.

In employment of Chinese involving any responsibility at all, foreigners in China encounter practically an impossibility in impressing upon native employees that initiative in reporting things amiss is preferred to the rooted custom of concealment and deception.

The philosophy of the native goes much beyond that of restaurant waiters and cooks in America, who proceed on the assumption that what a person doesn’t know never hurts him.

The Chinese version is that whatever a person can’t find out at the moment, irrespective of the certainty with which he will find it out a little later, is of no consequence.

This last-mentioned trait is very characteristic of the so-called “high class” Chinese, and characterizes most dealings with Chinese officials.

[...] The Chinese seldom lie with consistency, and never with ingenuity. Their production aims at quantity, not quality.

Current American fiction ideas about the sinister cunning of the Chinese with their matchlessly clever deception is laughable after a slight amount of first-hand experience.

They could rarely fool a bright ten-year-old after he had been in the country long enough to get the hang of their style.

Some American editor now and then urges the Government to send out shrewd diplomats to the Far East—men too electrically astute to be taken in by the polished suavity of the wool-pullers there.

As to that, it is true we have had some deplorable dullards among our diplomats in China, but not one, I believe, who was ever such a complete fool as to be fooled by the Chinese.

We think of lying as a recourse, a somewhat venturesome and usually reluctant expedient intended to maintain a deception until the crisis of a difficulty is past.

The Chinese idea of lying is first of all that it is an answer - a response of some sort, opposed to the bothersome or disagreeable actualities of the moment - designed to protract uncertainty in another person, or at least get rid of him.

It may not even be expected to do this, but will be designed merely to parry the approach of the disagreeable.

Chinese lies of this latter variety are often so ludicrously transparent that they could deceive no one for a single instant.

They may be the first ill-considered absurdity that comes into the liar's head.

But, eternally fond of words, he will stick tenaciously to one lie until it is hopelessly blasted, then without change of countenance ignore it altogether and switch to another equally preposterous, contradicting the first.

And to gather his wits, while cornered and pondering a new one, your noble host may be relied upon to launch into proverbs, with which the tongue and head of every Chinese are at all times hopelessly infested.

[...] An interesting Chinese trait, worth mentioning here, is that very generally, if you catch some one doing something impossible to tolerate and tell him he is discharged, he will fall to pleading in the most pitiful fashion to be excused, and will get any possible “higher up” friends in the household to intercede for him with a good word.

Then, if excused, a few hours later the coolie will ask for his wages, announcing that a message from somewhere tells him that his aged mother is ill.

He pockets his wages and goes his way.

By all the exactions of tradition dear to him, he has "saved his face".

This same principle of “face” operates higher up in the cultural scheme.

A Chinese official must have incurred the hatred of his superior clique very venomously indeed to be discharged outright.

He is allowed to send in his resignation (perhaps with intimated assassination if he doesn’t) once, twice, three times, before it is “accepted.”

This appears to be about the nearest approach in China to consideration for the fallen foe.

It does not prevail all the time, but it occurs often enough to classify it as one of the existing systems of the country.

It does not spring exactly from application of the golden rule, but arises from the fact that tendencies to corn* promise, deviousness and dissimulation are lodged inextricably in the molecules of every Chinese, and further from the fact that there is a lot of difference between the potential menace of a temporarily disgruntled loser and an intensely infuriated outright enemy.

🍋 Chinese are strangely uneasy in the face of really explosive wrath, and prefer not to provoke it if there is any other course.

It should be remembered that a Chinese is eternally a dramatist, a play actor in the midst of the most poignant realities about him. [...]

The speed with which the most bedraggled, cringing, smiling and piteous beggarly rickshaw boy can change gears and become a shouting and cursing and spitting Oriental demon is eye-opening.

Even round-the-world tourists, in Shanghai for a day, if they go about much alone, make this astonishing discovery soon enough.

I have seen Chinese deck passengers, by their convenient talent for self-induced momentary grief, elicit immense sympathy among uninitiated foreign bystanders.

Complaining that they have no money for fare - after already coming aboard—they scream, moan and thresh about in a grand epileptic scene, gurgling meanwhile about sick parents or one of the usual expedients in such cases.

The tears, in profusion, were unmistakably real. But grabbed by a strong-arm squad, and facing a certainty of being thrown off the boat, they could produce the money readily enough, then settle themselves among their poles and baskets and begin chatting amiably away as if nothing had ever happened.

According to our standards, it is a melancholy truth that nearly every single word and gesture in China having the outward semblance of squareness, sincerity, loyalty and truth is a hollow rite, while the only genuine consistencies of words with actions are those in the field of rascality.

🍋 [...] Among foreign residents in China, when a house coolie or the cook announces that he must set off on a distant journey to visit his aged mother, the first thing to do is to look about to see what is missing.

I had heard of this wisdom, and the first time a coolie came to me with the story of a sick mother I took a look around the premises—though unfortunately not until the coolie was out of sight.

Sure enough, a bit of money laid aside for incidentals was gone.

It is quite common—I should say usual—for a coolie who has been threatened with discharge, and pleaded tearfully to be kept on, to wait two or three days for face-saving, then announce that his aged mother is ill, and that he desires to go away for a “few days.”

He will almost never say that he is going away for good.

The reference to the aged parent is not a story he expects you to believe. It is simply the conventional way of treating the affair.

In matters of this kind, the Chinese have an immense lore of things that mean other things.

One of the difficulties for a foreigner in reading their literature is to understand its real meaning.

Thus a Chinese desiring to announce to another Chinese that his brother had been killed would perhaps go no nearer the actual facts—in words—than to mention that his brother’s house had been damaged by wind.

Wherever we look in Chinese history we find it characterized by this absolute meaninglessness of words, with the virtues of loyalty, reliability and truth all tumbled into a sterility of mere outward noise.

🍋 COWARDICE AND AVERSION TO PHYSICAL EXERCISE

A few centuries ago, when China was a nation enlightened to a greater degree than any of its neighbors in the matter of arms and munitions, Malay pirates were troubling the South China coast.

The pirates evidently made raids now and then upon the coast villages, settled temporarily and then took sail again.

To break up this practice, the Emperor of China issued orders that all Chinese residents along that coast should remove inland a certain number of miles.

For, he reasoned in his instructions, if there was nothing valuable along the coast for the pirates to come after, they would cease to trouble the Flowery Kingdom.

At that time, theoretically, China was the strongest power on earth, yet she withdrew in alarm before a few small prahus full of naked Malays.

Had the pirates set up residence on the coast, Chinese talents could have met the problem handily - the Chinese could simply have outlied them and outbred them.

But an issue of swords and spears, though the Chinese possessed many thousand times the resources of the invaders, filled them with terror.

In the journal of a traveler of a century ago among the Mongols—frontier nomads of the farmer Chinese Empire—we find that the lament of the Mongols was that while the Chinese would not fight them, their wheedling traders, pawnbrokers and the like managed progressively by flattery, skilled deception and eternal thrift to reduce them to a state of impoverished subjection.

🍋 Of the differences we see between various races, this absence of physical courage in the Chinese is perhaps a characteristic instinctively repellent to Anglo-Saxons.

It is coupled, of course, with Chinese distaste for any kind of vigorous physical endeavor.

No one ever saw or heard of a typical Chinese engaging in any sort of sport requiring activity.

They are the one large group of the world’s population having absolutely no traditions of physical contests for the mere exhilaration of feeling the play of muscles in friendly rivalry.

Almost every veteran foreigner in contact with native Chinese has been asked in bewilderment why he plays tennis, or why he rides a horse without appearing to go to any definite destination.

A frequent query is, “Why don’t you hire coolies to bat the ball around and sit down and watch?”

With the tens of thousands of Chinese men in foreign schools equipped with gymnasiums and often with physical education directors, it is interesting that there are no Chinese athletes.

And even among the Chinese adopted and brought up in foreign families, reluctance to exercise appears strong.

Those slant-eyed, yellow-faced tennis players you see on American campuses are nearly always Japanese, not Chinese.

Efforts are being made in foreign or foreignized schools in China to introduce outdoor sports, but any one watching the results can see that it is something mightily against the grain.

Chinese jugglers and acrobats are practically outcasts according to Chinese traditions, and special laws existed against them until recent years.

The profession was hereditary, and one of the lowest. Profit was the motive, not zeal of an athletic sort.

🍋 This absence of lusty physical exhilaration evidently accounts for the poor showing of Chinese in warfare, and with this in mind, any talk of the Chinese being a world power as soon as they gain adequate scientific knowledge is ridiculous.

As a matter of fact, China for more than seventy-five years has had very able foreign military advisers, and dozens of elaborate munitions and arms plants have been built under foreign direction.

Then as soon as the foreign director’s contract has expired in each, and the plant is turned over to Chinese graduates of American scientific schools, it goes to rust and ruin in short order, or if it remains open, operates very incompetently.

Particularly since the World War, when German ex-officers have been available at low cost, China’s armies have been very plentifully supplied with them.

But as the missionaries fail to give the Chinese character, foreign military advisers fail to give them courage.

This is not a matter of ignorance and poor training. Northwest frontier tribesmen of India incorporated into British forces fight with passionate determination, though as illiterate as the Chinese.

Further in reference to that “Chinaman’s word as good as his bond” business, I may mention that in the Chinese Navy, which is co-officered by retired British naval captains and commanders, each British adviser, from past experience, works on a basis of having his salary deposited in trust at a foreign bank for six months ahead at all times.

🍋 Nobody in the Far East trusts a Chinese where the Chinese has any possible way to slip out of the contract.

Written contracts were not usual in China in the past because there was no means of enforcing one at law.

Hence bargains were about as good orally as on paper, with each party as wary as possible.

Only a short residence in native China today is needed to hear of various Chinese who commit suicide—the usual expedient—to spite some debtor who refuses to pay.

The idea of going and killing him, natural to an Italian or a Cuban or a Mexican, seldom appeals to a Chinese.

It is much better to make the offender “lose face” by killing one’s self, a device which will direct unfavorable gossip upon the debtor.

Chinese wives through the centuries past have been able to restrain ill-natured husbands from unendurable excesses of cruelty by this threat of suicide.

The husband might not mind losing the wife, who could be replaced readily enough.

The rub was that where a wife committed suicide, her family’s clan could exact of the husband an elaborate funeral feast, for which they could dictate the menu and the number of guests.

They invariably seized upon this occasion to get as much as possible for nothing, and by naming the most expensive viands obtainable on a wholesale scale, actually bankrupt a delinquent husband, besides making him the laughing stock of the community.

🍋 OBSESSION WITH “FILIAL PIETY”

[...] Disobeying parents was a serious offense under the old Chinese penal code, punishable by death if the parent cared to reveal the insult to the local mandarin.

Striking a parent and equivalently serious offenses could be and were punished with death by slow torture.

[...] The wife of a fairly prominent Chinese with whom we were dealing at Foochow hung herself to spite her husband only a few months ago.

He cracked her on the head with a soapstone letter seal, we learned, during a row over proper discipline of a child.

True to form, the husband lost a great deal of "face" by her expedient.

🍋 MONEY DEFINES '“STATUS”

[...] Among the proprieties of opening small talk, when you meet a Chinese, one of his first questions will inquire how much money you make.

If he comes to see you, he asks you what rent you pay, or how much your house costs.

These are polite formalities observed out of regard for etiquette.

The purpose, so Chinese informed me, is to determine at once, by his income, “with what respect a person should be treated.”

Money is the life and soul of these people, the nearest thing they have to a religion.

Their fortitude in toil, where profits loom, is past belief.

The only occasions upon which I have ever seen Chinese exhibit grief had to do with losses of money, though I have seen them lose friends and members of the family without the slightest trace of distress.

[...] A foreigner in China never ceases to encounter new and more astounding revelations of Chinese tenderness in the matter of money, and numbness of feeling in every other aspect of life.

🍋 [...] The Chinese, to this day in fact, are remarkable in the way they can keep track of one another’s movements.

A Chinese detective really anxious anxious to find the guilty can do so more easily than in America, for the reason that most Chinese move in beaten paths, with somebody along the line sure to know of his activities.

In the old days, a Chinese meditating a crime might be restrained by his neighbors if they could expect to bear a part of the penalty, and thus the business of pulling down all the houses on the street was well reasoned.

Another device was to take one member of a family for punishment if the truly guilty could not be found.

This took advantage of the Chinese clan and family obligation tradition very neatly, and probably millions of crimes were prevented by it.

Life was cheap, and why not a father or brother if the culprit escaped?

In really heinous offenses, such as insurrection, all the first of kin and even second of kin might be executed or tortured to death along with the guilty man.

This possibility invoked such terrible associations of violated filial piety that a tempted Chinese might be induced to think twice before any overt act.

[...] They do not work as fast as an Occidental, and it is usually impossible to hurry them.

But nobody ever heard of a Chinese suffering a collapse of nerves. So far as anything except actual physical torture is concerned, they appear to have no nerves.

In this connection I have frequently noticed, and I believe all foreigners in China have noticed, their complete indifference to noise.

A Chinese clerk can make up his accounts or type his notes as congenially while a carpenter is hammering the floor under his chair as he could alone in the middle of Gobi.

Not once have I ever so much as heard a Chinese refer to noise as a distraction. Such a possibility seemingly never occurred to one.[...]

Those employed in American government and business offices seem absolutely tireless.

Few ever ask for a vacation, and this is rather meanly taken advantage of by foreigners, government and business employers alike.

In the American consulates, naturally, all government employees have, up until this year, been allowed one month annually with pay.

But fear that they would anger the consul keeps most Chinese employees from availing themselves of the privilege which in theory is theirs by right.

[...] Even the small children are vastly different from ours.

The turbulent shouting and jumping about from the instant of dismissal, such as we see among American kindergarten and lower grade pupils, does not prevail among Chinese children of the same age.

They play at times - with kites or dolls, or at beating with sticks any roaming dog that can be cornered - but the excited jumping about known among us is rarely seen.

[...] Education in the main consists of learning more and more characters, and learning to write them.

All this doubtless develops the memory for things seen and cultivates careful observation as well as patience.

In any event, the memory of a Chinese for a face, or for anything written, is uncanny if his attention has ever been directed to it once.

Chinese books on natural history, medicine, astronomy and the like reveal attentive regard for details observed but amazingly poor reasoning in efforts to establish conclusions from these details.

They learn well the habits of animals, the recurrent positions of stars, the differential diagnoses of disease, and many other things in the world of natural phenomena, but fall down hopelessly in their failure to deduce from any of their data constructive inferences in any systematic order.

That is, they impress us as primarily an intelligent people but not an intellectual people, and one gathers from conversation with returned students from foreign universities that this difference still applies to those educated abroad.

We do not find in their ancient scholarship the progressive reasoning forward from point to point that distinguished the thinkers of classic Greece, nor do we find any approximation of the constructive thinking in mathematics developed among the Arabs.

It is easy to see that China could never have produced a Euclid or a Descartes.

The relatively simple utilities of physical laws and natural forces known to them may be classified more as discoveries in most cases than inventions.

🍋 Neither causality nor finality ever seemed to trouble them.

They were content with elementary relationships, without much in the way of constructive efforts to discover new truths from these.

They discovered the behavior of the magnetic needle, the explosive properties of saltpeter and charcoal and sulphur mixed together, the processes of paper making and other things. But they went nowhere in mathematics.

Very simple principles of geometry escaped them, and algebra left them completely untouched. The advantages of decimal numeration were not utilized.

At the present time the majority of Chinese shop-keepers use the abacus —that thing with sliding beads we employ in primary grades—to compute prices.

They are surprisingly swift in some kinds of simple multiplication and division, but are usually perplexed and often helpless at multiplication or division of complex fractions.

[...] They learned the value of fertilizers but made very little headway in understanding chemical principles.

There is reason to believe that they discovered the property of steam as a power in early times, but if so they never did anything with it.

Similarly it is possible that they knew centuries ago the immunization properties of animal virus as protection against smallpox, but again if that is true they omitted turning the discovery to practical advantage.

Ever and again through their long history the strange Chinese have remained on the threshold of imminent advances all along the line, but stopped there, to remain in substantially the same balance of enlightenment and ignorance in which their earliest history, beginning in 2205 b.c., reveals them. They are there yet.

🍋 THE CLAN SYSTEM

[...] The clan system is both the strength and the curse of the country. It prevents the total destruction of the «nrial order, yet it assures the continuation of customs which militate against improvement in needed directions.

Chinese families tend to live in family herds, each household often a miniature village in itself, with parents, grandparents, children, uncles and cousins all under one roof or under adjoining roofs.

Where for business reasons one member moves to another residence, the allegiance still holds.

If he prospers, he is expected to share his earnings—or his proceeds from banditry or whatever else his occupation may be—with less fortunate members of the clan.

The tradition of family obligation is so strong that very few Chinese care to resist it.

The whole theory of self-respect for an individual is based upon this system.

Many present-day Chinese realize the mischief of it. But these are the fortunate ones financially and they are outnumbered by the unfortunates.

If a lucky individual makes money and refuses to divide it with his relatives, though they may be shiftless and good for nothing and unwilling to work if they get a chance, public opinion supports the impecunious and perhaps undeserving relatives in their demands upon him.

Vast numbers of profligate gamblers, opium-smoking wastrels and lazy roues live in pleasant idleness by their levies upon more industrious uncles or cousins.

And what if the sorely-tried industrious member of the family decides to call a halt and shut his wallet?

Immediately the rest of the clan rise up and denounce him to the community.

A favorite expedient is to pack mats and blankets forthwith to his gate, by which the whole drove of outraged relatives will camp and shout to passers-by their version of the affair, heaping abuse upon the delinquent.

Henry Mei, one of the prominent lawyers in Shanghai, and a graduate of the Columbia University Law School, told me that he regarded the clan system of sponging as one of the foremost ills of China today, and one of the most difficult obstacles in the way of building up a better social order for the future.

🍋 ACUTE SENSITIVITY TO RIDICULE

A Chinese, callous in many respects, is acutely sensitive to ridicule and public acrimony.

He is a rare individual who is able to resist this pressure.

After many inquiries I could never learn of a single authenticated instance of one remaining happily indifferent to such tactics.

Mei was born in America, and was thus an American citizen, but renounced his American citizenship a few years ago to adopt the citizenship of his ancestors.

He is very highly regarded, is thoroughly modern in his oudook, and from his American upbringing and education gives the impression of being much more an American than a Chinese.

Yet he is not free from the claims of relatives whom he never saw until he was grown, and whom he would have been just as happy never to have seen at all.

Not only do impecunious relatives demand cash assistance as a right, but exercise at will the traditional right of coming with bag and baggage and droves of children to spend as long a time as they please at the home of one who has made money.

A fortunate Chinese may expect a flock of poor relations to bring their pots and baskets and mats and camp on his premises as they please.

One individual who had prospered took a house near one I occupied myself (though prior to my day there) and set out to live “foreign style.”

He was immediately set upon in the traditional manner by a horde of rustic relatives. His rice bill grew until he saw no way to meet it nor could he get rid of his unwanted guests.

In resignation he abandoned the effort to live in luxury, and returned to a Chinese house and the Chinese outward semblance of impecuniousness.

Few Chinese homes in areas outside foreign settlements will reveal on the outside any indication of prosperity.

If you go inside, you may find things intimating comfortable means, but the wall and the gate and everything outside will be in woeful disrepair, suggesting the slums.

The advantage of this is that claims of having no money can be better sustained by such evidence, and also that outward evidence of wealth would invite official extortions as well as plots by brigands.

[...] The clan system explains why more Chinese do not starve. As long as one has a relative a shade better off than himself, he can expect a division.

This division is not made with a show of loving-kindness. It is often hard fought for, and gained only after the more prosperous of the two has tried in vain to show that he has nothing to share, and is finally threatened with the dread picketing, an extremity developing only now and then in the case of unusually resistant persons.

The Chinese clan system is responsible for a vast number of worthless government employees.

An official of standing is expected to fill openings with relatives, and if no openings exist, to create them.

The hordes of cousins and nephews must be satisfied, irrespective of any claims of ability.

But this is only one of the many curses of the system.

[...] It is not astonishing, therefore, that with a momentum of such deep-set convictions and traits, upon a background such as theirs, the Chinese do not see eye to eye with us in all the particulars of our international relations.

But alert opportunists as they are, and ever accommodating with words, they agree with our point of view for the sake of polity, and meanwhile pursue their age-old aims with unaltered instincts as they have for centuries past.

🍋 [...] The Chinese appear less susceptible to counter influences of environment than many other races with which we may compare them.

We come to doubt that any Chinese really free themselves from the powerful influences of conformity to a racial pattern.

Their racial life stream is as permeating as a methyl dye, as reduplicating as yeast, actuating each to see, think and feel in the typical Chinese manner.

The educated Chinese may parrot the words we use to express our own contrasting oudook and sense of things, but within depths beyond the reach of intellectual compliance he remains alien to us, and faithful to the forces of the life stream in which his soul was born to swim.

To what extent the Chinese at large are what they are because of their inner racial spirit, and to what extent they are so because of long-continued hardships of environment, we cannot accurately measure.

The two forces merge indistinguishably, and we can observe only the force of the combination.

In the matter of environment, many centuries have passed in China since the average individual there had any significant control over his lot in life.

When he emerges to existence, it is not to look upon choices, but to face forward along lines of narrow necessity, along a slim furrow of possible survival kept open by his family ancestors through the thicket of competing humanity.

Into this, he steps and toils until he dies.

There is no escape, no means of reaching a status of relative comfort and security, whatever the effort.

Experience teaches him that moderately intensive effort means perhaps enough to keep alive, less means starvation, and more futility.

The principle applying to physical endeavors applies likewise to moral endeavors.

Moderate goodness keeps him out of jail, a less amount risks penalties, and a greater amount sacrifices needlessly much that he might otherwise enjoy.

🍋 The Chinese thus becomes the most coolly calculating materialist the world has ever known.

He lives skeptically immune to moral enthusiasms, having long ago arrived at an opportune materialism whither some of our own gospel ministers tell us we are now rapidly drifting.

[...] Traditionally they have acknowledged mentally what the brute world acknowledges with instinct—that an alert and prudent selfishness dominates in the end all things.

In such a society, a freak individual actuated to higher conceptions had to carry on at a tremendous disadvantage.

🍋 […] The Chinese is disposed to look upon our effervescence of moral loftiness as an impracticality, something that cannot long be sustained, something juvenilely untutored in the longer lessons of human nature.

In the scheme of things for the average Chinese, with so little reserve against adversity, the chance hazards of a poor crop, a war, an oppressive local official, a flood, a famine, a plague of insects, or a charge preferred by a malicious neighbor, defeated often the best efforts of toil.

Hence with enough prudence to keep outside the law, in this monotony of repeated generations born only to survival, there was little difference between what life might offer to the virtuous and to the wicked.

The aspirant for moral improvement, if there was any such among the downtrodden poor, found himself beset by conspicuous futilities.

Survival was the aim, and the vices that might assist it were as attentively studied as the virtues.

Similarly, the vices that might brighten moments of leisure were cultivated as expediently as the moralities to the same end.

A philosophy of opportunism, weighing the dividends, governed in both.

Meanwhile there remained a small group more fortunate, a few scholars, versed in the moral aphorisms of the sages.

These kept alive admonishments to rectitude. Their proverbs and tenets were in spirit a part of the law of the land, invoked in ordinary criminal and civil judgments.

In this way the vocabulary of righteousness became familiar among the common people, who thus understood what was expected of them in the way of behavior.

[...] Passionate rectitude was asserted in every negotiation, with nobody accepting the words for literal truth.

The loftiest declarations of honor, everywhere used and nowhere meant, became as much taken for granted as the “dear” in the salutation of our most impersonal of letters.

🍋 [...] This lying has been described previously. Reference to it here is in connection with the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of lodging in the head of the average Chinese any notion that what is said is meant.

Upon insistence that terms of honor and square dealing are thoroughly meant, the Chinese replies “of course”—he would never think of doubting you.

In thus agreeing, incapable of sensing your seriousness, he feels he is merely reciprocating the ritual.

🍋 The Chinese are inclined to hear in the missionaries’ “good talkee” nothing more than a Western variant of their own immemorial camouflage.

The emphasis upon moral values is nothing new to them. They have had them abundantly on their tongues, going their devious and unchanging ways, for thousands of years.

The Chinese use moralizing words regularly for the same reason the low-class French use perfume—to distract attention from the underlying dirt.

It is the custom of the country. You can find the loftiest sort of moralizing in letters from Chinese bandits demanding ransom for kidnap victims.

Caught red-handed in the most outrageous rascality, your illiterate coolie will burst loose like Old Faithful in a geyser of moral rhetoric, without the slightest concern at an inconsistency between the utterance and the evidence.

[...] Because this chapter and the next dwell upon the unsuccessful efforts to merge Western with Chinese ideas, it is well by way of prelude to invite examination of our own characteristics—the things that most contrast our racial current with that of the Chinese.

Our foremost distinguishing feature is the confidence, in individuals and masses, that great additional human progress is possible by united efforts, that human cooperation, assisted by time, will steadily diminish the afflictions of existence.

We instinctively look upon time as an ally, expecting the future to do for us what the past has left unsatisfactorily incomplete.

Except among the few educated Chinese mimics of Western ideology, these conceptions do not appear to occupy the thoughts of the Chinese.

🍋 What is more, the Chinese at large appear immune to the spirit of such an outlook. They may parrot the words we use in regard to it, but the inner spirit remains alien.

[...] Christianity is for us, in its theology and ethics, a cult of reward for effort, temporal and eternal.

To Chinese skepticism, the eternal part is hard to accept, while the conditions of his environment do not permit the belief that he will be much better off in this life, whatever creed he professes or does not profess.

Life is hard, and he prefers to stick to the ancestral methods of utilizing all opportunities to keep going.

If they happen to be virtuous, well and good. If not, he is in no great pain of conscience. As a choice, he looks to expediency first, last and all the time.

That a Christian God will look out for him any better than his household idols he doubts.

Looking around him, he sees neighbors who have professed Christianity suffer illness, oppression and catastrophe as he suffers them.

He may be told that the Christian God loves him, and is kindly. But in the absence of concrete testimonial to the fact in the rice pot, he agrees with words alone.

He is not easily to be moved from the notion that he must look out for himself, and he is wary of any moral handicaps in the undertaking.

The primary question of all things with a Chinese is, “does it pay?”

🍋 [...] This same spiritual sterility is evident in China today.

[...] It is an astounding reflection that every religion that has ever entered China and been left to its own devices has died there.

Judaism, Nestorian Christianity, Greek Christianity, and Roman Catholicism have all fallen to extinction when submitted to the test.

Buddhism and Mohammedanism have also died there, though they survive as names without much trace of either their original theology or their original ethics.

Confucianism and Taoism, which originated in China, would in any other country have become religions.

In China they have remained cults of philosophy among the learned.

Never has China produced a religion, and never has China accepted a religion.

That this indicates something singular in the Chinese spiritual sense is evident in the fact that implantations of all the religions that have perished in China have survived elsewhere in isolation.

Christianity has kept its identity through the centuries in Armenia, in Abyssinia, and among the Malabar converts of India, without any extra-territorial support from more vital world centers.

By contrast China is the boneyard of missionaries and the morgue of religions.

A little examination of Chinese ideas of religion reveals much that is significant.

To begin, their sages have reverenced Confucius conspicuously, but not in the sense of religious adoration. The feeling was philosophic accolade and an avowed obligation of emulation.

The common people know only vaguely of Confucianism and Buddhism and Taoism, terms which among them are mere misnomer identifications of misty superstitions and propitiatory rites, having little or no connection with tenets of organized religious cults.

If you ask the average illiterate Chinese what religion he belongs to or believes in, he will not comprehend the question.

The Mohammedan minority among them is slighdy more definite in allegiance, but even the elsewhere militant Mohammedanism died out into a tepid meaninglessness of name when it fell upon Chinese spiritual sterility.

There is not among the Chinese anything akin to the religious sense as it prevails in India, the Semitic world, among Negroes, Latins, or Southerners of the United States.

The priestcraft of China has lacked the pedagogic urge, and nothing in the way of instruction appears to have been done for those, the majority, unable to read the analects and aphorisms of the ancient scholars.

[...] the temples were and are used almost wholly for propitiatory offerings in times of distress, or for good luck on the birthday of a son or some such felicitous occasion.

The rest of the time, so long as the crops are good and the fish bite, the average Chinese desires no more intercourse with the Lord than with the sheriff or doctor or pawnbroker, recourse to all being emergency developments.

From early times a sort of urbane Voltaire-like cynicism has charactcrized the educated native Chinese.

The favorite proverb “religions are many, reason is one,” expresses their indifference.

The Chinese notice that the missionaries are always poorer financially than the business and government foreigners on the scene.

🍋 “Missionary man no proper—no buy Number One thing” is a frequently heard observation of semi-contempt among Chinese servants and peddlers dealing with other classes of foreigners.

That the missionaries are infinitely wealthier than themselves does not count.

They skimp where other foreigners spend freely, and that, in Chinese estimation, means “loss of face”.

And as the Chinese exceed all other peoples, even the Jews, in emphasis upon material values, their esteem for Christianity is not improved by the relative financial inferiority of its messengers.

The average Chinese not only ignores missionary Christianity because of what it fails in his estimate to offer, but to a degree he resists it because of what it imposes.

He does not relish the added restrictions of behavior insisted upon by the missionaries.

🍋 The three stand-by pleasures of the average Chinese are in order of preference gluttony, coition and gossip.

Gluttony is for the majority a very rare privilege, but sexuality is somehow available most of the time, and gossip all the time.

It is the conviction of American Consular officers in China that the missionaries would suffer less if they would realize that the two-cheek policy is an absolute failure in dealing with the Chinese.

Instead of being shamed into virtue by it, the Chinese naturally take advantage of its privileges.

It is the view of the American business man that this posture of crawling humility “spoils” the Chinese, and in fact it does, very decidedly, dispose them to disregard all common rights of foreigners—rights prevailing as a matter of course in every civilized land.

Business men in China are perpetually cursing the missionaries for causing all foreigners, as they feel, to lose caste by allowing themselves to be run over and stepped on.

[...] Chinese speakers in America, especially students attending leading universities who are asked by credulous audiences to say a few words, invariably launch into rhetoric about Chinese gratitude to America, and insert a plea for greater “understanding and cooperation.” Those two words always draw a good hand.

By cooperation is, of course, meant more money to be lavished on them in China.

By actual evidence, in any mission school in China, a part of this money will be used to propagandize against us.

As for understanding, if it were by some miracle achieved, the Chinese would miss a great deal of easy money now going their way.

To Chinese the fact that they have benefited does not entail, in the way it would with us, a restraining sense of obligation.

Much of the history of mission enterprise and its probable eventual defeat in China may be found in this characteristic.

[...] By the highest standards of charity, people do not give because they expect repayment in gratitude, of course, but because of the belief that what they give will do good.

But aside from gratitude, at least the cooperation of the beneficiary in not making an actual attack on the donor is reasonably to be expected. In this modest hope the Chinese have persistently failed us.

One of the staggering disclosures of missionary work in China is that in the foreign philanthropy-supported schools the foreign teachers must take turns at night patrolling the classroom buildings and dormitories to prevent the Chinese students from burning them down.

Students fished out of slavery and all other sorts of misery and chaos by American philanthropy in an effort to give them a chance in life, and installed in expensive modern dormitories, are fond of expressing their resentment at the greedy Yankee imperialists by sneaking out of their rooms and setting the house afire.

On the policy of missionary evasion and crawling compromise versus ordinary self-respect, this is what Dr. Paul Wakefield, medical missionary, twenty-two years in China, had to say on leaving the country in 1927 rather than submit to the conditions many other missionaries accepted:

“The ignorant coolie has been taught to hate the foreigner and the student has been used to spread lies... Even missionary enterprise, which brought to China the only charity hospitals she has and the only worthy school system, has been attacked as ‘imperialistic.’ ”

[...] In conclusion Dr. Wakefield offered the following prophecy which elapsing years have borne out:

“The mission boards have been trying constantly to save the Chinese ‘face.’ ... If the boards continue their efforts to save ‘face’ for the Chinese they will lose their own.”

Here is what another departing medical missionary had to say, voicing the bitterness of hundreds. It is quoted from Hallet Abend’s Tortured China, 1930. Abend has been for some years chief New York Times correspondent in China. He writes:

“A woman medical missionary, ice-bound off Taku Bar in a small coasting vessel, discussed this question with great frankness. ...

“ ‘I am going home, at the age of sixty-two, a disappointed woman.’ So ran her story. Tor thirty-four years I have served the Chinese people as a medical missionary in a remote interior province. Even during the Boxer days I did not leave my small hospital.

Evangelization work was not in my line, but for more than three decades I have worked at healing the sick, and at teaching the Chinese how to live in a measure of sanitary decency.

“‘Today, at sixty-two, I find that I have wasted my life. I might have stayed in America, married, borne several children, and have succored the poor in our own tenement districts. That would have been a useful career. ...

It is a rather bitter thing to go home convinced that my years of service here were useless and unappreciated.

But I can be useful from now until the day I die, for I shall spend the rest of my years trying to persuade young folks at home that it would be folly for them to come to China as missionaries.’ ”

🍋 […] It is a frequently true principle of Chinese character that if one of them is not strategically in position to kill you, he will most cordially and admiringly agree with you.

Searching for morals, it is interesting that the missionaries have overlooked that one. Missionary blood in China has underscored it.

[...] Just as the Chinese mentality lacks real inventiveness, it emphatically lacks constructiveness in all abstract fields.

Their leading writers and speakers are ninety-nine per cent of the same stamp, as witness any Chinese magazine or newspaper, or the theses Chinese university students are prone to polish off in this country.

The modern writer whom the Chinese most revere, Sun Yat-sen, reveals everywhere this academic negativity.

He tells what ought not to be done, but in stating what should be done he goes little farther than saying that he wants China to be a land of cooperating workers living happily.

🍋 Out of the thousands of Chinese students with the best education the world can provide it is one of the amazing contemporary phenomena that they have produced no thinkers of any rating.

The significantly able analyses of Chinese problems have been made by foreigners, mostly British and American.

No Chinese I have met has been able to point out to me a single book of Chinese authorship on current troubles there that is worth the reading in a constructive sense.

There is, by Chinese, no honestly broad and detailed work recognizing and analyzing conditions, let alone objectives.

With a vastly larger educated personnel to draw upon, they do not offer us any discussions of their problems anywhere near as good as those we get, for example, from the Russians.

The prevailing policy of all Chinese writers is a public denial of what each is unable to deny in private in respect to the more hideous details of the reality.

[...] But the Chinese are talented in assuming just the right tone of injured humility combined with an air of surprised disappointment that stirs in average Americans a hang-dog feeling of guilt in not having met just expectations.

This wheedling act is manifest in every peddler and coolie in China, and veteran foreigners after lifelong experience with its underlying mercenary motives of cool calculation simply clutch their wallets and laugh it off.

On our side of the Pacific it is naturally not understood, nor its preposterousness analyzed—so it works pretty well.

A startling fact is that the Chinese appear to blame us for the quality of their students.

But as mentioned, their students who are exposed to'the best in American universities here are about as sorry a product as those educated in China.

🍋 What they really ask, though they do not put it in such terms, is that we inoculate the Chinese students with character.

That is their chief lack, but it is naturally something that we cannot put into them from without.

[...] it is worth reflection that American philanthropy is assisting to educate more students in China today than were in attendance in the entire original Thirteen Colonies at the beginning of our Revolution in 1776, with vastly better facilities and with coverage of more advanced branches of learning.

Yet in the presence of cooperation and courage, worth-while things were accomplished then, with the lack of universal advanced education no great drawback.

The point is obvious that character and intelligence, not a superabundance of elaborate academic training, count in a crisis, and that without these, academic training is a useless pretense.

🍋 The fundamental lack in China is character, and it is precisely this lack in themselves that the Chinese, leaderless, opportunistic, treacherous to the death politically with one another, accuse us of not remedying by more American-financed education (under Chinese mismanagement).

This plaint is voiced in extenuation of China's woes by thousands of Chinese who hold A.B.’s or MA.’s.

And in all probability not one of them would possess the makings of leadership, if the entire Congressional library were crammed into his head.

🍋 China has the advantage of a population more easily governed by central authority than most, a people, who while quarrelsome in a back alley and neighborhood way, are as a population easily governed by moderately strong unified force.

The great majority ask nothing more than to be let alone unoppressed. Yet those Chinese in strategic positions to exercise this moderate show of authority hill vastly short of the requirements for it.

🍋 They betray and obstruct one another, maintaining a tug of war, with each pulling a different strand in a different direction, not one willing to give an inch in a common cause, each negotiating with temporarily allied henchmen to stab competitors in the back, each determined on no compromise which does not offer him a lion’s share of the booty.

[...] The most illiterate boatman or small shopkeeper able to speak a little pidgin English knows and can tell you what is wrong.

The participants reveal their conscious guilt by their endless lofty talk about justice, fairness, cooperation and the like, all elucidating principles of human dealing self-evident and known, even if infrequently observed, before the alphabet was invented, and not dependent for comprehension upon modern courses in sociology.

And as they talk, they covertly keep up the eternal conniving, blocking, assassinating and plundering.

In all this the returned Chinese who have specialized in civics, political economy and problems of government in American or European universities join gleefully, or sit by and fan themselves in serene Oriental indifference, or in a few cases write platitudinous articles saying people would be happier if things were otherwise.

🍋 [...] the Chinese leaders do not impress any one as struggling against the illiteracy of the masses.

The thing is the other way around, with the illiterate masses struggling—for survival—against the terrible tyranny and crushing oppression of their leaders.

Not anxious for strife and content to plow their small farms, the majority of the common people would be better off without leaders than with the ones they have.

[...] It has been the fashion for about everybody who has had anything to say on international affairs during the last fifteen years to tell us that we are self-centered, intolerant, and falling down on our obligations to the rest of the world.

But reviewing one by one our international diffimlrif?, it appears on check-up that most of them have originated because we were not self-centered enough.

So it is with our China relations.

Money subscribed for our philanthropies, while accepted readily by the Chinese, is later cited by them as evidence of our determination to disorganize their spirit and culture for purposes of “imperialistic exploitation.”

🍋 [...] In short, the real Chinese patriots in China are American missionaries. They think ten times as much about the welfare of China as the Chinese themselves, and they express their ideas a hundred times as practically.

[...] Innumerable Chinese have plenty of money—vastly more than the majority of Americans who keep up the enterprises to which they contribute nothing. [...]

If the Chinese really want what we are doing, but do not want foreigners doing it, why not call off our workers, and turn the plants over to the Chinese as a parting gift?

[...] Chinese soldiers are always ready to switch to the opposing side, and on promises of slightly better pay or more prompt pay or better territory to plunder, vast numbers of them are constantly doing so.

Switching to the opposition is common among officers as well as among men.

Thousands deserted to the Communist side from the armies sent against the Communists from Canton and Amoy last year, and a few days later swarms of these were reported to have rejoined their former outfits.

The number of officers in China who have remained steadily with one allegiance during the past three years is not tabulated, but it may be estimated as very nearly zero.

When foreign groups get together in China and conversation turns to what it usually turns to—the local rackets—the latest reports of switched allegiances are exchanged in the manner that a club group in America would discuss stock market fluctuations.

The desertions to the “bandit” side and back again and vice versa are as regularly recurrent everywhere as sunshine and rain.

[...] Among the higher-ups, biographical summaries of the outstanding military chiefs in China now show there is scarcely one who has not been both an ally and an enemy of almost every other one during the last seven years.

Most of the military men we had dealings with in Fukien had been under two or three allegiances during the last three years. Several, like Ch’en Wei, were alternately bandits and “loyalists.”

But there is never an alliance in the sense of two strong leaders combining in a cause other than their own private interests.

Altruistic combinations have been hailed in the press from time to time, but to date, early subsequent developments have shown that the public spirit alleged by the partnerships and believed by a gullible foreign public was non-existent.

🍋 The Chinese are well aware of the extent to which an American public can be fooled by putting a satisfactory pious label on pure devilment.

The banner and slogan technique has crossed the Pacific, and there is a certain humor in observing the way it fools the original champions back in America.

American readers are prone to be impressed in reading of a solemn feast of Chinese leaders wherein each present pricked his skin and signed a momentous compact in blood agreeing to fight for the glory and lasting unification of China, even unto the death.

By following the news with unimpaired memory, the impressed reader might note that half, or more, of the signatories were within a few weeks fighting one another again, with the only visible unity of purpose among them being that of looting their respective territories as thoroughly as possible.

But the odd Chinese names do not stick in the foreign reader’s head, and when a few weeks later he reads of the treacherous doings of some of the bond brotherhood, he accepts the news as a new development altogether, not identifying the participants, and reflects sadly upon the obstacles confronting that splendid group of patriots he read about not long before.

[...] It is to be remembered that only the larger events are cabled to America. On the scene you hear of nothing else but desertions, rejoinings, new desertions, assassinations, ad infinitum.

The amazing feature is that no editor in the United States ever appears to follow a career through for a few weeks.

A single rosy news dispatch will inspire a dozen editorials and luncheon speech references to the long- awaited progress of Chinese unity.

The public at large keeps vaguely in mind this rosy hokum, never checking it up in fact.

[...] Present reports are that General Feng, the hose-baptizing “Christian” leader, is holding out with his army of allegedly fifty or sixty thousand troops against the Japanese while his confederates in the same cause have accepted a Japanese peace.

This leaves Feng fighting against a Nanking Chinese army and against Japanese forces at the same time.

🍋 Two probabilities will automatically occur to the average foreigner in China in reading of this action by Feng:

The first is that Feng is not doing it for nothing and the second is that he will not do it very long.

Within a few weeks he will withdraw with some face-saving announcement as surely as he is Chinese.

And the chances are that he will be a few hundred thousand dollars better off when he does so.

🍋 It is well appreciated in China that a leader with a fair number of soldiers will set out to make himself a menace, either to the Japanese or to Chinese rivals, purely for the purpose of raising a bid to buy him off.

The more formidable he can make himself look, the more money he can expect the “enemy” to offer him to lie down and retire, or accept a “position.”

Therein looms spending money for a youthful leader and a nice nest-egg for an elderly one.

To the Japanese this business is a matter of dollars and cents.

If a Chinese general can be bought off more cheaply than the cost in munitions and man-power required to rout him, he is accordingly bought off.

Of course, in a good many instances the leaders bought off in this fashion find it expedient to have a few of their coolies slain in a mock skirmish with the opposition troops.

That lends a little face to the procedure.

In Chinese military doings at large, it is significant how many commanders of large armies “withdraw” or “suffer losses dictating a compromise” when the intimate facts of the affair show that the commander really put up no honest resistance at all.

It was noticeable that among the various Chinese armies opposing the Japanese during the spring of 1933 each Chinese leader made his separate “peace” with the enemy. Well, what after all is a man’s army for in China?

Their typical Chinese character cropped up further when, after settling privately with the Japanese, these patriots turned their armies toward their own capital with threats that brought new “settlements” from their own people!

When you hear of peace anywhere and at any time in China, you can conclude that a bit of money has been passed.

[...] In a sense the Chinese leader is practical in a way that we are not, and are glad we are not.

🍋 With a few square miles, or a province or two under him, a Chinese leader with plenty of opium, concubines and food for endless eating, may expediently reflect that he is better off not risking the luxury that he has for ambitions that may jeopardize it.

He prefers his limited autonomy, too, to any partnership in a larger authority over more extensive territory.

That is, he would rather be the boss in say, Yunnan, than a prominent subordinate in a national government that ruled the whole of China.

This is comparable to an American who would rather be mayor of a good profit-yielding city than have a low-paid cabinet post in Washington.

But where we have relatively few such men, practically all Chinese are of that order.

🍋 Of course, the average Chinese is not bothered by abstract ideas about doing anything for the country at large, or in fact with ideas about doing anything for anybody but himself and his immediate family.

As a personal philosophy - setting aside the outrageous tyranny usually accompanying it in China—perhaps it is intelligent.

But collectively, as it operates in the country as a whole, its destructive consequences are too obvious to require mention.

🍋 The Westerner’s most often and most justly criticized trait - that of pursuing restlessly and recklessly abstract conceptions of improvement - gives him an immeasurable advantage in world affairs and even in his home affairs over the Chinese.

To live, or if necessary to die, for an idea the success of which might enable others to benefit, expresses the height of the ludicrous to ordinary Chinese mentality.

Yet this unaccountable oddity in our nature, this youth-spirit of inheritance, so often a terrific penalty upon the individual, has placed our race where it is in the world today.

The lack of it has placed the Chinese where they are in the world today, and will probably keep them there.

[...] The main reliance of the Chinese central government in money is the customs receipts.

The Chinese customs are managed by foreigners by a special arrangement introduced some seventy-five years ago, at the wish of the Chinese monarchy.

It was recognized that the foreigners possessed adequate integrity for the work, and that with a foreign inspector-in-chief and foreign inspectors in the various ports, an honest accounting could be expected.

This has proved correct, and this service, still manned by foreigners, functions as smoothly as our own, with regular remittances from the central office to Nanking.

🍋 It is interesting that not one of the contending factions in China, with all their propaganda of anti-foreignism, has demanded the abolition of foreign customs supervision.

The reason is that all parties benefit from it.

It is impersonal, and the returns are never questioned as to honesty.

The central government benefits by having a revenue it would not otherwise be able to collect, since it controls only a fraction of the territory of the country.

The rebel leaders, who in most cases draw handouts from Nanking—a sort of blackmail—realize that if the impartial foreign supervision of customs were abandoned their handouts would be less or nothing.

Many Americans are employed in the Chinese customs. It is a career service, with a fair salary and a retirement pension. Americans and British, I believe, compose most of the official personnel.

🍋 [...] The fighting in China is Chinese, and that means it is peculiar. Very little of it is fighting to a finish.

The numbers slain in actual combat are astonishingly low in relation to the total forces engaged.

Between two armies of approximately 50,000 men each, say, one may completely rout the other with no more than two or three hundred killed on both sides.

The Chinese soldiers have little courage for determined conflict.

They lack the exhilaration in strife, the blood lust of possible victory, that characterize the Japanese and some of the rest of us.

And then they have nothing to fight for in a sense of vanquishing somebody else.

The soldiers are in the army they happen to be in order to eat. They are there to escape death by starvation. Why should they risk it by bullets?

Military big shots who are rivals with adjacent territory exist for long periods in a state of enmity without arriving at a mood for outright battle.

Their front ranks will have skirmishes now and then, with a few casualties, but the main armies will remain poised for months in torpid indifference, neither making a really serious offensive move unless the other threatens invasion of his territory.

That is something serious. Usually it can be stopped by the go-betweens, the “friend pigeons" who make interminable trips from one camp to the other, bargaining down the amount of money that is to be passed to square things, naturally adding in a little to keep themselves.

🍋 These “friend pigeons” are one of the foremost institutions of China. Every Chinese is on occasion a friend ; pigeon to some other Chinese, and as often relies upon another for himself.

Everything from murder to marriage involves go-betweens, for Chinese have a strange dread of mixing words face to face over a difficult issue.

All matters are approached with the most roundabout deviousness, so that in extremely precarious affairs a third person may be asked to tell a fourth person who will relay the intended message to the other party of the issue.

But the friend pigeons do not start business until one general has felt out the strength of the other.

And if one general possesses fairly preponderant strength, that does not mean he will attack.

He reflects that he might lose, and in military affairs the Chinese prefer to sacrifice a little money in a cash present rather than risk everything in a campaign.

Now and then an especially determined leader will wage a real fight. At the news that such a person is on the warpath, the others commonly flee before him with scarcely a sign of resistance.

🍋 A vigorous positive attitude outrages the sense of propriety of the average Chinese, and fills him with such a dread that he usually retreats in terror before it.

In China, from Chinese, you hear among the educated that “conditions may change," and this is heard so regularly that finally the fact dawns that the speakers do not expect anybody to change the conditions, but that sometime the conditions may change of themselves.

🍋 And that is the way Chinese regard about everything, except making money. They know money does not make itself, and so each puts ample personal energy into making all he can. In that objective they are the world’s champions of industriousness.

Their day and night endurance in tasks where profits are good and assured, especially after they emigrate to a peaceful country, is past belief.

A Chinese will still be going strong when an emigrant Jew or lunch-counter Greek is panting with his tongue out.

If there are any patriotic, enlightened, practical and ambitious Chinese who really see what ought to be done, they must be miserable, because intelligence of that degree will reveal to them the futility of attempting it.

🍋 No one with a good and workable plan in China could be convinced that his fellows would support him in any collective effort.

Even less could he believe that if the plan were to achieve initial success, his fellow-participants could resist the opportunity to turn the power so gained into advantages of personal enrichment and oppression of the masses, repeating the past all over again.

[...] But there really appears to be very little opposition to any military leader or faction in China except what comes from rivals anxious for the same privileges.

[...] I asked a university graduate who had just returned to China after ten years of advanced work in sociology, government, and what not, at Syracuse and other American universities, why he proposed to identify himself with the racketeer element instead of the reform group.

He answered that he did so because under present conditions there was no other career open in China in which he could expect to make a living, and that he was merely doing what others similarly situated felt obliged to do.

[...] The Chinese motto is, make no official enemies and run no risk of making any.

As night guards, however, the police are of some use in stopping suspicious persons—petty thieves or burglars of no standing. Certainly without them, poor as they are, foreigners would be much worse off in China than they are.

Most of the time persons on the streets late at night will be stopped. Martial law, with a curfew hour, prevails much of the time, too, and the police are useful in enforcing this among the riff-raff.

Their authority is dreaded by the average city sneak or burglar who lacks the money to get out if he ever gets into jail. The small thief knows that the penalties are terrible if he is caught.

Execution without trial is extremely common. The police, to give themselves a show of zeal, naturally deal with severity toward those who have no money.

🍋 Perhaps the most generally oppressive practice in China is that of farming out the tax collection privileges to the highest bidders.

This is done in “government” territory. The tax collection privileges are sold by districts and hsiens—a hsien is a small division something on the order of a township.

The successful bidder is required to turn in a specified amount. But he can collect as much in excess of this amount as he pleases and keep it himself.

He can hire his own soldiers, too, to coerce objectors. The result is what would be expected.

The tax collector’s tenure of office may be brief, so he squeezes all he can out of an already poverty-stricken and many-times-looted population. He needs a retirement fund in the event that politics change—a practical certainty.

🍋Methods are accordingly cruel. Outrageous levies are loaded on in a spirit of simple plundering. Persons appealing for mercy are punished or shot down. Levies often amount to confiscation of all a family possesses.

At times families are subjected to abominable cruelties merely because a previous tax collector has entirely cleaned them out and they have nothing with which to meet new demands.

No sentiment of indulgence mitigates the lot of those oppressed in this fashion.

A Chinese not dealing with his own family or with a close ally is a thoroughgoing fiend unhampered by scruples of any sort.

[...] People ask, how is any trade possible in such a country? The answer is that the coast ports and some of the Yangtze cities have sufficient foreign protection to make warehouses and trading offices halfway secure. From these, goods are sold to Chinese on the spot.

They reach remote points by the methods of toll mentioned, and by smugglers who can evade these.

Goods are brought from inland in the same manner. So as long as the port cities are kept reasonably safe, trade can be kept up half-heartedly.

These port cities with some foreign protection are growing very rapidly in population, because of the attraction they hold for Chinese who wish to escape from the vastly worse conditions everywhere inland.

A Chinese with money finds it wise to live in a port city. This causes a certain amount of local prosperity, expansion in new building to house the newcomers, and the erection of shops to- take care of the wants of those who have been abroad and have acquired a taste for foreign luxuries.

The profiteers from the looting, opium traffic, and the like add to the spending, so that with the interior being steadily drained of resources, and kept washed in blood, fictitious signs of prosperity are seen in the shopping streets of a few cities.

🍋 This deceives many foreigners who make brief visits to the country, and who conclude from seeing plate glass windows being installed and new moving picture houses going up that China is making swift strides.

But for every plate glass window a thousand peasants perish, and every bloated official’s automobile means countless families desdtute —back there, over the hills and up the rivers, where live the 395 out of the 400 million.

We met now and then, at Chinese feasts or foreign official receptions, the contact men of the local Chinese official roster, and on such occasions the conversation was necessarily in the plane of high compliments, innumerable gambeis, and a complete ignoring of all the indignation, irritations and accusations which would resume again the next day.

The party and government they represented was antiforeign, but their speeches were of the flowery kind usual in diplomatic intercourse, further elaborated by traditions of Chinese etiquette.

Foreign responses were in the same key, lauding the greatness of China, and referring to long-standing international friendships.

Nobody believed anybody else—less still did anybody believe himself.

We knew their trickiness and incompetence, and they resented us for our more smooth-working organization and unmatchable instinct of cooperation.

“Kindness and love are also a part of China's high morality. ... In the practical expression of the fine qualities of kindness and love, it does not seem as though China were far behind other countries... Faithfulness and Justice—Ancient China always spoke of faithfulness in dealing with neighboring countries and in intercourse with friends... the quality of faithfulness is better practised by Chinese than by foreigners"

—thus writes the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who after several attempts to assassinate him, and after he had been tricked out of all he had worked for, has for the lack of any one better become accepted as the prophet and saint of the modern Chinese.

And as mentioned, his San Min Chu I, from which the above is quoted, is their bible.

So much stuff similar to that quoted above has been written by Chinese authors, while dodging the bullets of other Chinese and being looted out of house and home, that foreigners reading it have come to accept such grand spirituality as the guiding force of China.

Repeatedly Sun Yat-sen had to flee to Japan. Once when he was in exile in England he was caught by an abducting squad under orders from the Chinese Government to seize him for execution.

He was at great risk rescued by a British friend— a happy circumstances which prolonged Dr. Sun's life long enough to permit him time for a written diatribe on what a contemptible race the British are.

Once again in China a British resident saved his life and gave him refuge from his own people, fortuitously enabling Sun to continue his vehement propaganda against the British there.

I have never encountered in any of his writings any acknowledgment to individuals or principles for these trifling and perhaps embarrassing services.

🍋 To the Occidental observer, it is an illogical inference that the Chinese love peace purely upon the evidence that they are invariably beaten in war.

And yet we have no other evidence. Left to their own devices, as soon as the first signs of relaxed authority appear, they go at one another’s throats like cats and dogs.

Searching their history, we find that this was always so.

“And then for three centuries anarchy prevailed..."—thus runs a sentence from one of the standard works of history dealing with China, referring to one of the innumerable long sessions of chaos in their past—a past which Chinese writers without the slightest regard for truth allude to as one of beautifully tranquil simplicity.

[...] Flowers of beautiful words from a subsoil character of muck and inertia—what contrasts! In a land where the stricken and injured are passed unassisted by thousands along the streets, where a boat is not halted to rescue a man drowning, where every native organization and activity is permeated with a spirit of suspected and confirmed treachery, where suicides for spite are the wholesale recourse of a people having no redress at law, where a humble peddler bringing you a few dollars’ worth of lacquer ware must be attended along the streets by a bodyguard of six, where officials hold for ransom serum intended for the poor, where your servants are afraid to go out of the house unless you accompany them, where old peasant women are seized and used as pack animals by lazy soldiers under foreign-educated officers—there the educated men, safe in foreign settlements or as refugees abroad, write essays and poetry upon the inspiring love and kindness of the Celestial Soul.

🍋 [...] "WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END?"

And to one accustomed to Chinese temperament and Chinese ways, it is a very Occidental suggestion that anything disagreeable must have an end. That is our philosophy, and it has generally worked with us.

But it worked because of forces in our inner nature—forces of cooperation, sacrifice for ideas, and a conquering courage among accepted leaders.

None of these forces exists in Chinese character in amounts to be looked upon as significant.

In China things distressing are not ipso facto things certain to pass away.

Through the centuries of their racial experience billions of Chinese have lived and suffered and died without seeing substantial mitigation of the many ills preying upon them, and it would be an absurdity of optimism of which few present-day Chinese are guilty to suppose that in this generation these ills will pass, or that they will ever pass.

🍋 Personally, I have never seen any signs of impatience about the matter among average Chinese.

[...] Thus it is practically certain that the masses cannot be roused from this apathy to any assertion of resentment against their oppressors.

We find that the average Chinese have little or no conception of fundamental rights, according to the theory developed in the West during the seventeenth century and expressed in mass movements in the eighteenth—the theory that every individual is entitled by the fact of birth to certain privileges, to restrict which is unlawful tyranny in another.

🍋 The Chinese masses look upon what we should call justice, if they get it, more as something fortunate than as something to which they are entitled.

Oppressions, conversely, are more misfortunes than injustices.

Being looted is about like suffering from a hurricane or other force of nature.

So here, among the masses, we have the inertness of ignorance.

🍋 Among the educated, the great majority of them, we have the inertness of indifference, each looking out for himself, but unconcerned with the whole.

That brings us back again to the recurrent observation—that about the only people doing anything in China are those doing harm.

They pursue direct personal ends, vigorously, and their personal ends maintain the chaos in China.

Opposition to them is negligible.

We have noted already the factors pointing to futility in any opposition.

Where would the opposition recruit its strength, granting the miracle that several Chinese patriots could carry through a campaign without assassinating one another? The student radicals definitely will not fight.

Nobody ever heard of one enlisting in any army. Coolies can be recruited galore, but they want to fight for money and loot, not for an idea.

Furthermore, a “righteous” army, with loot and plunder forbidden, would be distasteful in itself.

And when by chance one among them does rise up, he too becomes a trampler, a tyrant, and seizes his strand to pull against the rest, forgetful of whence he came and of those who still endure what he himself so recently suffered.

🍋 THE KOWTOW

[...] In a lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society in December of 1841, John Quincy Adams declared that opium was “a mere incident in the dispute, but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American Revolution. The cause of the war is the ‘kowtow.’”

Harsh words those are, but in that reference to the kowtow, particularly, a great deal of astute insight into all problems with the Chinese is revealed.

The kowtow, and all that it implies, is as important today as it was ninety-two years ago in our relations with China.

🍋 By way of information, the kowtow is the obeisance a Chinese demands of those he considers below him—and secredy the Chinese maintain a superiority theory by which they are arrogandy above all foreigners.

Before the Chinese were soundly beaten several times during the nineteenth century, they felt privileged to treat foreigners as “running dogs,” as they called them, unworthy of respect in trade agreements or anything else.

In the earlier treaties and other official correspondence the Chinese used a character for the foreigner which in Chinese is a contemptuous term for barbarian, a character pronounced ee in the official Mandarin dialect.

In informal references, Americans and Europeans were termed ouai go co, meaning “foreign dog.’

Dogs in China, as over most of the Orient from time immemorial, are regarded as the final extremity of all that is filthy and opprobrious. They wander as starving scavengers around city and village streets, just as they did in Bible lands at the time of Lazarus.

With such an arrogant official attitude, it is not astonishing that the common people were encouraged to exercise to the fullest their native talents for chicanery and insult in dealing with foreigners, and all kinds of outrages were current accordingly.

Thus, in respect to the trade with China up to the time of the “opium war” in which Great Britain asserted herself, we find a paradoxical situation.

The trade was highly profitable both to local officials and local Chinese merchants around Canton, and in many ways they encouraged it all they could.

At the same time their innate contempt for foreigners and their unshakable ego as the chosen of heaven caused them to treat the foreigners engaged in the opium trade and all other trade as creatures beneath consideration in the matter of rights and privileges.

🍋 All diplomatic overtures by foreigners to meet the situation in a spirit of dignity and equity were disdainfully repulsed—the ee were treated as impudent supplicants daring to address the Son of Heaven.

The full details of the so-called opium war are lengthy, and cannot be included here.

The bound volumes of the various related treaties and military incidents obtainable in any large public library make very informing reading in connection with the popular conceptions of the affair as engendered by ill-informed teachers of history in most high schools and colleges.

Not only in reference to opium, but as revelations of a Chinese attitude that has occasioned much mischief, the historical particulars of the trade war between Britain and China in 1842 are highly informing.

Even today this lofty arrogance of the Chinese, officials and civilians alike, is everywhere noticed.

It is a compulsory rite for officials to affect politeness in their homes or offices, though they may inwardly froth with hatred.

Their arrogance comes out in what they do—their contemptuous disregard of inquiring letters, their subtle insults which escape all but an initiated veteran familiar with their customs, and their quick change of front as soon as they have a strong momentary advantage.

And even the most bedraggled rickshaw coolie nurses this inner conviction of his superiority to any foreigner, which he does not always take pains to conceal—after the fare and the tip are in his hands.

🍋 […] Our elaborate Western concepts of justice, with flexible gradations of punishment, admissions of doubt, appeals, presumptions of innocence in absence of proved guilt and the like, seem unsuited to the management of a people as evasive as the Chinese, among whom moral standards are too low to make any testimony reliable, and whose talents for concealment are so distinct.

What works with them is something simple and stern.

The minds of the Chinese masses cannot grasp intricate hairlines of procedure, but they can grasp simple “do’s” and “don’ts” where the penalty is clear and sufficiendy formidable.

[...] Upper class Japanese seem influenced by the Samurai tradition of “one word men.”

The Samurai were an aristocracy of warriors, mighty touchy about their honor, with a fanatical reverence for exactitude in the spoken word—that is the tradition, anyway.

They had one answer to questions—yes or no.

A Samurai was supposed to tell the truth, and be quick to lay his two-handed sword across anybody who said he didn’t.

With their reckless, religious devotion to loyalties, marked among Japanese even today, we may well believe that the old Samurai were in general a caste intensely zealous in their adherence to definite principles.

🍋 This tradition is precisely the opposite of anything we find in the same field in China, where flexibility of meanings in language is past belief, and where at no time in their history, so far as any one has discovered, was there ever any sense of insult at being called a “teller of falsehoods”—it being remembered that the Chinese have no word for lie or for liar.

[...] Officially, the Chinese government was able to deny to the world that it was behind the anti-Japanese boycott. [...]

In the same way that they managed the boycott, the Chinese arrange all other anti-foreign activities. They set up an organization manned by government men who act for that particular purpose as party men, not as officials.

Then when the trouble starts, the sponsors blandly reply, “The incident is deeply regretted. It was the work of irresponsible parties, unknown to the authorities. Unfortunately, such an act could not be anticipated or prevented.”

China has no national economics in the sense that other nations have, and could thus perpetrate a boycott which ruined thousands of individual Chinese without appreciably suffering nationally.

Chinese economics are within the family unit, and the boycott ruined an untold number of Chinese families.

But they ruin one another on one pretext or another all the time: the boycott was just one more thing to bear for the people at large.

Millions being ruined in some fashion all the time and millions more being born and growing up to the same fate—this is China.

[...] As to Japanese occupation of Manchukuo ( Manchu —pure people, kuo, country), it is clearly a blessing to the thirty million or so Chinese living there, whatever the laments may be over the fact that the tenets of a piece of paper, designed to protect humanity’s best interests, were violated.

🍋 [..] The average Chinese does not care what flag flies over him, just so he can work and go his way unoppressed. He has no allegiances except his purse and his family.

[…] The foremost impression of an Anglo-Saxon in contact with the Chinese of all classes in China is the eternal pressure of the people.

It is not a robust, lusty assault upon our consciousness. It is more like the steady seeping upon us of quicksand, or the infiltration into everything about us of an infinitely numerous army of termites, not openly bold but eternally watching and relentless.

🍋 A counter-vigilance is the price of survival, whether the responsibility is a government office or a commercial concern.

Any matter not checked up daily will go wrong.

And in what they want of us, the average of the Chinese do not understand the Occidental “no.”

An applicant who is told he cannot enter a school, or a Chinese wanting a visa, will come back day after day, week after week, sitting and waiting and blinking, hearing the same verdict over again a hundred times and pretending each time he does not quite understand.

They have an enormous advantage over us in their absence of impatience.

Either in pursuing what they wish, or in evading what they prefer not to do, they have no sense of finality.

Peculiarly, a Chinese is about the most difficult thing alive against which to maintain a consistent anger.

You may know that a particular individual is a thorough rascal; he will disgust you with his supplications at one time, at another he will infuriate you through and through with his insolence.

But—he is the most talented being in creation in soothing wrath that has become too hot for comfort.

Those who have had experience with foreigners are fairly skilled in judging just what a foreigner (or a foreign government) will stand for.

🍋 Being gamblers, however, they invariably, in the course of their history with every country, become too presuming, and receive the force of a long accumulated indignation.

[...] Proper appreciation of this Chinese ability in gaining sympathy is essential to intelligent diplomatic dealings with them.

Yet it is nearly impossible for people without residence in China to appreciate the extent to which tears, plaints, and all sorts of sympathy-winning actions can be simulated by Chinese in the most cold-blooded spirit of gaining an end.

🍋 For every Chinese, from highest to lowest, all the acts of life are concentrated upon extracting, from those who mean nothing to him, what he can for the benefit of himself and his clan.

Just as all creatures wage the battle of life with the best weapons given them by nature, the Chinese wage theirs with their foremost weapon—acting.

🍋 They have no talent for warfare. They are not inventive. They cannot compete in industrial organization.

They are at heart seemingly immune to the loyalties by which national unity might be achieved to give them greater strength.

Thus about all that is left to them protectively is their remarkable ability to detect the emotional susceptibilities of opponents, and to attack these with the display best calculated to achieve the desired results.

The display may be designed to induce sympathy, to mollify anger, to inspire generosity, or to flatter conceit.

But the Chinese are adept at deciding what method is best, and before this talent many a sturdy diplomat has given way against the accusations of his rational self in the manner that Samson melted in the arms of the cooing Delilah.

[...] But further, on the subject of Chinese lying, I recall as typical a case which took up a good deal of my time off and on last year.

An American mission school near Futsing had a vacant piece of land near the buildings. The heads of a Chinese school nearby kept hinting that as this plot was unused by the mission school, and was convenient to the Chinese school, it might as well be lent to the latter for use as a playground until the mission school desired to utilize it.

Very foolishly, the mission school agreed to this—something no keen-witted foreigner in China would ever do in the face of well-known Chinese characteristics in such matters. But anyway, the property was lent to the Chinese, with a specific agreement that it would again be at the disposal of the mission authorities at any time they might see fit, with no claim in any respect by the Chinese. But the Chinese no sooner began using the lot as a

playground than they began building a wall around it. A wall around property in China, by the way, is indicative of ownership.

The mission school head, alarmed at the prospect of losing the ground, protested at once. This accomplished nothing, and the wall was steadily built higher every day. The Chinese schoolboys stoned the mission crowd who protested. The local “police,” naturally anti-foreign, even in a community where large benefits had been freely conferred by American philanthropy, refused help.

In a civilized country, of course, the mission owning the land could have set out with its own workmen and demolished the wall. But in China that would merely invite incendiarism if not outright mob retaliation. Besides, missionaries are Men of God, and can’t well proceed with direct tactics, in spite of the fact that the Chinese appear to understand man’s wrath much better than they understand God’s love.

The matter dragged on, the missionaries futildy protesting and the Chinese finally completing the wall and laying claim to the property. Nothing was to be done locally, so the case was laid before the American Consulate in Foochow. The Consulate exchanged the usual number of requests for justice for the usual number of promised investigations.

Meanwhile the wall stood. Very vigorous demands were finally made to the Provincial Government, corresponding to an American state government. In time a memo of this and a good many other then long-protracted exasperations on the part of the Chinese was sent to the American Ministry in Peiping. About that time, the Peiping Government was particularly anxious to stand in well with the American Government in order to gain a sentimental ally against Japan, and simultaneously the Provincial Government at Foochow was particularly anxious to stand in reasonably well with the Chinese Central Government at Peiping for certain considerations of “splits” and support against a threatening rival gang.

After more weeks of calls and correspondence—not limited to this one small case, of course, but including it—the Chinese official responsible reported that the wall would be torn down at once. It wasn’t. He reported again that the wall would be torn down at once. It wasn’t. Demands on the Provincial Government were made stronger.

The Chinese official responsible then reported by letter that the wall had been torn down and the property completely restored to its former aspect. We investigated and found it had not been touched. Again he declared in a letter that the wall was tom down, and we could go see for ourselves. We did go and found the wall untouched.

This happened time after time. We talked vigorously in straightforward terms to the Provincial Government. The official responsible admitted that his previous claims had been “errors,” but said the wall had at last been torn down, in proof of which he sent a photograph of the vacant lot. This was after two or three dozen dispatches, with an accumulated bale of signed assurances.

Sure enough the photograph showed the vacant lot, evidendy snapped from a road bordering it and from such a position that were the wall still in place the photograph could not have included the view of the ground in question. But evidence of this kind is not to be accepted in dealing with the Chinese.

Before we had time to set about verifying the official’s report, the head of the mission school hurried forward with the explanation. He showed us a photograph he had taken himself, showing a hole in the wall a few feet wide. We investigated and found the official had merely placed a camera outside the wall and snapped the photograph through the hole his assistants had made for the purpose.

This evidence was taken over to the Provincial Government, with the official’s signed report declaring the wall finally demolished, and a rather warm demand for action was made. Confronted with the evidence, and his stack of previous promises by that time filling more than a brief case, the official amiably ignored all past history in the case, talked of it as a fresh matter suddenly thrust upon him, seemed surprised that in a matter so new any impatience could be shown, and very readily agreed to investigate, to see if there had ever been a wall there, as we claimed! Of course, if the facts were as we contended, and a wall built under such circumstances really existed, he would be only too pleased, too pleased, to have it demolished at once. But the matter being entirely new to him, he would naturally have to make a few inquiries before he could answer us. The numerous letters from this very official on the matter meant nothing. He had been writing to us about it for a year or so, and knew every lying evasion that had been offered. Thus, ultimately, the wall came down I

But in tearing down this wall, the Chinese carefully left a few foundation stones on the ground level, hoping the missionaries would build over them—after which they could make an exorbitant demand to have their stones back or be paid a high indemnity. But the missionaries had been caught by this trick a year or so before, and this time it failed to work.

Business of that kind, day after day, every case, however trivial, strung out over months and years of endless, aimless lying, with each lie merely a pretext for another, with all the while the consular officer impatient in the American way to render all the assistance possible to his nationals, has been responsible for a large number of American consuls quitting the China service in disgust They cannot slip into the Chinese willingness to let things slide.

The Chinese are comfortably at home doing nothing about anything while the American official frets his head off at the perpetual lying and evasion.

A “case,” to a Chinese, is merely a nuisance every time the consul calls, whereupon the Chinese must rouse him self momentarily from his torper and relate the most plausible lie calculated to get rid of the fretful American for another day or two.

As soon as the American is out of sight the Chinese official prepares a face-gaining report for the local radicals of the Kuomintang showing how he opposed the foreign devil, then he goes back to his fanning, his tea and his opium pipe.

Determined and full-of-life Americans, hindered by an indulgent Department of State policy, which is in turn determined by church and missionary power in America, wear themselves out in a chafing futility.

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