Part 1 (2/2)
For the past three thousand years and more the eastern end of the European-Asiatic land ma.s.s has formed a world to itself. Most of this time it was larger, richer, and more civilized than the European world.
Down to the nineteenth century of the Christian era the Chinese had no reason to suppose that theirs was not the most advanced and powerful of civilized societies. They looked upon the Far East as the all-inclusive universe of civilization; to them, their way of life was the common-sense way. The Europeans did likewise, with reference to their own sphere. When the European realm expanded so as to include the whole planet, when Western civilization began to dominate the earth, and the Christian family of nations became the world-wide international system, the Chinese were forced to concede that the Far East could not be kept to itself. They have found it indispensable to respond, as individuals and as a people, to the new environment closing in on them. Doing so has necessitated the reexamination and restatement of nearly all basic values of Chinese life.
Since the nineteenth century the Chinese have been faced with the alternative of adhering to their own traditions or accepting those of the West. Inst.i.tutions and practices which are so well established that they seem to rest on sheer common sense in each of the competing civilizations have been placed in juxtaposition. As a result, the Chinese now know two kinds of common sense to justify a course of action. The ensuing difficulty at times goes deeper; for they may be said to have even two kinds of sanity. In old China a man who wanted no sons seemed a patent lunatic; in the Western world he might be perfectly sane. A modern Chinese faces thousands of such choices.
_The Peculiarities of Old China_
Obviously, government in Republican China cannot be understood without a.n.a.lysis of the foundations upon which it is built. Such an a.n.a.lysis requires an inquiry, however cursory, into the peculiarities of old China and those of contemporary China. Some of the difficulties of modern China arise from the very adequacy of the old system. Had the Chinese of the past been less satisfied with their society, they might have become more accustomed to change and transience.
China from the first millennium B. C. occupied the central position in the Far East. No other country in that part of the earth was so powerful or so civilized. India, despite important contributions to Chinese religious thought, was too far away to impinge greatly upon the Chinese.
j.a.pan was heavily indebted to the Chinese, and encouraged the Chinese in viewing themselves as the most civilized of peoples. This had important consequences. As China was unified most of the time, and as there was no other polity to compare with the Chinese, their political system took on the appearance of a universal empire. The neighboring states paid formal tribute, and the Chinese were unprepared to meet another people who might claim political equality as an organized state. Even today, in the att.i.tudes of the Chinese and j.a.panese toward one another, there are strong traces of this traditional point of view and indications that the j.a.panese would like to restore a closed Far Eastern order with themselves in supremacy.
Since old China was rarely confronted with international problems, the Chinese were not aware of their realm as a nation-state. There was no sharp territorial limit to the Chinese polity, and no requirement that within certain boundaries one authority be defined as supreme. The Chinese were able to make their adjustments in the interplay of social and political controls with less frequent resort to theory than the Westerners. Nor was the Chinese ruler ever so firmly entrenched as to eliminate the chance of being overthrown or to preclude the existence of other--pluralistic--independent social controls. The power of government was indeed limited. It maintained the peace of the Chinese world, directed education, supported the social proprieties, and was ornamental rather than efficient for the greater part of its activities.
The Chinese lived primarily under the dominance of nonpolitical agencies. These were the family (comparable to the Western clan), the village and district, and the _hui_ (a.s.sociation, guild, society--in the narrowest sense of the term). The family was intimately bound up with the Chinese religious system, which stressed the continuity of each individual in the flesh. A personal immortality was to be secured with greatest certainty through the survival of one's own blood. The village was the main economic unit, and the union of villages into districts (_hsien_) provided an administrative division of importance: below the _hsien_ level, common interests were fostered by community home rule; above it, by the government. This meant that elders, clans in council, village bosses, and other nongovernmental agencies carried on police work, all local public construction, and most of the activities which are regarded in the modern West as falling under the jurisdiction of the state. The _hui_ was able to supplement the family and the village; in guild form, it provided the chief framework of commercial and industrial organization.
If the government was weak and limited, and social control ensured primarily by nongovernmental agencies, how did the Chinese achieve so great a political stability? Why did their polity not break up into a wilderness of tiny social groups, each jealous and particularistic, like medieval Europe? The answer is to be found in the psychological controls which the Chinese established. They devised a system of indoctrination unequaled by that of any other people.
The Chinese sought to guide men through the guidance of their ideas: government by education, or government by propaganda. For this purpose scholars.h.i.+p and administration were closely allied. The government was made up of scholars, who thereby occupied the position of greatest prestige in the society; the scholars were trained to serve as government officials. Few officials were not scholars; few scholars pursued a nonpolitical course. This led to a profound uniformity of thought, and was in accord with the dictates of the Confucian tradition.[1]
From the earliest times Chinese thought was social and political in emphasis, rather than metaphysical and scientific. For thousands of years scholars studied problems of society, government, and ethics. They appealed to tradition, and interpreted it. They organized the primitive religion of the Chinese into a sophisticated social philosophy, and over the centuries their work took effect. Chinese of different racial backgrounds, using different spoken languages and unable to communicate with one another by writing, living under different climatic and economic conditions, came to show a startling uniformity of behavior.
Custom and common sense were woven into a solid pattern by the scholars and accepted by the ma.s.ses. Everything in human life bore some relation to everything else, and the life of man was related to the world of nature. There was no sharp distinction between natural science and social philosophy.
The educational integration of government, mores, and physical existence created a system of control which has exceeded all others in lasting power. The group in command was the scholastic bureaucracy, but members.h.i.+p in it was not hereditary. Scholar-officials were recruited by civil service examinations, and to this degree the society was a democratic one. Every child in the society had the theoretical opportunity of becoming prime minister. Furthermore, the power exercised by the scholar-officials was different in its nature from that of legal rulers in the West. Government was preventive rather than remedial.
Const.i.tutionality was not confined to legal matters; in a broader sense it extended to all subjects. The scholars were as much subject to established tradition as the humblest Chinese, and everyone knew the tradition. The scholars excelled only in knowing it more thoroughly.
It may be stated as a truism that under any government the actual scope of its intervention is confined to a certain category of affairs, bounded on the one hand by matters which are so trivial or so unexplored that they are left to the citizen's free choice and on the other by subjects in which there is such general agreement as to make political action unnecessary. This latter sphere might be called ideological compliance--control of men brought about by the inculcation of broad uniform patterns of belief and behavior. If men are induced to agree upon a traditionally fixed mode of behavior, they will unite in persecuting dissenters and will not be conscious of the tyranny of ideological doctrine. But if they think in many different ways, they will be able to gain security only by promises of mutual noninterference. Liberty--as absence of governmental restraint--may thus result either from a complete concord, in which every man is free to do as he wishes since all men wish to do basically the same, or from a specific guarantee of each individual's freedom to follow his own interest or caprice within a defined limit. The old system of China was a free society in so far as dissent calling for government interference was relatively negligible, and at the same time a society rigidly controlled with respect to the uniformity of individual behavior.
This tradition was pragmatic and realistic. The Chinese ideological controls operated successfully because they corresponded reasonably well with the actualities of social and economic existence. With the coming of the West, the old Chinese system was affected in two ways: First, the amorphous Chinese society was threatened by the strong, effectively organized states of the West. Secondly, the compet.i.tive accomplishments of Western civilization destroyed, in large part, the a.s.sumption of universality upon which much Chinese tradition depended, and thereby impaired the power of the scholar-officials. The twentieth century brought China a new freedom, unaccustomed and unsought. The old system was threatened with ruin, and modern China faced the problem: replacement or reconst.i.tution? Or, more dangerously: chaos or political extinction?
_The Peculiarities of Modern China_
The lifetime of one man can span the gap between old China and new.
There are men living in Peking today who can remember when the Forbidden City (the palace-city of the emperors) was sacred and inviolate, and when the mandarinate ruled in accordance with immemorial usage. These may regard all Western science as a confusion, a wild torrent of exotic words, which answers no problems, gives human life no aim and no dignity, and is bound to return to the alien dust whence it came.
Opposing them are younger Chinese who hate the dead hand of the past and look forward to a Westernized, scientific, industrial China which will differ from Europe and America only in being even more modern than they.
Most Chinese fall into neither of these groups. Many of them, however, have a definite conception of the West and of the benefits which Western civilization has to bestow. They also realize the threat which it contains for those who do not master it. Yet they have been nurtured in the serene humanity of ancient custom and hold to it with the effortlessness of habit long transmitted. Out of this dual standard there spring daily problems of ethics and conduct, of private life and public policy. Administrative organization versus family loyalty and nepotism, promptness versus leisureliness, discipline versus courtesy: these and many others are omnipresent ant.i.theses.
Anachronism is China's second self. There is no set scheme of things.
Modern Western civilization has not been adopted so fully as to make the traditional habits seem outmoded, nor has the past survived to an extent as to make everything modern appear ridiculous. The notion of world government, for example, is gone from China, and the notion of multi-national government not yet clear. The relation of the individual to society and of the parts of society to the whole are not yet reformulated; this affects such matters as criminal law, political organization, and economic development. Virtually every adaptation in China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think after the fas.h.i.+on of the West--scientifically and logically--or are they to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner?
It is thus patent that the new Chinese world which is appearing must grow out of the background of the past and the necessities of the present. It cannot readily be planned because there are not enough formulas common to the old Far Eastern and the new Western worlds. New China must be a blending, from use, from habit, from new skills imposed upon old. Out of the dangers and misfortunes of the years since 1912 the Chinese have developed a small body of political methods which is temporarily workable. But the greater part of their social and governmental thought and custom has yet to go through the process of reevaluation by practice. Chinese political development has perforce to be emergent and not planned.
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