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.
In the dining room the same system prevails. You tip the dining room No. 1. 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 anyone 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.
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For example, 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. If you want your suit dry cleaned by Friday afternoon, or some such thing, of course you are assured that it will be ready, and you may privately rest assured that it will not be. 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. And on inquiry, you will be told that in the whole history of the Wing Wong dry cleaning concern no suit was ever cleaned in so short a time as you mention, and the hint is that you are highly unreasonable to have expected quicker service. The same experience will characterize dealings with Chinese high and low, from trifles to things of importance. I should say, from personal experience, that the total of procrastination is no greater per diem and per capita in China than in some Latin American countries. But after summarizing a fair number of instances both ways, I sense that the motive is different in China. There is not a cult of mañana, exactly, because the Chinese, compared to Latin Americans, are very industrious. 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.
In this particular, you may recall the admonition of a Chinese philosopher of the past, 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.
After a few days of being lied to by Chinese on all sides and at all times, you will wonder at the strange individuality of your experience. For you will have heard all your life, if you are an average American, that a Chinaman’s word is as good as his bond. Accordingly, you broach the problem to a veteran foreign resident:
He agrees that a Chinaman’s word is as good as his bond. But he postscripts this with the salty humor with which the explanation is always sprung: “Of course — but then his bond isn’t worth a damn.”
That leads to mention of one of the standing jokes of the Orient — the yarn about Japanese being so distrustful of one another that they hire Chinese to count the money. Americans have told me this yarn appeared in a school geography used in America many years ago. Anyway, it is amusing after a little experience in China.
Another common conception in America is that the Chinese are a most ostentatiously sinister and mysterious people, and that they are furthermore “impassive Orientals,” transacting the affairs of life by means of slow nods and grunts from expressionless faces, something like Chief Rain-in-the-Face meditating upon the Happy Hunting Ground. As a matter of fact, excepting Negroes, few races ventilate more tooth and gum area on occasions of humor than the Chinese, and none are more noisy than they on occasions of anger. 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. Thus practiced foreigners living in dangerous territory learn to sense from surface signs when to evacuate down river to a protected foreign settlement. Those who never learned soon enough are now buried here and there inland.
*
Of course, a good many young men sent out by foreign firms go to pieces from dissipation in Shanghai. The food, the climate, and the general tenor of life do not conduce to tranquil asceticism, and particularly not to celibacy. For persons with infirmities of character and tendencies to recklessness, life in Shanghai, or anywhere else in the Far East for that matter, may operate much more disastrously than at home. It is not surprising that a fair percentage make fools of themselves. The British, Germans and French seem to make a better average showing than Americans. This is scarcely to be attributed to our home prohibition, since the same fact was observed in respect to Americans in China well before our thirteen-year-old experiment began.
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They have most of what it takes, in the modern world, to make things work. They have a talent for obedience, when well supervised. They have industriousness and intelligence. But two other essentials, honesty and willingness to coöperate, 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 loyalty. They seem ever prone to work against one another rather than coöperatively, though they are very fond of membership associations expressing a theory of coöperation, 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 sight in a Chinese enterprise is a dangerous liability, an opportunist weighing the advantages of working for his employer or working covertly against him.
It is little wonder, accordingly, that the Chinese are such frenzied gamblers, setting 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.
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Snatches of lunch and tea conversation dwell lightly and with indifference upon massacres, famines, floods, piracies. “The latest” usually has to do with some military chief who has deserted for a consideration from some previous allegiance. 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, a game occasionally of dollars and cents concern to the foreign business men, one hinting of lengthy reports in code for the consular and diplomatic men, and one of amusement over tea and sandwiches and cocktails for the wives of both and their bridge guests.
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If you dismiss or postpone the art side, the pressure is still strong to look into the matter of how the country ever got into such a muddle, which is a way of wanting to know why the Chinese are Chinese.
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I used to see droves of Chinese women out digging in damp places with hoes and pails. I was in time rather curious, as they appeared to be peasant Chinese and not fisherfolk. I learned that they were digging worms for their chickens. Chinese families have no table scraps left over and they have so little for themselves that to feed grain to a chicken would strike them as the wildest extravagance. Every member of the family in China does something useful. The small children are kept busy picking dry grass or weeds for fuel to cook with. A fire for warmth in winter was never heard of by most Chinese.
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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. This is twenty cents Chinese money for an ordinary ride — and thirty or forty cents for proportionately longer rides, say those of several miles or with waits of half an hour or more. Twenty cents Chinese money, “Mex” as it is called as a hangover from the days when Mexican silver dollars were the only general currency, is equal to about four or five cents American money, depending upon the exchange.
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. If he thinks you do not understand any Shanghai dialect, he will curse you roundly at the top of his voice for the benefit of other grinning coolies looking on. 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.
Experimentally, I have more than once handed a coolie a dollar for a brief and easy trip, to see what he would do. In only one instance did the coolie handed a dollar, about two days’ earnings, fail to turn on me with a grand show of fury and indignation at being underpaid.
Missionaries will try to tell you that away from the big cities, out among the noble-spirited “real Chinese” in the rural areas, such a present would bring immediate thanks and amiable smiles. But experimenting similarly elsewhere, in smaller cities, villages and even out on the farms away from any possible tourist, hundreds of miles from Shanghai, I have found the same results uniformly in every locality visited.
Once returning from a mountain walk late in the afternoon I missed the proper path back across the valley of rice paddies. The paths, made of stones used as field boundaries, ran in every direction. It was impossible to see the paths ahead because of the dense growing rice, and I called an idling farm boy to ask the correct way. He walked a little distance to show me. I thanked him and fished out a silver dollar, as much as he could earn with exceptionally good luck in an ordinary week. He took the dollar, pocketed it, and announced that the standard price for path-showing thereabouts was two dollars. He raised a loud commotion, shifting, as is usual with Chinese, to supplications and wails when Act I of the accustomed drama failed of effect, and followed behind me moaning for two miles, absurdly hoping the foreign devil would change his mind.
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In Shanghai, as in all places where Chinese predominate, the foremost impression along the streets is of their eternal eating. Every few doors is a shop with flat pressed ducks, red and looking as if they were lacquered, hung everywhere inside, and facing on the sidewalk a sort of stove with sweetmeats frying. And along the curb, peddlers with entire kitchenettes, which they carry on their backs when moving, are constantly mixing dough and cooking little cakes. 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. In a land where millions starve daily, food is uppermost in the minds of all. 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. The most bedraggled and emaciated coolie, looking good for nothing but the grave, when given his pay after a ricksha pull will become a new personality the moment he can begin to wad some sort of vendor’s mess down his cormorant-like gullet, wagging his head to speed swallowing and vacate his mouth for more.
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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. And he will succeed in being so plaintive, so movingly pathetic in his passion for your continued kind regard, and so skillfully histrionic in the compliments he bestows, that three to one you will accept the package of tea, or whatever it is, thank him, and silently cursing yourself for your gullibility, mumble that you will be in to see him later about that what-not he wants to sell, and which he would not sell to anyone else at twice the price.
This interprets in part what people mean when they say they like the Chinese. They mean they find them affable. The “like” does not embody the element of admiration of character implied in referring to members of our own or a closely similar race. To like the Chinese, an Anglo-Saxon must necessarily dismiss, in the weighing, many standards that he would employ in a judgment of a fellow Occidental. And it is true, a point to be elaborated later, 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 liking 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.
You discover in China that among the Chinese friends are regarded as friends on a strictly personal basis. Thus, to Ding Ling, it matters not what sort of a rascal Sing Ming may be to the world at large, provided his treatment of Ding Ling himself is satisfactory, all according to the Book of Rites and so on. Cutting a person’s acquaintance because of what he did to some unknown third party would rarely enter the head of a Chinese.
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You will meet some Chinese, perhaps dozens, who will appear to combine with native standards of grinning grace and hospitality other qualities that we should expect in an Occidental entitled to esteem. No percentage estimate of this number is possible, naturally. Each foreigner’s experience will vary. But from average experience it is fair to say that the number of such Chinese is very small relative to the whole. Sincerity of utterance is microscopically scarce, and general trustworthiness, even in common affairs, is almost equally wanting.
Some of our highly psychological brethren undertake to establish, and perhaps correctly, that in the final analysis no ethical system can be claimed as superior to any other system, that while differences may be observed they remain differences and not superiorities and inferiorities. In these informal notes herewith, laying claim to no authority on such abstruse points, no effort is made to chase down the alleys of philosophic calculus to capture truths beyond those self-evident for practical review. But in this humble earthly plane of values, it is fairly clear, in contacts with the Chinese and in looking about the country, that many of the standards they nourish are decidedly destructive to any satisfactory social and economic order.
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People in America who turn with disgust from the doings of Tammany Hall, the Boo Hoo Hoff régime, 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. And 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. I mention this because the term “corruption,” in speaking of China to persons thinking of the United States, is decidedly ambiguous. The meaning is not the same, certainly, as applied in America to squandered taxes and Tammany nepotism, and in China to personal extortion right and left at the point of a bayonet, with heads chopped off for tardiness in paying or inability to pay.
Little discussion has been undertaken, in this section, of what favorable evidences there are of improvement in China through the activities of the enlightened minority. The explanation is that improvements are not a conspicuous feature on the scene. They are vastly less than a newcomer who has read the enthusiastic accounts of money-raisers for philanthropic projects and who has listened to Chinese speakers at forum discussions has been led to expect. The improvements are on paper, true enough, and if the visitor goes no farther than reading the provisions of the Nationalist Government for public health, administration of justice, prison reform, national education, agricultural advance, and so on, he will come out of China an enthusiast. But if search is made to determine the workings of these provisions, the illusion is short-lived. And what is significant, the Chinese on the spot, where they can be checked up, will not ordinarily, except in propaganda for uninformed consumption, make claims quite as extravagant as they commonly make abroad. However, they fool a good many credulous and uninvestigating visitors, including many who write books.
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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 severally understood in other countries. All movements reaching China from without appear to be chameleonized — 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.
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It may be observed here in passing that after each massacre of foreigners in China during the last fifty years, many pious Americans step forward to declare that such barbarism has passed, that the Chinese are henceforth an advanced, peace-loving and responsible people, of whom to suspect ill would be unreasonable as well as unkind. In the check-up to date, however, it appears that a good many foreigners in China who have undertaken to demonstrate such confidence have done nothing more than mark its last resting place with their own gravestones. A significant fact is that the worst atrocities are not perpetrated by illiterates and hoodlums, as is ignorantly supposed in America, but by Chinese of the upper strata, as in Peking in 1900.
Herbert Hoover is believed to be one of the survivors of the Boxer attack. He is said to have been in Tientsin at the time. The Boxer uprising is often called the Boxer Rebellion. This name seems to me a misnomer, for a rebellion is presumably a movement against an existing government, whereas in 1900 the Chinese Government aligned itself with the Boxers after initial Boxer successes inspired confidence.
You will hear foreigners in China say they would not be astonished at further treacherous mass efforts, officially inspired, to fall upon inadequately protected foreign colonies and murder men, women and children. Certainly the Chinese cannot be said to have advanced beyond the possibility since 1927, when their last effort in that direction was made. Even Shanghai is not safe from initial mob successes, for the reason that the foreigners there do not live in a compact foreign quarter, but are scattered here and there all over the International Settlement and the French Concession, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese spread among them, a circumstance making such a barrage fire protection as saved the foreigners at Nanking impossible, unless the foreigners could be first herded together in one spot.
And why do Chinese want to massacre foreigners?
Mainly because to the average Chinese, all foreigners are well-off, and Chinese leaders, anxious for a following and daring to do so, can always promise the privilege of looting them. Chinese armies loot their own people all the time, and murder them right and left with indifference. On the rare occasions when they dare, they do the same thing to foreigners. They dare when they think they can escape with impunity. Increasing foreign leniency encourages this attitude.
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An airplane service functions rather irregularly west from Shanghai, with the planes flying high to avoid rifle fire from the ground. A Chinese turned loose with a gun may be trusted to shoot at almost anything not a part of his immediate family or gang.
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A favorite amusement of the Chinese on the upper Yangtze bank, where the river is narrow, is to shoot at vessels passing up and down. Sometimes the intent is to disable the man at the wheel, and thus cause the vessel to ground, where it can be looted, but more often it appears to be just aimless Chinese cussedness. Passenger boats on the Yangtze have steel bulkheads as an extra protection for officers, crew and passengers, and some of them are equipped also with steel emergency shutters. A detail of marines not infrequently travels aboard American passenger-carrying vessels in the Yangtze service. They have orders not to fire until fired upon. When the familiar shots begin to plink against the smokestack and armor plating from a hut or thicket along the shore; the marines open up the machine gun in high glee.
Most of the Chinese passengers, both on foreign vessels in the Yangtze service and on foreign vessels in the China coastal service, are locked behind steel bars for the duration of the voyage between ports, and as extra precaution beyond this menagerie-wise transportation, an armed foreign guard in relays keeps watch over them from outside the bars.
This is necessary in order to prevent pirates smuggling themselves aboard, capturing the bridge and looting the ship in cahoots with an allied gang somewhere en route. Sensitive newly arrived foreigners may be at first disposed to look upon this rigorous code for Chinese passengers as humiliating. But it is merely necessary to observe the way Chinese passengers prefer the relative safety and reliability of foreign craft, to the hazards of traveling aboard one of their own ships, to see the prudence and justice of such methods. And to the average Chinese there is no hardship or dishonor in traveling behind bars and being watched with a rifle. It would, in fact, be impossible for a foreigner in his sternest moments to conjure any savagery comparable to what Chinese receive all the time as a matter of course from their own people. These Chinese deck passengers are treated with amiable consideration in every instance I have observed aboard foreign craft, but at the same time with an underlying firmness that tends to discourage any treacherous attempts. Observing the success of this policy, and the complete accord that it engenders, you will regret at times that we have not drafted some of these tattooed old weatherbeaten captains of the China merchant service into Washington to help draft our Far East policy. Their tactics are reasonable to Chinese standards, and occasion no resentment. On the other hand, 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. This point will come in for consideration in more detail later in this book.
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A people who show surprising sensitivity of feeling and at the same time appall us with their seeming crudity of instinct, accomplished in craftmanship yet living ever in houses falling to pieces, alert in business yet unable to make a success of large business themselves, quoting proverbs about truth in every breath and not to be believed in anything, always exasperating us and then mollifying our exasperation with a talent all their own, always busy and never getting anything done — four hundred million of them, upon a background of green paddies seen through slow rain, swirling yellow rivers with bobbing junks and rattan sails, above and through all the smell of a damp moldiness amid spiced cooking — that is China and the Chinese.
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In China all the foreigners talk about the real Chinese, assure you that those you know are not the real Chinese, and try to tell you where and how to find the real ones.
It appears that the real Chinese are scarce, very scarce. After following innumerable clues in various parts of China, after tracking through peasant rice paddies, bumping up and down hundreds a of dim-lit cobbled alleys and foul-smelling native streets in small and large Chinese cities in rickshas and sedan chairs, relieved at times by teas or feasts among the most cultivated and élite well-to-do and eminent Chinese that the country offers, with the added experience of contacts and acquaintance among the highly studious and allegedly intellectual group, I am convinced that I never met any of the real Chinese. I do not believe any “real” Chinese exist.
Once or twice I thought I was hot on the scent, but always somebody came along afterwards to tell me that those I had in mind were not the real ones. The real article should be searched for in another place. The real Chinese are like Brussels sprouts in Brussels, or chop suey in Shanghai, mighty hard to get at. During the first few weeks I was in China, I found that the missionaries, the business people and the government people all have their ideas of who the real Chinese are, and that even within these classes there are varieties of individual convictions on the subject.
But obviously to find out what sort of people the Chinese are is to take them as they come, the viciously bad, the patently good and the torpidly neutral, the innumerable dirty and the occasional clean ones.
It is possible to say almost anything about the Chinese and have the statement true, and yet with proper modifications decidedly untrue. For example, the Chinese seem to do more washing and slopping around with pails of water everywhere than any other race on the globe, and at the same time they are among the dirtiest people to be found. They certainly approach the championship for laziness, and yet their claim to the title of most industrious is hardly open to dispute. They are perhaps the most unreliable and tricky to do business with of any large racial group, and yet under certain conditions a Chinese will make incredible sacrifices to meet his obligations, and die of humiliation if he can’t. These latter conditions, be it noted, are rare as things go in China, but within every foreigner’s acquaintance they recur now and then to present a poignant spectacle of an admirable fidelity to pride.
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Swatow, by general consensus of veterans, is declared to have the meanest coolies in China, and that is saying a lot. Not a great while before I was there in April, 1932, a foreigner lost his life in a manner illustrative of coolie character. The details as related to me were that the foreigner, a sailor, I believe, was returning to his ship late at night in a sampan. After paying the sampan man off, the latter as usual started his clamor for more money. Not heeding him, the sailor started up the gangplank. The Chinese scrambled up after him, evidently grabbing at his legs or clothing (Chinese coolies never show any hesitation in putting their filthy hands on you). The sailor kicked down with his foot, and unintentionally gave the sampan man such a crack that he was knocked off into the water.
With more impulsive heroics than good judgment, the sailor instantly leaped into the dark water himself, and after a little effort heaved the Chinese into his sampan. Here the moral of the story comes in: the Chinese was no sooner rescued and back in his boat than he seized an oar or a boathook, bashed in the head of the sailor, who was still swimming, then hastily rowed away. An officer on watch on the ship’s deck above fired a shot at the escaping Chinese to no effect, and he soon disappeared in the darkness. The sailor was drowned.
This incident, like others detailed here, could of course occur anywhere in the world. They are not related, however, to show what has occurred in China with any hint that they might be limited exclusively to that country. They are samples of what is representative, not exceptional. Of course, the precise duplication of a sailor rescuing a Chinese and being drowned for it does not happen daily, but less serious occurrences of the same sort do come to light daily, on a wholesale scale and with a consistency making that class of happenings endemically characteristic of China as of nowhere else.
In Western thought and moral philosophy, we are accustomed to regard certain impulses as common to all mankind, and assertive under the same conditions among all normal individuals. Some of these impulses, residence in China soon teaches, are certainly not common to all mankind, very definitely not to the Chinese. 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.
Instinctive sympathy is another trait which we in the West are prone to regard as normal in creatures above the brute. But this view certainly cannot include all the human family.
In much of China — perhaps all of it, I am not personally sure — Chinese traveling in small passenger boats up and down the rivers commonly travel two together. The reason is that if one becomes ill while traveling alone, the captain or boat owner of the Chinese raft will at once toss him off and abandon him on the superstition that if he should die on board the event might bring bad luck to the boat. Hence a passenger will take a relative or a trusted friend, or a friend he hopes he can trust, by way of a safeguard, to intervene and perhaps save his life should sudden illness develop.
Apologists for the Chinese point out that in such a case the boat captain is merely following the rigid superstitions he has inherited, and for which he is not in his ignorance responsible. But there seems more to the matter than that. I have never seen, and I have not encountered anyone else who has seen, a Chinese stricken with grief in the act of fulfilling his obligations of superstition against the evident dictates of human feeling. What we see among them is complete indifference to supreme distress in anyone 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. In fact, manifestations of this emotion we commonly regard as human appear now and then among the higher forms of four-footed life. African game hunters present well-authenticated accounts of such occurrences as a badly wounded elephant being assisted to cover by his comrades. And anyone 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 zoölogy. The interesting evidence in the matter is not only that 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 not 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 staunch as ever.
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Arthur Smith, who died in California last year after lifelong work in China, has in one of his books on Chinese character an observation the truth of which impresses itself on a foreigner more and more, the longer he lives among the Chinese: “Nobody trusts anybody else in China, for the excellent reason that he knows that under similar circumstances he could not be trusted himself.” Smith was a missionary, one of the outstanding Americans in China during the last half of the nineteenth century, heart and soul devoted to the uplift and improvement of the Chinese, one of the ablest foreign friends the Chinese ever had, and the man who induced Theodore Roosevelt to give back to China the unpaid installments of the Boxer indemnity fund. But Smith’s devotion as a friend of the Chinese did not unfit him as a critic, nor make him indisposed to acknowledge the inescapably evident traits universal among the people he desired to serve. He recognized, as only a very few philanthropic workers in China today recognize, that the best service to China would come out of an honest acceptance of the differences inherent in Chinese as compared with some other races.
But 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 their unexpected catch of fresh pork, and life went on as usual.
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The fate of a Chinese coolie, male or female, who is hundreds of miles away and abandoned penniless is hard indeed. The very poor cannot hitch hike their way back home, as is done in America. A moneyless stranger is unwelcome anywhere in China, and in the remote areas may expect to be stoned away or driven off by the dogs as he approaches one village after another to beg. There are no scraps to be picked up, because nobody throws away anything conceivably edible. There are no handouts for tramps, no acknowledgments of hard luck stories, no brothers sparing a dime. You will hear more than one account, in China, from foreigners who tell of flood or famine survivors being driven away or killed out-right when wandering into strange territory. Villagers fear newcomers so obviously indigent may in their desperation be more than ordinarily disposed to steal anything they could lay hands on, and think that prudence recommends nipping the possibility in the bud.
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There are occasionally heard ignorant contentions that in the good old palmy days, before the modern turmoil ascribed to Western contacts set in among the Chinese, the officials of the country were a highly learned and just lot. This supposition is rather quickly banished by a little effort in poking through the mass of material gathered a century or a century and a half ago — the volumes of company records by the early British and American traders in the country, the chronicles of the pioneer missionaries, the journals of observant and literarily disposed sea captains and travelers, and by the abundant surviving court minutes of the Chinese themselves. All this material, and there are tons of it, leaves the impression that for as long back as we have reliable records of them, the Chinese have shown traits no different in the matter of cruelty and official incompetence from what they exhibit at the present time.
One of the foremost travelers to China during the first part of the nineteenth century was the famous Abbe Huc, sent out by Catholic Church authorities to survey and report upon the fertility of China as soil suitable for Christian enterprise. Huc must be ranked as one of the great travelers of all time. Next to Marco Polo he may be accounted the most thoroughly determined of all who have tackled China. For thirteen years, equipped with special letters from the Emperor of China, which in those days commanded obedience, he rambled in and out of mountain fastnesses, swamps, across deserts and into remote plains and cities. Stopping to learn new languages or dialects as he went, he penetrated innumerable places where no white man had ever been known, and even managed to stay two years or so in the sacred city of Lhassa, in Tibet. A competent scholar, nowhere prone to sensationalizing, but on the contrary conservative and careful, his records make informing reading.
Huc describes one incident that is particularly revealing. Hearing an unusual chorus of noises proceeding from a caravan of carts in a Chinese city street one day, he walked forward to investigate, and noticed that the carts were piled deep with live human beings. Looking closer, he observed that the hands of each were nailed fast to the cart, with nails through the palms. Inquiring of the official in charge of the guards the occasion for this, the official told him that there had been some thieving by persons in a certain village, and that he had gone out to bring in the entire lot of villagers, upon the presumption that among them the actual culprits would be found. Huc exclaimed over the nailed hands of the prisoners, and thereupon the guard leader explained that the matter was purely an accident, that the arresting constable had forgotten his supply of handcuffs, and nailing the prisoners’ hands to the wood was the handiest expedient under the circumstances. Huc asked if he took into account the innocent ones among them. Of course, was the reply, but they need not fear — they would be released as soon as their innocence was established! The significant item in this incident is that Huc, a foreigner, appears to have been the only astonished person in the crowd. Nails through the hands, in those palmy days of celestial serenity, did not impress the Chinese as anything unnatural in the course of the law.
The old observation that insight into character is provided by what people appear to take for granted is something usefully kept in mind in surveying the Chinese.
Elsewhere, among his varied experiences, Huc 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. Huc 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.
The tortures to which convicted persons were until fairly recently sentenced by law in China are familiar to most foreign readers. The sentences of death by pieces was very common. This provided for whittling down the culprit, so to speak, by the removal of small portions while still avoiding wounds to any vital organ that would immediately cause death. Another device was a sort of death by lot. A number of tagged knives, each marked with some portion of the victim’s anatomy, would be placed in a basket. A blindfold draw would produce a certain knife, and the label indicated where it was to be used. The drawing was continued until the doomed man died of successive wounds or had the good luck to draw a knife marked for some fatal spot early in the business. Of course a little bribery by relatives would generally fix things so that the executioner managed to draw a fatal tag with reasonable promptness.
These punishments no longer appear among the legal crime preventives on Chinese statutes. Officials, however, continue outside the large foreignized centers to punish pretty much as they please. As always, they themselves are the law — or lack of it — and their present-day abominations are widespread and fiendish to a degree that persons who have not lived in isolated parts of China can scarcely believe. If any consistency or pseudo-justice were apparent in their activities, there might be some excuse, because the recalcitrant and vicious elements in China require stern handling. The mollycoddling sentimental vogue of dealing with tough criminals, conspicuously a failure in the United States, would be even more ridiculous among people with the traditions and inherent character of the Chinese. But the outlandish cruelties of Chinese officials very often, in fact in some places most of the time, have no connection with presumed justice even according to Chinese standards, but represent instead the private machinations of the acting official.
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by Ralph M. Townsend
first published in 1933
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