CHINA - THE PEOPLE AND THEIR CIVILIZATION China at the present time is passing through the most momen tous transformation in her history; affecting every aspect of life: economic, cultural and political. The essential features of her traditional civilization were developed and established three to four thousand years ago in the basins of the Hwang-ho and the Yang-tze. The great isolation of this area of characterization— separated from the West by arid High Asia and from India by the lofty mountain chains and valley-jungles of Indo-China—ac centuated and stereotyped social conceptions already strongly marked. It has been said of China that "no other nation with which the world is acquainted has preserved its type so unaltered ... has developed a civilization so completely independent of any extraneous influences . . . has elaborated own ideals in such absolute segregation from alien thought." This generalization underestimates the debt of early Chinese civilization to external sources, but in substance it is true, and enables us to appreciate the strength of the initial resistance to change when at long last this ancient culture was brought into active contact with the entirely different civilizations of Europe. Throughout the 19th century the European conception of the Chinese was of a people immobile, uniform, unchanging and virtually unchangeable. But the impact of Europe on China is relatively very recent. During the 19th century it affected little more than the fringes of the country and its external political framework. Now its influences have begun to penetrate to the foundations of Chinese civiliza tion, foreshadowing changes in the social and economic fabric, and in the traditional philosophy and ethical outlook of the people of greater significance than the more dramatic changes in the political sphere. The ultimate effects on the structure of Chinese society of the changes in the material environment and on the Chinese mind and character of the flood of new ideas, at once disintegrating and liberating, are beyond prophecy, but no gener alizations can be valid which do not allow for the great vitality and adaptability of the racial stock. In the consideration of the various aspects of Chinese life it seems better to stress those elements inherited from the past which count for most in the present and the future, and to indicate the character of the new forces than to attempt an adequate description of the traditional civilization.
(b) The triangular tract of the Yangtze delta with its apex at Nanking.
(c) A relatively narrow coastal belt extending southwards from the Yangtze mouth through Chekiang, Fukien and Kwangtung to the Si-kiang or Canton delta, where it widens considerably.
(d) The Central (Hupeh) basin with the triple city of Hankow Hanyang-Wuchang as its node and extending up the radial valleys converging on it (Han, Siang, Kan, etc.).
(e) The Red basin of Szechwan, isolated far in the west beyond the Yangtze gorges.
In the first three of these regions the density of population is perhaps 65o to the square mile and in many districts it is very much more. In the second it is about 2,000 per square mile. For the cultivated land of China it may be not far from 1,500 to the square mile. The northern belt of maximum population is essentially one of peasant farmers, depending upon the land; large cities are rare and industries relatively few. In the Yangtze delta, the coastal zone, and the Canton delta agriculture greatly predominates, but in addition there are industries old and new and active river or maritime commerce. The merchant classes form a bigger element and great cities are numerous. That these great regions as a whole, but particularly the northern (Shan tung), are supersaturated with human beings relative to the pres ent means of subsistence there can be no question. It is attested by the appalling frequency of famines in the north (about one in every five or six years) and to a less extent in the Lower Yangtze, and by a very low standard of comfort which yet allows of no margin.
In some districts, at least 5o% of the families have incomes below "the poverty line." Outside these limited regions which do not form more than about 15% of the total area of China, population is dense only in isolated valleys or small basins. In the provinces of the loess plateau (Shensi and Shansi) the density is moderate and the population fairly evenly distributed. The same may be said of the south China plateau as a whole. In both well-peopled valleys contrast with sparsely-occupied highlands. The south-western provinces (Kweichow, Yunnan and Kwangsi), Kansu, the new provinces which have been formed out of Inner Mongolia in the north-west and the three Manchurian provinces in the north-east have all at present distinctly low densities, and, although in different degrees and affected by different factors, present some, although strictly limited, opportunities for future colonization.
About 8o% of the people of China are either farmers or closely dependent on the land. Recent estimates indicate that only about 6% live in cities of 5o,000 or over, another 6% in towns of from to 50,000 and the remaining 88% in places of less than It is calculated that there must be in China at least farm villages with a population of say i oo,000,000 and at least 1,000,000 hamlets with a population of say 200,000,000.
The Chinese have been throughout their history a colonizing race, but the mobility of movement from congested and over peopled regions to sparsely-occupied areas has been constantly held in check by the great reluctance, for reasons connected with their social philosophy (see below) to leave their ancestral homes. This is least true of south-east China. There has long been an increasing stream from Fukien and Kwangtung with their densely-peopled coasts to the rich peninsulas and islands to the south, where they have helped to develop the Far Eastern tropics. In Japanese Formosa they form three-fourths and in British Malaya nearly one-half of the total population. In the Philippines, in Java and Siam and many other parts of the East Indies and Indo-China their vigour, frugality and tenacity make them a prosperous and progressive element, and almost invariably that with the greatest natural increase. These same qualities often constitute a menace to the economic prospects of the less energetic native peoples. These important and thriving Chinese communities of the Far Eastern tropics, although generally, as in Malaya, contented citizens of an alien power, retain close contact with their ancestral provinces which receive large re mittances from them and are influenced by them in many ways.
The peoples of the congested districts of the north in Shantung, Hop-eh and Honan have until recently been somewhat less adven turous. The rich grasslands of Manchuria beyond the Great Wall only became available for agricultural settlement under the Manchu dynasty, and economic development was very slow until after the Russo-Japanese War of 19o4–o5. With the rapid develop ment of railways, new cultures and industries Manchuria be came a very attractive field. North China on the other hand was devastated by famines and the ravages of civil war. The almost intolerable conditions of life in many districts so weakened old prejudices that a tremendous mass movement set in. It was no longer a mainly seasonal migration of males, but a wholesale ex odus of families. The increase of population in Manchuria in the four years 1923-27 is estimated at two millions and the exodus from north China during the summer of 1928 at 4o,000a week. The density of population in Manchuria according to the Post Office estimate of 1923 was only 61 per sq.m., and large areas of fertile land were still available, particularly in the north. After 1931 the Japanese control of Manchuria brought to a halt the move ment from south of the Great Wall. However, whatever the polit ical status of Manchuria may be, its population will presumably continue to be overwhelmingly Chinese. To this great field of colonization in the north must be added the adjacent districts of Inner Mongolia on the Chinese side of the Gobi desert, with very considerable pastoral possibilities which the Peking-Kalgan Suiyuan railway has made accessible. Northern China has thus had a "land of promise" along her whole northern border. Except for some sections of Manchoukuo, however, this too has about reached the saturation point. The tendency to overpopulation, moreover, which is the root cause of the grinding mass poverty of so many districts, and which underlies so many of her prob lems, is due essentially to social causes, and a modification in the traditional social philosophy of the people is alone capable of removing it.
But the most important aspect of adaptation concerns the family system itself. To it China undoubtedly owes the remark able social stability which has enabled her to survive the many shocks which the political fabric has received and to outlive many far more highly organized communities. Many of the most attractive aspects and some of the most fundamental virtues of the Chinese character are almost indissolubly bound up with it. Yet the cult of the family is the primary cause of the intense pressure of population on the land. In the long formative period of Chinese history, when cultivation in the midst of undrained swamps and forest jungles called for the maximum of co-opera tive effort, there was a strong economic justification for the propagation of large family groups to which ancestor worship, and later the Confucian teaching, gave a sanction and force of religious intensity. But this sanction has long outlived that phase of economic development and there is left what J. 0. P. Bland has called "the procreative recklessness of the race, that blind frenzy of man-making, born of ancestor worship and Confucian ism, which despite plague, pestilence, famine . . . persistently swells the numbers of the population up to and beyond the visible means of subsistence. By means of polygamy, early marriage and the interdependence of clans, the Chinese people struggle to fulfil at all costs the inexorable demands of their patriarchal system." The first result of this chronic tendency to over-population, in a country so largely composed of peasant proprietors and where no law of primogeniture exists, is naturally the excessive sub division of land. According to the Famine commission's investiga tions in certain districts of north China and the Yangtze delta, 33%, of the family holdings were of less than one acre and 55% of not more than one and a half acres in extent, and the sig nificant comment is added : "the average size of the families who have as much as one and a half acres is 5.7 and the number in the families increases with the size of the holdings." The abnormally low standard of living and the absence of a reserve explain in their turn the existence of a "submerged tenth" of desperate men, ready to adopt brigandage. Hence the contrast between the singularly peaceful and law-abiding character of the Chinese as a whole and the frequent disorder and terrorism in country districts when authority is relaxed. Hence, too, the ease with which armies can be raised in a country essentially unwarlike and the extreme difficulty of disbanding them once they have come into existence. Excessive emphasis on the family is also a potent cause of China's political weakness, since family-interests have been constantly preferred to those of the State. Nepotism in fact has been described as a religious duty in China, an obligation to use public office for the benefit of the family group as the supreme object of loyalty. Many individuals have attained to a larger vision but usually there has been a marked contrast between the admirable honesty and trustworthiness of the Chinese in their individual and trade relations and the corruption which has tended to characterize their public life and to ruin large-scale undertakings lying outside the traditional group organizations. The State, as such, has until recently meant very little to the vast majority of the Chinese people. The vast size of the country, the relative uniformity of her culture, the absence until modern times of rival political organizations in close contact with it, all militated against the development of a sense of nationality as understood in the West. China has been a civilization rather than a national entity in the European sense. The loose associa tion of family and other groups permeated by this civilization are only now becoming conscious of a larger unity as the result of the poignant experiences of the last century of their long history. China, as the sub-title of a recent study aptly suggests, is "A nation in evolution." That is perhaps the best description of the slow, painful and fateful transition now in progress.
Many influences are at work in modem China to reduce the importance of the joint-family and to disintegrate the traditional structure of Chinese society. The most important effects of in dustrialism are at present localised in the cities of the Yangtze and Canton deltas, the central basin, at nodal points along the main railways and at several of the sea-ports, but its indirect influences spread much farther afield. In these cities there is now a large and increasing class of industrial workers of a type quite new to China. They are losing touch with the corporate life of the countryside and are increasingly detached from the traditional social heritage. A large proportion of them are women, and the entrance of women into large-scale factory industry implies at once their growing economic independence and the break-down of the clan system. Nor is that all. Industry and commerce in China were formerly almost entirely controlled by the guild system. The guilds are group organizations of various types but like the family organization all make the well-being of the individual dependent on his obedience to the code governing the interests of his craft or trade or, in the case of provincial and city guilds, of his locality. In the main they have been essentially democratic and have emphasized not the separate interests of employers and employed but the solidarity of the trade. Loyalty to them, as for example in the matter of sub mitting books for inspection by guild officials, has been as con spicuous as loyalty to the family. Large-scale industries of Western type employing the new class of artisans are for the most part outside the guild system, and the workers, often living under conditions similar to those of the factory towns of Eng land in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, are open to the appeal of new influences such as the Western trade union movement and Communism. That the old capacity for combina tion is capable of taking new forms is shown by the many ex amples in recent years of relatively successful strikes and boy cotts.
China may in time work out a new form of industrial democracy consonant with the spirit of her ancient institutions. The segrega tion of classes is wholly alien to her traditions and the idea of the class war was expressly repudiated by Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Kuo-min-tang or people's party, regarded by most reformers as the father of the new China. The guilds have not yet lost their vitality, and some experiments have been made in combining separate trade-guilds into larger industrial unions adapted to the modern business world. Much will depend upon the relationship of the guilds to the chambers of commerce, a new and significant feature of commercial organization in China. These chambers are primarily associations of business men and form one of many evidences of a growing solidarity and steadying power of merchant opinion. They herald the emergence of a middle class, whose links, however, with the mass of the workers are at present much closer than in most Western countries, and which has by no means lost the conception of social solidarity. Promotion of good relations between employers and workmen is an avowed object of the chambers and in some cases they repre sent the guilds.
Of the new cultural forces the most outstanding are the modern educational system, the student movement and the penetration of new ideas from Europe, America and modernized Japan. The sudden abolition of the old classical system of examinations in the last years of the Manchu dynasty marked a dramatic break probably more fundamental in effect than the abolition of the Imperial Office six years later. In the final section on Administra tion an outline is given of the new national scheme of education which, though still in an early and experimental stage, has been launched in the face of infinite difficulties during troubled years. The most revolutionary of its social influences are (I) the grant ing of educational facilities to women and the introduction of co education in primary schools. In conjunction with the economic forces already noticed this is producing a remarkable change in the status of women, a most significant fact. (2) Western science, at present very imperfectly organized in China, but implying a mental discipline of a kind quite foreign to the old literary train ing. (3) The ideal of mass education. In respect for learning no country has excelled China, but in the past it has always been associated with a relatively small group of scholars. A long time must elapse before there is a sufficiently large number of ade quately staffed primary schools; but there are few more prom ising features in modern China than the almost passionate enthu siasm with which the students and teachers of Government schools and colleges have organized the popular educational movement, devoting evenings and parts of vacations to the conduct of free schools, for poor children and adults. The popular vernacular (Pai-hua) of the Mandarin dialect is being made the accepted medium for new literature, in place of the old classical and "dead" language, which presents far greater difficulties. The change, virtually accomplished, is comparable in character and importance to the adoption of the vernacular as the medium of literary expression in place of Latin in Chaucer's England and Dante's Italy. Further, out of the vast number of Chinese char acters, i,000 (or even 600) of the most essential have been selected for use in the people's schools—hence often called "foun dation character schools"—and are exclusively used in the writ ing of appropriate popular books. The alternative method of a phonetic alphabet, in which extensive experiments have been made, seems likely to be discarded in its favour.
These important linguistic reforms, especially the development of the new national language (Pai-hua) are to a large extent the outcome of the remarkable movement known as "the new tide" or Chinese renaissance. This movement, associated with the new "intelligentsia" in the chief centres of thought, such as the Na tional university at Peking, owes its origin to returned Chinese graduates of foreign universities (especially Paris and certain American universities), and in particular, on its literary side, to Dr. Hu Shih, often called "the father of the Chinese renaissance." It witnesses to an intellectual ferment similar in many ways to that of the renaissance and reformation period in Europe. On the literary and linguistic side it has been essentially constructive. In most other respects it is at present mainly destructive and critical. Especially notable is its vigorous and unsparing attack on the inferior status of women, child betrothals and costly ex penditure on funeral rites. On its more speculative side it is con cerned with what its exponents describe as a "revaluation" of Chinese thought and philosophy in the light of Western science and knowledge. In the sphere of religion it is for the most part sceptical and rationalistic and, in conjunction with the political agitation of recent years, has helped to give birth to a widespread but probably rather transient anti-Christian movement in the ranks of "Young China." At the same time the movement in many of its aspects includes some of the most distinguished of the leaders of Chinese Christianity.
This movement has had great influence on the large student class. The counter-attraction of political agitation has no doubt recently absorbed an excessive proportion of student time and energy, much of it misdirected. With the development of more stable political conditions and better international relations, this may turn out to be but a passing phase and "the student move ment" may be re-orientated to its real task of social, cultural and economic reconstruction. For, in the absence of a class of heredi tary leaders, such as carried through the transformation of Japan, the pioneers of reconstruction in China must inevitably be drawn from the student class, and it is almost impossible to exaggerate the part which they can play. Their leaders inherit the prestige which was always enjoyed by the old-time literati and the absence of caste distinctions brings them into far closer and more intimate contact with the peasantry than in most oriental countries. In the last analysis the wise direction of education underlies all spe cific reforms. The disintegrating effects of the new influences inevitably invade the religious sphere, but in certain respects the break with the past is less complete and revolutionary than in other aspects of life. This is due to two main causes : (I) The fact that religious beliefs in China have never been held with the same tenacity, certainty and fanaticism as in India or Moham medan Asia. China has been strikingly free from religious bigotry and from wars of religion. Anti-Christian movements and occa sional persecutions have been inspired rather by fear or misunder standing of foreign influence. (2) The nature of the prevailing religious systems. Of the three historic religions of China (see under History), Taoism in its later phases has been little more than a congeries of superstitions which must gradually lose their vitality. The same may be said of the cruder side of popular Buddhism, especially in its northern form (Lamaism), but in its more philosophical aspects Buddhism has a definite adaptability and is by no means a negligible factor. Confucianism, although it has a religious aspect, denotes a social code and an attitude towards life, rather than a religion. Although obviously no longer adequate to the changed conditions it retains great vitality ; it forms the mental background and in part orientates the lives of many educated Chinese who hold no religious beliefs at all defi nitely. There is little in Confucianism which is incompatible with either Buddhism or Christianity. The China of the future is likely to provide a relatively free field for religious propaganda of many kinds. The average attitude of the majority of educated Chinese may probably be described as agnosticism, coloured and softened by Confucian and Buddhist tendencies. The influence of Christianity is considerably greater than the relatively very small number of its adherents would indicate, and the marked tendency to adapt it to Chinese modes of thought and organiza tion will almost certainly increase it. The Christian community has already played a part in the public life of China out of all proportion to its numbers ; nor is the influence of the missionary schools and colleges to be measured by the sum total of professed converts. Against stark materialism, which in a China unre strained by the ancient loyalties but fortified by modern science would be the greatest menace to the world, Christianity can join forces with all that is noblest in Buddhism and Confucianism alike. Thus in modern China "the old order," stable for four millennia, "changeth, yielding place to new" and the time-honoured social grouping of scholars, farmers, artificers and merchants must grade into a much more complex society. Yet many-sided as is the revo lution through which the country is passing, prolonged as must be the social turmoil and difficult the new integration, there are many valuable elements in the heritage of the past still vital and making for stability. If these can be preserved and reorientated to serve the purposes of a new national life, inspired by a widened scale of social values, China may yet eclipse her greatest achieve ments under the most famous of her dynasties.