In China the case is different. Many people think that in real ability the Chinese are the equals of any other race. But almost every one agrees that China as a whole is extremely conservative. The com mon people, especially in the north, are so wedded to old customs that it is almost impossible to change them. Moreover, China's relatively democratic form of social organization helps to cause this conservatism to be shared by the leaders. In Japan the Samurai married only among themselves and thus retained the qualities of leadership which originally raised them to their high position. In China a system of universal education and public examinations made it possible for the son of the poorest peasant to rise to positions of importance. This has had some excellent results, but it has tended to make the leaders conservative like the peasants.
With this conservatism goes a deplorable lack of public spirit. The Chinese tend to look after their own interests. This is one reason for the inefficiency and corruption of the Chinese government. The officials rob the public treasury more systematically and openly than in most , countries not because they are especially bad, but because the mass of the Chinese are so callous to all matters that do not immediately touch them, that almost no one raises a protest. Hence business is greatly hampered because its success depends very closely upon the quality of the government. The best governments are the most criticised. Eng land, for example, hears constantly from her people that she is being !ruined by this or that defect of government, while China hears little about her own defects. Hence abuses are remedied in England but 'continue and grow worse in China.
Japanese, on the contrary, have a much stronger tendency to look after the public welfare. An illustration of this is the harikari, or custom whereby it was considered right and noble for a Samurai to ill himself if he failed in some public duty. Certain other prominent Chinese traits are intense economy, great shrift, wonderful patience and endurance, and the capacity to live on the smallest possible allowance of food. These qualities are very valu kble except that they are usually accompanied by undue conservatism. ilt is partly this quality of conservatism joined with really remarkable skill in certain respects, which makes the Chinese so wonderful in their ability to make exact copies of anything that they have once carefully examined. If an American tailor is given a coat and told to make cfne like it, he often suggests making the new coat different from the old one. A Chinese tailor, on the other hand, was once given a coat in which a large torn place had been mended in the back, and told to make a new coat of the same kind. He made it, and tore a rent in the back and sewed it up. He did not think of making any change in the coat.
Some Reasons for the Difference between Chinese and Japanese.— We have already seen that one reason why the Chinese are less ready than the Japanese to adopt new methods is the social system whereby the students who could best pass examinations in the Chinese classics have been the ones who have risen to the top and become leaders.
Slow, patient labor and a vast amount of memorizing were the quali ties which gave success in the examinations. Among the Japanese, on the other hand, the ones who rose to be leaders were usually those who showed initiative in war or in pushing themselves to the top by active effort. Famines are another agency which has helped to make the Chinese more conservative than the Japanese. These are especially severe in North China because spring droughts and summer floods often occur together. Practically all of North China has less than an inch of rainfall per month from October to April, and only in May does the rain begin to be abundant enough for agriculture. If the beginning of the rains is delayed, as happens not infrequently, the farmers who depend only on rain may be able to raise almost nothing. The many who depend on irrigation, however, do not suffer so much. But then comes the second trouble: when the rains finally burst, they usually fall in showers of great violence. Since the spring droughts prevent the growth of trees on the mountains the rain pours down the hillsides, and floods the fertile, irrigated lowlands, especially the great flat plain of the Hwang Ho, so that the crops are often ruined.
Such famines often throw scores of millions of people into danger from starvation. Here, as in so many other cases, Nature applies her principle of natural selection. The only way to survive in a Chinese famine is either to stay at home and eat very sparingly until new crops can be raised, or to wander away to distant regions where the famine is less severe. In either case the people who combine intelligence and physical vigor are the ones most likely to survive. But suppose two men are alike in these respects, but one has a nervous, active tempera ment and wants to be doing something while the other is slow, steady, and careful. Americans who have had experience in Chinese famines say that a man of the first type is likely to migrate to the city or to some distant region where there is no famine. If he and his family go to the city, their descendants gradually die out. Even in the United States, with all our public health measures, the urban death-rate in states where the cities have no special advantage such as a location near large bodies of water is about 25 per cent greater than the rural death-rate. In China the urban death-rate is so high that the city population would die out if people from the country did not constantly migrate city ward. So the energetic and active Chinese whose descendants should become inventors and leaders are largely lost either through the high death-rates of the cities or through migration to other regions.