Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903

II

In my last letter I endeavored to give some general account of the salient differences between your civilization and ours. Such differences have led inevitably to conflict; and recent events might seem to give some color to the idea that in that conflict it is we who have been the aggressors. But nothing in fact can be further from the truth. Left to ourselves, we should never have sought intercourse with the West. We have no motive to do so; for we desire neither to proselytize nor to trade. We believe, it is true, that our religion is more rational than yours, our morality higher, and our institutions more perfect; but we recognize that what is suited to us may be ill adapted to others. We do not conceive that we have a mission to redeem or to civilize the world, still less that that mission is to be accomplished by the methods of fire and sword; and we are thankful enough if we can solve our own problems, without burdening ourselves with those of other peoples.

And as we are not led to interfere with you by the desire to convert you, so are we not driven to do so by the necessities of trade. Economically, as well as politically, we are sufficient to ourselves. What we consume we produce, and what we produce we consume. We do not require, and we have not sought, the products of other nations; and we hold it no less imprudent than unjust to make war on strangers in order to open their markets. A society, we conceive, that is to be politically stable must be economically independent; and we regard an extensive foreign trade as necessarily a source of social demoralization.

In these, as in all other points, your principle is the opposite to ours. You believe, not only that your religion is the only true one, but that it is your duty to impose it on all other nations, if need be, at the point of the sword. And this motive of aggression is reinforced by another still more potent. Economically, your society is so constituted that it is constantly on the verge of starvation. You cannot produce what you need to consume, nor consume what you need to produce. It is matter of life and death to you to find markets in which you may dispose of your manufactures, and from which you may derive your food and raw material. Such a market China is, or might be; and the opening of this market is in fact the motive, thinly disguised, of all your dealings with us in recent years. The justice and morality of such a policy I do not propose to discuss. It is, in fact, the product of sheer material necessity, and upon such a ground it is idle to dispute. I shall confine myself therefore to an endeavor to present our view of the situation, and to explain the motives we have for resenting your aggression.

To the ordinary British trader it seems no doubt a strange thing that we should object to what he describes as the opening out of our national resources. Viewing everything, as he habitually does, from the standpoint of profit and loss, he conceives that if it can be shown that a certain course will lead to the increase of wealth, it follows that that is the course that ought to be adopted. The opening of China to his capital and his trade he believes will have this result; and he concludes that it is our interest to welcome rather than to resist his enterprise. From his point of view he is justified; but his point of view is not ours. We are accustomed, before adopting any grave measure of policy, to estimate its effects not merely on the sum total of our wealth, but (which we conceive to be a very different thing) on our national well-being. You, as always, are thinking of the means of living; we, of the quality of the life lived. And when you ask us, as you do in effect, to transform our whole society, to convert ourselves from a nation of agriculturists to a nation of traders and manufacturers, to sacrifice to an imaginary prosperity our political and economic independence, and to revolutionize not only our industry, but our manners, morals, and institutions, we may be pardoned if we first take a critical look at the effects which have been produced among yourselves by the conditions you urge us to introduce in China.

The results of such a survey, we venture to think, are not encouraging. Like the prince in the fable, you seem to have released from his prison the genie of competition, only to find that you are unable to control him. Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless eifort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunk, your incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties, and you endeavor, in vain, to replace them by the impersonal activity of the State. The salient characteristic of your civilization is its irresponsibility. You have liberated forces you cannot control; you are caught yourselves in your own levers and cogs. In every department of business you are substituting for the individual the company, for the workman the tool. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; the well-being of the laborer is no one's concern but the State's. And this concern even the State is incompetent to undertake, for the factors by which it is determined are beyond its control. You depend on variations of supply and demand which you can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a harvest, the modification of a tariff in some remote country, dislocates the industry of millions, thousands of miles away. You are at the mercy of a prospector's luck, an inventor's genius, a woman's caprice—nay, you are at the mercy of your own instruments. Your capital is alive, and cries for food; starve it and it turns and throttles you. You produce, not because you will, but because you must; you consume, not what you choose, but what is forced upon you. Never was any trade so bound as this which you call free; but it is bound, not by a reasonable will, but by the accumulated irrationality of caprice.

Such is the internal economy of your State, as it presents itself to a Chinaman; and not more encouraging is the spectacle of your foreign relations. Commercial intercourse between nations, it was supposed some fifty years ago, would inaugurate an era of peace; and there appear to be many among you who still cling to this belief. But never was belief more plainly contradicted by the facts. The competition for markets bids fair to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the bigotry of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves, like hungry beasts of prey, on every yet unexploited quarter of the globe. Hitherto they have confined their acts of spoliation to those whom they regard as outside their own pale. But always, while they divide the spoil, they watch one another with a jealous eye; and sooner or later, when there is nothing left to divide, they will fall upon one another. That is the real meaning of your armaments; you must devour or be devoured. And it is precisely those trade relations, which it was thought would knit you in the bonds of peace, which, by making every one of you cut-throat rivals of the others, have brought you within reasonable distance of a general war of extermination.

In thus characterizing your civilization, I am not (I think) carried away by a foolish Chauvinism, I do not conceive the inhabitants of Europe to be naturally more foolish and depraved than those of China. On the contrary, it is a cardinal tenet of our faith, that human nature is everywhere the same, and that it is circumstances that make it good or bad. If, then, your economy, internal or external, be really as defective as we conceive, the cause we think must be sought not in any radical defect in your national character, but in precisely those political and social institutions which you are urging us to adopt at home. Can you wonder, in the circumstances, that we resist your influence by any means at our command; and that the more intelligent among us, while they regret the violence to which your agents have been exposed, yet feel that it weighs as nothing in the scale, when set against the intolerable evils which would result from the success of your enterprise ?