Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903
Hitherto I have avoided any discussion in detail of the existing political and commercial relations between ourselves and the West, and of the events which led up to the situation we all deplore. I have endeavored rather to enlist your sympathies in the general character of our civilization, to note the salient points in which it differs from your own, and to bring into relief the more fundamental and permanent conditions which render an understanding between us so difficult and so precarious. I cannot, however, disguise from myself that even a sympathetic reader may fairly demand of me something more; and that if I am to satisfy him, I am bound, however unwillingly, to enter upon the field of current controversy. For, he may reasonably inquire, If it be really true that your people possess the qualities you ascribe to them, if they be indeed so just, so upright, so averse to violence, how is it that they have committed the greatest breach of international comity that is known in the history of the civilized world? How is it that they have been guilty of acts which have shocked and outraged the moral sense of communities, according to you, less cultured and humane than themselves?
In reply, I will urge that I have never asserted that the Chinese are saints. I have said, and I still maintain, that if they are left to themselves, if the order to which they are accustomed is not violently disturbed, they are the most peaceful and law-abiding nation on the face of the earth. If, then, they have broken loose from their secular restraints, if they have shown for a moment those claws of the brute which no civilization, be it yours or ours, though it may sheathe, will ever draw, the very violence of the outbreak serves only to prove how intense must have been the provocation. Do you realize what that provocation was ? I doubt it! Permit me then briefly to record the facts.
When first your traders came to China it was not at our invitation; yet we received them, if not with enthusiasm, at least with tolerance. So long as they were content to observe our regulations we were willing to sanction their traffic, but always on the condition that it should not disturb our social and political order. To this condition, in earlier days, your countrymen consented to conform, and for many years, in spite of occasional disputes, there was no serious trouble between them and us. The trouble arose over a matter in regard to which you yourselves have hardly ventured to defend your own conduct. A considerable part of your trade was the trade in opium. The use of this drug, we observed, was destroying the health and the morals of our people, and we therefore prohibited the trade. Your merchants, however, evaded the law; opium was smuggled in; till at last we were driven to take the matter into our own hands and to seize and destroy the whole stock of the forbidden drug. Your Government made our action an excuse for war. You invaded our territory, exacted an indemnity, and took from us the island of Hong-Kong. Was this an auspicious beginning? Was it calculated to impress us with a sense of the justice and fair play of the British nation? Years went on; a petty dispute about the privileges of the flag — a dispute in which we still believe that we were in the right— brought us once more into collision with you. You made the unfortunate conflict an excuse for new demands. In conjunction with the French you occupied our capital and imposed upon us terms which you would never have dared to offer to a European nation. We submitted because we must; we were not a military Power. But do you suppose our sense of justice was not outraged? Or later, when every Power in Europe on some pretext or other has seized and retained some part of our territory, do you suppose because we cannot resist that we do not feel? To a Chinaman who reviews the history of our relations with you during the past sixty years and more must you not naturally appear to be little better than robbers and pirates? True, such a view is unduly harsh, and I do not myself altogether share it. A study of your official documents has convinced me that you genuinely believe that you have had on your side a certain measure of right, and I am too well aware of the complexity of all human affairs to deny that there may be something in your point of view. Still, I would ask you to consider the broad facts of the situation, dismissing the interminable controversies that arise on every point of detail. Which of us throughout has been the aggressor—we who, putting our case at the worst, were obstinately resolved to maintain our society, customs, laws, and polity against the influences of an alien civilization, or you who, bent on commercial gains, were determined at all cost to force an entrance into our territory and to introduce along with your goods the leaven of your culture and ideas? If, in the collision that inevitably ensued, we gave cause of offence, we had at least the excuse of self-preservation. Our wrongs, if wrongs they were, were episodes in a substantial right; but yours were themselves the substance of your action.
Consider for a moment the conditions you have imposed on a proud and ancient empire, an empire which for centuries has believed itself to be at the head of civilization. You have compelled us, against our will, to open our ports to your trade; you have forced us to permit the introduction of a drug which we believe is ruining our people; you have exempted your subjects residing among us from the operation of our laws; you have appropriated our coasting traffic; you claim the traffic of our inland waters. Every attempt on our part to resist your demands has been followed by new claims and new aggressions. And yet all this time you have posed as civilized peoples dealing with barbarians. You have compelled us to receive your missionaries, and when they by their ignorant zeal have provoked our people to rise in mass against them, that again you have made an excuse for new depredations, till we, not unnaturally, have come to believe that the cross is the pioneer of the sword, and that the only use you have for your religion is to use it as a weapon of war. Conceive for a moment the feelings of an Englishman subjected to similar treatment; conceive that we had permanently occupied Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth; that we had planted on your territory thousands of men whom we had exempted from your laws; that along your coasts and navigable rivers our vessels were driving out yours; that we had insisted on your admitting spirits duty free to the manifest ruin of your population; and that we had planted in all your principal towns agents to counteract the teachings of your Church and undermine the whole fabric of habitual belief on which the stability of your society depends. Imagine that you had to submit to all this. Would you be so greatly surprised, would you really even be indignant, if you found one day the Chinese Legation surrounded by a howling mob and Confucian missionaries everywhere hunted to death?
What right then have you to be surprised, what right have you to be indignant at even the worst that has taken place in China? What is there so strange or monstrous in our conduct? A Legation, you say, is sacrosanct by the law of nations. Yes; but remember that it was at the point of the sword that you forced us to receive Embassies whose presence we have always regarded as a sign of national humiliation. But our mobs were barbarous and cruel. Alas! yes. And your troops? And your troops, nations of Christendom? Ask the once fertile land from Peking to the coast; ask the corpses of murdered men and outraged women and children; ask the innocent mingled indiscriminately with the guilty; ask the Christ, the lover of men, whom you profess to serve, to judge between us who rose in mad despair to save our country and you who, avenging crime with crime, did not pause to reflect that the crime you avenged was the fruit of your own iniquity!
Well, it is over—over, at least, for the moment. I do not wish to dwell upon the past.
Yet the lesson of the past is our only guide to the policy of the future. And unless you of the West will come to realize the truth; unless yov will understand that the events which have shaken Europe are the Nemesis of a long course of injustice and oppression; unless you will learn that the profound opposition between your civilization and ours gives no more ground why you should regard us as barbarians than we you; unless you will treat us as a civilized Power and respect our customs and our laws; unless you will accord us the treatment you would accord to any European nation and refrain from exacting conditions you would never dream of imposing on a Western Power—unless you will do this, there is no hope of any peace between us. You have humiliated the proudest nation in the world; you have outraged the most upright and just; with what results is now abundantly manifest. If ignorance was your excuse, let it be your excuse no longer. Learn to understand us, and in doing so learn better to understand yourselves. To contribute to this end has been my only object in writing and publishing these letters. If I have offended, I regret it; but if it is the truth that offends, for that I owe and I offer no apology.
THE END.