China Now
'China : The Pity of It. By 0. P. Bland. (Heinemann. Ss- fld• PRoFEsson TAWNEY'S book was originally written as a memorandum for the Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations held at Shanghai in 1931. It attracted a great deal of attention in China, and has now been made available to the general public in a slightly expanded form. As an approach to the fundamental problems of modern China it deserves the status of a classic.
The West came to China only yesterday. Briefly, but with a rare understanding, Prof. Tawney indicates what it found there ; and all that he has to say thereafter is related to this all-important, this too often neglected background of the old China. Among China's friends there are too many prophets and too few historians, too many architects and too few surveyors: There is an idea that western civilization -is. something that can be delivered in plain vans—that we need know nothing about our customer beyond his address. This is bad salesmanship ; it is not CVOS, very good dumping. . With Prof. Tawney_ we can study not only the customer's wishes but his needs, and the habits which condition those needs.
• " Until yesterday China was aloof and self-sufficient: Like her pealtants,- who ploughed with iron when Europe used wood, and continued to plough with it when Europe used steel, she had carried one type of economic system and social organization to a high level of achievemen* and was not conscious of the need to improve or supersede it. . . . What elsewhere is forgotten is in China remembered ; what elsewhere is a memory is in China a fact. . . . Her history spans, with impressive continuity, what in the west are regarded as epochs . . . Her unity, like that of mediaeval Christendom, has been tho unity of a civilization rather than of a political system."
Here was a nation of four hundred million souls with a coherent individuality of its own—an individuality untouched, unshaken, by the reshuffling of values which has made up modern history in the west. What was the result of the impact of western civilization on China? The result was that " economic, political, and intellectual movements, which else- where made their way by small stages and gradual increments of growth, are, in the China of to-day, in simultaneous ferment."
Change is in the air, but the great mass of the people is as yet not directly touched by it. Not directly ; but " the move- ment to industrialization is a growing force Its effect on the mind is ultimately more important than its embodiment in mills and mines." Three-quarters of the population of China is agricultural, and for them agriculture is " at once a craft; a business, and a manner of life." One of the most striking features of Chinese farming is the unimportance of animal husbandry. " Land capable of growing food for human consumption cannot be spared for raising beasts " ; so " the Chinese consumer is almost a vegetarian, the Chinese farmer not a dairyman, grazier, or shepherd, but a cultivator."
There is no landed aristocracy, and only a small proportion of wage-workers. Half the peasants own their own farms. Each tiny holding (the average size has been computed at about three and a half acres) is divided and subdivided among the heirs of successive generations, and is moreover equitably dispersed in separate plots about the land owned by the village, which naturally varies in value from place to place. -.The: peasant, cultivating every- scattered inch of ground, practises " an agriculture which has been aptly compared to a kind of gardening." He works with devotion and efficiency ; but the centuries of tradition which have perfected his tech- nique have also narrowed it." In education,.which will break down the limitations of that technique, and in science, which will revitalize and expand it, Prof. Tawney sees the principal hope of salvation for the Chinese farmer. He stands badly in need of salvation._ He dedicates his life to unremitting labour which has survival, not progress, for its ideal. He works under the shadow of pestilence, famine, drought, flood and civil war. With no reserves in hand, he is at the mercy of money-lenders and middlemen. " A large proportion of Chinese peasants are constantly on the brink o7 actual destitution." Prof. Tawney believes that his more desperate needs will not go for ever unsupplied. He may himself evolve an effective system of agricultural co-operation. His rulers have already adopted agrarian policies of an impeccably progressive nature, and it is possible- that they will one day be in a position to put them into practice. Railways he must hope for ; roads he may reasonably expect. Only one thing is certain ; that he will continue, heroically, to survive.
In a survey—which I have space only to mention—of " The Old Industrial Order and the New " Prof. Tawney observes that
" the industrial system cluuncteristio of China is that which pre- dominated in most regions of tho West till the nineteenth century. . . . In technique and organization the major part of her industry belongs either to the pre-capitalist era or to the first infancy of capitalism. . . . What is surprising . . . is not that the modem- ization of industry has taken place gradually, and in isolated areas, but that it has taken place at all. "
So far as natural resources go, the limiting factor is not coal, but iron. But, as in agriculture, the need for, peace and 31. decent administration is paramount and immediate. Prof. Tawney's suggestions for the attainment of this not inac- cessible goal have the practical and constructive modesty of one who realizes (as Chinese legislators never do) the need for a gradual approach.
A lively and contentious pessimism, based on an intimate knowledge of the habits and outlook of Chinese officials and politicians, distinguishes China : The Pity of It. The chief weakness of Mr. Bland's hook is that, in his anxiety to con- vince us that China is not, and never can be a great nation, he molts to remind us that the Chinese always have been, and always will be, a great people. His well-documented exposures of.their iniquities, and his implacable contempt for everyone who does not share his own opinions on Far Eastern questions, are unrelieved by any more constructive propdsal than that the Powers should abandon the policy of non-intervention to which they pledged themselves at the Washington Conference and come to China's rescue with what amounts to a polite form of martial law. It is a pity that Mr. Bland's chronic disgruntlement should have been allowed to detract from the force of a book whose main thesis—the absence in China of the will or the capacity for effective self-government—is, though here stated in extreme terms, regrettably near the truth. Much of his material is extremely valuable : as, for instance, his analysis of the Cantonese character and in- fluence ; his " debunking " of Sun Yat Sen, whose legend has been padded out to meet China's " instinctive need of some object of veneration " to replace the Dragon Throne ; and his remarks on the alleged " Red Peril." But never to use the word " international " without a sneer, nor the word " idealist " without the epithet " sentimental," is to arouse the reader's suspicions by obtruding on his attention the limitations of a pamphleteer ; and Mr. Bland's manner jeopardizes his success in a cause which his matter might have won for him.
PETER FLEMING.
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