Chinese government

“ The only safeguard against bad government was good government by good men; the only remedy for bad government was the effort of good men. The Chinese never set up an imaginary machinery and turned themselves into its cogs. To the simple, common-sense humanity of the Confucians, a government made up of rigid laws—a system having no reference to the personality or value of individuals, but embedded in a vast mechanism of numbers—would have seemed anathema and lunacy.
Government in China was an auxiliary activity, the reserve power of a hierarchy given to the pursuit of different ends. ”

“ If the government was weak and limited, and social control ensured primarily by nongovernmental agencies, how did the Chinese achieve so great a political stability? Why did their polity not break up into a wilderness of tiny social groups, each jealous and particularistic, like medieval Europe? The answer is to be found in the psychological controls which the Chinese established. They devised a system of indoctrination unequaled by that of any other people.
The Chinese sought to guide men through the guidance of their ideas: government by education, or government by propaganda. ”

“ We saw in a former chapter that to charge the Chinese, as a people, with a proclivity to untruthfulness, or at any rate to assign such untruthfulness, if it exists, to Confucianism, is erroneous and unjust. But let it be admitted at once that the charge of insincerity in politics is one that can without unfairness be brought against the Chinese Government—as, indeed, it can be brought against some other states that have had less excuse for their conduct than China. ”

“ The Chinese absorbed all their conquerors of the past because the country was large, because the people were extraordinarily homogeneous in ideology and habit, because the Chinese were wealthier than their conquerors and more cultured. Absorption or cultural extinction is not a matter of race; it is a question of ideology, of thought and the habits which arise from ways of thought. What ways of thought are there today that will absorb the conquerors? What ways of thought are there that the conquerors might tear apart from the long past, to change China into a mere geographical expression? ”

“ In China some of the most benevolent and effective emperors advocated at times a government of rules and not of men, in order to check the caprice and the oppression of officials; yet the role of law in China, in contrast to the part it has played in the West, remained slight. The West affords instances of effective political work outside legal systems, while the Chinese have produced law codes of considerable breadth and significance. Nevertheless, the power of Chinese government aside from law is just as clear as the Western development of government within law. ”

“ Cases of this sort, which are by no means of infrequent occurrence, exhibit the weakness of the Chinese government, but they also exhibit its strength. If the millions of China were not satisfied with the existing rule, nothing would be easier than for them to unite and overthrow it. But the security of the government is based mainly upon the well-understood and well-ascertained fact that the people as a whole have no wish to overturn the system under which they live, as well as upon the equally indisputable fact that, with the Chinese, effective combination is an exceedingly difficult matter. ”

“ The only movements which need be here considered are constituent ones. It has been noted that the real basis for the stability and operation of the old Chinese society lay not in the power of an organized body of law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-interpreters but in the constitutionalism of common sense, in the deep harmony of agreement which the Confucian outlook on fact and value had created. ”

“ Even if the project comes to [437] nothing it is a bad omen for the future that the Chinese Government should give it serious consideration at a time when all the energies and resources of the Empire should be devoted to internal reform and development. If China's responsible rulers do not realise the precarious position into which the country has drifted and the pressing necessity of administrative reform, they are not fit to hold the helm of the State. ”

“ In the international field the Chinese owed their strength to the same factors that weakened them at home: careful attention to form, the anxious cherishing of prestige and appearance, and a limitless patience which did not predispose the diplomats to violent action. Since the Peking regime, in point of military forces available for world-wide action, was on about the same level as Liberia, the fact that China remained a second-rate power instead of becoming a plain victim suggests the degree of her international prestige. ”

“ This duality of role strongly affected the development of government in China, and is a factor which still plays a great part. The Chinese owe many of their social and political peculiarities to the effectiveness of their mass action, which is able to take place with a minimum of formal leadership and coordination and with a maximum of secrecy and totality. In times when foreign conquest of China is no longer in the realm of the improbable, it is worth remembering that the Chinese are a people adamant in resistance to force and schooled in centuries of rebellion. ”

“ Controlling men through controlling their minds and through making sure that every possible leader would lead from within the hierarchy—these devices of the past had failed. There were now Chinese to whom the Confucian rules were pleasant and homelike but not the real material of modern life. These Chinese possessed intellectually trained leaders who had nothing in common with the dominant elite—who were more interested in building railroads, improving water supplies, defending China's frontiers, and modernizing the country than in augmenting the virtue of mankind. ”

“ Something has, no doubt, been accomplished within the last twenty years towards opening the eyes of the Chinese Government to the wisdom of assuming a recognised place in the comity of nations, and inducing it to introduce various domestic measures of a useful and progressive nature. ”

“ This tradition, the ideology called Confucian, was the device whereby the scholar-officials of the old imperial bureaucracy controlled society. Government itself was subordinate to the moral and social leadership of the intellectuals, who relegated the economic and military professions to the less honored categories of society. The whole fabric of Chinese life was made up of interlocking patterns; the West, by destroying a part, tore the whole asunder. Modern China faces more than political problems; a totalitarian revolution has engulfed it. ”

“ And here, too, I must differ from those who have such high notions of the Chinese in these respects. I think no country can be well governed where the government is powerless, and has not the means of punishing those who break the laws. China is very weak in this respect, compared with European nations, and the only thing [Pg 8] which keeps the country together is the quiet and inoffensive character of the people. Everybody, who has travelled in China, knows that, wherever the natives are enterprising and bold, they set the government at defiance whenever it suits their purpose to do so. ”

“ The ideal ruler of old was a humane classicist with a taste for historical studies; the contemporary Chinese ruler must be military, if not militaristic, and must have the inevitable background of engineering and management which modern war connotes. The soldier must collaborate with the modern administrator, while both recapture the high ideals of devotion typical of the old scholastic rule, even if they cannot use its substance. These imperatives are indispensable if China is to live. ”

“ Confucianism in modern China owes its position not so much to its prospects as to the fact that it has provided a frame of reference, however obsolescent, for the political struggle. Hence, through the tumultuous modern period, the Chinese have been strengthened by a philosophy which emphasized the separateness and stability of each institution in society, and which did not make them lose all with the fortunes of a single supreme organization. ”

“ But then China has ages of experience, both in organizing and in rebelling, back of to-day. Establishing a Republic, however, is something new; the Chinese have never before tried their hand at that, but if they will only bring into play now all their undoubted power of organization, of resource, of moderation, they will certainly make a success of their new experiment in government. ”

“ It had to gather together the members of the old Chinese world-community, reorient them with respect to the new, divided world around them, and fight off the inroads of outsiders. Above everything else, it had to grow strong, so that it might institute order, so that it might someday grow weak again. On the other hand, if a governmental system were set up which tried to maintain the precarious supremacy that Western states have enjoyed, and which was subject to uncontrolled fluctuations in the thought of the people upon whom it rested, the Chinese might lose their character as Chinese. ”

“ Nothing has ever been more exaggerated, than the state of civilization and social advancement among the Chinese. They are, in general, a frugal, sober, and industrious people; but the accounts of their government, sciences, religion, public institutions, and improvement in morals and arts, are both false and ridiculous. The administration of public affairs, is such as would disgrace any country on the globe; and the code of laws which is expressed in such high flown metaphors, and boasts such wonderful wisdom in its doctrines, serves, in truth, but as a cloak to hide injustice and oppression. ”

“ It is thus patent that the new Chinese world which is appearing must grow out of the background of the past and the necessities of the present. It cannot readily be planned because there are not enough formulas common to the old Far Eastern and the new Western worlds. New China must be a blending, from use, from habit, from new skills imposed upon old. Out of the dangers and misfortunes of the years since 1912 the Chinese have developed a small body of political methods which is temporarily workable. ”

“ It is the desire of this Government to maintain its relations of friendship with the part of Chinese people and Chinese officials not concerned in outrages on Americans. Among these we consider Li Hung Chang, just appointed viceroy of Chili. You will to the extent of your power aid the Government of China, or any part thereof, in repressing such outrages and in rescuing Americans, and in protecting American citizens and interests, and wherever Chinese Government fails to render such protection you will do all in your power to supply it. ”

“ How can Western technology be used without the attitude of mind which has created it and brought it to operative efficiency? How can a world which never knew Rome or the Normanic Curia Regis know jurisprudence? How can modern government be made Chinese, when government itself has meant something far different in China from what it has meant in the West?
Further, the nature of Chinese leadership has not only been transformed from being literary and ethical in its orientation to being technical and legal; it has also been transformed socially in the replacement of scholars by soldiers. ”

“ But already the Chinese are beginning to understand that the American Government is a friend; that it does not seek their territory; that it will not be a party to extortion; that it does not want to destroy China but to save her ”

“ Government in China has in the Republican era undergone one of the most significant transformations to be found anywhere in the world's political experience. The oldest society on earth found itself forced to redefine its position and to reconstruct its ways of thought and internal means of organization. Pressure from without compelled China to adopt the modern state. Chinese society was required to incorporate this state and all implied institutions in its routine living. ”

“ The same tight, enduring system of ideological control served to restrain the Chinese in their thinking even when they had the material power sufficient to shake off their past and build Utopia in its place. Rebels themselves obeyed the unwritten precepts. The triumph of the civilians was complete: with infantry prevailing on the battlefield, the peasants were the strongest; and with the total population saturated in compelling, uniform ideas of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the scholars had only to await the establishment of administration to assume the leadership. ”

“ Whether we should have a Constitutional Monarchy or a Republic we are prepared to leave with the people. What they want we want, and we are prepared to leave the matter for a decision by the vote of the people. For our part, we advocate a Republican form of government, as the Chinese are democratic in their nature and their habits. Even under an absolute monarch careful observers of the Chinese political tendency have remarked that the Chinese Government is a democracy superseded by a monarchy. ”

“ Institutions and practices which are so well established that they seem to rest on sheer common sense in each of the competing civilizations have been placed in juxtaposition. As a result, the Chinese now know two kinds of common sense to justify a course of action. The ensuing difficulty at times goes deeper; for they may be said to have even two kinds of sanity. In old China a man who wanted no sons seemed a patent lunatic; in the Western world he might be perfectly sane. A modern Chinese faces thousands of such choices. ”