It was a wonderful time in which to live in China, and I was at the right age for it. Young, interested in all that went on around me, able to read Chinese as well as English, surrounded by friends far beyond the Christian circle of missions, I found myself stirred and stimulated by many events. True, the center of new movements was far from our quiet rather old-fashioned city and countryside, but we knew what was going on. Even the Church was growing, and my father was surprised at the number of businessmen and farmers who were interested in becoming Christians. None were scholars of the old-fashioned sort, and few were young students in schools and colleges and this grieved him, for if he had a snobbish tinge it was in the direction of the literate rather than the illiterate person. There was no hiding the fact that when he baptized an educated man, whether old or young, he felt such a one was worth at least a baker’s dozen of the ordinary uneducated sort. Yet a solid group of Chinese was becoming interested to some extent in the Christian religion, and it was, I am sure, although my father refused to agree with me, because this religion did give promise of creating a new society where all men could be equally valuable as human beings.
The mission schools, too, had a very strong part in the revolution. I do not know how missionaries liked the idea that they helped to bring about chaos in China, but they did, nevertheless. It was more than that they insisted upon unbinding the feet of girl students, that they taught Western subjects including science and mathematics rather than the old classical and literary subjects of Chinese schools. More even than these was the fact that they taught the revolutionary and world-shaking principles of Christ. The wonder is that none of them, at least in that day, realized how revolutionary those principles were. They had been reared in the Western atmosphere where church members do not take literally the teachings of Jesus, and practice them only as far as is convenient in the total framework of their society. The Chinese, however, tended to be practical even about religion, and the result was often very upsetting indeed.
But perhaps the most powerful force came, after all, from the graduates of mission schools, who had not been allowed to compete in the old Imperial Examinations and even after these were abolished in 1905 were still not considered sufficiently educated in Chinese ways to apply for high political positions. There was a deep jealousy between the two groups of scholars, the old traditional ones who had earned their Chinese degrees by dint of knowing the classics, and the new ones who had Western degrees but were deficient in the classical and traditional requirements. Each group held the other in contempt, and the young new scholars were determined to build a society where they and not the men they considered old fogies would be in power. Sun Yat-sen had many of these young men among his followers.
What troubled me, however, as I looked upon my Chinese world with my own young and too idealistic eyes, was that really first-rate minds were not turning to Christianity. I was troubled, not for my own sake, but for my parents’, for I feared that the good which they and others had undoubtedly brought to China with their living expression of Christianity would be outweighed by the evils that had accompanied it, and eventually the whole structure would fall. I did not foresee how soon it would fall, but I knew enough to understand that in China coming changes would be shaped by the best minds. The Chinese people had for centuries revered learning and there was little danger that they would live under the leadership of ignorant men for any length of time. Confucianism had built itself too strongly into the mental and spiritual texture of the people, and Confucius had dinned into them the qualifications of the superior man. The failure of missions and of Christianity, insofar as they have failed in China, was that no first-rate Chinese minds joined the Christian movement. I make this statement without qualification. Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao, who was the spiritual and mental leader of the young in that period, declared openly that religion, and especially Christianity with its record of meddling in the political life of many Western nations, would always be the weapon of the State.
No fundamental change in any people is sudden, however, and change in China was not sudden, either. Chinese educated in the West had been returning since 1880, bringing with them ideas of other ways of life. Laborers and merchants had gone to Hawaii and the United States in large numbers and had also brought their versions of Western ways. Most tragic and amusing of all, some of the so-called “coolie” labor corps, which was China’s contribution to the First World War, were bringing back French wives or concubines, whose stay was long or short depending upon the conditions they discovered in a man’s home when they arrived. Of course the “coolie” lovers had assured the French women that life in China was comfortable and modern. Railways? Certainly China had railways. The French women wanted to be sure they could get away easily if they did not like what they found. As a matter of fact, there were a few excellent railroads. One of them, connecting Shanghai with Peking, ran through our city. It had been opened when I was twelve years old, and I remember the excitement it had caused, because a tunnel had to be built under the hill upon which the fort stood, and our whole community was in a state of distraction, lest the spirits of the dead people buried in the graves on that hill would be disturbed by the roar and rattle of the trains shaking their bones. Those were the days when the Old Empress was feeling her defeat, however, and trying to prove how modern she intended to be, she favored railways at last, or said she did, and so the tunnel was made and the trains ran.
Nevertheless, prudent French women, and most of them were prudent, did not give up their French citizenship by marriage, and they kept tucked away enough money to get home again, and these, with the cooperation of French consulates, were no trouble, except for the one problem they left behind them. This was that a Chinese uneducated laborer could and did boast of having been married to or at least connected with a white woman and his stories destroyed even more of the prestige of the white race.
The two men whose names were magic at this time, to me as well as to my young Chinese friends and my pupils, were still K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao, who had been tutors of the Young Emperor. Both had been exiled after 1898, and of the two, Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao during the years had gradually assumed the stronger position. This was not, I think, because he had the better mind, for it would have been difficult to find in any country a mind so versatile and yet so profound and original as that of K’ang Yu-wei. K’ang had a breadth of understanding and vision which made partisanship impossible, and he early saw that East and West, if they would cooperate in friendship and mutual benefit, could help each other in complementary ways. He was stimulated by Western history and science and was not abashed by any false sense of Chinese inferiority. But after he went into exile in Japan he never again had the same influence, mainly, I believe, because he did not approve the radical trend of the revolution. He was convinced that China ought not to be a republic, and that her people were not ready for this form of government. He was right, of course, but he was unpopular, as those who are right at the wrong time always are, and so Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao became the idol of the literate young.
As early as 1902 Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao had begun his remarkable writing. Hu Shih in his autobiography describes the profound influence which he and others like him felt when they read Liang’s essays, published then in Japan in the Ming Pao, or People’s Newspaper. There Liang set forth a doctrine which was different indeed from the old Chinese belief that civilized man is never aggressive or even active except in passive ways. Instead he told the young Chinese, who were longing for activity and change, that Darwin had proved the theory of the survival of the fittest, that this in itself declared aggression to be the law of nature, and it was because Western peoples were aggressive that they had conquered. Therefore Chinese must make themselves into a new and aggressive people.