Everywhere this phrase, the new people, became fire set to tinder. Sun Yat-sen had thought that when the Manchu dynasty was overthrown, the people would then inevitably become “new.” Like the Nationalists in recent years, however, the Manchus were overthrown too easily and quickly, before anyone had had time to think out exactly how to make the people new. Rueful indeed did I feel when I heard from a Chinese friend in Hong Kong a few years ago that the Communists were actually alarmed when Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers surrendered so readily. “We had counted on five years of struggle,” the Communist general is reported to have said, “and we needed those five years in which to learn how to govern the people. Now victory has come so quickly that we are not ready for it. We shall make many mistakes.”
The same thing had happened after the revolution of 1911, when the rotten defenses of the Manchu rulers, even with their three million Bannermen clustered in villages about Peking to protect them, and in every province capital as well, gave way to the revolutionists. What does one do with a vast country and hundreds of millions of people without rulers? No one had a plan, and it was doubtless due to this planlessness that Sun Yat-sen was able to put forth his ideas of a republican form of government. At least, people said, such a government could be organized without the usual era of civil wars and the trouble and expense of setting up a new dynasty. The common man, peasant or merchant, was glad to think that he would not be taxed any more to keep up expensive palaces and pleasure gardens for officials. There was a great deal of democracy in China, deep and inherent in the people. They had accepted their Emperors, follies and all, as necessary government, but when it appeared that there were countries which had none, a change seemed sensible to them. When Yuan Shih-kai dreamed of setting up the imperial system again, they decided against it. So decided were they that it permeated even his bemused brain that the people not only did not want him, they did not want any emperor at all. They wanted some form of modern self-government.
As a matter of fact, the Chinese had always governed themselves. They distrusted and even held in contempt governments. They were cynical to the last degree about official honesty and considered it inevitable that every official was corrupt. Their ancient adage is that the best government is the one that governs least. A country folk song runs thus:
When the sun rises I work;
When the sun sets I rest.
I dig the well to drink;
I plow the field to eat.
What has the Emperor to do with me?
And the Chinese people were quite capable of self-government. Their traditional family system, wherein every individual man, woman and child belonged to a clan and each clan was responsible for all individuals in it, was a sound basis for a new kind of modern democracy. It is hard for Americans to realize the soundness of the family clan as the unit for democratic government, but indeed it is so. In China before Communism began its destructive work on the family system, there was no need, for example, for the expense of institutionalism which lies so heavily upon our own democracy. There were no orphanages, for no child was orphaned, since the family as a whole continued responsible for the care of the child who had lost his immediate parents. There were no insane asylums, for the family cared for its insane. As a matter of fact, there were very few insane, for the family system provided individual security without disgrace and thus removed one of the main causes for modern insanity, the lost individual. There needed to be no relief rolls, for again the family as a whole cared for its members who were jobless. Only in times of widespread famine and catastrophe did there have to be outside help, and even then the family stayed together. Business was stable in a large middle class, for the generations carried it on in the same family. Nepotism, it is true, tended to be a problem, since it was natural that a man would try to get jobs for his relatives. Yet I do not see the difference between family nepotism in China and political nepotism in the United States, and of the two, family nepotism in China seems the less dangerous to society because the family still remained morally responsible for each of its members, and the disgrace of any member was a family disgrace.
Could Sun Yat-sen and his followers, and this includes the later Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, have understood the value of the family system and have built upon its responsible democracy, there is little doubt that Communism would not be ruling in China today. One proof of this is that the Communists, wishing to establish their political theory, have made their main attack upon the family system, and the measure of the length of their stay will be to the degree to which they are able to separate the members of the family from each other and thus to destroy the fabric which has kept China alive, functioning and vital for centuries after her contemporaries in history were dead.
The failure of the early revolution was not evident at first, of course. Sun Yat-sen continued to struggle for political unity although the country was drifting toward the old trend of war lords, helped this time by the rising tide of militarism in the West. I suppose few Americans, then as now, thought about China at all and fewer still could have realized that events in the West were working with an old historical process to produce the Chinese war lords, called “generals,” who began to be the real rulers in their own regions. I lived under war lords for many years in that period, and peacefully enough, although we had always to watch the mood and the temper of our local war lord. He was usually uneducated and he was given as much to pleasure as to war. After a combat, whether he were victor or vanquished, he tended to settle down for a while, take a few new concubines and perhaps yield to opium or some such diversion and so we would have peace again until the next time. War lords seldom disturbed white people, because they did not want trouble with Western governments, but they had another vice, maddening to the young radicals, which was that they needed endless amounts of money to support their ever-increasing armies of ne’er-do-wells and malcontents, and needing money they sold off bits of their country to Japan, who was during the First World War making great hay. She had joined the war on the side of the Allies, and thus had been in a position to take over the German holdings in China, gaining a foothold for later aggressions. She leased or bought mines and ports and concessions from greedy war lords, and became indeed our ogre and portent.
Educated Chinese despised the war lords, but ordinary folk were, more often than not, amused by them so long as they kept off bandits and let other people alone, and the war lords were usually strong, wilful, humorous, rough-and-ready individuals, afraid of no one, and often very funny. One of our neighboring war lords was famous because of the three things he did not know — how many soldiers he had, how much money he had and how many wives he had. I remember the war lord in the province next to ours who was twice defeated by another war lord. At last he declared in loud and public tones that he intended to fight once more and if he were defeated he would come home in his coffin. We all waited the outcome of this much-touted battle, and when it ended as the others had, in defeat, an elaborate funeral was prepared for the return of the body. The funeral went off in high humor with every detail complete, except that instead of a corpse in the enormous coffin, the old war lord, very much alive though vanquished, was seated therein, dressed in his best robes and grinning at the astonished crowds while he smoked a large foreign cigar. The people burst into roaring laughter and instantly forgave the old ruler all his sins because he had made such a good joke, and this is characteristic of the Chinese, then and now, for they love laughter. My own father saved his life more than once by a quick-witted joke.