Meanwhile young Chinese, many of them the husbands of my friends, or even my own students, were trying their best to create the new China. Unfortunately, instead of beginning with reality, and this was to know and understand what they had in their own people upon which to build, they tried to apply Western ideas cold. For example, they began to believe in the necessity of militarism, since, they argued, the strength of the West lay in its armed forces and weapons, and certain young reformers attached themselves to the war lords and tried to modernize their large and irregular armies. Others felt that the strength of the West lay in its standards of law and that China was weak because her government did not depend upon law but upon individuals and their human relationships, and such young men studied law abroad and then came home and tried to build up a legalistic government, modeled after the American and the French. Their attempt failed because Sun Yat-sen insisted that the parliament thus set up must be the ruling body of the country whereas the old-fashioned Yuan Shih-Kai, while he was President, determined to keep power in his own hands. Provincial assemblies were actually set up but the war lords soon put an end to them as they continued to rise to power.
It was a fantastic era. I felt sometimes as I read the newspapers that I was a juggler trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. Here were the Western-educated young, quarreling over parliaments and legalities and mechanistic theories as opposed to the old idealistic philosophies, and here were the crude, hearty, entirely selfish war lords building up their little separate empires, and here was imperial Japan gnawing diligently at the land and resources and preparing for her future empire, and here was the desperate Sun Yat-sen, fighting bravely without money or army for his own ideals, and here was old Yuan Shih-kai, determined to restore the monarchy. The air became clear to some extent when Yuan understood that the people would not have him, and so plain was this made that he had to back down, or resign and acknowledge his mistake, a disgrace which he did not long survive. When he died in 1916 we were all relieved.
The aspect of the revolution which interested me most, however, was still the literary one. While the country was struggling to find a political form suitable to the modern age, a profound change was going on in the writing and reading of books. Before I begin to describe this part of the revolution I must make clear, or as clear as I can, the place which books have had in China ever since the era of Confucius, five hundred years before Christ. If there was an aristocracy in China it was one not of birth or even of wealth, it was of scholarship. The Imperial Examinations had been open to all candidates and those who passed them most successfully could even be the sons of peasants. They often were, for if a village recognized a boy genius among its inhabitants, it was quite usual for all the villagers to join together and provide for his education, in the hope that if he passed the Imperial Examinations he would bring honor to the home village and would also give the villagers a return for their investment in him. Automatically the young scholar joined the elite of the intellectuals and thereafter never put his hands to any menial labor. He was a scholar and lived a scholar’s life, rich or poor. Even if he never achieved fame he never lost his position, and he could at least support himself by opening a village school. Whether he became an advisor to the Emperor or only a village schoolteacher, he received respect as a scholar. This national attitude of reverence for learning made the task of teaching young Chinese a pure pleasure, for instead of lackadaisical lounging in the classroom or childish absorption in sports, my pupils were alert and eager to learn all they possibly could, since academic achievement was the key to success in Chinese society. There were practical rewards for the intellectual.
As long as the Manchu government stood and especially as long as Imperial Examinations continued, strength remained with the old classical scholars, who would not recognize Western university degrees. When the Examinations ended, however, and the Throne fell, the old scholars were at a loss. Their protection was gone as well as their jobs, and so the young Western-trained scholars became powerful through the political revolution they had created. It was characteristic of these young intellectuals that instead of tackling the practical problems of the country, which were political and economic, they plunged with fervor into a literary revolution. Fully eighty-five percent of the Chinese people could not read and it is doubtful if more than five percent read with ease, and among the five percent were all the scholars, both old and new. Yet here the young intellectuals spent their energies. They attacked first the written language itself, the language of the old scholars, the classical wen-li, which was the only language used for literature. Fiction, or “wild writing” as it was called, was not considered literature. It was pastime reading, and a true scholar of the old school was ashamed to be seen reading novels, although all read them in private. This classical language, however, did prevent the ordinary Chinese from getting information, much as Americans might be prevented if Latin were used instead of English. Years of study were necessary in order to learn proficiency in wen-li, and the young intellectuals, who had spent those years in studying science and other Western subjects and therefore were poor in classical Chinese, declared themselves against wen-li. The language of the people, the spoken language, they said, should also be the written language. It was more than language — the old literary tricks of allusiveness and allegory and parable were also to be sternly rejected. From now on, young intellectuals said, they would write with simple clarity in the vernacular. Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei, the renowned president of the National University in Peking, headed the revolutionary movement, and he enriched his teaching staff with first-rate minds from among the new group. Among them I think before all others of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, brilliant, bold, and radical, who was later lost to Communism. His magazine, Ch’ing Nien, or Youth, was an inspiration to thousands of restless young Chinese, and when in 1916 the magazine took up the cause of the literary reform, the flame of new intellectual life spread everywhere through China.
Old scholars, of course, and even average conservative minds, literate or not, were horrified at what they considered the destruction of the literary past while discussion went on in scores of new little magazines, in newspapers and in teashops. When Hu Shih, in an article in Youth magazine, startled us all by the brilliance and persuasiveness of his argument for the use of the pai-hua, or vernacular, as against wen-li, we recognized a fresh force in modern China.
Both Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih based their arguments not merely on Western literature, which had obviously influenced them strongly, but also upon the revolutionary spirit of the West. Older Chinese minds were revolted by what seemed to them the foreign and unpatriotic attitudes of the two young men and those who flocked to follow them, but the fact is that Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih did search the history of their own people and did find there the periodic appearance of the same revolutionary spirit which had changed their country, too, again and again, as well as the culture of Europe, and this revolutionary spirit, they felt, was simply the renewed determination in progressive generations of human beings, wherever they lived, to do away with old clutter and meaningless phrases and to try instead to approach freshly and directly the problems of life.