They were confirmed in this belief, for, ever since the Bolsheviks had come into power in Russia, there had been hundreds of pitiful White Russian refugees streaming southward in China and settling into the port cities. Even when I had lived in Nanhsüchou I had known them. Sometimes there was a knock on the door and when I went to open it I saw on the threshold a sad little group of men and women, perhaps children, too, aristocrats of Russia, who were exiles. They were bewildered and lost and yet even while they begged they showed a proud discontent with what they were given. “Have you no better shoes than this?” they inquired or they examined disconsolately a dress or a suit. All their lives they had been served and cared for and now it was an evil dream that their great houses and easy comforts were gone forever.
The young Chinese exulted thus to see the rich white people brought so low, but old Chinese were usually kind, comprehending, it may be, the portent of what they saw. I remember once, in the northern country where I was visiting in a wealthy home, very ancient and famous, that the old grandmother one day led me outside the great carved gateway and showing me a deep ditch she said:
“There I have twice had to hide, once with my parents when the peasants on our land turned against us, and again when my own children were small.”
Her old forefinger with its long curved fingernail did not tremble as she continued to point. “And there,” she went on, “yet again will my children’s children hide, for the poor are always against the rich.”
Ah well, so those White Russian aristocrats filtered down through the Chinese cities. They lived in poverty and they sickened and died and their beautiful daughters became dancing partners hired in cheap cafés in Shanghai and Tientsin and the young Chinese modern men learned from them to tango and foxtrot while the tall handsome White Russian boys became chauffeurs and bodyguards for the war lords and the wealthy Chinese merchants, protecting their lives and keeping their children from being kidnapped when they went to expensive private schools. Meanwhile, Chinese revolutionists were saying the Red Russians were the only people in the world who had been brave enough to rise up and take the land from landlords and corrupt rulers, to overthrow the old superstitious religions and in place of God to set up Science. The modern young minds in China in those days admired Russia extravagantly and it began to be uncomfortable to be a plain American who did not like what she heard of Communism and its doings.
There was some reason, I confess, for this urge of interest in the Russian revolution, although those of us who knew history remembered only too well the ancient desire of Russia toward China. The young Chinese, however, were as impatient with the lessons of history as our young Americans are, and they heeded only what was taking place in their lifetime and therefore within their own knowledge. Like the Gaderene swine, they could not be prevented from rushing to their own destruction.
This brings me to the second monumental date of that decade between 1920 and 1930. Again it is the date of a death. In the year 1925 Sun Yat-sen died in Peking of cancer of the liver. He had gone there in the hope that at last he could unify the country with the help of a successful war lord, Feng Yü-hsiang, that burly, gigantic, half-humorous figure who had conquered, at least temporarily, the other northern war lords, and then suddenly declaring himself for a republican form of government, had invited the revolutionary leader to come and help him. Alas, before the meeting could bear fruit, Sun Yet-sen was dead.
The story of this man has been told many times, and it is not needful, surely, to tell it here again. In his way Sun Yat-sen had been to me as distinct a figure as the Old Empress once was, but the romantic elements were entirely different. Sun was a typical product of Christian schools, although he was not an average man, at least in the vital energy of his unselfish idealism. Yet no great man appears as a solitary star, unrelated to what has gone before, and alone Sun Yat-sen could never have achieved what he did in his brief lifetime. He was the crest of a wave of revolution, and such a wave is always the rise of a deep ground swell of human events, and Christian missionaries themselves continued to increase that ground swell, without knowing what they did. They were men and women of single mind and one purpose, and when after a hundred years Christianity still seemed to take no root in the vastness of Chinese life they cast about to discover why this was. The cause of their failure, they decided, was not so much in the strength of other religions as in the whole Chinese culture which was so strong, so closely knit, so solidly united that it had to be attacked at its very foundations. Attack it they did, therefore, and in much the same way that the modern Communists are attacking it again. The missionaries set up schools and they taught the Chinese children that their own religions were superstitions, and that their elders were not to be obeyed before the Christian God, for this God was the one true God. They enforced these teachings with the practical benefits of Western life, such as hospitals, modern medicine, famine relief, unbound feet for girls, free choice of mates in marriage. The impact of these ideas was terrific and radical.
Like the missionaries, Sun Yat-sen was both a Christian and a realist. That is, he prayed and sometimes got what he wanted. When he did not, he went to work for himself. What he owed to the foreign religion was very much, nevertheless. It was more than an education, it was a fierce dedication to the benefit of his own people through modern reforms. He did not begin as a rebel, but as a Christian who wished to serve. He saw misery and injustice everywhere about him, and he wanted to change what others said was unchangeable. He trained himself as a doctor and a surgeon and established a successful practice. Then the intolerable slowness of his task overcame him. In a lifetime of incessant labor he could help but a few people among the millions who needed help. Only a good and modern government, he concluded, could change his country. He gave up his profession then and spent his life in the simple determination to overthrow the Manchu government and help his people set up another better one, under which China could be strong.
To look back now upon this single-hearted man is to feel pity and sorrow and an unwilling admiration. He was a man who won the affection of all who knew him, a man of goodness and unshakeable integrity, qualities remarkable enough in a corrupt age. There was never a wind of evil rumor about Sun Yat-sen. No one suspected him of accumulating riches for himself. Chinese gave him money everywhere he went in order that he could help their country, and no one doubted his honesty. He gathered men to him, particularly the young modern intellectuals who had nowhere to find employment, since their traditional place in government administration was no longer open to them, for, since the first graduates of mission schools were not educated in the traditional subjects of literature and philosophy and history, and government posts were denied them, it was natural that they flocked to Sun Yat-sen, whose purpose was to overthrow the government itself and establish a republic, modelled after the United States. If he were successful, the Western-educated youth would fill its posts.