What of China?
WHAT OF CHINA? THE United States, in more or less close association with other powers, is hovering on the outskirts of China, perplexed by political, economic and military events to which no...
...in the second place, it is viewed with alarm by those who sincerely believe that China can profit by western technical and commercial assistance, quite apart from existing treaties...
...One concludes, therefore, that regardless of what other powers may do, the United States may profitably exhibit an attitude of patience toward the Chinese struggle...
...About the whole of Chinese progress toward republicanism there is much that must strike western minds as factitious and bizarre...
...In the first place, Leninism would mean violence and industrial chaos, danger to Europe and destruction of much Christian missionary effort...
...Most of us who know something of China can hardly picture its people Bolshevists...
...But I believe it will not come to pass...
...Great Britain, however, is apparently convinced that Chiang will triumph ultimately, and its wager invites respect...
...And it is perhaps one of the ironical details of recent history that Great Britain, which once abetted Sun Yat-sen and saved him from prison, should now be most vitally affected by what is happening in revolutionary China...
...Up until now, the fate of the missionaries has been, of course, to share the general uneasiness and disturbance in China...
...Sun Yat-sen himself drew up a remarkable theory of government which blended Occidental practice with Chinese traditions and which needed only—the education of a vast people, utterly without training in popular rule or modern business, in the conduct of their common affairs...
...The Chinese students, too, will grow in wisdom...
...T. Z. Koo, connected for several years with the administration of Chinese railways and for more years with Christian student movements in the Orient, contributed to the New York Times a reasoned statement which, to say the least, sounds eminently plausible...
...To a large extent, it goes hand in hand with that same movement...
...Thomas Millard, the veteran correspondent now in the service of the New York World, feels that, as conditions now are, the label may actually precipitate disastrous military intervention...
...This point of view seems also to have influenced Dr...
...Agrarian organization has been completed on a scale hitherto unknown in the Orient, and soldiering has become a popular and honorable profession...
...More reliable testimony than even all this seems to come from the Very Reverend James A. Walsh, superior-general of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, whose statement to the press is an admirable summary of the information and comment supplied by priests and religious in the Chinese mission field...
...Was the army to be an instrument of government, or government itself...
...but there has been nothing like organized persecution...
...Movements toward democracy are normally steps toward industrialism and nationalistic expression...
...The rise of the military was indispensable to the Chinese advance, but it created the turmoil from which the nation now chiefly suffers...
...Mention of communism brings up what is, of course, the most lurid aspect of the whole situation...
...and indeed about the only emulators of Napoleon Bonaparte in the country were scoundrelly bandit chieftains...
...Similarly, Alexander Kerensky, who might be pardoned an unusual eagerness to see Sovietistic spectres everywhere, has clearly expressed his conviction that the gospel of the present Russian government will never get a wide hearing in disciplined, conventional, reasonable China...
...It is a feeling which has been developed as slowly and firmly as the revolutionary movement brought to a head by Sun Yat-sen in 1911 was organized...
...Most authoritative commentators seem to agree that the Southern Nationalist army has loyally tried to be the first, and that it has maintained an admirable discipline...
...Two things, however, have undoubtedly occurred...
...At present this intraparty hostility is the most serious of Chinese disturbances and also the most difficult to understand or gauge...
...Today the armies whose "lords" divide the country of the Manchus among themselves are not, perhaps, models of tactical organization, but they are 702 veritable nuclei of fighting forces which we may some time take seriously enough...
...THE United States, in more or less close association with other powers, is hovering on the outskirts of China, perplexed by political, economic and military events to which no single formula seems applicable...
...This is not now, as during the Boxer uprising, the product of mere traditional antipathies or vagrant outbursts of superstition...
...China has been in turmoil since fateful 1911, and it is certainly an open question whether any really notable success has been gained in the formation of public opinion...
...The proper antidote to Bolshevism in China is surely Christianity, representing to the Chinese not merely a sublime gospel of religious truth, but also the varied kindly arts of the western world...
...These activities will not cease...
...Its soldiers do not loot or merge into bandit hordes, and its leaders tend to regard treaties with respect...
...Once a group of thoughtful Chinese, influenced by what they had seen in foreign countries, found practical means to realize their dream of a republican government in China, it was inevitable that they and their followers should wish to be as independent of alien control as of domestic dynasties...
...This opinion is fortified by the comment of at least four prominent men, all of whom are familiar with Chinese conditions...
...Besides, they have a strong religious sense...
...This need was soon felt...
...The Chinese are peace-loving, their family traditions are sacred, and they cling to property...
...Indeed, the news indicates that he is hard pressed to contend with a split in his own ranks, a communistically minded party having found the methods he sponsors too slow and compromising...
...But for the most part, "Bolshevism" is a convenient label for those who wish to see "concerted action" by the powers now concentrated in Shanghai, and who believe that a "firm hand" is the best answer to a lot of "coolie nonsense...
...Soviet poison," he says, "has already entered the minds of scores and hundreds of young students, who in turn have harangued the laboring classes and influenced them against all foreign influences—including, of course, the 'foreign religion.' The propaganda has been intense and has run the whole gamut of Soviet doctrines...
...Oriental leaders—the Filipinos afford another interesting example—seem to feel that a lofty political ideology is enough to guarantee the arrival of a milennium...
...Above all, it is necessary to avoid the errors of "firmness" which, as displayed by continental nations, did so much to make the Russian upheaval a success...
...Therefore communism could be, at best, only a local urban affair...
...He puts forth the simple fact that "there is insufficient wealth in China to 'commune' with," the only large fortunes being a few controlled by business men in large cities...
...They will soon learn that financial questions are very practical and that their elders were wise to cultivate business relationships with many other nations, even though, in times past, some of these were not as 'decent' as they should have been...
...But in spite of the successes of Chiang Kai Shek, the Nationalist general, it is not at all sure that he can proceed to oust those rival leaders who continue to make every important city in China a battleground...
...What has been the influence of Russian Sovietism upon the formation of Chinese revolutionary leadership ? There are many reasons why this query should arouse concern...
...Whatever happens, the Church will not cease its efforts to minister to the vast, mysterious Orient, for the Church alone is in possession of the secret of clarity and wisdom which is the proper and fitting foundation of any government as it is the recipe for the saving of the individual man...
...Nicholas Murray Butler who, speaking on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, expressed opposition to "hasty coercion" of the Chinese by "more advanced peoples...
...One thing alone is wholly evident—a growing distrust of foreigners created by a fixed resolve to achieve national independence...
...Prior to the revolution, wearing a military uniform was considered extremely degrading...
...On the other hand, public opinion in the United States and Europe has plainly been loath to accept the idea that a great agrarian people, trained to a quite unparalleled respect for the golden mean, and benefiting by a wide distribution of private property, would suddenly blossom out on a frenzied communistic parade...
...and if the Russians should succeed in splitting the Nationalists and replacing with their own the present anti-Soviet leaders, the Catholic missionaries will have to go through the fire of persecution...
Vol. 5 • May 1927 • No. 26
