XXVII CHINESE WOMANHOOD 519
XXVIII AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY IN CHINA 533
XXIX CHINESE ARCHITECTURE AND ART 541
XXX SOCIOLOGICAL CHINA 555
XXXI AWAKENED INTEREST IN AMERICA 567
INDEX 581
CHINA REVOLUTIONIZED
I
THE GENESIS OF THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA AND ITS HISTORY
FROM OCTOBER 10, 1911, TO YUAN SHIH KAI’S ACCEPTANCE OF THE PROVISIONAL
PRESIDENCY
A republic in place of the oldest monarchy! Preposterous. It would
involve making a yellow man think as a white man, and that had never
occurred, not even in the case of the prodigy, Japan. It would involve
free intercourse with the whole wide world, and China had opposed such
an innovation stubbornly for 400 years. It meant that the proudest
and most self-contained nation should treat others as equals and
interchange with them. It involved throwing 4,000 years of continuous
history and agglomerated pride and precedent to the winds, and humbly
beginning anew as a tyro for a while. It meant the dealing with
400,000,000 kings, instead of one, and asking: “My lord, what is your
will?” An educational system 2,000 years old to be forgotten at once!
A religion 5,000 years old at least, whereby every man had his own god
(his father), to be made as cheap as the paltry sacrifices of wine,
rice and the painted stick of Confucianism were in reality! The taking
up of individual and national responsibility for 400,000,000 people,
and entrance upon a wide path of world-influence, with its divided
shame and fame! The taking and giving of blows for wrong and right!
The giving up of the triple eternal Nirvana of father, self and son,
in exchange for an exciting rôle limited to fifty-five crowded years
in the individual! The scale of action! A land as large as all Europe,
and a people as numerous as the Caucasic race! The thunderous knock on
the long-locked doors of science and medicine by 400,000,000 people who
had bowed to idol and charm alone! It shook the world. It was pregnant
with paradisal possibilities for mankind, because of the vastness of
the movement and the depth of its well-spring. The launching of this
new leviathan ship of state could not but raise a wave that would
lift the already floating hulks of Europe and America, and give them
added impetus, though temporary alarm. The rearrangement of commerce,
manufacture, labor, finance, taxation, learning, agriculture, art and
possibly religion for the whole world. The adding of the most difficult
language to the tongues and pens of men, and the call on the English
speech to rise once more greater than the mighty stranger, or die.
The challenge to Palestine’s Bible to conquer by truth, or retreat
with half a world lost. The uprising again of the yellow ghosts of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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