Not much progress in education has been made under British rule, for the resources of the Government are meagre in the extreme. A Government school at Port Edward and one or two missionary schools provide elementary education for a few dozen children, but very little has been done to improve the village schools. It need hardly be said that except in the Government and missionary schools the education, such as it is, is confined to the orthodox curriculum of "Old China": the flood of Western learning has not yet affected the little backwater of Weihaiwei except to the extent of rousing a certain limited interest in such subjects as geography and arithmetic. Writing of present-day conditions, a Chinese diplomatist in the United States has stated that "John Stuart Mill, Huxley, Spencer, Darwin and Henry George, just to mention a few of the leading scholars of the modern age, are as well known in China as in this country. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is on the lips of every thinking Chinese.... Western knowledge is being absorbed by our young men at home or abroad at a rapid rate, and the mental power of a large part of four hundred millions of people, formerly concentrated on the Confucian classics, is being turned in a new direction--the study of the civilisation of the West."[117] These remarks are true enough of a large and rapidly growing number of the Chinese people: but Weihaiwei and the neighbouring regions have more in common with the Old China that is passing away than with the New China that is coming and to come.