China -- Civilization; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government
The callousness of the Chinese is bound to strike every Anglo-Saxon.
They have none of that humanitarian impulse which leads us to devote one
per cent. of our energy to mitigating the evils wrought by the other
ninety-nine per cent. For instance, we have been forbidding the
Austrians to join with Germany, to emigrate, or to obtain the raw
materials of industry. Therefore the Viennese have starved, except those
whom it has pleased us to keep alive from philanthropy. The Chinese
would not have had the energy to starve the Viennese, or the
philanthropy to keep some of them alive. While I was in China, millions
were dying of famine; men sold their children into slavery for a few
dollars, and killed them if this sum was unobtainable. Much was done by
white men to relieve the famine, but very little by the Chinese, and
that little vitiated by corruption. It must be said, however, that the
efforts of the white men were more effective in soothing their own
consciences than in helping the Chinese. So long as the present
birth-rate and the present methods of agriculture persist, famines are
bound to occur periodically; and those whom philanthropy keeps alive
through one famine are only too likely to perish in the next.
Famines in China can be permanently cured only by better methods of
agriculture combined with emigration or birth-control on a large scale.
Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes them indifferent to efforts
to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of Chinese callousness
has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the vastness of
the problems involved. But there remains a residue which cannot be so
explained. If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt,
nine out of ten passers-by will stop to laugh at the poor brute's howls.
The spectacle of suffering does not of itself rouse any sympathetic pain
in the average Chinaman; in fact, he seems to find it mildly agreeable.
Their history, and their penal code before the revolution of 1911, show
that they are by no means destitute of the impulse of active cruelty;
but of this I did not myself come across any instances. And it must be
said that active cruelty is practised by all the great nations, to an
extent concealed from us only by our hypocrisy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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