An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China and Japan by G Lowes Dickinson

Author:G Lowes Dickinson [Dickinson, G Lowes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, Japan, Reference, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136927003
Google: JKnHBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-11-01T15:53:25+00:00

mostly confined to the treaty ports. And though these are now very numerous and include a number of cities far inland on the Yang-tze, they are of course but isolated points in the vast territory of China. And even in these ports the western spirit has hardly touched even the externals of Chinese life. The foreign communities build their own cities outside the native city; there they administer themselves, lead their own life as in Europe, their life of business and of sport, and never, if they can help it, enter the native city or any part of the interior of China. The British firms, who were first in the field, did and still do their business through the medium of Chinese merchants, and have no direct relation with their customers in the country. They never stir from the treaty ports, and they know nothing and care nothing about Chinese conditions except so far as these may react upon their business. “We see too much of things Chinese here,” the agent of a British firm said to me, when I made some comment on the Chinese city. And the sentiment, I believe, is pretty general among Europeans in China.

While these conditions prevailed there was nothing in the presence of the foreign traders which need have led to any radical change in Chinese institutions or ideas. But the conditions are now rapidly changing. The new enterprise, especially of Germans and Japanese, is sending bagmen acquainted with the language all over the interior of China. Oil and cigarettes are the pioneers of this commercial invasion. The skin-disease of advertisement is beginning to disfigure the face of the country, and German art nouveau appears in the stations of the railway from Tsinan-fu to Pekin. The grip of the West has begun to close, and will more and more be felt in the general dissemination of ugliness, meanness, and insincerity throughout the empire.

More important, however, I think, than commercial enterprise in disturbing the secular tradition of China has been missionary activity. I did not, indeed, gather, and I do not believe, that China is in process of Christianisation or will ever be Christianised, though I have met Chinese Christians and, I think, sincere ones. But the missionaries have been the pioneers of western education, and it is western education that has made the revolution. All the new leaders have been educated, first at missionary schools and colleges in China, then abroad, mainly in Japan and the United States. And this education has produced a new and surprising type of Chinese. Nothing in my travels has struck and perplexed me more than this. China has always been regarded as the type of the unchanging. If ever there was a stable national character, a stable national mentality, it might have been supposed that it would be there, in a homogeneous people of the same stock, never conquered, or at least never affected in race, in manners, in laws, in language, by conquest; never interrupted or disturbed for centuries in their traditional ideas and their traditional manner of life.

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