"Thoughts, if not things, change with such rapidity in China that one is hard pressed to keep up." So writes Prof. John Dewey, whose sojourn in the East gives him first-hand information of the cultural changes going on there. First China, in her ready response to foreign influence, put her trust in militarism, and failed; then she tried politics, "but the republic hardly came off either"; civil and mechanical engineers were next invoked to occidentalise China, but progress here "brought new dangers and evils"; moral reform then gave rise to anti-footbinding societies, anti-opium movements, anti-gambling associations, new education movements. "Democracy clearly demanded universal education, the extension of schools to all the people, and a change from literary learning to something connected with civic and social action." But at once it was seen that the people could never be reached until the written language was simplified and made more accessible. In Asia (July), the American magazine of the Orient, Professor Dewey follows out some of the consequences of this latest grasp at the example of the West:
"And the language of speech must also be used in writing in order that modern ideas might get adequate expression. A scholar of the old school remarked to me in Hangchow, a centre of the older culture, that no one knew how many valuable ideas had been lost to China in the past few hundred years because those who thought them could not make them known, for lack of command of the cumbrous and artificial medium of writing. So there grew up, about, two years ago, the so-called literary revolution — an attempt to write and publish in the vernacular and also to familiarise Chinese readers with what is distinctive in the trend of modern Western literature, from free verse to Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, and Maeterlinck. I know of one school that criticised its foreign teacher of literature as not up to date, because he used Shakespeare and Dickens while they wanted H. G. Wells and Strindberg! They even suggested that he take a vacation, go home, and catch up! He had become, they said, too 'chinafied' and conservative.
"The matter of content, of ideas, soon became more important than that of language and style. The new ideas were turned full against ancient institutions. The family system came in for full measure of criticism, and this not only from the point of view of the traditional Western idea of family life, but from that of 'The Doll's House' and the most advanced Western radical thought. Socialistic literature, anarchism, Marx, and Kropotkin ran like wild fire through reading circles. Tolstoy became perhaps the most read of foreign writers. Thus was evolved a new formula: China could not be changed without a social transformation based upon a transformation of ideas. The political revolution was a failure, because it was external, formal, touching the mechanism of social action, but not affecting conceptions of life, which really control society.
"And now there are signs that the next stage will be an interest in scientific method. It is recognised that technology and other branches of applied science are dependent upon science as a method of thought, observation, registration, criticism, experiment, judgment and reasoning. The idea is gaining ground that the real supremacy of the West is based, not on anything specifically Western, to be borrowed and imitated, but on something universal, a method of investigation and of the testing of knowledge, which the West hit upon and used a few centuries in advance of the Orient."
These ideas underlie the "new culture movement" of China with which, may be associated the student revolt of May 4, 1919. Outwardly, this revolt was a manifestation against a group of corrupt politicians, and was stimulated by the failure of Chinese claims at Versailles; but, Professor Dewey assures us, "it was in its deeper aspect a protest against all politicians and against all further reliance upon politics as a direct means of social reform." We read:
"The teachers and writers who are guiding the movement lose no opportunity to teach that the regeneration of China must come by other means, that no fundamental political reform is now possible in China, and that, when it comes, it will come as natural fruit of intellectual changes worked out in social non-political ways. And the great mass of the student body in the higher schools of China is now virtually pledged to abstinence from official life. Doubtless many will fall by the way in the future. They will not be able to resist the lure of an easy living and of power. But the anti-political bias is pretty firmly established."
This movement, though instigated "by contacts with the distinctly modern world," says Professor Dewey, "has become more and more characteristically Chinese." In fact —
"The movement of May 4 was directly undertaken by Chinese students, not only without the instigation of returned students, but against their advice. It was spontaneous and native. The movement for a reform of language would hardly have been started without foreign influence, but it is naturally, a movement conducted by Chinese, for specifically Chinese ends, and it has precedents in Chinese history. The subsidiary movement toward phonetic script has been encouraged largely by missionaries, and so one hears more about it in Western newspapers. Even the anti-political movement, the belief that reform is conditional upon scientific and social changes, is in, a way a return to Chinese modes of thinking, a recovery of an old Chinese idea, plus an assertion that the power of that idea was not exhausted and terminated by Confucianism. It has now to be worked out in adaptation to new conditions, even if it involves the overthrow of Confucian forms of belief and conduct. Another obvious feature of the evolution is that it shows steady progress from the superficial to the fundamental.
" The comments just made take the movement at its best, in its spirit. From the point of view of results concretely attained by it, they involve an undoubted idealisation of its development. Each old stage has left behind it a deposit, a stratification. 'Young China' is at best an ambiguous term. It lumps into a single mass representatives of each of the phases described — military, political, economic, technological, ethical, literary, social, etc. By selecting certain individuals from each of these strata, one may, with some degree of truth, bring almost any charge against 'Young China.' Naturally, in other words, there is confusion, uncertainty, mutual criticism, and hostility among the various tendencies. Most of the returned students of some years ago are opposed to the present anti-political movement and to the literary revolution. Many, are still in a nationalistic stage where they rely upon some change to be wrought miraculously in the army and the Government. More are distinctly in the technical stage, believing that if they could get the engineering jobs for which they have trained themselves, China would begin to move— as it doubtless would, to some degree.
"One more discrimination has to be made. Although cultivated Japanese as well as politicians like Marquis Okuma have long proclaimed the right and duty of Japan to lead China, to be the mediator in introducing Western culture into Asia (including India, where they look upon the English as alien interlopers), few Americans have taken seriously the dependence of China upon Japan in just these ways. I have seen books on the development of modern Chinese education which do not mention Japan, which attribute the renovation of the Chinese system to American influence, and which leave the impression that it is modelled upon the American common-school system. As a matter of fact, it is modelled, administratively, wholly after the Japanese system, which, so far as Western influence enters in, is based on the German system, with factors borrowed from French centralisation."
The writer here does not claim that any great number of the students and teachers influenced by the new culture movement are wholly conscious of its underlying philosophy. He says:
"This is confined as yet to a small group of leaders. The movement is for the most part still a feeling rather than an idea. It is also accompanied by the extravagances and confusion, the undigested medley of wisdom and nonsense that inevitably mark so ambitious a movement in its early stages. By making a clever selection of extracts from the writings put forth in its name one could easily hold up the whole movement to ridicule, as less than half-baked, as an uncritical and more or less hysterical mixture of unrelated ideas and miscellaneous pieces of Western science and thought. Or a selection of writings could be made which would show it to be dangerous to society, to the peace of the world. Japanese writers who have paid attention to it have mostly held it up as a subversive radicalism and have attributed it to Bolshevik propaganda. But in the nine provinces I have visited, I have yet to find a single trace of direct Russian influence. Indirectly, the Russian upheaval, has, of course, had a tremendous influence as a ferment, but far subordinate to that of the world-war and even to ex-President Wilson's ideas of democracy, and self-determination. For the new culture movement, though it cares nothing for what is politely called a republic in present China, is enthusiastically stirred by democratic ideals, and is starting out with the premise that democracy must be realised in education and in industry before it can be realised politically. For Bolshevism in the technical sense there is no preparation and no aptitude in China. But it is conceivable that military misrule, oppression and corruption will, if they continue till they directly touch the peasants, produce a chaos of rebellion that adherents of the existing order will certainly label Bolshevism."
Lachlander and Condobolin and Western Districts Recorder (NSW : 1899 - 1952), Wednesday 12 October 1921, page 7
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