IN MY last lecture I tried to show that there are various types of cultural response, of which the Japanese type may be called one of "centralized control," and the Chinese type one of "diffused penetration and permeation." In the absence of the exceptionally favorable conditions for effective control of cultural adaptations such as were found in transitional Japan, the cultural readjustment in China has taken the form either of unconscious modifications through long contact with Western civilization, or of conscious reforms led by private advocates and achieved through persuasion and education. In some cases it has been necessary to undermine and .destroy the old obstacles and vested interests in order to accomplish a change; in such cases, the conscious movement amounts to a revolution and often requires long periods of persuasion and propaganda. In other cases old ideas and institutions were rejuvenated by suggestive influences from the West and reforms are brought about peacefully and without serious break with the past. In still other cases long association with the new culture has made certain new ideas and practices so self-evident and so natural that they are quietly adopted and old institutions are modified or replaced without much ado.

In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding. Understanding and appreciation presuppose contact or association, or at least originate from people who have had opportunity to come into intimate contact with the new culture. A happy contact invariably leads to appreciative understanding and insight. And much of the early resistance of the non-European peoples to the Western civilization is explainable by historical experiences of unfortunate first contacts.

Where the first contacts are carefully planned and wisely handled it is quite possible for divers civilizations to fall in love at first sight, although such hasty love affairs do not always eliminate the possibility of later domestic troubles and divorces when the parties have come to know each other better.

The great success of the Jesuit missions in China during the seventeenth century is a good example of cultural appreciation almost at first sight, and will serve as an instructive contrast to the unfortunate encounters between China and the Western powers in the nineteenth century. The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture. So the Society of Jesus took great pains to select and train the first missionaries for China and these men brought with them not only their religion, but also the latest mechanical inventions and scientific knowledge of the Europe of 1600. They had learned that China was then in the midst of a long controversy over the possible reforms of the calendar which had been in use for over 250 years and was no longer considered sufficiently accurate in the prediction of the eclipses and other stellar phenomena. So the first Jesuits were all trained in astronomical science; and the greatest leader and pioneer of them was the famous Matteo Ricci, the favorite pupil of Father Clavius, who was one of the chief authors of the Gregorian Calendar.

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country. Their great learning, saintly devotion, and kindly manners soon won for them the attention and respect of Chinese scholars, of whom some became their friends, pupils, and converts, to their religion. The Jesuit missionaries, through their influential disciples, offered to assist the government in the reform of the imperial calendar. There were already three schools of astronomers in the country competing for ascendancy; and the astronomers of the new school from the West were assigned a separate office and observatory on the same level with the native schools. Their relative merit and accuracy in the astronomical predictions and calculations were to be the final test on which the government was to select the men for the reform of the calendar. From 1629 to 1643, for a period of 15 years, the competitive tests in astronomical exactness went on, and the scientists of the four schools prepared tables of calculation and prediction, the results of which were rigidly compared by the government. All such tests resulted in the absolute superiority of the new science from Europe. Some of those scientific competitions were quite spectacular and were watched by the scholars of the whole empire. In the case of a moon eclipse on February 22, 1636, the Jesuit astronomers, fearing that the tests might be spoiled by local rain or clouds, prepared exact predictions for Peking, Szechuan, Honan, and Shan-si, and requested the government to send observers to all these stations to record the time and extent of the eclipse. When the eclipse was over, all the three provinces reported that the Jesuits predictions were accurate to the second, f while those of the other three schools were discredited by j their great inaccuracies. The scientific triumph of the Jesuits was complete, and the new astronomy was finally recognized by the government, which in 1643 promulgated the new calendar revised by the Jesuits as the official calendar of the Ming Empire. Although the Ming Empire fell the next year, the new calendar was adopted by the Manchu Dynasty and remained the calendar of the empire until its abolition in favor of the solar calendar in 1912.

Such scientific triumphs greatly aided the success of the spread of the Christian religion, which won over a number of the most brilliant and serious-minded scholars of the age. Among them was Hsu Kuang-ch'i (died 1632) who arose to be one of the imperial ministers of state and was the Director of the Imperial Observatory. He was so deeply impressed by the saintly character and profound scientific knowledge of these Jesuit teachers that he most ardently wished that this Christian religion, which could produce such excellent learning and character, should be adopted as the national faith of China for the salvation and regeneration of the people. In a letter to a friend, he said: "Buddhism has been in China 1800 years; but the morals and customs of the nation have continued to deteriorate, and the Buddhist faith has not been able to produce men of good character. I am convinced that the Christian religion will be able to transform every man into a good and virtuous character, to elevate society to the high level of the best ages of classical antiquity, and to place the government and state upon the solid foundation of everlasting peace and order. All this can be easily tested upon a small community."

Two hundred years after this first happy association, and over one hundred years after the dying out of Jesuit influence in China, China was again in direct contact with the West. This time the encounters were most unfortunate and sowed the seeds for two wars (1840 and 1860) and for a long period of Chinese resistance to the Western civilization. In these contacts the Europeans were no longer remembered as the heralds of a wonderful science and a religion of love: they were only recognized as pirate-traders and, most conspicuously, as traders of opium. Opium had come into China for a long time and, through the processes of gradual penetration and permeation, was poisoning a very large number of Chinese people. Before the government began to realize the situation, this drug was draining annually a large amount of silver from the country, and was fast becoming a curse to the nation. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the government tried to prohibit all import of opium into China. But in a country where no effective leadership could be located either in the government or in the social classes, such prohibitions were never really carried out in the face of great temptations of profit. By 1829 the opium import amounted to $10,591,760 gold, forming 49 per cent of all British imports to China. In 1834, it was $11,381,930 gold, forming 51.4 per cent of the British imports. It brought about the Opium War of 1840 and the Nanking Treaty which gave Hongkong to England and opened five ports to foreign commerce and residence. It was the first Chinese defeat in war with any European power. China paid for the defeat, but she never could understand why any civilized country would resort to war for the sake of keeping trade open and, least of all, for the sake of maintaining the commerce in a poisonous drug.

The attitude of suspicion and resentment brought about in these unfortunate events of the early contacts took a long time to wear off. It was only very slowly and gradually that the Chinese came to form a better opinion of the Western nations and of their civilization. This change was slowly brought about by the new opportunities of contact. With the traders there had come also the missionaries who started schools and hospitals in China, who began to agitate against such social evils as foot-binding and even opium-smoking, and who were known to have carried on an anti-opium campaign in their home countries. Some of these missionaries were men of high learning, sympathetic understanding, and admirable character; and they, especially the Protestant missionaries, succeeded in making contacts with the intellectuals of the nation. The new treaty ports, especially Shanghai, Canton, and the leased island of Hongkong, which had been intended for foreigners to trade and reside in, soon attracted a large Chinese population, who in those devastating years of the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion, began to seek refuge and shelter in the foreign settlements. In spite of numerous unpleasant experiences common to Chinese residents in these settlements, the treaty ports furnished great opportunities for the Chinese to observe and know the Western ways and manners of life, trade, and government.

The participation of English, French, and American soldiers and commanders in the suppression of the T'ai-p'ing rebels in the lower Yangtze Delta, furnished the first occasion for the Chinese and foreigners to work together for a common political cause; and some Chinese statesmen, like Li Hung-chang, learned through such close contacts to appreciate not only the efficacy of Western arms, but also the valor and character of the Western soldier. One incident may be cited to show how an old prejudice and contempt for the foreigner was broken down by such contacts of working together and fighting together. For a short time the Chinese city of Shanghai was in the hands of the rebels and the Chinese authorities were unable to collect the customs dues in that port. When the region was recovered by the government troops the foreign authorities remitted to the Chinese government a fairly large amount of money as the dues they had collected in the absence of the Chinese officials. This display of political honesty on the part of the foreigners was a great surprise to the Chinese officials who had always regarded them as more or less suspicious characters trading in opium and the like. The great leader of the age, Tseng Kuo-fang, expressed his surprise in a letter to a friend in which he said: "Even they also have some of the virtues of a gentleman."

By this time better ways of contact were being found in the sending of Chinese diplomatic representatives to Europe and America and in the occasional visits of Chinese scholars and students to the West. Some of the early ministers to Europe have left good records of their travels and observations; and in some of these records the civilization of the West was favorably and sympathetically presented to the Chinese public. Kuo Sung-t'ao's report of the Western civilization was so eulogistic that it brought forth a public outcry of protest, and the book was once placed under ban. But others after him continued to interpret to the Chinese people what they actually saw and appreciated in the social and political life which had come to be regarded as more important and more fundamental than the rifles and cannons, the steamship and the railroad, the commercial and industrial enterprises.

The following quotation from an essay on English government by the scholar-editor Wang T'ao will suffice to show the appreciative understanding which Chinese thinkers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century had of the civilization of the West. He said:

The real strength of England lies in the fact that there is no barrier between the government and the governed; and that this close relationship between the government and the people forms the basis of national stability and solidarity. My observation is that the political life of England embodies the best ideals of our classical antiquity.

Then he went on to praise the system of popular election of men to office, the majority rule, and the judiciary. He was most deeply impressed by the government by law under which no governmental official, however powerful, is allowed to do an illegal deed or kill an innocent person. He noted the absence of torture for the purpose of forcing a confession from the suspected criminal, and was apparently embarrassed by a comparison with the horrors of the Chinese law courts.

When a convicted criminal is confined in a prison, he is supplied with food and clothing, and taught to work. He is visited every week by preachers and is never maltreated by those in charge of the prison. The prison system of this country, I must admit, is what China has never had since the days of the Golden Age.

Then he described the power of Parliament and paid special tribute to its control over policies of war and peace. He noticed that government in England was far more expensive than that in China, and that the fundamental principle of governmental finances was not limiting expenditure by income, as was the customary practice in China, but the contrary idea of devising income to meet the expenditures of the annual budget. But, he hastened to add, "all the money comes from the people and is spent in the interest of the people. Therefore the Government is able to tax the people heavily without ever arousing opposition or resentment from them." And he concludes in these words of unreserved praise: "From all these, we can see that the English people are not only superior to others in military strength, but also superior in the art of government. Their political excellence is only comparable to the ideal reigns of Chinese antiquity. They certainly deserve their leading position in power and prosperity among the nations of the world."

Wang T'ao sometimes indulged in speculation about the future of the civilizations of the world, and some of his speculations are full of prophetic insight. He said:

Now that the ingenious inventions of the steamship and the railway are enabling the European peoples to reach every corner of the earth and every strange tribe of mankind, the beginning of a world unity is here. When scattered races and nations are brought together, then divers civilizations will also gradually become unified. Our ancient sages made a distinction between the too [the way of life] and the ch'i [the tools]. The ways of life cannot be immediately unified; they must first be brought together by the tools or implements of human invention. The steamship and the railroad are the carriages of the ways of life. . . . .Therefore, these great inventions, which the western powers are using for their encroachment upon China, are the very things which the sages of a future age will utilize as the means for the unification of the ways of life of all the nations of the earth.

In these words, he was prophesying the unification of the civilizations through the conquest of distance by the new inventions of science.

Wang T'ao was the Chinese assistant to James Legge in the translation of the Confucian Classics into English, and he was also the assistant to many Protestant missionaries in translating into Chinese books on the life and institutions of the West. During the last quarter of the last century there were produced in the treaty ports a number of books on the history, government, and civilization of the Western nations as well as works on the various physical sciences and their applications. Through these books a large number of Chinese scholars were able to acquire some intelligent understanding of the institutions of the Western peoples. And from these books there grew up the reform movements which were often led by intellectual leaders who had never been outside their own country, but who had learned to appreciate the civilization of the West through diligent reading and personal contacts with foreign missionaries and teachers. The war with France over Annam (1883-85) and the more crushing defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) gave fresh impetus and vigor to these movements for radical reforms in government and education. These movements culminated in the reforms of 1898 which ended in tragic failure. But the period of the hundred days of reforms under the intellectual leadership of K'ang Yu-wei was truly spectacular and aroused the greatest enthusiasm of the intellectual class throughout the whole country; and its equally spectacular failure, together with the subsequent years of downright reactionism, convinced the nation of the impossibility of peaceful reformation and turned the minds of the more radical leaders toward the road of revolution.

After the humiliating defeats in the wars with foreign powers had convincingly exposed all the weakness of the Chinese political and military organization, and after the debacle of 1898 and 1900 had more convincingly revealed all the corruption and helplessness of the court, the officialdom, and the literati-after these, there began the period of searching self-reproach and glowing appreciation of the new civilization of the West. The popular novels of this period were chiefly of the muckraking type and full of exposures of the corruption and ignorance of Chinese officialdom, and the rottenness of Chinese life in the family and in society. The essays in the most influential periodicals, on the other hand, were full of enthusiastic appreciation of the life and institutions of the West.

Even as early as 1894 Dr. Sun Yat-sen, at the age of 28, having had his foreign education in a medical school and having traveled abroad, was formulating for Li Hung-chang what he had conceived as the four fundamental principles of the Western civilization. They are: "to enable man to exert his utmost capability; to utilize land to its utmost fertility; to use nature to her utmost utility; and to circulate goods with the utmost fluidity." In these concise words the future leader of the Chinese revolution was outlining a most enthusiastic idealization of the scientific, technological, and democratic culture of the West.

But the greatest representative of this period of appreciative interpretation of Western civilization was Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (died 1929), who was one of the leaders of the reform movement of 1898 and who, after its downfall, lived many years in Japan and made an extensive tour in the United States. A young man, barely thirty years old, but with a very good training in the classical and historical tradition of his own people and with the fresh but bitter experiences of a defeated reformer, Liang Ch'i-Ch'ao started in 1903 a new magazine which he called The New (Renovated) People, and he signed his articles "One of the Renovated People of China." To this magazine he contributed a series of 16 essays under the general title "The Renovation of a People." With one of the most powerful pens ever wielded by man, and with his rich store of historical knowledge of China, he tried in this series of essays to expound his main thesis that in order to rejuvenate the Chinese nation it is absolutely necessary to acquire the new virtues and traits which have made the Western nations great and progressive. Of the new virtues he has attributed to the peoples of the West, we may mention: civic morality (as distinct from the private morality of the Eastern peoples); nationalism; the jealous regard for one's rights and liberties; the sense of duty; the love of freedom; self-discipline; self-respect; the love of adventure; the martial spirit; perseverance; progressiveness; the ability to unite and organize; respect for economic independence.

In his introductory essay he asks the question, "What people shall we take as our model in our effort to renovate the nation?" And he frankly answered this question thus: "Of all the races, the Caucasian race; of all the Caucasian peoples, the Teutonic; and of all the Teutonic peoples, the Anglo-Saxon." Therefore, all the new virtues he advised his people to adopt are those for which the Anglo-Saxon people have been most noted. Of every one of these new virtues he quotes numerous historical examples both from the East and the West, eloquently lauds his occidental heroes, and complains of the deplorable absence of such admirable and necessary qualities in our own people. His enthusiasm for the Western people and their civilization knows no limit; and his powerful style and glowing appeals opened the eyes of thousands of readers and captivated them and made converts of them. These new virtues, he told us, are the foundations of the strength and glory of the Western nations; and these are the qualities we must learn to admire and emulate.

But, as you must have noticed, all these new virtues so eloquently and vehemently preached by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao are almost without exception the individualistic virtues most admired in the Victorian Age. Mr. Liang wrote immediately after the death of Queen Victoria and was conspicuously under the magic spell of the glory of that most remarkable age. He was totally blind to the new movements and tendencies which had already arisen in the midst of that age of individualism and liberalism, and which were already loudly challenging the economic and social structures created by those individualistic virtues most admired by this Chinese convert. Moreover, he was a journalist by training, and received no systematic modern education. Therefore, he was silent on the scientific and technological phases of the Western civilization. And, in spite of his most enthusiastic eulogies of the new culture of the West, he was a product of the old classical tradition and was never free from a fundamental bias, namely, that, while there were all those admirable virtues in the Western culture, the old morality as taught by the best teachers of the Confucian and neo-Confucian philosophers was still the backbone of the Chinese nation and civilization and must not be undervalued and discarded.

The first two decades of the new century brought about new facilities for still easier and closer contacts between the Chinese and the West. Thousands of young students were given opportunities to study in Japan and Europe and America. In particular, the return of a portion of the Chinese indemnity to the United States and its exclusive use for the education of Chinese students in this country, made it possible for our students to spend longer periods in the American universities and to come into intimate contact and association with the life and institutions of America. With these government students there have come also their friends and relatives who are able to pay their university education without governmental aid. Numerous students have also gone to study in the European universities where living expenses are lower than in the United States. With these longer and closer contacts, and the increase in linguistic facilities acquired through the new schools, a better understanding of Western civilization has been made possible.

During the first decade of the Republic (1912-23), the attitude of the Chinese intellectuals toward Western civilization continued to be one of appreciation and admiration. But the emphasis shifted from those virtues of individualistic liberalism to the method and results of science and technology. The new intellectual leader of the period, Mr. Ch'en Tu-shiu, advised the youths of the nation to worship only two gods: Science and Democracy. Another veteran thinker, Mr. Wu chih-hui, believes that science and technology alone have been responsible for the creation of the civilization of the West.

About the year 1922, Liang Shu-ming, a young scholar influenced by Buddhist and Confucian thought, published a book under the pretentious title, The Civilizations of the East and the West and Their Philosophies. In this work he propounds the thesis that W7estern civilization which is admirably suited to the needs of the present age will be succeeded by the Chinese civilization which emphasizes the importance of always maintaining the golden mean; and that the age of the Chinese civilization will ultimately be followed and replaced by that of the Indian civilization which is characterized by the ideal of negation.

This pessimistic view brought forth protests from a number of writers who jumped to the defense of the civilization of the West. Mr. Wu Chih-hui, who was approaching his sixtieth birthday, vigorously attacked the older civilizations of the East, and in particular that of India. A master of historical knowledge, he pointed out that the influence of the religion of India has been responsible for the social and racial degeneration of the Chinese people; that the preponderant influence of Buddhism in the neo-Confucianist moral philosophy has given to China of the last seven centuries a reign of inhumanity, cruelty, and oppression; and that there has been in reality very little moral or spiritual life under such civilizations as shun life and glorify poverty and sickness. With equal vehemence he defends the Western civilization which through science and technology multiplies the tools of man, provides for his ever-increasing needs, seeks to realize all the wildest ideals of the human imagination, and has thereby brought about a society the moral level of which is unknown in past history. He says, "I believe that the more material progress is advanced and the more goods are multiplied, the nearer will be the ideal of human unity and the easier will be the solution of all the complicated perplexities of the world."[1]

But, while these discussions were going on in China, great changes of unprecedented historical significance had taken place in the West; and the civilization which was so heatedly debated in China, was also seriously challenged in the Western world itself. The World War had raised in many minds much doubt as to the stability and permanent value of the Western civilization. The great revolution in Russia was sending forth weighty challenges to many of the basic institutions of this civilization. Its scientific achievements were attacked by theologians and defenders of spiritual values as being too materialistic and leading man to the brutal ways of the machine. Its economic and industrial system which had been the most important force to utilize the new discoveries of science and to help to bring them from the laboratory to the market-place and the home, was most ruthlessly condemned as capitalistic, as the exploiter of the sweat and blood and brain of the many for the exclusive benefit and enjoyment of the few. Even its political ideal of democracy and parliamentary government, which had been accepted as the highest embodiment of the political genius and inspiration of the race, was severely criticized as the historical accompaniment of the capitalistic system, as the instrumentality of the rich and strong for the government and oppression of the poor and the weak, and as a wasteful and inefficient system better suited for the division of spoils than for the effective ordering of society and the state.

All these transvaluations of values in the Western civilization have had their reverberations in all the non-European countries. In China the effect of these criticisms is particularly noticeable because here these ideas have the strongest appeal to those who have been apologizing for the so-called spiritual values of the East, and to those who have found it difficult and uncomfortable to be in the age of the machine civilization which seems so radically different from the ideas and habits of the agricultural society. A nation which is only on the threshold of political democracy and capitalistic industrialism, therefore, begins to congratulate itself on not having gone very far in imitating blindly a civilization of which the fundamental blunders are being so loudly exposed by a unison of the voices of the Marxian Communists, sentimental social workers, pious religious leaders, anti-religionists, imperialistic junkers, and anti-imperialist reformers. Mr. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, .who twenty years ago had been the most eloquent champion of Westernization, came out in 1919 as the standard-bearer to sound the warning of "the imminent bankruptcy of the scientific civilization." The young men of the country, who have never seen what a capitalistic civilization is like, are coming out with hundreds of pamphlets condemning the imperialistic and capitalistic systems of economics and government, and advocating Marxism, revolution, and dictatorship of the laborer and the farmer. Even the onetime liberals are wavering from their faith in democracy and are being attracted by the newer tendencies of fascism and other forms of dictatorship.

Thus has come the period of the "new doubt." All the values have been turned upside down, and the nation is standing at the parting of the ways, wondering which road to take, which prophets to follow. Will these new doubts retard the processes of China's modernization? Or, will these criticisms and challenges help China better to understand the real nature and meaning of the Western civilization which has probably been oversimplified by the earlier enthusiasts who, in their excessive zeal, saw only one side of the shield?

I, for one, am of the opinion that this new attitude of doubt and criticism is on the whole a healthy improvement over the older attitude of uncritical appreciation. Underneath all this apparent criticism and condemnation we are beginning to see a deeper unanimity in the appreciation of those fundamental values of this new civilization. Are not the leaders of Soviet Russia the most ardent champions of science and technological progress? Are they not also working out a gigantic program of nation-wide industrialization by the best aids of science and technology, even though the benefits of that industrialization may be intended for a different and much larger class of the people? And, lastly, are we not tempted or even justified in viewing these socialistic and communistic movements not as tendencies alien and extraneous to the Western civilization, but as an integral part of it, as the logical consequence in the fulfilment of its democratic ideal, and as merely supplementary to the earlier and more individualistic ideas of democracy?

[1] Cf. Hu Shih, "The Civilization of the East and the West," in Whither Mankind, ed. by Charles A. Beard. Mr. Wu agrees with and supports the ideas I express in that essay. Also see my study of Wu Chih-hui in "Some Thinkers of the Last Three Hundred Years," in Hu Shik's Collected Essays, Third Series, Vol. I.