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 railway 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. -WANG T'AO

WHEN the Chinese thinker made these remarks over half a century ago he probably had in mind the possibility of the Chinese ways of life as taught by the ancient sages gradually being carried to the West and influencing or even replacing those of the Western peoples. He probably never dreamed that, half a century after he had written those words, all the social and political institutions of his own country would be rapidly undermined and replaced by new forms and new ways which the steamship, the railway, and the printed book had brought to Chinese shores and sent into the interior provinces.

But Wang T'ao was essentially right in prophesying that it was the new tools of the West that would unify the ways of life of the nations of the world. For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples. Naturally, the first things accepted by the Chinese people were material goods which seemed to be capable of satisfying the daily needs more effectively than the native products, and which, at their first appearance, were never suspected as being prejudicial to the existing social life and institutions. The clock, which had come with the Portuguese traders and the Jesuit missionaries, remained in use long after the decline of Jesuit influence in China. Throughout the nineteenth century, various kinds of manufactured goods gradually came in and became, first the luxuries of the elite, then the necessities of the cities, and finally articles of everyday use by the people. Slowly and imperceptibly, but irresistibly, the imported goods found their way into the villages and farms, and replaced all their rivals of native make. Thus matches replaced the old-fashioned tinder-box of iron and flint; the kerosene lamp, the vegetable oil; the cigarette, the old water pipe and the long bamboo pipe; and the piece goods of Lancashire the home-spun cloth. Even paper of Western manufacture is completing its conquest of the country of its invention. And the story is true of practically every article of modern invention and mass production.

Old handcrafts are driven out of existence; gigantic factories and monstrous trading companies are rising in the cities; sales agents are penetrating into every corner of the country; peasants are flocking to the manufacturing and trading centers to find new employments. New ways of transportation and communication-the steamship, the railway, the new roads, the telegraph, the post service-are assisting the spread of the goods, the migration of peoples, and the transmission of new manners and ideas. And with them have come the new technique and processes of commercial and financial transaction and organization. The mill dollar has replaced uncoined silver; and the copper coin has killed the old cash. The banks, the paper notes, the joint stock company, and lastly, the stock exchange-all these are bringing about an economic and industrial revolution in an old country.

And the rapidity of it all! Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights. In the field of locomotion, I traveled in sedan chairs, wheelbarrows, and small river boats rowed by men; in 1904 I first saw the streets of the International Settlement in Shanghai crowded at night by sedan chairs carrying beautiful singing girls hurrying to their calls; the horse carriage was then the fashion in Shanghai, the most modern city. I saw the first tramway operated in Shanghai in 1909, and wrote a poem protesting against its dangers to the rickshaw. My first trip on a steamship was when I was only two years old, but I never rode in a motor car before corning to the United States in 1910, and did not travel in the air until 1928. And my people have traveled with me from the vegetable oil lamp to electricity, from the wheelbarrow to the Ford car, if not to the aeroplane, and this in less than forty years' time.

It is true that not all these material transformations have touched the vast hinterland of China; they have taken place only in the cities. But three great events have helped to make the effects of these changes spread far and wide: the rapid migration of people to the cities; the founding of the new schools; and the political revolution.

The city is always the center of radiation of the forces of change and progress. Trade and industry and the facilities of education draw people from distant regions. These people may live permanently in the cities or may return to their home villages. They may work in the shops and factories with their families left behind in the country, or they may migrate to the cities with their wives and children. In either case, the influence of urban civilization cannot be overestimated. It means the breaking-up of old homes, the removal from family and clan ties, the change of living and working habits, contact with new forms of social organization, the entrance of women and children into the factories, the reliance of the individual upon himself for good or for evil, new temptations and new wants.

The new education which began with the founding of new schools throughout the country produced changes far more revolutionary than its moderate curriculum would seem to warrant. It is revolutionary when it is compared with the meager content and narrow extent of the old village school. The old education was purely classical and literary, and was intended only for those who were to take the literary examinations and to become officials. The sons of the ordinary fanner and artisan, if they went to school at all, wanted to know no more than a few hundred characters; only exceptionally clever boys were encouraged to go beyond that. But the new education, however inadequate and bookish, was meant for everybody who came to take it; it was planned as education for citizenship. The content has become so different that a new world, far more interesting and far more intelligible than the moralizings of the ancient sages, is brought within the comprehension of the average boy and girl. New ideas and ideals are consciously instilled and new ambitions developed in the minds of the school children as well as in their parents. If the education does not give the pupils new capabilities, it has at least taught them to be dissatisfied with their lot and with their old environment. They know enough to see that foot-binding of the girls is bad, that marriage arranged by parents is bad, and that superstitions of all kinds are bad. Well, this would be enough to make trouble and set parents at variance with their own children. And the troubles increase with the advance of the school grade and with the growing complexity of thought-currents that come with the new fads of the cities. And of course the newspapers from time to time bring new troubles to the schools and to the homes. Every important political crisis, especially when foreign aggression is involved, creates new vibrations and fresh troubles even for the village community in the backward parts of China.

And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools. However skin-deep and unsuccessful the revolution of 1911-12 may seem to the outside critic, its most important meaning to the common people is that "even the emperor must go!" What else can have greater permanence than the institution of the emperor which had stood the test of time for thousands of years? And with the downfall of the imperial dynasty, there were gone all the numerous institutions which had been for centuries its accompaniments-the parasitic nobility born to power, the Manchu garrisons stationed in various parts of the country, the thousands of useless offices which earlier reformers had failed to abolish gradually and peacefully, the public sale of office, the open corruption of a class of untitled petty clerks who controlled the departments and the magistral offices and who, because of their permanence and technical knowledge, were more powerful than the ministers and the magistrates. All this had immense effects on the life of the nation in dislocating old social classes and necessitating the rise of new professions. On the other hand, revolutions also bring into power new groups of people who are energetic, unscrupulous, and capable of fishing in troubled waters. The rise of the new politicians and the military men is particularly noticeable.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority. In a country where there was no ruling class, this sudden collapse of political authority was truly a serious matter. It brought about long periods of social disorder and anarchy. Nobody was leading; and everybody seemed lost in a sea of uncertainty. New ideas were filling the air: single tax; woman suffrage; free love; destruction of temples and idols; anarchism; socialism; federalism; party government, etc. Some of these died away in the speeches and in the magazines; others like the destruction of Buddhist and Taoist temples and the forming of political parties for a time penetrated into the interior districts.

On the whole, the political revolutions made possible many of the intellectual and social changes which would have been impossible in the old days of the empire. The old political powers which were incapable of effective leadership for reforms were in a position to block and suppress the new movements. The tragic failure of the reforms of 1898 clearly showed that important changes could not take place without first overthrowing the age-long authority of the dynasty and its appendages. The nascent intellectual and literary movements would not have been permitted to go on under the Manchu dynasty; a memorial to the throne from one of the imperial censors would have been sufficient to imprison the leaders and kill these movements in the bud. Similarly, most of the social changes that have come in recent years have been greatly facilitated and accelerated by the political movements since 1911.

The most important effect of the political revolutions on social change lies in the fact that the conservative gentry in the various localities was swept aside by the overthrow of the old political power. In the province of Hunan, where the old gentry had successfully opposed many a reform movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the revolution of 1911 drove the reactionary leaders away from the province, and the more radical revolution of 1926-27 publicly executed many of them after sham trials by mob tribunals. This province, whose conservative gentry and people in 1872 actually mobbed and stoned one of its leading citizens for the outrageous act of hiring a foreign steamboat to hurry back to Changsha to attend a family funeral, became the hotbed of radicalism in the first years of the revolution and was the center of communist activity a few years ago. Radical social revolutions are made possible by the removal of the forces which were once the bulwarks of the institutions and usages of the old society.

The most conspicuous change in Chinese society has been the rearrangement in the social classes. The old tradition of class division gave the scholar highest rank, the farmer next, the artisan next, and the merchant at the bottom. This division was never literally observed, for the merchant who had the money power was never really at the bottom of the social scale even in the good old days. The public sale of office under the last decades of the Manchus gave an opportunity to the rich merchants to buy titles or even high offices and to achieve political position far more rapidly than the poor scholar who had to climb the regular ladder of the state examinations. But even this did not fully raise the merchant above the social contempt which the scholarly class cherished toward him, because the social prestige of the successful candidate in the higher literary examination was so great that the merchant who held high offices through the power of money was still regarded as "smelling the odor of copper" and no scholar would willingly give up the literary future, however uncertain, for the contemptible profession of the money-maker. The banker was called the money devil; and the compradore was regarded as the slave of the foreign trader. But the rise of new industries, new banks, and new trading and importing companies which demanded a highly educated personnel rapidly changed the situation. Prominent retired officials were invited to become directors; modern trained students did not hesitate to take up jobs with these new business concerns; and in recent times it is not uncommon to see ex-ministers of foreign affairs and ex-prime ministers becoming general managers or chairmen of boards of directors in big trading or manufacturing companies. The merchant class which could not buy social esteem with money has been elevated by raising its own intellectual level.

The same is true of the rise of the soldier class. The personal successes of military men like Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Keun did not remove the contempt in which the soldier was formerly held by the public. It was the initial successes of the student army of the Huang Pu Cadet School as a well-disciplined revolutionary army that first attracted thousands of secondary-school graduates and university students to leave their schools and flock to Canton to be trained as the new soldiers for the salvation of the nation. And the splendid battles recently fought against Japan by the new armies both in Shanghai and in Kupei-kou and Nantienmen have greatly enhanced the social prestige of the new soldier as the defender of the nation.

Many other new professions have accelerated the change in the social strata. The engineer, the modern trained doctor, the lawyer, the woman teacher, the nurse, the broker, the seaman, the railway worker, the factory hand, the party worker are each finding an important place in the new society. In one year (1921), there suddenly sprang up in Shanghai over 70 exchanges of stocks and bonds; and the effect was electrifying: hundreds of school teachers deserted their profession to enlist in the new business that promised greater rewards and less drudgery. Of these, the rise of the legal profession is probably the most significant. China had developed her own law codes and her own theories of jurisprudence; but she never developed the institution of public pleading by specially trained lawyers on behalf of the parties in a law suit. The absence of the legal profession has been largely responsible for many of the injustices and tortures in the old law courts. Through the ages, however, there grew up a class of "masters of litigation," often also known as "rascals of litigation," who operated as secret managers of law suits, writing the papers for the litigants, coaching them in the requirements of the law and the courts, and sometimes acting as go-between in bribing corrupt magistrates. The law and the government never recognized this underhand institution, and always tried to suppress and punish these "rascals of litigation" as corrupters of men and disturbers of the peace. And they were usually bad characters, who knew very little of law, but plenty of its abuses and corrupt practices. The advent of the modern lawyer in China does not merely mean the rise of a new profession, but also the coming of a new age in the administration of law and justice.

Another very important change is the breakdown of the old family. Improved means of transportation have enabled immigrants to the cities to bring their wives and children with them; the high cost of living in the cities has placed a necessary check on the size of the family, confining it to the immediate members; and the long absence from the home community has weakened the old hold of the elder over the younger generation. New ideas and strange temptations have begun to play on the young people. Old ties have gradually loosened. The wage-earning members of a family no longer find it possible to support the other unproductive members; the young women no longer wish to live with their mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law; the large family naturally breaks up into smaller units. Marriages and funerals become simple affairs of hours and minutes, instead of elaborate communal events of days; and ancestral worship is usually discontinued by the city dweller. New and loose relations between the sexes, which would be impossible or at least severely censured in a village community, pass without notice in the busy life of the cities.

The young students who leave their homes to get an advanced education in the cities find it difficult to return to live and work. They have come under new intellectual influences and new social contacts which make them dissatisfied with the old ways of life back in their ancestral villages. They break their old betrothals and even marriages, and often carry out what they commonly call "revolutions of the home" at the grave cost of being disowned by their parents or deprived of financial support from home. Some of them openly attack the old ideas of filial duty, and such criticisms receive applause or silent approval from thousands of their generation. Under the influence of a movement to induce students to go to France to work and study, under the allurement of the slogan of "Hard Work and Inexpensive Education," thousands of young men deserted their families and ran away to seek their new education and new life in post-war France, only to find there no work, no employment open to them, and to find themselves stranded in a strange land. Some of them had to request their families to send them money; others simply drifted and landed in the midst of radical revolutionaries and communists.

All these disintegrating tendencies soon began to worry the conservatives in the old society. For a time they tried to make scapegoats of the leaders of the new intellectual movements, and rallied their attacks on them. But such reactions only gave the new movements greater publicity and therefore wider currency. They falsely accused Mr. Ch'en Tu-shiu of changing the old proverb "Adultery is the first of all sins, and filial piety, the first of all virtues," into a new dictum, "Filial piety is the first of all sins, and adultery, the first of all virtues." While the charge was entirely groundless, that peculiarly effective way of wording what the conservatives had perceived as the tendency of the younger generation was a clear indication of the signs of the times. The age-honored idea of filial duty which had degenerated into a mere demand of the parents for material support and unconditional obedience from their sons, no longer appealed to the reason and imagination of the young generation, and was definitely passing away as a moral force in the new and disintegrating society. And, while the new leaders never exalted adultery to a first virtue, they did openly attack the traditional conceptions of the double standard of sexual morality which legalized and rationalized the institution of concubinage for men, but which used all forms of social sanctions (government award of public eulogy, special honorable mention in local annals and national histories, and stone monuments erected at public expense, etc.) to encourage widows and even unmarried virgins to die or to refuse to marry in memory of their dead husbands or betrothed. The conservative defenders of the old order could not answer these adverse criticisms and had to resort to force and persecution. When these failed, they resigned themselves in despair.

The discussion of sex morality leads us to a consideration of the changed status of woman in the family and in society, which is one of the most important phases of the social revolution in China. At the outset, it is necessary to point out that the position of women in the old family was never so low as many superficial observers have led us to believe. On the contrary, woman has always been the despot of the family. The authority of the mother and the mother-in-law is very well known. Even the wife is always the terror of the husband; no other country in the world can compete with China for the distinction of being the nation of hen-pecked husbands. Certainly, no other country has produced so many stories of hen-pecked husbands. The wife built up her strong position sometimes upon love, sometimes upon beauty or personality, but in most cases upon the fact that she could not be dislodged from her position: she could not be divorced!

It is true that there was no law forbidding divorce; and that the Classics laid down seven conditions for divorcing a wife. Jealousy, or failure to bear sons, or even talking too much, would be sufficient to divorce her. But the same classics also gave three conditions under which she could not be sent away: (i) if she has shared with the husband a three-year mourning for one of his parents; (2) if the husband has become rich or attained high official positions since marriage; or (3) if she has no home to go back to. These conditions were very common and almost made divorce absolutely impossible. Particularly the last condition was a most powerful protection of the wife, for as China came more and more under the inhuman influence of the medieval religions and began to condemn remarriages of widows, the divorced woman found herself with nowhere to go except to death or the nunnery. If she still had parents, they would be ashamed of her; and if she had no parents, she could not live on her brothers and sisters-in-law. She had no property of her own; and no face to encounter the disapproval of a pitiless society. Therefore, there has grown up in society and in religion a peculiar sentiment against divorce. History tells us that Confucius, his son, and his grandson all divorced their wives. But when China came out of her medieval age there was no more divorce in respectable families. A wife threatened with divorce could only commit suicide or become a nun; and both would be terrible blows to the respectability of the family. So, by the Ming dynasty, the only justifiable cause for sending away a wife had been narrowed down to adultery, short of which no husband could really divorce a wife without inviting the strongest social condemnation.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century a great writer, Pu Sung-ling, gave a great deal of thought to the problem of unhappy marriages, and wrote many short stories on the theme of husbands maltreated by horrible wives. One of the stories he developed into a great drama of 70,000 words; and later he enlarged it into a serial novel of about one million words under the title A Marriage That Will Awaken the World. It deals with a truly terrible wife with only one eye, who is guilty of every conceivable crime and who maltreats her own parents, her parents-in-law, and in particular her husband whom she treats with most brutal cruelty and whom she twice tries to murder. But there is no way of escape, except for the husband to run away from home and seek a new life in Peking and later in Szechuan, but she followed after him, and he had to tolerate her and suffer her cruelties. But she never committed adultery; and social usage and religion conspired to protect her from being sent away or divorced. After writing a million words, the author came to the only possible conclusion that such a marriage must be the result of accumulated retribution of a past existence in which the tables were turned, and the oppressed was once the oppressor and the oppressor, once the oppressed. The causal chain could not be broken except through resignation to fate and through a determination never again to create causes for revenge in a future existence by short-sighted measures of human invention.

In the last years of the nineteenth century a well-known scholar, Wang shih-t'o, died and left an interesting diary in which he told all his horrible sufferings at the hands of his wife. He said in effect: "I cannot fight you, nor can I escape from you. But you are an illiterate and cannot read what I write down about you. And you cannot answer back. I hereby solemnly and truthfully set down and charge against you ninety points of your unpardonable crimes.....This is the only means I have to revenge myself!" He, too, never thought of divorce as a possible way of escape.

But what a change has come in these recent years! Let me read a few articles from the new Civil Code, promulgated December 3, 1930.

ART. 1049: Husband and wife may effect a divorce themselves where they mutually consent to it.
ART. 1050: Divorce by mutual consent is effected in writing and requires the signatures of at least two witnesses.
ART. 1052: Either spouse may apply to the Court for a divorce provided that one of the following conditions exist:
1. Where the other spouse has committed bigamy;
2. Where the other spouse has sexual intercourse with another person;
3. Where the spouse receives such ill-treatment from the other spouse as to render it intolerable to live together;
4. Where the wife has so ill-treated the lineal ascendants of the husband, or has been so ill-treated by them that life in common becomes intolerable;
5. Where the other party has deserted the spouse in bad faith and such desertion still continues;
6. Where the other has made an attempt on the life of the spouse;
7. Where the other party has a loathsome disease which is incurable;
8. Where the other party has a serious mental disease which is incurable;
9. Where it has been uncertain for over three years whether the other party is alive or dead;
10. Where the other party has been sentenced to not less than three years' imprisonment or has been sentenced to imprisonment for an infamous crime.

Will the new social consciousness make it possible for the divorced wife to live without public censure and to remarry without losing respectability? It has, at least in the cities. The law now provides for compensation if the woman cannot support herself after divorce. Under the new code, daughters are entitled to an equal share with their brothers in the inheritance of property from parents. And the private property of the wife, if she chooses to keep it separate from the property of her husband, is protected by law.

These emancipations remove the modern woman from the invulnerable position enjoyed by the undivorcible wife in the old society. But in no longer becoming an unremovable terror, she also ceases to be a nuisance. She has won her new position by her own right. She is no longer to be married away without her consent. She must win her position by her own charms, her education, and her personality. With the new rights have come also new responsibilities. She must live her life as a useful member of society. And in many cases, she is thrown out into the new world, unprotected to work with men. She is facing her perils, making her own successes and failures all alone. What type of womanhood these new rights and responsibilities will make of her, time alone will tell.

These are a few of the important changes in the social life of the Chinese people. As we look back on them and view them in the light of historical development we cannot but hail them as the greatest gains which Chinese civilization has received from its contact with the life and institutions of the West. Even the break-up of the old family, which is often lamented by well-meaning critics, must also be considered as one of the greatest achievements in China's social progress. For the Chinese family of old times rarely, if ever, possessed the valuable virtues which have sometimes been attributed to it or read into it. The Chinese family is theoretically built on the foundation of suppressing individuality for the sake of the well-being of the whole. The real basis was economic: it was always cheaper to live together and cook together in a large family than for the separate married couples to start life independently; and it was considered more economical for the incompetent members to be helped and supported by parental or ancestral charity, or by the communal income made by the more enterprising and productive brothers. But the disadvantage of such a system is very great. It is false economy to place too great a burden on the promising members of the family. Very often when a boy shows literary gifts and wins a degree in the examination, the whole family look to him for future maintenance; and sometimes a father retires from active work at forty-five when his son is capable of earning a respectable living. And this family burden not only often breaks the back of the productive young man, but also imposes an immoral obligation on him to find employment for his good-for-nothing relations. And even today we often read advertising of public officials in the newspapers thanking their relations for recommending assistants but deeply regretting there were not enough rice bowls to go around.

Moreover, the old family system is undesirable because it is often a nest of frictions, suspicions, intrigues, oppressions, and even suicides. The constant quarrel between sisters-in-law is proverbial in China. The oppression of daughters-in-law by the mother, and the suffering of the mother in the hands of unreasonable and impossible daughters-in-law, are both common occurrences. History tells us that there was a famous Chang family in the seventh century which was able to keep nine generations living together without separation. When the emperor of the T'ang dynasty visited the family and inquired how such a feat was ever possible, the old patriarch who was too feeble to speak, asked permission to submit his answer in writing. And the answer consisted of one hundred copies of the one word, "Forbear!" When forbearance is necessary it is certain that the peaceful externality of a large family covers underneath an impossible demand for the sacrifice of individuality on the part of every man and woman; and the suffering, because it is always silent and undemonstrative, is beyond the comprehension of those whose family system has long outgrown it. All the much-idealized virtues of filial piety simply could not exist; and in those rare cases where they were consciously cultivated, the price paid for them was nothing short of intense suppression resulting in mental and physical agony.

The new changes, therefore, are on the whole for the better. They release the individual from the collective responsibility of the whole family, and recognize in him the new rights and duties of an independent member of a larger society. The old framework has gone to pieces, not because of external attacks criticisms, but because it was incapable of holding itself together in the face of the new forces which claim its members, men or women, for the school, the factory, the shop, and the world at large.