Changing China

nlightenment; periods of darkness and desolation; but the country remained essentially the same country. There might be some small alteration in its customs, but

r in the hearts of the adversary. Monseigneur Jarlin, the head of the French mission in Peking, described the China of olden times by saying that in his young days all Chinamen had a rooted contempt for everything Western. Theirs was the only civilised land. The West was the land of barbarism. Now, he added, the positions are reversed; every Chinaman despises China, and is convinced that from the We

is a land which is seeing so many radical changes, that a missionary said, when I asked him a question about

n spirit than of anything else. And this intense belief in progress shows itself at every turn; the Yamen runner has become a policeman, towns are having the be

e are two chief causes. One may be small, but it is not insignificant; the other is certainly great and obvious. The less appreciat

culminating in the battle of Mukden, where a flagrant act of insolent contempt for the laws of neutral

Japan was no longer an Eastern power, where knights with two-handed swords did deeds of valour and won for themselves everlasting renown. And when at Ping-yang the armies met, the Chinese General ascended a hill that he might direct the armies of the Celestial Empire with a fan. He conceived the battle to be merely a sma

shment for this murder may have been a good stroke of policy, but it has brought but little honour either to Germany or to Christianity. In fact it may be regarded as a most regrettable action from a missionary point of view, for it convinced the Chinese that the missionary was but a part of the civil administration of a hostile country, and that if China was to be preserved from the foreigner, missionaries m

iples were believed to be invulnerable to any Western weapon. It protested against the movement towards Western ideas, which it regarded as immoral; it condemned and destroyed everything Western, from straw hats and cigarettes to mission houses and railways; its disciples believed that the spirits that defend China were angry at the introduction of Western things, that they were withholding the rain so necessary to the light loess land of that district, and that the only way they could be propitiated was by the sacrifice of a Western life or by the destruction of a Western building. One of

eir credulity was told me at Newchwang. The Russians had occupied Newchwang, and, more suo, were pacifying it; they were shooting all the Boxers on whom they could lay hands, and, I am afraid, a great number who were not Boxers. They chained one of these fanatics to a stone seat with the intention of executing him; but they thought they might get some useful information out of him, so they asked an Englishman who spoke Chinese perfectly to make inqui

long, as the Boxer, waving his sword, stood right in its path. The driver was a European, and seeing some one on the line, pulled up his train to avoid running over him. The Boxer pointed to the train triumphantly, and the astonished villagers became Boxers. There was, however, a sceptic who refused to believe, so next day th

ty; the second result was to inspire the Chinese with a respect for the military power of the foreigner. The Boxers had failed, the foreign powers had taken Peking, the Son of Heaven had become a fugitive; all this was gall and wormwood to the Chinaman. The sack of Peking was especially felt, both because of

ng the fear his people have of Europeans, said, "They regard you as tigers." The troops who sacked Peking were to the thinking Chinaman but another example of the well-known truth, that those nearer the savage state fight better than

tory, and events provided them with teachers who taught them that the cause of this humiliation was their refusal to acce

popular mind. The story was this. The Amur divides China from Siberia. When the Boxer movement broke out the Russians required all the Chinese to go to their side of the river; but with sinister intent, they removed all the boats, so that no one could cross. The Chinese pointed this out, and the respectable merchants of the town presented a petition saying th

in Japan, their pupils in civilisation. The Japanese believed in Confucius, used Chinese characters, worshipped in Buddhist

Japan were disputing over Korea, and both nations were at peace with China. Russia might have invaded Japan; Japan might have invaded Russia, or both might have met in Korea, but what they did was to select a province of a neutral State and decide that

Mukden taught the Chinese, and which convinced the anti-foreign party in China, that however much they might hate the foreigner, they must adopt Western methods if they would retain their independence. The result was that the progressive and anti-foreign parties found themselves at one. Both agreed that Western ideas were necessary. The first, because th

ry-a war which, if it demonstrated the incapacity of their officers, proved the courage of their soldiers. But the humiliation of China was intense. When one remembers the position that the Emperor occupies in China; when one also remembers the reverential feeling that exists towards ancestors, one realises what it must have meant to the Chinaman that the site

em. The exact degree of what should be preserved in China and what should be destroyed and replaced by Western innovations, differs according to the age and the temperament of the thinkers, but the principle is most generally accepted-Western thought must be grafted on to Eastern civilisation. When we remember the size of China, we may well ask ourselves what effect this policy will have on the rest of the world. We have at present a period of reflection, for how long we canno

lt through the power that Lamaism had had over a great part of the Eastern world. A learned Japanese, discussing this subject, said that no one could study Lamaism and Buddhism without realising how intimately it had been in touch with some form of Christianity. Later on the great Roman Catholic missions, initiated by St. Francis Xavier in the thirteenth century, began to work in China, and have slowly but surely raised up a large population who have been Christians for many generations. Their missions were interrupted by

ult of their efforts has been that there are a considerable number of enlightened Chinese gentry who are either Christians or who have a great sympathy with the Christian side of Western civilisation. Sometimes they educated these men in China, sometimes they induced

o were also Christians, and who founded a Chinese Commercial Press. These two bodies have given to China a vast amount of Western literature, the first on philanthropic lines with the definite intention of spreading Christianity, the second on a commercial basis but with the intention of presenting to their fellow-countrymen the pure

as published in 1814, they have been scattering the Christian Scriptures throughout the whole of China, from Mongolia to Tonkin, and I am told that those Scriptures are read by men in the highest positions and with the most conservative antecedents in the who

ands of Christians had suffered in Shan-si, the Home bodies, especially the China Inland Mission, refused to take any compensation for the blood that had been shed in the cause of the Gospel. The Chinese were then convinced that the German presentation of Christianity was not the only one; if Germany could look on Christianity only as a stalking horse behind which she could creep up to her prey, the English-speaking races had a holier ideal to teach and

is in the West a power which comes from goodness, and that goodness has its root in Christian faith. It is this twofold aspect of the awakening of China which is so important to bear i