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Tides from the West, a Chinese Autobiography, written by Chang-Mung Lin, read by Tang Da-min. Chapter 8 Westernization China was now definitely on the track of Westernization, whatever her struggles between old and new, between constitutionalism and revolution. The victory of Japan over Tsarist Russia gave further impetus to her reforms along new or Western lines. By this time, about 50,000 Chinese students had gathered about Tokyo, a center of the new knowledge. In the meantime, the government had begun a series of reforms. New educational, military, and police systems were adopted, all copied after the Japanese models. Many believed that the Western systems and institutions which had been assimilated by the Japanese and adapted to Japanese life were more suitable to Chinese conditions than purely foreign forms. That is to say, China was to receive Western civilization via Japan. There were others, however, who held that if she must introduce Western civilization for her rejuvenation, why should she not go direct to the West for it? I was one of those who believed in the direct route. In spite of the persuasions of friends studying in Japan, I stuck stubbornly to my belief. I entered Nanyang College with a view to preparing myself for American universities. As all the textbooks on Western subjects were in English, it suited me splendidly. The college had been organized with the advice of Dr. John C. Ferguson, a former American missionary who only recently died in New York, and its preparatory department was run along the lines of an American high school. So it was most convenient as the final step to an American college. There were several American teachers who taught us modern subjects. After two years there, I could read English fairly well, although I was still quite deficient in speaking. The language was not taught by phonetic methods, and I found my tongue too stiff to follow. The curriculum was divided into two groups, one of Chinese and the other of Western subjects. I always stood high in both, once winning honors in the two examinations simultaneously. The principal summoned me and paid me high compliments to my great satisfaction. The college was laid out and built according to Western plan. The main building had in its center a clock tower which could be seen several miles away. In front of a row of buildings was a vast football field, green and well-kept. Football and baseball were encouraged by the college authorities, and games and sports generally indulged in by the students. Intercollegiate track and field games were held twice a year with thousands of spectators. Born physically frail, I began to realize that a healthy body was necessary for a healthy mind. Besides daily exercise and some sports of the lighter kind, I adopted a course of physical culture for myself. Every morning, at about six, I practiced with dumb bells for half an hour, and again for fifteen minutes in the evening before going to bed. I kept this up for three years without interruption, and after that time, found myself in good health and always in a cheerful mood. Spencer's Principles of Education, consisting of three elements, the intellectual, moral and physical, had by now been introduced into China. So to make up my moral education, I reviewed some of the Confucian classics and studied the Song and Ming philosophers and biographies of great men in history, both Chinese and Western, with a view to imitating their conduct. I entered selected parts of their sayings and doings in my diary, as I came across those that struck me. Then I did some careful thinking about them, tried to act on them, and watched the results which were also entered into the diary for further examination. It was exciting whenever I discovered that Chinese and Western ideas regarding certain matters were similar or almost identical. When they were, I knew that in acting in accordance with them, I would be guided by a universal truth. When discrepancies occurred, I studied them and tried to find out the reasons for them. In this way, I unconsciously made a comparative study of morals or rules of conduct of East and West. The most important result was that I learned to differentiate essentials from non-essentials and the fundamental from the superficial immoral ideas. Henceforth, I began to be more positive, more definite, more self-confident in steering my life on troubled waters, for moral ideas are the charts by means of which a life of action is directed. I began to see the oneness of East and West and appreciate the dictum of Lu Xiangshan, a Song philosopher, that the sages born of the Eastern Sea will of the same mind and therefore the same reason as the sages of the Western Sea. I also began to see unity in chaos, for I came to realize that essentials are but few while to know the similarities, differences, or contrasts among them is to clarify each and all of them. It was the buzzing of trifling things that made you dizzy, so I followed the teachings of Mencius and Lu Xiangshan that in learning we must grasp the essentials and neglect the trifles and make our own reasoning power the sole arbiter. Thus I began to establish myself on a solid rock of reasoning instead of traditional beliefs. I felt as if I had stripped off clothes that were altogether too tight and stepped forth naked and free. However, reason does not exist in a vacuum. I indulged in too much thinking which led to nothing but disappointment. But the way to write thinking had to start from thinking itself and learning to think by experience. You cannot teach a person how to think if he does not think at all. My belief here was reinforced in later years in America by reading John Dewey's How We Think to which I owed much. It is the teaching of the Confucius school that mental culture is the starting point of personal culture which in turn will serve as the foundation for statecraft. Therefore in order to save China, save yourself first. So I devoted myself to study and thinking, to physical exercise and to proper conduct. This was, as I understood it, the way to personal culture which would someday serve as the foundation for rendering service to the state. While I was still at Nanyang College, the imperial court took a definite step in educational reform by abolishing in 1905 the age-long system of civil examinations. By this act, the door to the past was closed to the younger generation once and for all. The decree was prompted by the victory of Japan over Russia. To replace the old, a new educational system was inaugurated, modeled after the Japanese, which in turn had been introduced to Japan from the west. China was now surely on the road to westernization. For some time past, Shanghai had been the center of a fugitive cultural movement in China. Harbored in the international settlement and the French concession, where Chinese jurisdiction reached to only a very limited extent or so far as international or French authorities might agree, Chinese intellectual and revolutionary leaders made their homes and enjoyed freedom of speech and publication. Here, political fugitives and men of radical thought or those so considered at the time gathered to discuss, elucidate and publish their ideas. Life here was comparable to that in one of the old Greek city-states, thinking was free and active. For my own part, in addition to my training at Nanyang, I joined in various activities as a junior member. More by way of learning than active participation. On Saturdays and Sundays, I frequented especially Qifang, a tea shop on Fujo Road, where all the students of Shanghai sipped their tea and indulged in lively discussions. No student of those days can forget the unique figure of the King of Rocks or King Xu, who was an inseparable part of the tea house, selling revolutionary literature to the students. He was dressed in shabby western clothes with a red greasy cap on his head, his cue being cut. Among his revolutionary wares, he included a pamphlet, a new treatise on sex problems, which he explained was to catch the attention of the reading public. Nobody ever knew his name or where he lived. Any book on revolution nominally tabooed by the municipal authorities by request of the Chinese government could be secured through him. In the same year that civil examinations were abolished, the Tongmonghui, the Revolutionary Union predecessor of the Kuomintang, was organized by Dr. Sun Yatsen in Tokyo with several hundred students joining, and Dr. Sun was elected president. This was the year of the Portsmouth Treaty, signed by Japan and Russia to end the Russo-Japanese War. After this victory over one of the western powers, Japan was now ready to launch aggression on China. This was a bear ten years before she delivered her famous 21 demands, and only 16 years before the Moogden incident, which led to full-fledged war in 1937. In Shanghai, a boycott movement against American goods was proceeding in all intensity as a protest against the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act by the American Congress. Students and merchants joined in calling from door to door on Chinese shopkeepers, urging them not to sell American merchandise. The shopkeepers tried to get rid of their boycott goods as fast as possible at very moderate prices and a number of people were happy to buy them at the back door. Mass meetings were held in which fierce speeches against the Exclusion Act were made. At one of them, the speaker stamped on the platform so hard that the soul of his shoe fell off and was flung into the audience, while waves of laughter rang through the hall. Another important incident in the following year was the agitation by the gentry of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces and the students and merchants of Shanghai against construction of the Suzhou-Hangzhou-Ningbo railway by British capital. There were public demonstrations in the form of mass meetings, circular telegrams, and soapbox orations, and subscriptions were opened for shares in the railway with a view to building it with Chinese capital. The line was changed to run via Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Ningbo. Shanghai being substituted for Suzhou by the curious reasoning that the latter, an inland city, would thus be spared for an influence, which was bound to increase with a railway. The British gave in as to the root, though the agitation was unsuccessful in obtaining Chinese capital ownership and the railway was begun the next year. Students all over China remained quiet in the schools during those years, partly because of their wider interests and activities outside school and partly because they themselves had wearied of the meaningless troubles they gave the school authorities. Nevertheless, they now turned their attention to the school cooks who prepared food for them. Each student paid $6 a month for his food in Shanghai, in the interior $3. One could not, therefore, expect very much from the cook, but the students were dissatisfied with what they got. They complained of the core's rise and the poor quality of meat and vegetables often demanding additional dishes, generally fried eggs, which were easy to prepare. Eggs were cheap in China then, about $50 or $60 for a dollar. Sometimes the students smashed the plates for bowls or beat up the cooks. No school was free from strikes in the dining hall, as they were called. In 1907, a short-lived revolution broke out in Anqing, provincial capital of Anhui. The leader was Xu Xilin, police dao tai, or chief of police of that province. He had been the teacher in a sino-oxidental school in Shaoxing, where I received my early education in Western learning, where I first learned that the earth is round. He was a Jiren, the second degree awarded through the Imperial Civil Examinations, had taught in the school for a few years, and then gone to Japan to study. Returning to China, he bought the office of dao tai with $50,000 borrowed from friends and was appointed for the province of Anhui. With the police under his control, he shot the governor with his own hand and started a coup d'etat in the provincial capital. With two personal followers and the police force, he occupied the arsenal, training its several cannon on the entrance. Not being adepts in military art, they were unable to make the guns work and soldiers rushed in and arrested him. One of his followers, Chen, was killed in action, while the other, Ma, was arrested later. Ma had been a schoolmate of mine at Zhejiang College in Hangzhou, and on their way from Japan to Anjing, he and Chen had stopped in Shanghai, where they came to see me almost every day. They talked at length about the revolutionary movement, which they believed was the only course for China's salvation, and asked me to go to Anjing with them. But a cousin of mine, the manager of a native bank, advised me rather to take a trip to Japan. During summer vacation, I took the opportunity of going with a friend to Tokyo, where an exposition was being held. Ma and Chen and I dined in farewell at the Yijie Xiang restaurant the evening before my departure, and they also left the next day for Anjing aboard a Yangzi steamer which took them up the river to their fatal destination. My first experience on an ocean-going steamer was rather thrilling. Everything was novel to me. The flush toilet was a wonder. The Japanese boy sons, or cabin boys, were courches. We reached Nagasaki the next morning, and were impressed with the beautiful scenery in that port. In the afternoon, we passed Shimonoseki, well known in China for Li Hongzhang's visit to it, and for the peace treaty concluded in 1895, and known by that name. We landed at Kobe, and from there took a train to Tokyo, getting off at Shimbashi station. A friend of mine who was studying in Tokyo took me to a small hotel, the Kimiga Yokan, in the Koishikawa district. The street was unpaved and muddy on that rainy day. I visited the exposition in Ueno Park dozens of times, and was impressed with the industrial development of Japan. In a war museum, where prices of war were shown, I was very much ashamed to see the Chinese flags, uniforms, and weapons seized in the Sino-Japanese War, and I tried, vainly, to dodge the eyes that stared at me. In the evening, the park was illuminated with thousands of electric lights, and the happy populace of Tokyo paraded on the grounds with myriad lanterns in their hands, shouting Banzai. They were intoxicated with the victory over Russia two years earlier, and still went wild about it. On my part, I stood alone at the top of an imitation hill, and watched the parade passing. I was so much moved, the tears rolled down my cheeks. Early one morning, within a week or so of my arrival, the naysan, or chambermaid, brought me a Japanese paper from which I learned of Xu Xilin's revolution in Anqing and its failure. I would have been killed if I had gone there with my two friends. The general impression I had of Japan was very favorable. The whole country was a garden. The people were well-dressed, their cities clean. They were perhaps inwardly conceited, but courtious to strangers. Impulsory education made the general level of the people much higher than in China, and this was perhaps the secret of Japan's becoming a world power. These were the impressions I carried home after a month's stay. Pretty soon, I began to work hard again at the college. The following year, during the summer vacation, I went to Hangzhou to take the Zhejiang provincial examination for scholarships to study in America. Having failed, I got a few thousand dollars from my father and prepared to go to California for further study. What you just heard is Tides from the West, a Chinese autobiography, written by Chiang Meng Lin, read by Tang Da Min, and published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Some names and terminologies in this book have been updated per contemporary usages.