Humane Endeavour: The Story of the China War

By Haldore Hanson

As a foreign correspondent in the 1930’s, Haldore Hanson covered the Chinese civil war and the invasion of China by Japan. Traveling rural roads on bicycle, he rotated among the warring forces and was occasionally arrested by one side or the other.

The present volume, “Humane Endeavor”, which was first published in 1939, was praised as a rare close-up from the remote front lines. Owing to his expertise, the State Department hired him as an official in 1942. After World War II, he became assistant director of the Point Four development aid program for Asia.

“A complete coverage of the war years, with pictures of outstanding personalities. [Hanson] reports on the fall of Peiping, on war on the Mongel front, on the sieges of Shanghai, Nanking, on Japanese atrocities, war in the air, finance and man power, Japanese rule in conquered areas, guerilla warfare, border republics, [and] experiences with the 8th Route Army. Interesting reading it holds the interest throughout, and has the vitality of a first-hand record.”—Kirkus Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eschenburg Press
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789127898

Haldore Hanson

Haldore Hanson (1912-1992) was a war correspondent, government official, and author. Born in 1912, Hanson graduated from Carleton College in the spring of 1934. He spent the summer after graduation in Japan and from there traveled to China, where he studied Chinese language and culture at a college in Beijing, supporting himself by teaching English at the college and working as a freelance journalist for local English-language magazines. When Japanese troops invaded China in July of 1937, the Associated Press hired Mr. Hanson as a part-time and freelance war correspondent. Hanson’s ability to speak Chinese made him one of the first foreign correspondents able and willing to travel behind the Japanese lines to investigate reports of partisan activity and the existence of an organized peasant fighting force. Hanson witnessed the Sino-Japanese conflict first hand and took many photographs of battles scenes involving the Japanese forces and the forces of the Eighth Route Army, images of destroyed towns and villages, and scenes that give insights into the daily lives and character of members of the guerilla forces. During his travels he was also able to interview Mao Zedong and other prominent Communist leaders. He later gave a historical account of his experiences in China in two books, “Humane Endeavour”: The Story of the China War (1939) and Fifty Years Around the Third World: Adventures and Reflections of an Overseas American (1986). Mr. Hanson returned to the U.S. in late 1938 and went on to have a distinguished career in the State Department and various important non-governmental organizations and foundations. Mr. Hanson delivered a Convocation address at Carleton in 1979 and received a Carleton Distinctive Achievement Award in 1981 Hanson died of heart failure on September 24, 1992 in Mexico City at the age of 80.

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Text originally published in 1939 under the same title.

© Eschenburg Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

HUMANE ENDEAVOUR

The Story of the China War

by

HALDORE HANSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 7

I — WANDERER 8

CHAPTER 1 — WESTWARD TO THE EAST 8

CHAPTER 3 — FREE-LANCING THROUGH CHINA 22

II — CUB WAR REPORTER 29

CHAPTER 4 — LUKOUCH’IAO AND SARAJEVO 29

CHAPTER 5 — FALL OF AN ANCIENT CAPITAL 35

CHAPTER 6 — TWO HORNS OF REVOLT 42

III — FIRST CAMPAIGN 49

CHAPTER 7 — DRIVING THE MONGOLIAN WEDGE 49

CHAPTER 8 — BATTLES AND BOTTLES IN HOPEI 55

CHAPTER 10 — THE PEASANT ARMY STRIKES 68

CHAPTER 11 — OFF WITH A WAR LORD’S HEAD 73

CHAPTER 12 — COGS IN A WAR MACHINE 78

IV — ATTRITION 84

CHAPTER 13 — THUNDER ALONG THE YANGTZE 84

CHAPTER 14 — SACK OF NANKING 91

CHAPTER 15 — BLUE AND RED BOMBERS 97

CHAPTER 16 — WHEN NAPOLEON REACHED MOSCOW 104

V — WHERE CONQUERORS RULE 110

CHAPTER 17 — JAPAN, THE CRUSADER 110

CHAPTER 18 — PUPPET GOVERNMENT 118

CHAPTER 19 — STERILIZED CULTURE 124

CHAPTER 20 — ECONOMIC PLUNDER 129

VI — GUERRILLAS 137

CHAPTER 21 — HOPEI’S HIT-AND-RUN ARMY 137

CHAPTER 22 — ADVENTURES CROSSING THE LINES 145

CHAPTER 23 — POLITICAL UTOPIA ON MOUNT WUT’AI 152

CHAPTER 24 — TRAVELS WITH A MULE 160

CHAPTER 25 — LAND OF ASHES AND BONES 167

CHAPTER 26 — HEADQUARTERS FOR 420,000 IRREGULARS 175

CHAPTER 28 — MAO TZE-TUNG’S LONG VIEW 192

VII — FREE CHINA 199

CHAPTER 29 — HERMIT NATION, TWENTIETH CENTURY MODEL 199

CHAPTER 30 — DR. K’UNG’S WAR CHEST 206

CHAPTER 31 — FIREBRANDS IN CHINESE POLITICS 215

CHAPTER 32 — CHIANG KAI-SHEK’S ARMY 221

CHAPTER 33 — CHINA IN THE LAP OF THE POWERS 228

CHAPTER 34 — TOKYO REVISED: 1939 236

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 244

DEDICATION

To

JIMMY WHITE,

ABLE CORRESPONDENT, WHO SHARED

THE BLAME FOR MOST OF THE ESCAPADES

RELATED IN THIS BOOK; AND

TO

BERNI

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE WRITER WENT TO THE FAR EAST IN 1934, SPENT the summer in Japan, and the next four and a half years in China. He worked as secretary for a Chinese diplomat, then taught in a Chinese university, then free-lanced for a number of English publications in Shanghai. When the war broke out he was an editor of a Chinese political magazine in Peip’ing. He joined the Associated Press staff in Peip’ing and later was made a roving correspondent for North and West China. Some of his most vivid experiences arose out of his association with the guerrilla armies in Hopei and Shansi, which no other correspondent had visited. He returned to the United States at the end of January, 1939, to complete this book.

His magazine articles have appeared in Asia, Pacific Affairs, Amerasia, Reader’s Digest, and the Nation.

"It is my very humane endeavour

To make, to some extent,

Each evil liver

A running river

Of harmless merriment."—The Mikado’s song from The Mikado by W. S. GILBERT

I — WANDERER

CHAPTER 1 — WESTWARD TO THE EAST

MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE JAPANESE, ODDLY ENOUGH, was in the brig of a ship as a stowaway. I had never been, arrested before and was not looking for cheap thrills but circumstances placed me, just a month after graduation from college, in the hands of the Japanese police.

In the spring of 1934 as commencement drew near in the college town of Northfield, Minnesota, professors talked gloomily of the Lost Generation—us students who were graduating in depression years without hope of work. I had no prospects; my only assets were a limited experience in newspaper work, a good scholastic record, and a thesis on Oriental diplomacy. But studious minds were cheap that year; PBK keys were hanging in most pawnshops and Ph.D.’s were mowing lawns at twenty cents an hour.

An air of desperation hung over the campus. A few sons of the rich had resigned themselves to the role of social parasite. Several of the leading science students were planning to hop freight trains to California in search of work, possibly in the airplane industry. My debating partner, a brilliant fellow who had helped win two national tournaments, accepted a teaching position in a six-acre country town. Another friend with the aid of relatives had landed a seaman’s berth on a South American tramp steamer.

I toyed with the idea of working my way across the Pacific, free-lancing through Japan and China, and returning home with a pot of gold. That seems to be the romantic ambition of every collegian who thinks the world does not appreciate him. Jeff Jones was my particular inspiration; Jeff is a jovial editor of the Minneapolis Journal. He was in China and Japan as a freelance during the World War and returned with a bank account of $5,000. I talked over my plans with a Chinese student who was also encouraging—low cost of living, leisurely life, and even if I should be short of money, he said, I could always stop at his home in Peip’ing. That settled it. I borrowed $125 after commencement and headed westward on a journey that led to—jail!

1

Pickets stood along the wharves of San Francisco when I arrived; the West Coast shipping strike had tied up every American freighter. The only ship scheduled to sail in the next fortnight was a Japanese liner, the Chichibu Maru, one of the largest passenger boats on the Pacific. I had $100 in traveler’s checks, barely enough to pay for steerage passage, but I did not dare land in Japan with so little money. I sat down in my fifty-cent hotel room, gazed out at the harbor, and pondered gloomily. All that prevented my returning home was a streak of Norwegian stubbornness, plus a fear of losing face after telling my friends that I was going to China. Stowing away was the only alternative.

I had read in books that when stowaways are caught, they are put to work as galley scullions and dropped at the next port; it is like getting a job, though not so pleasant—so I thought. I still believed everything that I read. An hour before the Chichibu pulled away from the dock I put on a clean linen suit, filled my brief case with oranges and biscuits, walked up the gangplank in a group of passengers, and paced the first-class deck. A Japanese band played The Star-Spangled Banner as the anchor was hoisted, and the Golden Gate soon sank on the horizon.

I began to feel conspicuous wandering around with a fat brief case. I had no plan for hiding; I reasoned that the sooner I was caught and put to work, the less dishonorable would be my stolen passage. Neat rationalization. At dinnertime I went into a washroom, ate a few biscuits from my brief case, and later dropped the case at the door of a baggage room. A dance had begun in the first-class salon and I joined in the fun, still wondering when I was going to be detected. The suspense was broken by a Japanese officer in white uniform who walked out on the dance floor, tapped me on the shoulder, and asked for my cabin number. I excused myself from my dancing partner, a California co-ed, and outside the door informed the officer I had no ticket. Consternation! The little detective—for that was his position—shook me by the shoulder, swore in Japanese, and boxed my ears before we reached the purser’s office.

The purser was a stout gentleman with patriotic blood in his veins; he charged me with insulting the Japanese Emperor, spying upon the Imperial merchant marine, and troubling Imperial officers. As meekly as possible I nodded my head to end his tirade and asked how the detective had identified me. A slap on the cheek was my only reply. I asked that I be put to work—any kind of work—and dropped at Honolulu, but I was told that Japanese ships are not permitted to carry passengers between American ports; by law they are required to imprison stowaways and turn them over to American courts in Hawaii My pockets were emptied and I was led to the brig, a bare jail cell about six feet square with one barred porthole.

The cell was furnished with a wooden bed and rusty iron water closet; no mattress, no blankets, no toilet paper. Three times a day a Japanese seaman opened a little trap door in the wall to push in a plate of rice and fish with a pair of chopsticks. He was a friendly fellow about my own age, and though unable to speak a word of English, he expressed himself with signs and pictures. One day I drew a picture of an apple and he brought me several with my next meal. On a chilly night he came on deck after dark to loan me his sailor’s jacket for the night. I found him, like many Japanese soldiers whom I met later, genuinely sympathetic.

By the time I was taken from the ship at Honolulu I felt and looked like a tramp. I had slept in my clothes for five days without washing or shaving; my hair was unkempt. Still in that condition I was escorted to the city jail, photographed for the rogues’ gallery with a long number across my shoulder, and lodged in a double cell with a fellow accused of rape. He regaled me from Saturday night till Monday morning with stories of mutiny, gun fights, and white-slave trade; I was young and took him seriously. A drunk in the cell across the hall, an unshaven middle-aged man with a raucous laugh, asked me what my offense had been and shook his head with mock sadness when I told him. Ish too bad, sonny, you’ll get shix month. Tha’s minimum. A guy’s got on’y one chansh round here. There’s two judges, one tough guy and one easy. If y’get B—, he’ll let yas off. He broke into a roar of laughter so loud that the jailer came to quiet the cells.

The lenient judge must have been on the bench next morning for I was released on condition that I leave Honolulu by the next Japanese ship and pay for a full passage. Articles removed from my pockets by the Japanese were returned to me, including a tobacco pouch in which I had hidden my traveler’s checks. I bought a steerage ticket on the next ship and then had but twelve dollars in my pocket. To live as cheaply as possible until the ship sailed I borrowed a blanket from the Y.M.C.A., stuffed it in my brief case, and started out on a hike around the island of Oahu. The sandy beach was my highway. At night I curled up under the palms. I ate only pineapples and crackers. I swam and sun-bathed and felt like a lotus-eater.

One night while walking along the beach after dark I stumbled over a cairn of rocks, some kind of Buddhist shrine, and cut a deep gash in my wrist. I was cursing loudly at the bloodstained hand when a flashlight appeared out of the darkness, less than a hundred yards away, and a man came up to ask my difficulty. It was a Japanese, a doctor from Honolulu who was spending his vacation in a tent on the beach. He put several stitches in the cut and invited me to stop for the night.

Another night I was curled up in my blanket on the beach of Pearl Harbor, the American naval base, when a downpour of rain soaked my blanket and chilled me to the marrow.

For exercise I started to walk the ten miles back to Honolulu but had not covered more than a quarter mile when I came upon a brightly lighted house where gay music was audible. I went closer and found a Japanese wedding in progress. A large gathering of guests, rosy with wine, was applauding the ceremonial dances of the bride and groom. I stepped onto the back porch and assisted the servants in ladling the hot rice wine from a washtub perched on an open brazier; my chattering teeth were soon quiet and my insides on fire.

A policeman sauntered by and joined the party of uninvited guests. He too was soon in the state which makes a man feel solicitous for mankind. We rode together in his squad car back to Honolulu. Where y’living? he asked as we approached the city. I told him my predicament. That’s all right, he consoled me, I have a friend at a sailors’ home—charitable place—no charge. And that was where I spent my last day in Hawaii, playing cards with jobless veterans of the sea.

When I sailed again, it was in the bowels of a Japanese ship, four decks below the music of a dance orchestra, but I still had nine dollars in my pocket and a friend awaiting me in Yokohama.

2

Seiichi Asada was, I imagine, a fair example of Japanese city-bred youth. He was twenty. His Prussian haircut bristled up from his stocky frame like the back of a frightened cat. He smoked incessantly. His eyes were blurred by the thick lenses in his horn-rimmed glasses. He was immaculately clean and a model of politeness.

I had learned something about Asada during our two years of correspondence. He had attended Tokyo’s No. 1 high school which is reserved for superior students and had graduated at the top of his class. At the time of my visit he was cramming for his entrance examinations to Tokyo Imperial University. He loved athletics, swam on the school team, played a good game of tennis, and occasionally indulged in wrestling and fencing. In America he would be a logical candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was my host for the next six weeks.

On the electric train to Tokyo, an hour’s ride from the seacoast, I am afraid I displayed to Asada the most obnoxious quality of the American tourist. I looked at the Japanese train, thought of an American express, and decided that all Orientals were backward; the locomotive was slow, the seats hard, the woodwork rough, the roadbed uneven. I rudely said as much. The Japanese youth bowed politely. It was not until I had lived in China several years and had entertained some equally garrulous tourists that I came to appreciate the first quality of a good traveler: he judges a nation by its background, its neighbors, its recent progress, not by contrast with the most advanced countries in the world. By such a standard Japan is a most dynamic nation. It lacks the iron mines of Minnesota, the coal fields of Pennsylvania, the wheat of Kansas, the oil of California and gold of Alaska, yet the Japanese have produced nearly all the comforts enjoyed by Americans.

Asada lived in Tokyo on a narrow, crooked lane which gave me an acute feeling of claustrophobia. Crowds of people clattered up and down the alleyways from dawn till dark, brushing elbows and crowding at the intersections. The houses—those fragile paper-and-wood structures that seem to be held together by gravity and hypnotism—stood flank to flank, only miniature gardens separating them. Front doors were flush with the street. Five feet separated one man’s parlor from another’s bedroom. The pressure of population pinches the outlook of every Japanese.

During a month in Asada’s home I had all the experiences that a tourist calls Japanesey—sleeping and eating on the floor, bathing in public bathhouses guarded by women attendants, utilizing an old-fashioned plumbing system known as the thunder bucket; but in retrospect I value most my opportunity to see the life of Japanese men. There were six of us who hobnobbed together: two students from Imperial University, one cadet from the merchant marine, a young accountant, Asada, and myself. We spent much of our time in cheap restaurants and beer halls, drinking and talking. Unlike the students I had known in America, these Japanese youths had no fears about finding work; unemployment was not among their worries, although they had resigned themselves to extremely low salaries. A crowding of population seems to crush individual initiative, and snuff out any thought of reaching for the stars. These fellows drifted into a life work like so many nickels entering a slot machine, some to pay twentyfold, others to fall into the jack pot.

Not that they were indolent. Most of the Japanese boys I met were spending several hours a day in rugged physical exercise at public gymnasiums. Young Enomoto was an ardent fencer and often took me to his favorite gym. Japanese fencing is not a gentlemanly sport like the French game of foils, but a rough-and-tumble encounter with heavy staves, similar to cudgel play in the time of Robin Hood. Men whoop and scream as they leap at each other, swinging their war clubs against the face mask or unprotected shoulders of the opponent. It is a sport fit for wild Indians; men leave the gymnasium dripping with perspiration and flushed from the violent pace.

I did not fully appreciate this passion for exercise until Asada and his four friends took me on a two-weeks’ camping trip around the lakes of Mount Fuji, and concluded the journey by climbing the holy mountain. Thousands of Japanese students make similar trips every summer; the government encourages them by giving all school children a 50 per cent discount on the national railways—a form of progressive education.

At midnight one August night we boarded a southbound coach in Tokyo; the car was crowded with boys and girls, many carrying skis, mountain boots, tents, and rice kettles. Early in the morning we left the train, cooked our breakfast over an open fire, and started on $ mountain trail that took us up 9,000 feet in ten hours, The Japanese boys walked slowly and methodically, rested five minutes every half hour, and bathed their feet in cold streams. I was impatient and set off as though catching the 7:42 subway, but as the sun grew hotter and midday approached, my calf muscles stiffened. I sat down to wait for the other fellows and was glad enough thereafter to follow the Japanese pace. They are trained hikers.

We slept that night, as we did for two weeks, upon a rough lava now which had hardened with parallel grooves in the surface. I cut a few evergreen boughs for a mattress and was about to slide them under my blanket when Asada stopped me with the polite query, What you do?

I explained that I was making the bed a little softer.

We don’t use, he said firmly. Our army teach us sleep on rock. There was a faint touch of contempt in his voice.

Next day we marched on through a wilder mountain region comparable to Tennessee hill country. Farm huts clung to steep slopes. Rice fields were but little shelves of earth propped up by walls of stone. Women naked to the waist stood in the paddy fields, hoeing weeds, their pendent breasts swinging slowly in rhythm with their laborious strokes. This was the Japan that few tourists see—still picturesque but crushed by poverty.

Even at these altitudes I saw an impressive symbol of Japanese unity—the Shinto Shrine. Some poor farmers had set a few clay idols in a niche beside the stream, or hung a wooden plaque upon an old tree. Compared to the great temples of Tokyo, these rustic places of worship were extremely crude; their very simplicity, however, emphasized the power of Japan’s national religion. The Japanese have always been nature worshipers but it required the work of shrewd politicians to change a primitive religion into a form of patriotism.

Back in 1870, I understand, when the Emperor Meiji was fashioning the present Japanese state, a few Japanese leaders visited Prussia, watched Bismarck adapting the old German faith of Wotan worship to the needs of a militaristic nation; the Japanese returned to reshape their own Shinto faith into a buttress to emperor worship and a glue to hold the race together. By coincidence perhaps, the militarism of Japan and Germany has run a parallel course. Both nations rose to power from 1870 to 1914. Both armies fell in prestige after the World War. Both revived their military threats in the 1930’s.

The supreme symbol of Japanese Shintoism is Mount Fuji, which our party climbed on the last day of our camping trip. Most American tourists who have climbed this 12,500-foot peak belittle the achievement; they say it is only a ten-hour walk up trails which are well graded—which is true. The real fascination of the trip to me was the sight of thousands of Japanese pilgrims—men, women, and children—climbing to the snowy summit, pausing to pray at the numerous Shinto shrines along the mountain trails, and returning with an inward satisfaction that they had visited the holiest mountain in Japan.

Has American nationalism, I asked myself, inspired any such physical enthusiasm? I once marched in a Memorial Day parade and climbed the stairway of the Washington Monument, but I can think of no feat comparable to a Fuji pilgrimage. The Christian religion, with the exception of a few dubious sects, has inspired no physical energy since the days of the crusades. The Moslems still have their journeys to Mecca, and Hitler’s youth make their annual treks afoot through mountains and forests. Perhaps it is no accident that the adherents of Allah, Wotan, and Shinto are among the most virile and aggressive races in the world.

3

I saw no preparations for war that summer of 1934, although there were frequent clashes between Japanese and Russian troops on the Siberian border; nobody took them seriously. I noticed, however, considerable enthusiasm for the work of the Japanese Army in Manchukuo. The principal of a Christian high school in Tokyo remarked to me, I am very eager to see the New Empire; we hear such fine reports. He was proud of the orderliness which he believed Japan had brought to Chinese territory.

Japanese business leaders were also proud of their rising position in world trade. I met an economics professor who had been educated at Wharton, and had the same blind faith in the Japanese trade boom that characterized Wall Street in 1929; Japan, he said, was at last finding its natural level in world affairs. This feeling of buoyancy and power pervaded every class of people.

I visited a Tokyo department store which had given its top floor to exhibits of national defense. The navy had set up a map of the Pacific about thirty feet square, emphasizing by arrows how Japan confronted the United States, and demonstrating by numerous diagrams how the Japanese Navy could defeat the American fleet. School children examined the models of new battleships and toyed with army machine guns. A very popular exhibit was labeled, How to Detect Spies. Children were warned to watch all foreigners, especially to look in their coat lapels for miniature cameras. Sample cameras were on display.

Looking back at that summer of 1934, I can think of many significant activities in Japan which the casual visitor did not see. An obscure German officer, a confidant of Hitler’s, was making a secret report on the Japanese Army. His name was Colonel Eugene Ott and his report prepared the way, two years later, for the Tokyo-Berlin axis. Ott was later given the rank of a lieutenant general and the position of ambassador to Japan.

The business indices also had an interesting story to tell. Since 1931, the profits of Japanese industry had been doubling, even trebling, while the wages of the average working man were declining two or three per cent a year. Not very exciting to a tourist, of course, but to a trained economist that record was startling. Japan had more goods to sell but fewer people who could buy. Soon the national leaders would be forced to look for new markets outside Japan; if they could not find them peaceably, they must seize them by force. The same danger signals had been evident before the Manchurian war in 1931, but a boom in the munitions industry and the devaluation of the yen had staved off economic recession. Now Japan was approaching another crisis—a choice between a stock crash that would dwarf the American debacle of 1929, or external aggression.

The army staff that year had begun its famous series of propaganda pamphlets arguing for expansion on the continent, a larger military budget, and stricter control of liberal college professors who were opposed to war. Predictions set the year 1936 as the fateful year for Japan. Blueprint plans had already been completed, no doubt, for a war involving China, Soviet Russia, or both. I left Japan ignorant of all these developments.

My money was gone. I had not written a single article. I had seen no prospect of work. And so, when a young American who was traveling to North China offered to loan me enough money for the trip, I gladly accompanied him to the country that was my home for the next five years.

CHAPTER 2 — MEET MR. CHANG

MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF CHINA AT THE HARBOR OF T’ANGKU was repulsive. T’angku is a smelly port on the coast of North China, a labyrinth of fly-ridden alleyways and tumble-down mud huts. The harbor is speckled with garbage. Three days earlier I had left the Japanese town of Shimonoseki, a tidy community of turbines and derricks, cobblestone streets, frame houses, and bright shops. The contrast was inescapable. The only relief from drabness in T’angku harbor was the grinning faces of the people. I remembered the Japanese wharf workers, silent and persistent as draft horses, while the Chinese coolies at T’angku were chanting rhythmically, Hi-ho yo-ho, hi-ho yo-ho, as they heaved great barrels of oil from the hold of a ship.

I was too excited by the strange surroundings to notice the minor irritations. A money-changer at the railway station cheated me a dollar. A missionary on the train to Peip’ing made me very uncomfortable with his tales of disease and death. He said there was a family of six Americans in Shantung who came to dinner one night in perfect health; the next morning they were all dead from cholera. Their cook had sprinkled salt with a chicken quill which happened to be contaminated. A friend of his was bitten by a typhus louse while riding in a ricksha in Peip’ing; the man went to bed for nine months. A missionary’s wife went to a Chinese restaurant and wiped her face on a hot towel; the following week her eyes were infected with trachoma. I had a feeling that armies of microbes were maneuvering on all sides, waiting for a chance to strike. That was five years ago. It is only fair to add that during my stay in China I had but one illness—dysentery—which was contracted while marching with Chinese soldiers through villages where clean food was impossible to obtain. Most travelers encounter no such conditions.

1

I arrived in Peip’ing without money or friends, yet within twenty-four hours I would not have traded places with any other person in China. I had telephoned the father of the Chinese student I had known in America and was invited to stop at his home. That was the beginning of nine months in a Chinese family, working as secretary to a Chinese official, learning a little of the language, and getting to know Chinese family life as few foreigners do.

My host was a placid-tempered man past middle age, perhaps fifty-five, moderately wealthy, a browser in bookshops, a putterer with home-grown flowers and mosses, a collector or singing birds and old porcelains. Old Chang had been educated in Chinese, Japanese, and American universities and during twenty years of official life had served in such varied posts as diplomat, legal adviser, college president, and tax supervisor; he retired from public life at forty-five; his wealth, I suspect, dated from the fiscal position.

As the newest member of the family I was assigned the guest room, a spacious chamber with a Louis XIV bed. My room opened upon two courtyards, but the doors had no locks and the windows no blinds. There was no privacy; two women servants shuffled into the room at any hour of the day or night. Not that there was any danger of scandal, for both of them were aged Manchu widows, wrinkled and toothless like Indian squaws in northern Minnesota. Their omnipresence irritated me less than their Chinese habit of sui pien—do as you please. Sometimes they made my bed, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes dinner was at six, sometimes at nine. Sometimes the coolie put coal in my stove, sometimes not. Nobody was dependable. The master of the house, Old Chang himself, never seemed to be ruffled; he sat in his courtyard, winter and summer, sometimes in wools and furs, sometimes in silks, always reading and thinking. Little wonder that a nation with such unconcern for efficiency has failed to produce a healthy industrial system.

I was called Mr. Chang’s English secretary, though my only work was correcting his English sentence structure in articles and translations. Some of his tasks required several months. One, I remember, was writing a popular English description of the Imperial porcelain collection which was sent to an exhibition in London. We spent hours in the Palace Museum arguing over colors, glazes, and crackles. Another month’s work was the translation of a Chinese guidebook for the Summer Palace outside Peip’ing.

The longer I worked with Old Chang, the more his philosophy of life puzzled me. He was the riddle of China personified—a well-educated man, citizen of a weak nation that needed his help, yet he preferred to lead a retired, leisurely existence. In 1906 he was considered a bright young man of the Chinese Empire, an ambitious fellow whose advice was sought by the Empress Dowager because he had spent three years in the Gothic halls of Yale University, had seen the industrial strength of America and Europe, and was supposed to have known the road to national power. When I met him thirty years later, he had drifted back to the ways of his ancestors—languid, indifferent to change. Anyone who could explain that psychological backslide would know why China has been the world’s Rip Van Winkle. I never found an explanation save this: One ambitious man cannot move a glacier of humanity; he is like a whippet harnessed to a freight train, and his discouragement inevitably leads to indifference.

I had always been interested in racial traits and was naturally fascinated by the bent in Old Chang’s mind. I often talked with him about Chinese floods and famines but my sentiments toward the millions who drown or shrivel up were acknowledged by a nod of the head and a knowing smile; and if my questions became boring, Old Chang would silence me with two expressions which seemed to typify the fatalistic attitude of the people: "Mei yu fa tzu—There is nothing can be done about it, or Pu yao chin—That is not important." The first remark was emphasized by a shrug, the second by a grin. Old Chang had a dash of the Spanish mañana and the Russian nichevo. In fact, all three nationalities—Chinese, Spanish, and Russian—have a deceptive languidness which gives way without warning to acts of violence. Perhaps it is coincidental, but the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century have been fought by these quixotic nations.

Chinese seem to have a totally different concept of death, illness, and suffering. Tragedy means nothing to them unless the victim happens to be a relative or close friend. I saw beggars dying or syphilis and tuberculosis in the streets of Peip’ing, but nobody notices them; on cold winter mornings as many as twenty frozen corpses were gathered every day from doorways and public outhouses, but Chinese newspapers did not consider the fact worthy of print. Thousands of babies were abandoned on the streets of every large Chinese city; Shanghai removed as many as 32,000 dead babies from its harbor in a single year. At first I thought the Chinese were callous and brutal, but I grew to see their point of view: The number of Chinese who lack adequate food and medical care exceeds the total population of the United States—a vast desert of human suffering in which a few canteens of water will accomplish very little. If a man of wealth were to give all his goods to feed the poor, he would make no appreciable dent in that hunger army. So men with money drew closer to their family clans, perhaps forty or fifty households, and shut their eyes to beggars and dying babies.

The clan system is a kind of group insurance. At least one man among fifty relatives is certain to become wealthy and supply the others with the wherewithal to exist. The survival and welfare of the family clan is considered so important that corruption in the government—i.e., stealing money for the benefit of a family clan—has never been considered a very serious crime. Industries have been destroyed by the family system because executives are obliged to place their relatives in responsible positions, regardless of their capability. Every retail shop in China has dozens of idle clerks—the extra mouths in a family clan.

2

At the time of my arrival Chiang Kai-shek was very unpopular in North China. I was therefore surprised one evening when my host, Old Chang, paid the national leader a very high compliment. We had been talking about civil wars when he turned to me and asked, Do you remember that struggle between Chiang Kai-shek and Feng Yü-hsiang in 1930? I said I had read about the war. Excellent strategy, he declared. The two armies each had about fifteen divisions; they were evenly matched. Chiang Kai-shek figured that the cost of one division—recruiting 10,000 men, training and feeding them, arming and transporting them to the front—had been not less than $1,000,000, and he could not hope to win the war without sacrificing at least three divisions. That would be a loss of $3,000,000. So what did he do? He appropriated $1,000,000 to bribe several enemy commanders and won the war for a bargain price, Chang sipped his tea and added, Good generalship—more brains than sword.

I was shocked at the time by his respect for treachery, but the longer I lived in China, the more I noticed this regard for cleverness and a contempt for force. In the memoirs of Robert Morrison, an early English missionary, I came upon a statement written in 1817 which is still an accurate comment on Chinese temperament: A Chinese will stand and argue with a man when an Englishman would knock him down and an Italian would stab him.

The trait is equally true of educated scholars and illiterate coolies. Most of the street fights I saw in