1、吾国与吾民第 1 页MY COUNTRY AND MY PEOPLEBy LIN YUTANGILLUSTRATE WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.LONDON : TORONTOFIRST PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1936REPRINTED FEBRUARY, APRIL (twice),AUGUST, DECEMBER 1936PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN ATTHE WINDMILL PRESS, B3NGSWOOD, SURREYTruth does not depart from human nature. Ifwhat is regar
2、ded as truth departs from human nature, it may not be regarded as truth.CONFUCIS INTRODUCTIONONE of the most important movements in China to-day is the discovery of their own country by young Chinese intellectuals. A generation ago the most progressive of their fathers were beginning to feel a stirr
3、ing discontent with their own country. They were conscious, indeed the consciousness was forced upon them, that China as she had been in the past was not able to meet the dangerous and aggressive modernity of the West. I do not mean the political modernity so much as the march of economic, education
4、al and military events. These Chinese fathers, fathers of the present generation in China, were the real revolutionists. They forced out of existence the old dynastic rule, they changed with incredible speed the system of education, with indefatigable zeal they planned and set up a scheme of modern
5、government. No ancient government under an emperor ever accomplished with more imperial speed such tremendous changes in so great a country. In this atmosphere of change, the present intellectual youth of China has grown up. Where the fathers imbibed the doctrine of Confucius and learned the classic
6、s and revolted against them, these young people have been battered by many forces of the new times. They have been taught something of science, something of Christianity, something of atheism, something of free love, something of communism, something of Western philosophy, something of modern milita
7、rism, something, in fact, of everything. In the midst of the sturdy medievalism of the masses of their countrymen the young intellectuals have been taught the most extreme of every culture. Intellectually they have been forced to the same great omissions that China has made physically. They have ski
8、pped, figuratively speaking, from the period of the unimproved country road to the aeroplane era. The omission was too great. The mind could not compensate for it. The spirit was lost in the conflict. The first result, therefore, of the hiatus was undoubtedly to produce a class of young Chinese, bot
9、h men and women, but chiefly men, who frankly did not know how to live in their own country or in the age in which their country still was. They were for 吾国与吾民第 2 页the most part educated abroad, where they forgot the realities of their own race. It was easy enough for various revolutionary leaders t
10、o persuade these alienated minds that Chinas so-called backwardness was due primarily to political and material interference by foreign powers. The world was made the scapegoat for Chinas medievalism. Instead of realizing that China was in her own way making her own steps, slowly, it is true, and so
11、mewhat ponderously, toward modernity, it was easy hue and cry to say that if it had not been for foreigners she would have been already on an equality, in material terms, with other nations. The result of this was a fresh revolution of a sort. China practically rid herself of her two great grievance
12、s outside of Japan, extraterritoriality and the tariff. No great visible change appeared as a consequence. It became apparent that what had been weaknesses were still weaknesses, and that these were inherent in the ideology of the people. It was found, for instance, that when a revolutionary leader
13、became secure and entrenched he became conservative and as corrupt, too often, as an old style official. The same has been true in other histories. There were too many honest and intelligent young minds in China not to observe and accept the truth, that the outside world had very little to do with C
14、hinas condition, and what she had to do with it could have been prevented if China hadbeen earlier less sluggish and her leaders less blind and selfish. Then followed a period of despair and frenzy and increased idealistic worship of the West. The evident prosperity of foreign countries was felt to
15、be a direct fruit of Western scientific development. It was a time when the inferiority complex was rampant in China, and the young patriots were divided between mortification at what their country was and desire to conceal it from foreigners. There was no truth to be found in them, so far as their
16、own country was concerned. They at once hated and admired the foreigners. What would have happened if the West had continued prosperous and at peace cannot be said* It is enough that the West did not so continue. The Chinese have viewed with interest and sometimes with satisfaction the world war, th
17、e depression, the breakdown of prosperity, and the failure of scientific men to prevent these disasters. They have begun to say to themselves that after all China is not so bad. Evidently there is hunger everywhere, there are bandits everywhere, and one people is not better than another, and if this
18、 is so, then perhaps China was right in olden times, and perhaps it is just as well to go back and see what the old Chinese philosophy was. At least it taught people to live with contentment and with enjoyment of small things if they had not the great ones, and it regulated life and provided a certa
19、in amount of security and safety. The recent interest in China on the part of the West, the wistfulness of certain Western persons who envy the simplicity and security of Chinas pattern of life and admire her arts and philosophy have also helped to inspire the young Chinese with confidence in themse
20、lves. 吾国与吾民第 3 页The result to-day is simply a reiteration of the old Biblical adage that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the childrens teeth are set on edge. Young China, being wearied of the revolutionary ardours of its fathers, is going back to old China, It is almost amusing to see the oft
21、en self-conscious determination to be really Chinese, to eat Chinese food, to live ir Chinese ways, to dress in Chinese clothes. It is as much of a fad and a pose to be entirely Chinese these days among certair young westernized Chinese as it was for their fathers to weai foreign clothes and eat wit
22、h knives and forks and want to gc to Harvard, These present young people have worn foreigr clothes all their lives and eaten foreign food and they did gc to Harvard, and they know English literature infinitely bette than their own, and now they are sick of it all and want to gc back to their grandfa
23、thers. The trend is apparent everywhere, and not only in the externals of dress and customs. Far more importantly is it to b highly ridiculous* With the exception of Chiang Kaishek and T. V, Soong, th Chinese leaders do not “work like a horse“; they simply work like civilized human beings, where lif
24、e is regarded as not worth the bother of too much human effort, and eventually if Chiang Kaishek and T. V. Soong come out on top, it will be just on account of their greater stamina and capacity for drudgery. It was T. V* Soong who, using a Chinese idiom, announced that he was “as strong as an ox“ w
25、hen he resigned, and failed to give diabetes or hardened liver or tired nerves for his political resignation, which all the rest of the Chinese officials unashamedly do. A list of the physical and mental ailments, from wrecked stomachs and overworked kidneys to shattered nerves and muddled heads, pu
26、blicly announced by the officials during their political sicknesses, most of which are genuine, would cover all the departments and wards of a modern hospital. With the exception of the late Sun Yatsen, the Chinese leaders, first-rate scholars all, do not keep up their reading and do not write. A wo
27、rk like Trotzkys autobiography by a Chinese leader is simply unimaginable, and even a manifestly lucrative first-class biography of Sun Yatsen has not yet been written by a Chinese, almost a decade after the great leaders death, nor are there adequate biographies of Tseng Kuofan or Li Hungchang or Y
28、uan Shihkai. It seems the sipping of tea in the yamen and the interminable talking and eating of melon seeds at home have consumed all our scholars time. Facts like these explain why gem-like verses, dainty essays, short prefaces to friends works, funeral sketches of friends lives and brief descript
29、ions of travels comprise the works of ninety-five per cent of the famous Chinese authors. When one cannot be powerful, one must choose to be dainty, and when one cannot be aggressive, one has to make a virtue of reasonableness. Only once in a while do we meet a Sstima Chien or a Cheng Chiao or a Ku
30、Yenwu, whose prodigious labours suggest to us the indefatigable bodily energy of a Balzac or a Victor Hugo. That is what two thousand years of kowtowing could do to a nation. A study of the hair and skin of the people also seems to indicate what must be considered results of millenniums of civilized
31、 indoor living. The general lack or 吾国与吾民第 21 页extreme paucity of beard on mans face is one instance of such effect, a fact which makes it possible for most Chinese men not to know the use of a personal razor. Hair on mens chests is unknown, and a moustache on a womans face, not so rare in Europe, i
32、s out of the question in China. On good authority from medical doctors, and from references in writing, one knows that a perfectly bare mons veneris is not uncommon in Chinese women. The pores of the skin are finer than those of the Europeans, . with the result that Chinese ladies, on the whole, hav
33、e more delicate complexions than have European ladies, and their muscles are considerably more flabby, an ideal consciously cultivated through the institution of footbinding, which has other sex appeals. The Chinese are evidently aware of this effect, for in Hsinfeng, Kwangtung, keepers of poultry y
34、ards keep their chickens shut up for life in a dark coop, without room for movement, giving us the Hsinfeng chicken, noted for its extreme tenderness. Glandular secretions from the skin must have correspondingly decreased, for the Chinese explain the foreigners* habit of talking their (imagined) dai
35、ly baths by their comparatively stronger bodily odour. Perhaps the most marked difference is in the loss of the full, rich resonant quality in the Chinese voice, compared with that of the Europeans. While facts regarding the senses are not to my knowledge available, there is no reason to suppose a d
36、eterioration in the fine use of the ears and the eyes. The refined olfactory sense is reflected in the Chinese cuisine and in the fact that, in Peking, one speaks of kissing a baby as “smelling“ a baby, which is what is done actually. The Chinese literary language has also many equivalents of the Fr
37、ench odeur de femme, like “flesh odour“ and “fragrance from marble (a womans body).“ On the other hand, sensitiveness to cold and heat and pain and general noise seems to be much more blunt in the Chinese than in the white man. One is well trained for such hardness in the Chinese family communal liv
38、ing. Perhaps the one thing that compels admiration from Westerners is our nerves. While sensitiveness is often very refined along specialized lines 梩 he obvious proof of this is the great beauty of Chinese handicraft products in general 梩 here seems to be a corresponding coarseness as regards respon
39、se to pain and general suffering.1 The Chinese capacity for endurance in suffering is enormous. III. INFUSION OF NEW BLOODBut the Chinese people, as a race, did not survive merely on the strength of coarse nerves or of capacity for suffering. Actually, they survived on the sinolization2 of Mongolian
40、 peoples. A kind of phylogenetic monkey-gland grafting took place, for one observes a new bloom of culture after each introduction of new blood. The brief sketch of the general constitution and physical condition of the Chinese people shows, not that they have entirely escaped the effects of long ci
41、vilized living, but that they have developed traits which render them helpless at the hands of a fresher and more warlike race. Life with the Chinese seems to move on a slower, quieter level, 吾国与吾民第 22 页the level of sedate living, not the level of action and adventure, with corresponding mental and
42、moral habits of a peaceful and negative character. This makes it easily understandable why periodic conquests from the North were inevitable. Politically, the nation has perished several times at the hands of these conquerors. The problem is then how, in the midst of this political subjugation, the
43、nation remained as a nation; not how the nation warded off these military disasters, as Christendom stopped the advance of the Moslems at the battle of Tours, but how it survived these disasters and, in fact, profited from them by the infusion of new blood, without losing its racial individuality or
44、 cultural continuity. The national life, it seems, was organised on such a pattern that the loss of the pristine vigour did not mean the loss of racial stamina and power for resistance. The key to this racial stamina and power for resistence is the key to Chinas survival. 1 Arthur Smiths renowned Ch
45、inese Characteristics has a chapter on “The Absence of Comfort and Convenience/ recounting his experience and observations of Chinese dress, houses, pillows and beds, which all European readers find amusing. I wager it is ten times more amusing to Chinese readers to learn of Arthur Smiths account of
46、 his sufferings and discomforts. The white mans nerves are undoubtedly degenerate. n * Tte* Yord* tfrougk kere used for the first time, is preferable to the atrociousSiniacation.“The infusion of new blood must explain to a large extent the racial vigour that the Chinese people possess to-day. Histor
47、ically, this occurs with such striking regularity, at the interval of every eight hundred years, as to lead one to suppose that actually a periodic regeneration of the race was necessary, and that it was the internal degeneration of the moral fibre of the people that brought about these periodic uph
48、eavals, rather than vice versa. Dr. J. S. Lee, in a striking paper on “The Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China,“1 has made a statistical study of these occurrences, which reveal an exact parallelism in these cycles of peace and disorder which “far exceeds the limit of probability“ and i
49、s “perhaps too exact to be expected from the proceedings of human affairs.“ For the striking fact is that Chinese history can be conveniently divided into cycles of eight hundred years. Each cycle begins with a short-lived and militarily strong dynasty, which unified China after centuries of internal strife. Then follow four or five hundred years of peace, with one change of dynasty, succeeded by successive waves of wars, resulting soon in the removal of the capital from the North to the South. Then came secession and rivalry between North and South with incr
