CHINA'S UNDYING LAMP.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—The point of view from which the first part of your article on China (July 7th) appears to be written seems, if I may put it so bluntly, a little curious. After showing indications of insight into Chinese national psychology, it leaps to the startling position that it is high time that Foreign Powers, in their own interests, should take over the govern- ment of the country. China, so far as she can be said to have a corporate will and spirit, certainly does not want this. She is happier and, as compared with much of Western civilization, according to her mild epicurean standards, better without it.
The plea that " the Powers should secure her from disinte-
gration at the hands of her own self-seeking and corrupt military adventurers " is discounted in advance by your own recognition that " the present tyrannical rule " (no new thing to her) " of the Tuchuns is regarded, even by the com- mercial classes, who most suffer from it, as burdensome rather than intolerable." Quite so I
That which is not integrated cannot be disintegrated.
China, left to herself, would probably be as well able in the future, as she has been in the past, to put up with her own military exploiters, whom she prefers to foreign commercial and industrial exploiters. The latter she would doubtless prefer to go on killing—and why not, from her point of view ? The invaders who sacked the Summer Palace were plainly representatives of a lower and less happy civilization than her own. What seems to me, as an ancient student of the writings of Mr. W. R. Greg, to be " curious " is that the Spectator should assume as axiomatic that if outsiders desire to industrialize a civilization which is contented with its own modus vivendi (unsympathetic as it may be to ourselves), they are entitled to force themselves into its country and annex its government. 'Why not keep out ?
It is difficult to believe that they will be able to do so— to establish an effectual central government for so vast a social mass. The lesson of the Boxer insurrection has appa- rently been forgotten, and the acts of violence you refer to seem to be the natural reaction likely to recur in China when- ever foreign intrusion is pushed too far and is threatening, as now, to assume extended self-dominion. That, however, does not affect the curiosity of the point of view I refer to.—
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