The Problem of China

The Problem of China by Bertrand Russell

The Problem of China opens Bertrand Russell's argument that China's fate matters to the entire world, since the Chinese constitute roughly a quarter of humanity and their development over the coming centuries will affect everyone. Russell frames China's situation through economic, political, and cultural questions, insisting the cultural question matters most: whether China can preserve its distinctive virtues — instinctive happiness, artistic sensibility, courtesy, tolerance — while acquiring the technical and organizational strength needed to survive contact with aggressive foreign powers, or whether it must adopt the West's restless, efficiency-obsessed, exploitative habits and thereby lose what makes it valuable. He rejects the idea that Chinese civilization is inferior to Europe's, arguing instead that the West's apparent superiority rests solely on greater proficiency in "the art of killing," not on any greater wisdom or goodness. He recounts a formative experience on the Volga in 1920, watching Bolshevik intellectuals argue theory while ignoring the silent suffering of Russian peasants, which left him distrustful of any ideology that treats human beings as raw material to be reshaped by force — a suspicion he carries into his account of China. Russell then sketches Chinese history: the legendary Emperors Yao and Shun, the Shu-King, the fierce and shifting Yellow River, the succession of dynasties from Chou through Han, Tang, the Mongol conquest under Jenghis Khan and Kublai Khan, the Ming and Manchu dynasties, and the unreliable population statistics across centuries. He identifies three features that most distinguish traditional China: ideographic writing, Confucian ethics replacing formal religion among the educated, and government by literati selected through competitive examination. He discusses Confucius's practical, this-worldly ethics, filial piety and its political consequences, and the eventual ossification of the examination system into the sterile "Eight Legs" essay form. He then narrates China's nineteenth-century humiliation by Western powers: Lord Macartney's rebuffed 1793 embassy, Emperor Chien Lung's famous reply to King George III, the Opium War of 1840, the destruction of the Summer Palace in 1856-60, the Boxer Rising of 1900 and its indemnity (partly redirected by America to fund Chinese education), and the resulting loss of tariff and fiscal autonomy through unequal treaties governing customs and the salt tax. He argues these humiliations stemmed purely from China's military weakness, not any real inferiority. Turning to internal politics, Russell describes the 1911 revolution, Sun Yat Sen, Yuan Shih-k'ai's presidency and failed attempt to become Emperor, and the subsequent chaos of warlordism under rival Tuchuns such as Chang-tso-lin and Wu-Pei-Fu, contrasting the relatively bloodless nature of Chinese civil conflict with Europe's far more destructive wars. He praises the reformist Canton government under Sun Yat Sen and criticizes British support for corrupt concessions there. He profiles "Young China" — the modern-educated intelligentsia — as China's best hope, distinguishing an older generation who struggled to break from Confucian tradition from a younger, more self-confident generation shaped by new schools. He warns against China absorbing the West's "mechanistic outlook," visible alike in Imperialism, Bolshevism, and the Y.M.C.A., and praises the tolerant, non-domineering spirit he finds in Taoist thought and Chinese art. Russell then turns to Japan, tracing its historical borrowing from Chinese civilization, the Meiji Restoration of 1867-8 as a deliberate revival of ancient forms combined with Western military technique, the manufactured modern cult of Mikado-worship, the real governing power of the Genro (Elder Statesmen) behind the constitutional facade, and the closure of Japan to foreigners after early conflicts with Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and traders. He stresses that Japan and China, despite both being called "yellow races," are culturally and politically distinct, with Japan's feudal, militaristic background producing an assertive nationalism unlike China's Confucian tradition of security and compromise. The final chapters detail Japan's escalating aggression toward China: victory in the 1894-5 Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 secured partly through the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, annexation of Korea, railway monopolies in Manchuria obtained through episodes like the Fa-ku-Men incident, the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, and Japan's wartime seizure of German rights in Shantung, secretly endorsed by Britain and France in exchange for Japanese support, then controversially ratified at Versailles over Chinese protest. Russell also covers China's manipulated entry into the First World War, the confiscation and expulsion of Germans from China after the Armistice, Japanese intervention in Siberia against the Bolsheviks, and the partial concessions won at the Washington Conference, including the restoration of Shantung and the (largely symbolic) reaffirmation of China's independence and the Open Door.

By Bertrand Russell · First published 1920 · Genre: Political Text, History, Philosophy · 15 chapters · 81,453 words

First lines

A European lately arrived in China, if he is of a receptive and reflective disposition, finds himself confronted with a number of very puzzling questions, for many of which the problems of Western Europe will not have prepared him. Russian problems, it is true, have important affinities with those of China, but they have also important differences; moreover they are decidedly less complex. Chinese problems, even if they affected no one outside China, would be of vast importance, since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries. This makes it important, to Europe and America almost as much as to Asia, that there should be an intelligent understanding of the questions raised by China, even if, as yet, definite answers are difficult to give.

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Philosophy · Politics · East Asia · China · Modernization · Colonialism · Imperialism · Capitalism · Communism · Marxism · Socialism · Democracy

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