My Country and My People

by Lin Yutang

She is greater than the lame propaganda and petulance of all her returned students, greater than the hypocrisy, shame and greed of all her petty officials and turncoat generals and fence-riding revolutionists, greater than her wars and pestilence, greater than her dirt and poverty and famines. For she has survived them all. Amidst wars and pestilence, surrounded by her poor children and grandchildren, Merry Old China quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I see her real strength. She quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I detect at times a mere laziness to change and at others a conservatism that savours of haughtiness. Laziness or haughtiness, which? I do not know. But somewhere in her soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!

northern Chinese, acclimatized to simple thinking and hard living, tall and stalwart, hale, hearty and humorous, onion-eating and fun-loving, children of nature, who are in every way more Mongolic and more conservative than the conglomeration of peoples near Shanghai and who suggest nothing of their loss of racial vigour. They are the Honan boxers, the Shantung bandits and the imperial brigands who have furnished China with all the native imperial dynasties, the raw material from which the characters of Chinese novels of wars and adventure are drawn.

Down the south-east coast, south of the Yangtse, one meets a different type, inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds' nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres , and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends, offsprings of the cultured Chinese families who crossed the Yangtse with their books and paintings during the end of the Ch'in Dynasty, when China was overrun by barbaric invaders.

the northerner is essentially a conqueror and the southerner is essentially a trader, and that of all the imperial brigands who have founded Chinese dynasties, none have come from south of the Yangtse.

The Chinese capacity for endurance in suffering is enormous.

Life with the Chinese seems to move on a slower, quieter level, the level of sedate living, not the level of action and adventure, with corresponding mental and moral habits of a peaceful and negative character. This makes it easily understandable why periodic conquests from the North were inevitable.

the rural mode of life was always regarded as the ideal.

to be close to nature is to have physical and moral health. Man in the country does not degenerate; only man in the cities does.

this family ideal of industry and frugality and living the simple life persisted and was recognized as the soundest moral heritage of the nation. The family system somehow wove itself into the rural pattern of life and could not be separated from it. Simplicity was a great word among the Greeks, and simplicity, shunp'o , was a great word among the Chinese.

the Chinese, as a people, avoided the dangers of civic deterioration by a natural distrust of civilization and by keeping close to primitive habits of life.

Apart from the English, few nations have laid such stress on character in their ideal of education and manhood as the Chinese.

the Chinese word for “character” brings to us the vision of a mature man of mellow temperament, retaining an equanimity of mind under all circumstances, with a complete understanding not only of himself but of his fellow-men.

A mellow understanding of life and of human nature is, and always has been, the Chinese ideal of character, and from that understanding other qualities are derived, such as pacifism, contentment, calm and strength of endurance which distinguish the Chinese character. Strength of character is really strength of the mind, according to the Confucianists. When a man has cultivated these virtues through mental discipline, we say he has developed his character.

fatalism is a great source of peace and contentment.

(i) sanity, (2) simplicity, (3) love of nature, (4) patience, (5) indifference, (6) old roguery, (7) fecundity, (8) industry, (9) frugality, (10) love of family life, (u) pacifism, (12) contentment, (13) humour, (14) conservatism, and (15) sensuality.

Too much mental sanity often clips imagination of its wings and deprives the race of its moments of blissful madness; pacifism can become a vice of cowardice; patience, again, may bring about a morbid tolerance of evil; conservatism may at times be a mere synonym for sloth and laziness,

They suggest the qualities of a civilization built for strength and endurance rather than for progress and conquest. For it is a civilization which enables man to find peace under any circumstance, and when a man is at peace with himself, he cannot understand the youthful enthusiasm for progress and reform. It is the old culture of an old people who know life for what it is worth and do not strive for the unattainable.

The Chinese people have put up with more tyranny, anarchy and misrule than any Western people will ever put up with, and seem to have regarded them as part of the laws of nature.

Taoism, in theory and practice, means a certain roguish nonchalance, a confounded and devastating scepticism, a mocking laughter at the futility of all human interference and the failure of all human institutions, laws, government and marriage, and a certain disbelief in idealism, not so much because of lack of energy as because of a lack of faith. It is a philosophy which counteracts the positivism of Confucius, and serves as a safety- valve for the imperfections of a Confucian society. For the Confucian outlook on life is positive, while the Taoistic outlook is negative, and out of the alchemy of these two strange elements emerges the immortal thing we call Chinese character.(So

This is the surface struggle between conservatism and radicalism in China. Its outcome will depend largely upon Japanese and European politics, for no mere argument will settle the question.

There is no doubt that the Chinese are in love with life, in love with this earth, and will not forsake it for an invisible heaven.

Confucianism, strictly speaking, was not a religion: it had certain feelings toward life and the universe that bordered on the religious feeling, but it was not a religion. There are such great souls in the world who cannot get interested in the life hereafter or in the question of immortality or in the world of spirits in general. That type of philosophy could never satisfy the Germanic races, and certainly not the Hebrews, but it satisfied the Chinese race in general. We shall see below how it really never quite satisfied even the Chinese, and how that deficiency was made up for by a Taoist or Buddhist supernaturalism. But this supernaturalism seems in China to be separated in general from the question of the ideal of life: it represents rather the spiritual by-plays and outlets that merely help to make life endurable.

Logically no man should get married, but practically all men should, so Confucianism advises marriage. Logically all men should be equal, but practically all men aren't, so Confucianism teaches authority and obedience. Logically men and women should not be different, but practically they are, so Confucianism teaches the differentiation of the sexes.

The Chinese are a nation of individualists. They are family-minded, not social- minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. It is curious that the word “society” does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought. In the Confucian social and political philosophy we see a direct transition from the family, chia , to the state, kuo , as successive stages of human organization, as in such sayings as “When the family is orderly, then the state is peaceful,” or “Put the family in order and rule the state in peace.”

There is no church and no church community. The Chinese religiously abstain from talking politics; they do not cast votes, and they have no club-house debates on politics. They do not indulge in sport, which binds human beings together, and which is the essence of the English and American social life.

He meant the moral training in the family as the basis for general moral training, and he planned that from the general moral training a society should emerge which would live happily and harmoniously together.

A younger civilization may be keen on making progress, but an old civilization, having seen naturally a great deal of life, is keen only on living.

So, in my mind, I pictured the Saviour of China. I would believe in a revolution, any revolution, and in a party, any party, that would replace the present government by Face, Fate and Favour by a government by law. These three have made the rule of Justice and the weeding out of official corruption Impossible. The only reason why official corruption remains is that we have never shot the officials, not one of them. We couldn't so long as these three goddesses still remain. The only way to deal with corruption in the officials is just to shoot them. The matter is really as simple as that.

That time will come, but it requires a change of ideology; the family-minded Chinese must be changed into social-minded Chinese, and the pet ideas, age-old, of face, favour and privilege and official success and robbing the nation to glorify the family must be overthrown. The process will be slow and laborious, how slow and labrious the preceding study of the whole mentality and cultural tradition of the race has shown. But the process is already at work, invisible, penetrating the upper and lower social strata, and as inevitable as dawn. For a time yet there will still be ugliness and pain, but after a while there will be calm and beauty and simplicity, the calm and beauty and simplicity which distinguished old China. But more than that, there will be justice, too. To that people of the Land of Justice, we of the present generation shall seem but like the children of the twilight. I ask for patience from the friends of China, not from my countrymen, for they have too much of it. And I ask for hope from my countrymen, for to hope is to live.