Project Gutenberg #13940
The Problem of China
Bertrand Russell
1922Russell's study of China after his year of lecturing there: its history, its dealings with Japan and the Western powers, and the contrast between Chinese and Western civilization.
Project Gutenberg #13940 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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an ancient civilization which is not industrial. All this is likely to pass away, under the pressure of the Japanese, and of European and American financiers. Their art is already perishing, and being replaced by crude imitations of second-rate European pictures. Most of the Chinese who have had a European education are quite incapable of seeing any beauty in native painting, and merely observe contemptuously that it does not obey the laws of perspective.
The obvious charm which the tourist finds in China cannot be preserved; it must perish at the touch of industrialism. But perhaps something may be preserved, something of the ethical qualities in which China is supreme, and which the modern world most desperately needs. Among these qualities I place first the pacific temper, which seeks to settle disputes on grounds of justice rather than by force. It remains to be seen whether the West will allow this temper to persist, or will force it to give place, in self-defence, to a frantic militarism like that to which Japan has been driven.
FOOTNOTES:
[96] This vexes the foreigners, who are attempting to establish a very severe Press censorship in Shanghai. See "The Shanghai Printed Matter Bye-Law." Hollington K. Tong, Review of the Far East, April 16, 1922.