Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/401

Rh adjust her relations with the world, they wish to plunge at once into anarchy. They are too willing to move because they do not know China, while the literati are unwilling to move because they do not know the world. China needs men who know the institutions of both China and the west, who see clearly the foundations of all real civilizations, and hence can help their nation forward.

From the very beginning of foreign intercourse with China, men have not been wanting whose vision was clear and disinterested enough to lead them to devote untiring energy to dispel the darkness of China's ignorance and superstition. With the opening of the nineteenth century the missionary societies began trying to find an entrance for Christianity and modern civilization into the Celestial Empire, but they were obliged, on account of the repellent forces still operative, to content themselves with such work as could be carried on among the emigrant Chinese in the vicinity of the Malay Peninsula, so that during the first period of large commercial intercourse with China (1677-1841), there was no modern educational effort within the confines of the empire. Through the work of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, founded in 1831, a beginning of western education within the borders of China was made by the printed page, while as yet the founding of schools within the country was impracticable.

Parallel with official China's arrogance with regard to trade was literary China's proud confidence in the axiom, "What Confucius teaches is true; what is contrary to his teaching is false; what he does not teach is unnecessary." "Confucius lived 2,400 years ago. Theirs was an assurance rooted in undisputed tradition, and fortified by the accumulated conservatism of two and a half millenniums of undisturbed conformity." The problem was how to teach a nation that had no desire to learn; no desire, not from lack of interest in learning so much as because they believed themselves to have a monopoly of valuable knowledge.

Effective contact of western thought with this colossus of conceited ignorance began on the cession of Hongkong to the British in 1842, when the British government assumed responsibility for the education of the Chinese population of the island. Though numbering only 5,000 at the start, it has since multiplied to 270,000, and considerably more than half a million Chinese pass annually between Hongkong and various parts of the mainland, so that the importance of Hongkong as a distributing center of ideas as well as of material products must not be underestimated, though a frank observer is somewhat disappointed at the inadequate way in which the opportunities for higher education are being improved.