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National Geographic : 1900 Aug
Contents
PROBLEMS IN CHINA as affording a discontented subject people opportunities to combine against their rulers. It will be evident that to march armies suffi ciently large to subdue 400,000,000 people through such a country armies almost all of whose munitions of war would have to be trans ported from the coast-would be a physical impossibility. Then the Chinese, when hard pressed, are capable of using means of defense against which the best equipped European armies, led by the ablest generals, would be as powerless as if they were naked sav ages. On one occasion the inhabitants of the northern province of Honan, being unable to meet an invading army in the field, " cut through the dikes of the Yellow River, ' China's Sorrow,' and flooded the whole country." The invaders escaped to the mountains, but upward of 200,000 natives perished in the flood, and the city of Kaifeng was destroyed. Another time, "in the first period of the Manchu dynasty, the Chinese had the patriotism and resolution to lay waste their own coasts as far as twenty leagues up the country, and destroy villages and cities, burn woods and cornfields-in fact, to create an immense desert-in order to annihilate the power of a for midable pirate, who for a long time had held in check the whole strength of the empire." What this extraordinary people have done more than once in their stress they would do again under similar circumstances. But are they united and animated by the single desire of driving out the " foreign devils " ? It does not seem to me that there is any evidence of this other than the mere assertion of writers who have apparently taken it for granted. A united purpose impelling the ignorant myriads of Chinese, divided in speech and in habits of life and separated by vast distances, is inconceivable. Hatred of the for eigners is, I believe, in large measure confined to the ruling classes, whose powers and privileges are threatened by the new religion and the reforms which it brings with it. The Chinese magistrate who sells justice to the highest bidder naturally hates the consular court. It is they and the literati, or educated class, from whose ranks they are drawn, who foment these disturbances; who placard the cities with inflammatory invitations to rise up against the foreigners ; who circu late scandals about the Christian rites, similar to the assertions made and believed in France and Austria about the Jews. That they are able to arouse the common people to action here and there, especially in the coast provinces and in large cities and their neighborhoods, recent events have proved. It is possible, but hardly conceivable
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