The Problem of China | Page 7

to belittle modern times shall be put to death with their
relations.... Thirty days after the publication of this edict, those who
have not burned their books shall be branded and sent to forced labour.
The books which shall not be proscribed are those of medicine and
pharmacy, of divination ..., of agriculture and of arboriculture. As for
those who desire to study the laws and ordinances, let them take the
officials as masters. (Cordier, op. cit. i. p. 203.)
It will be seen that the First Emperor was something of a Bolshevik.
The Chinese literati, naturally, have blackened his memory. On the
other hand, modern Chinese reformers, who have experienced the
opposition of old-fashioned scholars, have a certain sympathy with his
attempt to destroy the innate conservatism of his subjects. Thus Li Ung
Bing[6] says:--
No radical change can take place in China without encountering the
opposition of the literati. This was no less the case then than it is now.
To abolish feudalism by one stroke was a radical change indeed.
Whether the change was for the better or the worse, the men of letters
took no time to inquire; whatever was good enough for their fathers
was good enough for them and their children. They found numerous
authorities in the classics to support their contention and these they

freely quoted to show that Shih Huang Ti was wrong. They continued
to criticize the government to such an extent that something had to be
done to silence the voice of antiquity ... As to how far this decree (on
the burning of the books) was enforced, it is hard to say. At any rate, it
exempted all libraries of the government, or such as were in possession
of a class of officials called Po Szu or Learned Men. If any real damage
was done to Chinese literature under the decree in question, it is safe to
say that it was not of such a nature as later writers would have us
believe. Still, this extreme measure failed to secure the desired end, and
a number of the men of letters in Han Yang, the capital, was
subsequently buried alive.
This passage is written from the point of view of Young China, which
is anxious to assimilate Western learning in place of the dead
scholarship of the Chinese classics. China, like every other civilized
country, has a tradition which stands in the way of progress. The
Chinese have excelled in stability rather than in progress; therefore
Young China, which perceives that the advent of industrial civilization
has made progress essential to continued national existence, naturally
looks with a favourable eye upon Shih Huang Ti's struggle with the
reactionary pedants of his age. The very considerable literature which
has come down to us from before his time shows, in any case, that his
edict was somewhat ineffective; and in fact it was repealed after
twenty-two years, in 191. B.C.
After a brief reign by the son of the First Emperor, who did not inherit
his capacity, we come to the great Han dynasty, which reigned from
206 B.C. to A.D. 220. This was the great age of Chinese
imperialism--exactly coeval with the great age of Rome. In the course
of their campaigns in Northern India and Central Asia, the Chinese
were brought into contact with India, with Persia, and even with the
Roman Empire.[7] Their relations with India had a profound effect
upon their religion, as well as upon that of Japan, since they led to the
introduction of Buddhism. Relations with Rome were chiefly promoted
by the Roman desire for silk, and continued until the rise of
Mohammedanism. They had little importance for China, though we
learn, for example, that about A.D. 164 a treatise on astronomy was

brought to China from the Roman Empire.[8] Marcus Aurelius appears
in Chinese history under the name An Tun, which stands for
Antoninus.
It was during this period that the Chinese acquired that immense
prestige in the Far East which lasted until the arrival of European
armies and navies in the nineteenth century. One is sometimes tempted
to think that the irruption of the white man into China may prove
almost as ephemeral as the raids of Huns and Tartars into Europe. The
military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as
we are tempted to think; and our superiority in civilization is a mere
delusion. Our histories, which treat the Mediterranean as the centre of
the universe, give quite a wrong perspective. Cordier,[9] dealing with
the campaigns and voyages of discovery which took place under the
Han dynasty, says:--
The Occidentals have singularly contracted the field of the history of
the world when they have grouped around the people of Israel, Greece,
and Rome the little that they