Chinese Civilization

Abstract

THE reader who takes up this volume, expecting to find it an ordinary popular sketch of Chinese life and manners, similar to dozens of others which have gone by and dozens which are doubtless yet to come, will be totally mistaken. For in place of a colourless account of China—if any account of that wonderful country with its marvellous civilization could be written wholly devoid of colour,—and a jejune outline of the peculiarities of the Chinese, the reader will find here one of the most closely reasoned, original, and powerful defences of the Chinese social and political system that have ever been published in Europe. Writers of eminence, indeed, there have been who have selected some special peculiarity of Chinese religion, society, or politics, and have held it up to the West as worthy of imitation, and as a mark of profound wisdom; but M. Sîmon defends Chinese polity and civilization all along the line. He lived in China as a French official in the critical years succeeding the war of 1861–62; he travelled widely, and he observed keenly. This volume was not written in the first flush of pleasure and surprise at the strange and wonderful things he saw about him; he returned home, and has had ample time to correct first impressions, to review conclusions formed on the spot by the light of subsequent experience and knowledge, and years afterwards he is able to tell to the West that, as of old, the wise men still come from the East, and that the highest product of the human mind is to be found in the civilization of China. The most civilized State is that “in which on a given area the largest possible number of human beings are able to procure and distribute most equally amongst themselves the most well-being, liberty, justice, and security.” Measured by this standard, China is pronounced to be the most highly civilized country in the world, and the Chinese have this peculiarity—that, while modern nations are only the collateral successors of those of antiquity, China is the direct heir of the generations which created it. “Its history shows the phenomena of heredity in regular succession, neither modified nor obstructed by change of medium, with the evolution of events and ideas—an evolution as regular as that of living beings, freely proceeding unshaken and untroubled by any exterior influence, by which its direction might have been altered or its development retarded; and it is here, I repeat, that we find the deep and original interest of China, and perhaps also the secret of her extraordinary longevity.” The book is a study of the progress and organization, in short of the civilization, attained by humanity under such conditions of liberty and, development. The student in this case is full of love of his subject, and this no doubt is a great advantage, although it has its disadvantages also, M. Sîmon tells us of a land flowing with milk and honey, moral as well as material. Nothing that he has seen is inharmonious or out of place; everything is for the best, and has had the best effects. Chinese civilization is not a dead, rotten branch, as it is usually represented to be, but a living active power for good; in fact, “nowhere in the world is there such proof of force and vitality“ as in the Chinese character and in Chinese civilization.

China: its Social, Political, and Religious Life.

From the French of G. Eug. Sîmon. (London: Sampson Low and Co., 1887.)