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“...THE CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK - / BEING "The Christian Movement in China" (THIRD YEAR OF ISSUE) EDITED BY Rev. O. H. BONDFIELD SHANGHAI CHRISTIAN LITERATURE SOCIETY FOR CHINA 19 12...”
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“...CHAPTER L GENERAL SURVEY, 191U (A) Review and Outlook. (B) Leading Events in 1911. By the Rt Rev* Bishop J. W. Bashford, D-D-, LL.D. A* Review and Outlooks IT is impossible for us to duplicate for the China Mission Year Book of 1912 the brilliant review of Chinese events which characterized Dr. Arthur Smith's introduction to the opening volume, or the full and detailed information which characterized Dr. MacGillivray's review in that of 1911. Indeed we have deliberately abandoned the effort to char- acterize in detail the movements now taking place because these movements are not yet sufficiently developed to reveal their final outcome. Placing as a supplement to our paper, therefore, the barest outline of the events of the year, we aim in the present review to put hope into the hearts of helpers. But times of danger like the present demand well grounded hope, not mere illusion. In order, therefore, to strengthen our hearts for the struggles which are before us, let us attempt to discover...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. Egypt. This fact alone makes China notable among the nations of the earth. (2) We have in China the strange phenomenon of an arrested civilization. Chinese civiliza- tion, beginning before the founding of Greece or Rome, advanced until it reached substantially its present stage about 500 B.C. and then halted until 1900 A.D. Sub- stantially the same type of tools for hoeing, digging and plowing, substantially the same methods of irrigating the soil, substantially the same method of making roads and building bridges, substantially the same style of boats and houses as prevailed in 500 B.C. prevailed in 1900 A.D. Families were organized on the old basis of complete parental authority down to as late as the present generation. The government was theoretically a pure despotism from 2,000 B.C. down to the death of the late Empress Dowager. Slavery and polygamy have existed in China during all these years. The compass was known twenty-six hundred years before Christ...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. According to many competent western writers, there are traces of a connection between early Chinese civilization and the civilization of western Asia. Other writers, however, hold that China's civilization is indigenous. While the weight of authority is decidedly in favour' of the earlier view, it matters little which theory we adopt as to the proximate cause of Chinese civilization. Either there is an historical connection between the Chinese and those receiving God's original revelation, or else the Chinese learned the invisible things of God from the things which were seen, even His eternal power and godhead. The cause of China's early civilization, therefore, was communion with God and the reception of life and light from Him either through her early connection with the nations of western Asia, or else, through Him who is the true light which lighteth every man coming into the world. II. Causes of the Arrest of China's Civilization. But a second and more...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. produces similar results to-day. Moreover, isolation results in inbreeding, and inbreeding results in infertility. The Chinese soon discovered the dangers of physical inbreeding and guarded against them by prohibiting marriages within the clan. But, alas, the Chinese made no provision against the infertility of intellectual and moral inbreeding. Indeed, the poison worked to such an extent in her veins that long before the Great Wall was built China had lost all contact with foreign nations, and the Great Wall was only the out- ward expression of Chinese exclusion policy. Here then, in the isolation of the Chinese for perhaps thirty-five hundred years through geographical causes we have one cause of the arrest of Chinese civilization. Second, China not only lost in a large measure her contact with the rest of the world through physical causes, but she also lost in some measure her contact with God through spiritual en uses. These processes of decreasing spiritual...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. Confucius feared all communication with the unseen world, and advised his people, aside from the customary sacrifices to ancestral spirits, to have as little connection as possible with the unseen realms. He was indeed no denier of the supreme God. Rather he seems clearly to believe in a supreme God and in an over-ruling Providence for himself. But certainly he was an agnostic in his teaching in. regard to such a God; and this agnosticism contributed to the neglect of the worship of the true God, and discouraged any earnest search for a knowledge of him. Confucius is so colossal a figure that we rank him with the forces of nature in his influence upon the Chinese people. Summing up the causes of the arrest of Chinese civilization Ave may say, therefore, that Chinese civilization was paralyzed through geographical isolation, through the people losing in some measure their contact with God, through disregard of such light as they had, and especially through the...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. proverb, "Of ten thousand evils lewdness is the chief; of ten hundred virtues filial piety is the first." While the Chinese are far from sainthood in social purity, they have main- tained the death penalty for adultery for many centuries; and they never fell into that moral perversion which would have led them to sanctify lust by making it a part of worship, as did Greece and Rome, and Babylon and Egypt, and even Judea at times, as does India yet. Once more, Chinese parents have observed more fully than any other people the first maxim of all sound learning: ''Teach your sons in childhood that which they must practise in age." The father is not simply the progenitor but the teacher and companion of his son, bringing him up at his side and training him in the trade or industry which the son must practise as a man. Surely if the partial, disobedience of the Chinese was one cause of the arrest of their civilization, their partial obedience to such light as they...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. the Chinese than other nations rendered to the true light which lightethevery man coming into the world; and finally the awakening of China is due to her contact with western nations partially Christianized, and above all to the Christian missionaries. Since, therefore, the new light and life which have come to China owe their origin to Christianity, the church must not repudiate her offspring. We may well be anxious for the outcome, for the Christian church has .not realized the urgency of the divine summons and has not sufficiently helped the Chinese to prepare for the crises which confront her, but Almighty God is back of the awakening in China. V. Chinese Institutions and Recent History. A study of three institutions of China and of her more recent history furnishes added assurance that God has been strangely preparing this people for a more democratic form of government and organization of society. God in His wisdom and divine grace has used not only Protestant...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. inefficient clan leaders and keep to the front their strong, representative man. Thus, the masses of the people enjoy to a considerable extent local self-government. * (2) Village Government* Moreover, the domocratic spirit often operates in the selection of the headmen of the tithes and the hundreds for the wards and the villages. Williams, in his Middle Kingdom, vol. 1, pages 482, 488, 500, speaks of each hundred or village selecting its headman in a sort of town meeting; of the principal men in the village exercis- ing the power of recall when the headman no longer repre- sents them; of the large influence of these headmen because they represent popular sentiment; and of the value of these representatives of the people in resisting the claims of the higher officials who receive their offices by appointment from above. Williams shows further that the principle of local self-government in some form prevails in all parts of China; that it has existed from a...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. ment and vastly more influence in the control of the business interests of the city than has the political government. The members of the guild settle almost all their personal and commercial disputes according to guild laws. They often enact trade regulations, settle general trade disputes, and perform with equal readiness the functions of a chamber of commerce or of a municipal council. The guilds often levy their own taxes, support fire brigades, provide their own standards of weights and measure, fix the rates of commission, determine their settling days, so that the combined guilds regulate and control the internal trade of the Empire- The laws of the guilds are read in the courts of China as if they were part of statutory law, and these guild laws determine the decisions of the courts. Mr. Morse on page 1, says, In China we have had for centuries a theoretically autocratic government working through a bureaucracy, but '' the people have lived their own...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. her defence, the Empress Dowager, full of superstition, fell a victim to the superstitions teachings of the Boxers and trusted that through them the gods of China would sweep the hated foreigners from the Empire. A fair reading of history compels the verdict that the Empress Dowager and the Manchu leaders desired the complete annihilation of the foreigners, and the total banishment of all foreign influence from China. This was no sudden or irrational change in Chinese policy, but was simply the logical carrying out of the exclusion policy, which had prevailed in China for more than two thousand years. Li Hung-chang doubtless would have been glad to see the Empress' dream fulfilled, but he had been round the world and knew the power of the for- eigners. Moreover, he had little faith in the gods of China. Hence, he and such supporters as Yuan Shih-kai and Chang Chih-tung and Jung Lu feared from the start that Boxerism was hopeless, and indeed advised the Empress...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. support, and hope through that nation to found a new dynasty more fully resting upon popular support than had the Manchu Dynasty for the last one hundred years. Hence, before his retirement, Prince Chun had pushed forward the opium reform to the best of his ability and in a manner which the London Times said challenged the admiration of the world. He was also pushing rapidly the movement towards constitutional government. Moreover, he took the progressive side in suppressing the plague. Even the revolutionists, by following in his footsteps, recognize that he adopted a wise policy in attempting to secure foreign loans; and his successors will yet follow in his footsteps in connecting the provinces by a national railway system. He was in advance of his times in his decree abolishing slavery. Indeed, the criticism which one of the most enlightened statesmen of Japan made on Prince Chun's administration was that China under him was moving so rapidly that she was...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. the universe, which are the laws of God, usually the faculties of a race are not awakened to that degree of activity, which leads to great inventions and enables the people to master the material resources of the earth, until communion with God has first quickened the spiritual nature and through it the moral and intellectual faculties of that race. All writers upon civilization recognize that it consists of the balanced and orderly development of the moral and intellectual and artistic and material interests of mankind. In the divine order, this progress originates in the quicken- ing spiritual life of the race. Nevertheless, it is possible for a pagan people coming into contact with an imperfect Christian civilization to accept such portions of this half- Christian, half-pagan civilization as pleases it and leave the rest. Thus the American Indians, brought into contact with the blessings and the evils of the half-Christian civili- zation which the white men...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. dictatorship of Napoleon and the progress and reaction of subsequent years to the republic of 1870. What right, therefore, have the western nations to expect Chinese leaders to prepare four hundred million people to pass from oriental despotism to a Chinese republic by a few weeks session of an assembly at Nanking ? Summing up our conclusions in a sentence, our review of Chinese history shows on the one hand that processes which have been at work for centuries have suddenly culminated, and that a new era has been inaugurated which will profoundly affect one-fifth of the human race, while on the other hand the present condition of the Chinese is such that only those living in a fool's paradise, and asleep in that, can dream that the proclamation of a republic will inaugurate the millenium. VII. Missionary Polity. What, therefore, shall we do ? First let us urge upon our governments in the home lands that they abstain from all intervention, and above all, that...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. Christian principles to help shape the government and policy of the nation. What new effort does the crisis demand of the mission- aries ? Is it not proof of our past providential guidance that help has been called for so largely along the exact lines upon which we have been doing our work, that is along lines of hospital work, of Christian literature, of education, and even of evangelistic work; for there has been a notable demand for the preaching of the Gospel among the soldiers of the revolution. Certainly all of us now recognize the providential preparation which we have already made in hospitals and in Christian literature, in Christian schools and colleges. Our chief mistake has been our lack of faith. We did not foresee the nearness and the greatness of the upheaval, and we have not made sufficient preparation for such a time as this. For instance, we have ready for the public service of China to-day only a handful of thoroughly trained Christian young...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. Cabinet was organized in the summer of 1911. The Tszechengyuan adjourned to meet again in the fall of 1911. Jan. J./f, Meeting in Chang Su-ho's garden at Shanghai. Formally inaugurated the queue movement. The queue as a badge of subserviency to the Manchus has been removed by from one-third to two-thirds of the population in the leading cities of the Empire. Feb. 13, Imperial Rescript commanding reform, and retrenchment in official expenditures. Feb. 2/fy Imperial Rescript abrogating torture in criminal trials. March Li Lien-ying, forty years chief eunuch of late Dowager Empress died. For many years he was the chief upholder of official corruption in the Empire. Mar. Sheng Iisuan huai negotiates the loan of 10,000,000 Yen for the Yuchangpu from the Yokohama Specie Bank. April 3, Imperial Decree proclaiming the Emperor through his representative the Prince Regent, Supreme Commander of the Army and the Navy. April 5, Plague Conference opens at Mukden and con-...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. During the summer of .1911 almost unprecedented floods in the Yangtze Valley caused by excessive rains in June and July, add greatly to the political disaffection. Aug. l2/f, The Szechuan Railway Bureau whose immense profits through contracts were diverted by the nationalization scheme inaugurated a general strike at Chengtu. Sept. /.{, The disorder in Szechuan became so great that British and American Consuls urgently advised all missionaries to repair immediately to places of safety. The Prince Regent appoints Tsin Chen-hsuan the popular former viceroy of Szechuan to take all the military forces in the province and Tnan Fang and go to to Szechuan and arrange the railway difficulties. Both men are directed to use the utmost clemency in dealing with the people. Sept. 10, The Imperial bodyguard at Peking reviewed by Prince Chun in person, who presents the guard his own colors-an almost unprecedented glorification of the army. Manoeuvres of the northern army on...”
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“...1() CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK. former Manehu. The Viceroy Sung Shao commits suicide. Nov. 11, Wu Ting-fang published an appeal to Prince Chun (Regent) to abdicate. Nov. IS, Yuan Shih-kai reaches Peking. Nov. 9-13, Swatow, Chefoo, Amoy, and the provinces of Yunnan, and Kay ei chow pass over to the Revolutionists. Nov. H, Mukden proclaimed a Committee of Safety with Viceroy Chao Erh-yeng as president. Nov. 1JH Shantung proclaimed itself a republic with the Governor Sun Pao-chi as president. Nor. The throne swears allegience to the new con- stitution of nineteen articles which had been formulated by the Tszechengyuan. Early in November Viceroy Chang Jeu-chun with the authority of the throne announced that the people of Nanking might go over to the Revolutionists. General Chang Hsun in command of the troops at Nanking resisted the Decree and imprisoned the Viceroy and declared that he and his men would die in the ditch before surrendering Nanking. Dec. 1, General Chang Hsun abandons Nanking with...”
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“...CHAPTER IL GOVERNMENT CHANGES AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS. By Sheldon Ridge, Editor of The National Review/' I. CHAPTER headings are not always reliable guides to the contents of the chapters over which they stand, but that defect can hardly be charged with reference to this chapter in this issue of The China Mission Year Book.77 During the past year China has passed from the heights of despotism, across the valley of revolution, to the sunlit slopes of democracy, and in reviewing the events of the year it becomes increasingly evident that many an apparently isolated and insignificant fact had a close and highly organic connexion with tendencies, movements and forces the combined and cumulative effect of which was only seen in the final declaration of the articulate element of the population that it would no longer have this dynasty to reign over it... In the following paragraphs there may be a tendency to over-interpret, but the remarkably complete network of the revolutionary organization...”
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“...and, provincial delegates tried to bring pressure to bear, and, rather than give the appearance of acting under compulsion, the Prince Regent postponed the matter. On the 15th April a fairly accurate draft of what ultimately turned out to be the actual constitution of the Cabinet was published in a Peking newspaper. The demand for the calling of a special session of the Assembly was getting to be rather annoying, so in order to turn the flank of this movement it was considered *"Tlie China Mission Year Book 1911, p.39....”