To the Editor of the "Norta-Cuina Dairy News."
Sm,—A large part of the Peking community has been following with interest and amusement Mr. Eugene Chen's pyrotechnic career in your correspondence columns. Most of the older residents of Peking, who remember how Mr. Chen annoyed this community for a time with his impertinent personalities and finally entertained it when his conceit finally carried him into the realm of impertinent absurdities, are grateful to you for having given him enough space in your columns for him to run the same course. If he hasn't commenced to be amusing to you yet, let him go on; we can assure you that he will take advantage of any opportunity with which you provide him to be insolent until his insolence is finally so grotesque that he will be highly diverting and his contributions a real boon to your circulation manager.
The only sad feature of it all, and the only reason which might prompt you to cut him short, is consideration for many of the kindly and sincere gentlemen whose political careers are involved in the fate of the Canton Government. Mr. Eugene Chen may have no connexion with that Government now, but unfortunately for Canton it is generally known that he has recently acted as English secretary to Dr. Sun Yat-sen and that he was also assisting in the work of the Canton Information Bureau; so that it will be very generally assumed that Mr. Chen still represents Canton. Nothing kills a cause in China so quickly as ridicule, and while Mr. Chen is making a buffoon of himself with his pointless personalities, the preening of his literary plumage and his verbal fireworks, he is also making Canton absurd. There is something sad in this because some of the people in Canton, can assure you, are painfully serious and deserve a better fate than to be coupled in the public mind with Eugene Chen, through the publication of his word orgies.
Perhaps you would like to have an explanation of how a man of Mr. Chen's apparently good education and wide reading can exercise so little restraint over his pen and allow it to lead him into literary excesses which are bound to discredit him in any sober-minded community. You will be distressed, after all that has already appeared in your correspondence columns upon a much tortured subject, to learn that it is nothing more than a common manifestation of a certain phase of the Chinese mind within certain limited classes of Chinese. Like most things in the psychology of the Chinese it is indirectly concerned with the business of making face. When a disagreeable person in China encounters a weaker person whom he can insult without retaliation, or abuse with impunity, he conceives that advantage of his impunity. Among the same Chinese classes, if a man can insult another covertly, or through innuendo, he also conceives that he is "making face." Of course, no Chinese gentleman, bred in respectable Chinese society, resorts to these methods of making Strangely enough, there are among the foreign-trained students many who either lack the cultural background given by good breeding in a decent Chinese family, or who have gone abroad as adolescents and have sacrificed their best Chinese traditions and manners to a superficial foreign culture which does not go deep enough to ensure decent social instincts. These persons often believe that an unresented insult makes face for the offensive person and for whatever cause he represents. This peculiar mental trend often manifests itself in the returned student's conception of diplomacy. These unfortunate people believe that in diplomatic correspondence unresented impertinences "make face' for China. 'A Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs addresses a note to the plenipotentiary of a Power which could swallow Peking whole in a tone which he would not dare to adopt to any garrison commander in the vicinity of the metropolis; and this for the simple reason that the former will not come with his bodyguard and administer a drubbing while the latter most certainly would. If the tone is not resented, the next communication is more offensive, and the more offensive the communications become the more they are cheered by the returned students of his unfortunate caste who believe that he is making face" for China, The returned students of this caste believe that Mr. Chen, who can insult all the contributors and correspondents, and finally the editor, of an important journal in the English language in a foreign concession, is "making great face" for himself, his caste and his cause. Mr. Chen, because he belongs to this unhappy caste, who have sacrificed their Chinese sense of decency and have acquired no more of Occidental culture than a scintillating veneer, himself believes that he is "making face" for himself and for the Cantonese cause. This is the whole psychology of his excesses.
The sad part of it, as I have already said, is that there are Chinese gentlemen in Canton in whom the tradition of decency according to Chinese standards is strong, and a number of others who have got deep enough below the surface of foreign superficialities to understand what is known as good taste in English; for these gentlemen the assumed representation of them by a man who shows that he understands neither Chinese nor foreign standards of good taste a regrettable hardship.
I am, etc., RopNey Gitpert.
Peking, Jan. 29.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.