oF HUMOUR
Dr. Lin Vu-tang, late professor of the National University, Peking ad now connected with the National Research Institute, delivered an teresting speech on "Chinese mand Humour" before the Shanghai Y's Men's Club September 22, Dr. Lin said in part:
Lately I have been doing a great deal of thinking about t.e strange phenomenon presented this great country of ours, whi is a puzzle to both Chinese a observers. We heard only.
yeek that China had failed to get eat in the League of Natior Council, while a small country like Uruguay got one. There is some-of an.anomaly in this situa tion, and the anomaly really in the situation we are facing ¢ay in China, As a full-blooded Chinese, I have watched first with high hopes and enthusiasm and then with bitter disappointment and rage the turn affairs have takea since the Revolution. Things so absurd are happening here now I hardly know whether to ery or to laugh.
I must frankly admit that China. is a less safe place to live in now than before the establishment of the Republic nineteen years ago.
Evidently there is some elemen' in our mental make-up which against progress and reform. I have racked my brain to find out what that element is, and I have found out that the great cause that is holding China back and that is ruining the nation is nothing else than the Chinese imperturab!s sense of humour—a humour that laughs at all ideals and smiles at sin itself as an essential part of human life, China has a devasta:- ing way of laughing at all.efforts to reform her and of turning the most serious national programmes into a jumble of slogans and nice-sounding phrases which are bandied about by politicians and taken lightly by everybody.
There is an old rogue in us which turns all political reforms into a farce and treats all human institutions as mere jokes. Th? lists and the greatest humorists on earth and that is why we were beaten by Uruguay at the League of Nations.
Briefly, my thesis is this: China is being' ruined, not by unequal treaties, not by' banditry or milit-arise, but because our bandit communists, and officials are great humorists and because the peop' whom the bandits, communists, and officials rob are' also humorists.
China is being ruined by our to-orant and humoristic view of band-try, communism, and officialdom, There is nothing on earth that can make a Chinese angry.
And so the merry, old Chisd marches on, unhampered by re-grots over the loss of a seat on the League Council, or by banditry, or by the fear of communists, oF by the invasion of imperialis: s, The placid life flows on serene and unperturbed. It is a serenity that has an element of old rascality in it. Tt is the wicked, shrewd ant cynical laugh of an old man who is beand disappointment. is too short to make an overserious business out of it. It is the hollow, reverberant laugh of old China, at the touch of whose breath every flower of enthusiasm and hope must wither and die.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.