CHINA 



1346 



CHINA 



Overcrowding. One thing may be said about 

 the Chinese people very positively there are 

 too many of them for the amount of land they 

 possess. Almost every locality which will sus- 

 tain life is crowded to its limit; every natural 

 resource is exhausted in trying to feed the 

 teeming population. Nor do the Chinese, much 

 as they suffer from this overcrowding, and bar- 

 ren as are their lives of every comfort, see any 

 way out of the difficulty. Marriage is universal 

 and takes place at a far earlier average age than 

 in any American or European country, nor must 

 a youth wait until he can support a wife. 

 He simply brings her home to his father's 

 house, and there she has her share, meager 

 enough in the case of the poor, of the family 

 rice. Families are large, for the number of 

 his sons is the thing upon which a man most 

 prides himself. And so long as the social sys- 

 tem remains as it is, so long as China is "ruled 

 more from the cemetery than from the palace," 

 men will desire sons to live after them and 

 honor them, and population will know no de- 

 crease save that of a high death rate. 



Position oj Women. In general, the men and 

 women of the household are kept strictly sep- 

 arate. The women are held to be much inferior 

 to the men, and have practically no social ad- 

 vantages. Not one in a hundred after marriage 

 travels a mile from the house to which she 

 was brought as a bride. In part, this is because 

 it is so difficult for them to walk, owing to their 

 bound feet. A Chinaman has always believed 

 a woman hideous unless she has tiny feet, and 

 lest a girl may not find a husband her parents 

 bind her feet while she is but a child, crush- 

 ing the bones, bending the toes under, and 

 crippling .her for life. This takes place not only 

 among the wealthy and fashionable, but among 

 all classes, and even the poor women who must 

 earn their living in the fields have often to 

 crawl about their work because they cannot 

 walk. But there has been a decided lessening 

 in this cruel practice, owing largely to the 

 efforts of foreign women, and now in the cities 

 and among the higher classes it is seldom 

 resorted to. The day is not far distant when 

 foot-binding will be rare, except far in the in- 

 terior, of the country. 



What the Chinese Eat. It is a common say- 

 ing that a Chinese family could live on what 

 an American family would not eat, and while 

 it may not be literally true, it is most sug- 

 gestive of the real condition of the people. 

 Prof. E. A. Ross, author of The Changing 

 T CTwnese, puts it graphically: 





The sea is raked and strained for edible plun- 

 der. Seaweed and kelp have a place In the 

 larder. Great quantities of shellfish no bigger 

 than one's finger nail are opened and made to 

 yield a food that finds its way far inland. The 

 fungus that springs up in the grass after :i rain 

 is eaten. Fried sweet potato vines furnish the 

 poor man's table. The roadside ditches are 

 bailed out for the sake of fishes no longer than 

 one's finger. * * * The silkworms are eaten 

 after the cocoon has been unwound from them. 

 After their work is done horses, donkeys, mules 

 and camels become butcher's meat. The cow 

 or pig that has died a natural death is not dis- 

 dained. * * * In Canton rats and cats are 

 exposed for sale. 



Tea is the universal drink, taken not with 

 the meal, but just as water is drunk elsewhere. 

 Nor is a love for tea the only reason for this 

 large consumption. Where people are so 

 crowded together and all care for sanitation is 

 lacking, only boiled water is safe for drink- 

 ing, and this the tea makes palatable. 



Language and Education. The Chinese lan- 

 guage has no alphabet, for it is not a letter 

 but a syllable language. Each written char- 

 acter represents not a sound but a word of 

 one syllable, for no Chinese word has more. 

 Thus a Chinese child learning to read must 

 learn not twenty-six letters, as in English, but 

 characters standing for every word he ever 

 hopes to use. Out of the 44,449 word-char- 

 acters contained in the dictionaries, however, 

 even a well-educated man needs fewer than 

 3,000. As the same word may stand for a 

 number of different ideas, according to its 

 position in the sentence, and as each sound 

 may be pronounced in a number of different 

 tones, each of which has a different meaning, 

 the language is one of the most difficult in 

 the world for a foreigner to master. When 

 written, the characters are placed in columns, 

 not in lines, and are read from top to bottom. 



Education is held in high honor among the 

 Chinese, but their ideas as to what constitutes 

 education are steadily changing. In the old 

 China, before it became tinged with the notions 

 of Western peoples, there was a special class 

 which devoted itself to study, with the object 

 of passing the examinations which alone could 

 admit to public office. These examinations 

 were held throughout the country at stated 

 times, and concerned themselves only with 

 literature and philosophy subjects which did 

 not necessarily fit men to discharge their official 

 duties well. 



In 1905, however, the old formal examina- 

 tions were abolished, and strenuous efforts are 

 being made to introduce a system of education 



