The Problem of China
In 1920, the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell traveled to China to teach at Peking University. What he found there changed him, and what he wrote in 1922 remains startlingly alive. Russell arrived as a Western intellectual, but he left as something rarer: a genuine admirer of a civilization he believed the West had grievously misunderstood. The Problem of China is neither a travelogue nor a polemic, but a philosopher's reckoning with a nation caught between imperial predation and its own ancient conservatism. Russell dissects the chaos of warlord politics, the humiliation of foreign concessions, the promise and peril of modernization, and the startling vitality of Chinese nationalism, while insisting that the West has more to learn from Confucian patience than from its own industrial violence. Written with Russell's characteristic clarity and moral urgency, this book offers a first-hand account of China at a turning point, and raises questions about civilization, progress, and humility that echo far beyond its moment. It is a historical document, a philosophical meditation, and an unlikely act of cross-cultural empathy.
Editions
X-Ray
“Our boat travelled on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lay at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the well-informed.””
— Bertrand Russell
“What most distinguishes Confucius from other founders is that he inculcated a strict code of ethics, which has been respected ever since, but associated with very little religious dogma, which gave place to complete theological scepticism in the countless generations of Chinese literati who revered his memory and administered the Empire.””
— Bertrand Russell
“Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.””
— Bertrand Russell
“The Chinese nation is the most patient in the world; it thinks of centuries as other nations think of decades. It is essentially indestructible, and can afford to wait. The "civilized" nations of the world, with their blockades their poison gases, their bombs submarines and negro armies, will probably destroy each other within the next three hundred years, leaving the stage to those whose pacifism has kept them alive, though poor and powerless. If China can avoid being goaded into war, her oppressors may wear themselves out in the end, and leave the Chinese free to pursue humane ends, instead of war and rapine and destruction which all white nations love.””
— Bertrand Russell
“Chinese problems, even if they affected no one outside China, would be of vast importance, since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries. This makes it important, to Europe and America almost as much as to Asia,””
— Bertrand Russell
“One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have forgotten what constitutes civilization.””
— Bertrand Russell
“The Chinese watch foreigners as we watch animals in the Zoo... they have no wish to alter the habits of the foreigners, any more than we wish to put the monkeys at the Zoo into trousers and stiff shirts””
— Bertrand Russell
“Instinctive happiness, or joy of life, is one of the most important widespread popular goods that we have lost through industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live; its commonness in China is a strong reason for thinking well of Chinese civilization.””
— Bertrand Russell
