{"id":6727,"date":"2016-11-03T18:45:04","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T18:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/frog\/?p=6727"},"modified":"2016-11-03T18:45:04","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T18:45:04","slug":"china-from-over-there-to-back-then-a-second-helping-on-e-a-ross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2016\/11\/china-from-over-there-to-back-then-a-second-helping-on-e-a-ross\/","title":{"rendered":"China from “Over There” to “Back Then”: A Second Helping on E.A. Ross"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Baumler’s juicy February 19 post “Edward Alsworth Ross and The Good Old Days of Scholarship<\/a>,” inspired me to look back through my notes.1<\/a><\/sup> E. A. Ross (<\/a>1866 to 1951) was a Progressive Era founder of professional academic sociology who got it into his head to spend the better part of a year in China. He published The Changing Chinese: The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China<\/em> (New York, Century 1911) just as Sun Yat-sen’s revolution was breaking out.<\/p>\n

The lead sentence of the first chapter is \u201cChina is the European Middle Ages made visible.\u201d The idea seems obvious now: Karl Marx had already said in his 1867 Preface <\/a>to Das Kapital \u201cThe country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.\u201d<\/p>\n

But to most Westerners at that point, China was\u00a0 the \u201cFar\u201d East. China was unique, exotic, and far away; it took weeks and weeks to get that upside-down and opposite wonderland. Ross and Marx used a different set of categories. They agreed on little else but they both now saw China not as far away in space but as one or two rungs below on the ladder of universal history. China was not “over there” but “back then.”<\/p>\n

Ross was a founding member of the American Sociological Association<\/a> that professionalized academic study of society (he was its president in 1914-1915).\u00a0 He gave the back of his hand to the “old China Hand” and “old treaty-port residents” who saw China as exotic:<\/p>\n

The theory, dear to literary interpreters of the Orient, that owing to diversity in mental constitution the yellow man and the white man can never comprehend or sympathize with one another, will appeal little to those who from their comparative study of society have gleaned some notion of what naturally follows from isolation, the acute struggle for existence, ancestor worship, patriarchal authority, the subjection of women, the decline of militancy, and the ascendancy of scholars. (Preface)<\/p>\n

The \u201cliterary interpreters of the Orient\u201d perhaps included Rudyard Kipling, who swore that \u201cEast is East and West is West and ne\u2019r the twain shall meet” or even the people who talked about \u201ceternal China\u201d and the \u201cunchanging East.\u201d For the sociologist, China was not even mysterious:<\/p>\n

The fact is, to the traveler who appreciates how different is the mental horizon that goes with another stage of culture or another type of social organization than his own, the Chinese do not seem very puzzling…. They act much as we would act under their circumstances. (Preface)<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s not begrudge Ross a little credit \u2013 the title of his book is \u201cThe Changing Chinese” not “The Eternal Chinese.” But we then have to ask just what would change them and what they would change into.<\/p>\n

Ross knocks those who see a “diversity in mental constitution” but his book is still a catalogue of blithe, earnest racial stereotypes. He wonders at \u201cChinese toleration of noxious microbes,\u201d which is \u201cnot likely to be developed in other races\u201d; their \u201cbluntness of nerve\u201d; \u201ctheir response to stimuli slow but strong and persistent\u201d; their \u201cstruggle for existence,\u201d which leads to \u201ccheapening of human life\u201d; \u201cinefficiency of native management\u201d; and, well … you get the point. No wonder he opposed Chinese immigration<\/a> and on largely racist grounds.<\/p>\n

In the quote, he speaks of “another stage of culture or another type of social organization\u201d and the \u201ccomparative study of society.” With only a little adjustment, what Ross is touting is modernization theory. He urges China to conduct a going-out-of-business sale: everything must go!\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing wrong with the Chinese brain or ability, it\u2019s just that \u201cpitting the China against a West armed with this technique of success is like pitting the sixteenth century man against the twentieth.\u201d (p. 316)<\/p>\n

Where will this change come from? \u201cWhen the Chinese become sensible of the inferiority of their own culture, Christianity presents itself to them clothed with prestige,\u201d and Christianity is \u201cin close association with a material civilization so successful that China will be obliged to adopt it in its entirety in order to survive.\u201d (p. 258). (You might want to read that over again \u2013 yes, you read it right.)<\/p>\n

If you can’t resist looking for yourself, there\u2019s a free access copy of The Changing Chinese<\/em> at Internet Archive: here.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

  1. Charles W. Hayford, “China by the Book: China Hands and China Stories, 1848-1948<\/a>,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations<\/em> 16.4 (Winter 2009): 285-311. ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Alan Baumler’s juicy February 19 post “Edward Alsworth Ross and The Good Old Days of Scholarship,” inspired me to look back through my notes.1 E. A. Ross (1866 to 1951) was a Progressive Era founder of professional academic sociology who got it into his head to spend the better part of a year in China….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[96,98,100,165,17,218,116,37,124,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-authors","category-books","category-china","category-china-us","category-christianity","category-east-vs-west","category-foreign-views","category-frog-in-a-well","category-historiography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1Kv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6727"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6904,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727\/revisions\/6904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}