Greene Advises Study of Orient

The following article arrived too late to be included in the Crimson's Seventieth Anniversary Issue Monday.

Vice and deputy consul-general at Rio de Janeiro, 1903-4; vice consul at Nagasaki, Japan, 1904-5; consul at Vladivostok, 1905-7; vice president in the Far East of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1927-29; acting director of Peiping Union Medical College, 1927-35; member of the American Society of International Law, Council on Foreign Affairs, and the Oriental Association; general director of the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1925-27.

Nearly to the end of the nineteenth century China knew little of the western world and cared less. Chinese education took account only of Chinese literature, ethics, history and art and of such sciences as had long been known in the Far East. To the Chinese, surrounded as they were by nations inferior in civilization, their world was the whole world. Westerners then regarded this Chinese provincial complacency with annoyance or amused condescension, and patronizingly applauded the recent Japanese effort to acquire western knowledge. But bitter experience, culminating in the incursions of foreign powers at the end of the century, turned the attention of the Chinese people outward. Europe and America became a part of their world and the object of much earnest study.

Few Courses Given

It is interesting to look at the catalogue of Harvard University for the year 1900-01 to see how successful a great American institution of learning was at that time in embracing the whole of the known world within its field of vision. The result of such an examination is rather startling. Apart from a section entitled "Indo-Iranian Languages" concerned mainly with Indian classics, there was little to indicate that the world extended beyond the United States, Europe and the extreme west of Asia. There is almost no mention of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia or the islands of the Seven Seas. Their geography, history, literature, philosophy and art received no discoverable attention. There was no attempt to study the government or the economic and social conditions, past or present, of the Far Eastern countries. One small exception at least must be made. Tucked away among the announcements of the Divinity School appeared these two sentences: "(1. Comparative Study of Religions, particularly the Vedic Religion, Hindu philosophies, Buddhism, Mazdaism, and the Chinese Religions.) Omitted in 1900-01." If no college graduate was actually ignorant of the existence of the less favored continents, the credit probably belonged to his grammar school class in geography. His college had given him an excellent excuse to believe that those regions had little that was worthy of his attention.

Connection Possible

Perhaps some connection might be discovered between this actual provincialism of American education and scholarship a generation age and the shock which we received at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Certainly most of the men in charge of our national affairs today were brought up in that period. An American illustrated paper which appeared three years before Pearl Harbor showed pictures of Japanese soldiers trying their bayonets on bound Chinese soldiers and civilians. Such actions, and indeed the whole attack upon China, were generally condemned, but many of our respectable citizens and responsible officials maintained that what happened so far away did not seriously concern us.

Advance Insufficient

We have advanced beyond that point, but not far enough yet. Harvard and several other universities now have courses in the Chinese and Japanese languages and their literature, history and art, but there is still little to be learned in American colleges about social and economic conditions in Asia, where more than half the people of the world live. There is still almost nothing taught about southeastern Asia and modern India, and yet, apart from the obvious military and political need for more objective information about regions which have been brought close to us by modern trade and transportation, there is much of intellectual interest, to be discovered from the experience of these ancient civilizations. In China and Japan there is a rich store of historical material on stone, bronze and old manuscripts, awaiting critical study and publication in a form accessible to the rest of the world. The Confucian emphasis on human relations exercised a powerful influence on oriental social and legal theories, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, according to our ideas. There would be great interest and perhaps some social profit in following such leads in Chinese literature for ideas which might be applicable today.

Victory in the present war will leave us with many unsolved problems concerning our relations with Asia and other little understood parts of the world. We have begun to realize that gross economic inequality between nations is an unsafe foundation for world peace; we know that extreme nationalism and high barriers against free movement of goods and persons are a menace to international good feeling, but we do not know just how we can avoid these dangers without running into others. Can we secure an equilibrium by raising the less fortunate countries to something like our level of well-being, without lowering our own, and how can this be done? How free should trade be? How much mingling of different races in business, industry and general social relations is beneficial to both sides and to the human race as a whole? If it is not good, how can it be avoided without creating dangerous frictions? Finally, how can the ordinary college graduate, or the man in the street, who does not have time to learn all that he should know, be given enough understanding of the world as a whole to play his part in a democratic state? The universities must help to answer such questions.

Thus, though Harvard University, and the Harvard CRIMSON too, are to be congratulated on the improvements that they have made since the opening of the century, there is still no lack of significant problems to be attacked or of important new work to be done for their country, in peace as in war.