LETTERS To A CHINESE OFFICIAL Being a Western View of Eastern Civilization. Being a reply to Letters From A Chinese Official.
New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906. 1st Edition. viii, [2], 97, [3] pp. 12mo. 7-1/8" x 4-7/8". Original publisher's buff paper covers with printed paper title label to front cover. Printed pale green dust jacket, now protected by a clear mylar wrapper. Small, neat prior owner signature to top rt of ffep, otherwise a VG+ book in a VG jacket which is age-toned, has some minor edge-chipping & a closed tear, with a piece missing from the front panel lower corner. Item #52325
"A superb vindication of Anglo-Saxon civilization and ideals, written by a great leader of Democracy in answer to the famous Letters from a Chinese Official. An inspiring and eloquent confession of faith in the standards and purposes of our race -- the word of Bryan the American and the patriot. There are passages that no man can read without elevation of his moral nature." [dj blurb].
Letters from a Chinese Official: Being an Eastern View of Western Civilization is the American title of a short book by the Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. It appeared in London in 1901 as Letters from John Chinaman, and in New York in 1903 under the "Chinese Official" title; the first four of its eight letters had already run in the Saturday Review. Dickinson wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and the multinational expedition sent to crush it, as a way of making what he called a fundamental criticism of Western society. The book is barely seventy-five pages, published anonymously, and framed as the work of an educated Chinese civil servant addressing an English audience.
The narrator begins by rejecting the charge that the Boxer violence proves Chinese barbarism, pointing back at the looting of Peking, the opium trade, the seizure of Chinese ports, and the gap between Christian professions and Western conduct. He then turns to a broader indictment: the West has confused means with ends. It has built enormous productive machinery, extraordinary wealth, and dazzling technical power, but has no agreed account of what any of it is for, so it fills the vacuum with more production, more acquisition, and more conquest. Industrialism has uprooted people from the land, reduced labor to wage-earning drudgery, made ugliness ordinary, and dissolved the family into a collection of individuals pursuing private appetites.
Against this he sets an idealized China: Confucian ethics rather than dogmatic theology, reverence for ancestors and continuity between generations, an agrarian life lived at a human pace, craftsmanship and beauty woven into daily objects rather than segregated into museums, and government by an examined scholar class rather than by commercial interests. China, he says, has accepted limits and knows how to live; the West knows only how to grow.
The final turn is the one that gave the book its edge. He warns that if the powers keep forcing China open at gunpoint, China will eventually learn Western methods — the factories, the armies, the commercial logic — and apply them with Chinese patience and numbers. The "yellow peril" the West fears would then be entirely its own creation.
The American edition landed in a country in the middle of its own argument about empire. The Philippine-American War, the Open Door notes, American troops in the China relief expedition, the Chinese Exclusion Act and its 1902 renewal, and the 1905 Chinese boycott of American goods all made the book's charges concrete rather than abstract. Anti-imperialists, Christian critics of commercialism, and readers already uneasy about industrial capitalism took it up warmly. Defenders of missions, of expansion, and of "Christian civilization" found it infuriating, and a common line of counterattack was to argue that the author's China was a fantasy that no one who had actually lived there would recognize.
The most consequential American response came from William Jennings Bryan. While on his 1905–06 world tour, Bryan wrote Letters to a Chinese Official: Being a Western View of Eastern Civilization, published in New York in 1906 — a direct, chapter-answering rebuttal. In eight letters addressed to the supposed official, Bryan defends Western and specifically American civilization, comparing the two societies on foreign policy, education, industry, family, and religion, and concluding that the average Chinese man does not match the product of Christian civilization in mental or moral terms. He leans heavily on American education being open to boys and girls regardless of wealth, against what he characterized as a narrow Chinese curriculum of a few sages and poems. Reading Bryan now is instructive mainly for what it reveals about him: the same populist suspicion of concentrated wealth, wrapped around a confident Protestant civilizational hierarchy.
That exchange is the book's main afterlife in America. Dickinson's volume stayed in print for decades and was reissued with an E. M. Forster introduction in 1946, but its lasting significance is less as a portrait of China than as an early, widely read statement of the critique of Western modernity — one that later reappears in the interwar disillusionment after 1918, in which Dickinson himself became a central figure as an architect of League of Nations thinking.
NB. Claude assisted in researchng the relevance of this publication by Bryan.
Price: $135.00