I realise that the students who go abroad from China have many
difficulties to overcome. It is hard to receive their information and
instruction in a language not their mother tongue. They have small
chance to finish their education by practical work in bank or shop or
factory. They get a mass of book knowledge and little opportunity to
practise the theories which they learn, and they do not understand
that the text-book knowledge is nearly all foreign to their country and
to the temperament of their race. I often ask, when looking at my son,
what is his gain? I presume it is in securing a newer, broader point of
view, an ability to adjust himself to modern conditions, and a wider
sympathy with the movements of the world.
China has for centuries been lost to the world by reason of her great
exclusion, her self-satisfaction and blind reliance upon the ways
marked out for her by sages of other days. These young men, with
the West in their eyes, are coming back to shock their fathers' land
into new channels. The process may not be pleasant for us of the old
school, but quite likely it is necessary. Yet, I feel deep within me, as I
look at them, that these new Westernised Easterners with their
foreign ways and clever English are not to be the final saviours of
China.
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