with the "Opening of
China" this must all change?

The Chinese--I refer to the Chinese of interior provinces such as
Szech-wan--are realizing that they hold an obscure position. I have
heard educated Chinese remark that they look upon themselves as lost,
like shipwrecked sailors, whom a night of tempest has cast on some
lonely rock; and now they are having recourse to cries, volleys, all the
signals imaginable, to let it be known that they are still there. They
have been on this lonely isolated rock as far as history can trace. Now
they are launching out towards progress, towards the making of things,
towards the buying and selling of things--launching out in trade and in
commerce, in politics, in literature, in science, in all that has spelt
advance in the West. The modern spirit is spreading speedily into the
domains of life everywhere--in places swiftly, in places slowly, but
spreading inevitably, _si sit prudentia_.

Nothing will tend, in this particular part of the country, to turn it
upside down and inside out more than the cult of industrialism. In a
number of centers in Eastern China, such as Han-yang and Shanghai,
foreign mills, iron works, and so on, furnish new employments, but in
the interior the machine of the West to the uneducated Celestial seems
to be the foe of his own tools; and when railways and steam craft
appear--steam has appeared, of course, on the Upper Yangtze, although it
has not yet taken much of the junk trade, and Szech'wan has her railways
now under construction (the sod was cut at Ichang in 1909)[G]--and a
single train and steamer does the work of hundreds of thousands of
carters, coolies, and boatmen, it is wholly natural that their imperfect
and short-sighted views should lead them to rise against a seeming new
peril.

Whilst in the end the Empire will profit greatly by the inventions of
the Occident, the period of transition in Szech'wan, especially if
machines are introduced too rapidly and unwisely, is one that will
disturb the peace. It will be interesting to watch the attitude of the
people towards the railway, for Szech'wan is essentially the province of
the farmer. Szech'wan was one of the provinces where concessions were
demanded, and railways had been planned by European syndicates, and
where the gentry and students held mass meetings, feverishly declaring
that none shall build Chinese lines but the people themselves. I have no
space in a work of this nature to go fully into