Pearl S. Buck

China and the West

ures marching across a fire screenthese were precious and marvelous as coming from that mysterious land, China. Beyond this point, little was known and less cared about a country of four hundred millions of human beings, differing in no wise in the quality of their humanity from millions of others upon the globe; a country occupying one and a half times the number of square miles in the United States. During the last quarter of a century, however, China has been gradually drawing to herself the attention of the world. No longer is she a place merely of queer customs, pretty bric-a-brac, and ubiquitous laundrymen. She has achieved a place, if an unstable place, in the family of nations, and the chief question about her now, torn as she is with civil war and rent with conflicting ideals, is, what will she become, what will she do next ? What have we to expect, what to fear, from this huge and unwieldy mass of humanity?