Emotionally the Chinese are mild, frugal, sober, gregarious, industrious, of remarkable endurance, but at the same time cowardly, revengeful, very cruel, unsympathetic, mendacious, thievish, and libidinous. They are taciturn, but spasmodically vehement. But they are also excessively courteous and ceremonious, with a great capacity for gratitude, and a very high sense of mercantile honour.
Intellectually the Chinese are non-progressive; though in modern times some have shown a desire for Western learning, most have always been and still are slaves to uniformity and mechanism in culture. They are unimaginative, imitative, lacking free individuality and creative power, slow in organizing, lacking reflection and foresight, vague in expression, unable to take a comprehensive grasp of a subject; they attach little importance to accuracy. They are also exceedingly suspicious and superstitious.
Regarding Chinese character as a whole, we find in it many traits common to races in early stages of development, such as the inferiority of size and structure, the larger alimentary system with smaller nervous power; a relative hardiness, with less acute sensations resulting from injurious actions than in the case of more highly developed types, and consequent weakness of the feelings prompting to effort and leading to improvement. With less plasticity of nature there is earlier maturity. The Chinese consciousness is relatively simple, exhibiting periodic impulsiveness, improvidence, little-developed altruistic sentiments giving rise to lack of sympathy and to cruelty and extreme conservatism. The Chinese mind is deficient in conceptions of general facts and distant results ; its ideas are rigid and concrete rather than abstract, lacking definiteness and accuracy. The absence of constructive imagination is shown by the few inventions recorded during a very long national life.
4 years ago
