““But in the younger generation, among the half-baked intellectuals and the minor bureaucrats of the Kuomintang, that childlike simplicity is apt to degenerate into a casual, "couldn't-care-less" attitude; of their capacity for unbounded self-esteem, for sly malice and for bullying someone who is completely at their mercy merely in order to show how important they are, I was to acquire later some first-hand experience. These young people have rejected the old traditions which gave their race its strength, substituting for them a façade of Western culture, whose ill-digested essentials too often include the less admirable features of American civilisation, which exerts upon many rootless Asiatics so irresistible a spell.”
