The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen

An Exposition of the Sun Min Chu I

By

Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, Ph.D.

The Department of Government, Harvard University

Greenwood Press, Publishers

Westport, Connecticut

Copyright 1937, The Johns Hopkins Press

First Greenwood Reprinting 1973

Contents

[pg v]

Foreword.

The importance of introducing Western political thought to the Far East has long been emphasized in the West. The Chinese conception of a rational world order was manifestly incompatible with the Western system of independent sovereign states and the Chinese code of political ethics was difficult to reconcile with the Western preference for a reign of law. No argument has been necessary to persuade Westerners that Chinese political philosophy would be improved by the influence of Western political science.

The superior qualifications of Sun Yat-sen for the interpretation of Western political science to the Chinese have also been widely recognized in the West, particularly in the United States. Dr. Sun received a modern education in medicine and surgery and presumably grasped the spirit of Western science. He read widely, more widely perhaps than any contemporary political leader of the first rank except Woodrow Wilson, in the literature of Western political science. He was thoroughly familiar with the development of American political thought and full of sympathy for American political ideals. His aspiration to build a modern democratic republic amidst the ruins of the medieval Manchu Empire, Americans at least can readily understand.

What is only beginning to be understood, however, in the West is, that it is equally important to interpret Chinese political philosophy to the rest of the world. Western political science has contributed a great deal to the development of political power. But it has failed lamentably to illuminate the ends for which such power should be used. Political ethics is by no means superfluous in lands where a government of law is supposed to be established in lieu of a government of men. The limitation [pg vi] of the authority of sovereign states in the interest of a better world order is an enterprise to which at last, it may be hoped not too late, Westerners are beginning to dedicate themselves.

As an interpreter of Chinese political philosophy to the West Dr. Sun has no peer. Better than any other Chinese revolutionary leader he appreciated the durable values in the classical political philosophy of the Far East. He understood the necessity for preserving those values, while introducing the Western political ideas deemed most proper for adapting the Chinese political system to its new place in the modern world. His system of political thought, therefore, forms a blend of Far Eastern political philosophy and Western political science. It suggests at the same time both what is suitable in Western political science for the use of the Far East and what is desirable in Far Eastern political philosophy for the improvement of the West.

Dr. Linebarger has analyzed Dr. Sun's political ideas, and also his plans for the political rehabilitation of China, with a view to the interests of Western students of politics. For this task his training and experience have given him exceptional competence. The result is a book, which not only renders obsolete all previous volumes in Western languages on modern Chinese political philosophy, but also makes available for the political scientists and politicians of the West the best political thought of the Far East on the fundamental problems of Western politics.

Arthur N. Holcombe

Harvard University

Preface.

This book represents an exploration into a field of political thought which is still more or less unknown. The Chinese revolution has received much attention from publicists and historians, and a vast number of works dealing with almost every phase of Chinese life and events appears every year in the West. The extraordinary difficulty of the language, the obscurity—to Westerners—of the Chinese cultural background, and the greater vividness of events as compared with theories have led Western scholars to devote their attention, for the most part, to descriptions of Chinese politics rather than to venture into the more difficult field of Chinese political thought, without which, however, the political events are scarcely intelligible.

The author has sought to examine one small part of modern Chinese political thought, partly as a sample of the whole body of thought, and partly because the selection, although small, is an important one. Sun Yat-sen is by far the most conspicuous figure in recent Chinese history, and his doctrines, irrespective of the effectiveness or permanence of the consequences of their propagation, have a certain distinct position in history. The San Min Chu I, his chief work, not only represents an important phase in the revolution of Chinese social and political thought, but solely and simply as doctrine, may be regarded as a Chinese expression of tendencies of political thought current in the Western world.

The personal motives, arising out of an early and rather intimate family relationship with the Chinese nationalist movement centering around the person of Sun Yat-sen, that led the author to undertake this subject, have their advantages and disadvantages. The chief disadvantage lies in the fact that the thesis must of necessity [pg viii] treat of many matters which are the objects of hot controversy, and that the author, friendly to the movement as a whole but neutral as between its factions, may seem at times to deal unjustly or over-generously with certain persons and groups. The younger widow of Sun Yat-sen (née Soong Ching-ling) may regard the mention of her husband and the Nanking government in the same breath as an act of treachery. Devoted to the memory of her husband, she has turned, nevertheless, to the Left, and works on cordial terms with the Communists. She said: “... the Nanking Government has crushed every open liberal, democratic, or humanitarian movement in our country. It has destroyed all trade unions, smashed every strike of the workers for the right to existence, has thrown hordes of criminal gangsters who are simultaneously Fascist ‘Blue Shirts’ against every labor, cultural, or national revolutionary movement in the country.”[1] The author, from what he himself has seen of the National Government, is positive that it is not merely dictatorial, ruthless, cruel, treacherous, or historically unnecessary; nor would he, contrarily, assert that the National Government lives up to or surpasses the brilliant ideals of Sun Yat-sen. He seeks to deal charitably with all factions, to follow a middle course whenever he can, and in any case to state fairly the positions of both sides.

The advantages may serve to offset the disadvantages. In the first place, the author's acquaintance with the Nationalist movement has given him something of a background from which to present his exposition. This background cannot, of course, be documented, but it may serve to make the presentation more assured and more vivid. In the second place, the author has had access to certain [pg ix] private manuscripts and papers, and has had the benefit of his father's counsel on several points in this work.[2] The author believes that on the basis of this material and background he is justified in venturing into this comparatively unknown field.

The primary sources for this work have been Sun Yat-sen's own works. A considerable number of these were written originally in the English language. Translations of his major Chinese works are more or less fully available in English, German, French, or Spanish. The author's highly inadequate knowledge of the Chinese written language has led him to depend almost altogether upon translations, but he has sought—in some cases, perhaps, unsuccessfully—to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding or error by checking the translations against one another. Through the assistance of his Chinese friends, [pg x] he has been able to refer to Sun's complete works in Chinese and to Chinese books on Sun wherever such reference was imperatively necessary. A list of the Chinese titles thus made available is included in the bibliography. The language difficulty, while an annoyance and a handicap, has not been so considerable as to give the author reason to suppose that his conclusions would have been different in any significant respect had he been able to make free and continuous use of Chinese and Russian sources.

The author has thought of the present work as a contribution to political theory rather than to sinology, and has tried to keep the discussion of sinological questions at a minimum. In the transliteration of Chinese words and names he has adhered more or less closely to the Wade system, and has rendered most terms in the kuo yü, or national language. Despite this rule, he gives the name of President Sun in its more commonly known Cantonese form, Sun Yat-sen, rather than in the kuo yü, Sun I-hsien.

In acknowledging assistance and encouragement received, the author must first of all turn to his father, Judge Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, Legal Advisor to The National Government of China, counsellor to and biographer of Sun Yat-sen during the latter's lifetime. Without his patient encouragement and his concrete assistance, this book could neither have been begun nor brought to a conclusion after it was started. The author desires, however, to make it perfectly clear that this work has no relation to the connections of Judge Linebarger with the Chinese Government or with the Nationalist Party. No [pg xi] information coming to the knowledge of Judge Linebarger in the course of his official duties has been here incorporated. Anxiously scrupulous to maintain a completely detached point of view, the author has refrained from communicating with or submitting the book to Chinese Government or Party officials, and writes purely as an American student of China.

Professor James Hart, formerly at The Johns Hopkins University and now at The University of Virginia, Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Johns Hopkins University, Professor Harley Farnsworth MacNair and Dr. Ernest Price, both of The University of Chicago, have rendered inestimable assistance by reading the manuscript and giving the author the benefit of their advice. Professor Hart has criticized the work as an enterprise in political science. Professor Lovejoy assisted the author by reading the first third of the work, and selections of the later parts, and applying his thorough and stimulating criticism; the author regrets that he was unable to adopt all of Professor Lovejoy's suggestions in full, and is deeply grateful for the help. Professor MacNair read the book as a referee for a dissertation, and made a great number of comments which have made the book clearer and more accurate; the author would not have ventured to present this work to the public had it not been for the reassurances and encouragement given him by Professor MacNair. Dr. Ernest Price, while at The Hopkins, supervised the composition of the first drafts; his judicious and balanced criticism, based upon sixteen years' intimacy with the public and private life of the Chinese, and a sensitive appreciation of Chinese values, were of great value to the author in establishing his perspective and lines of study. The author takes this opportunity to thank these four gentlemen for their great kindness and invaluable assistance.

It is with deep regret that the author abbreviates his acknowledgments and thanks for the inspiration and the [pg xii] favors he received in his study of Chinese politics from Dr. C. Walter Young; Professor Frederic Ogg, of The University of Wisconsin; Professors Kenneth Colegrove, William McGovern, and Ikuo Oyama, of The Northwestern University; Dr. Arthur Hummel, of The Library of Congress; Professor Frederick Dunn, of Yale University; Professor Arthur Holcombe, of Harvard University; Professor Quincy Wright, of The University of Chicago; and Dr. Wallace McClure, of The Department of State. Many of the author's Chinese friends assisted by reading the manuscript and criticizing it from their more intimate knowledge of their own country, among them being Messrs. Miao Chung-yi and Djang Chu, at The Johns Hopkins University; Professor Jên T'ai, of Nankai University; and Messrs. Wang Kung-shou, Ch'ing Ju-chi, and Lin Mou-sheng, of The University of Chicago, made many helpful suggestions. The author must thank his teachers at The Johns Hopkins University, to whom he is indebted for three years of the most patient assistance and stimulating instruction, in respect of both the present work and other fields in the study of government: Dr. Johannes Mattern; Dr. Albert Weinberg; Mr. Leon Sachs; and Professor W. W. Willoughby. Finally, he must acknowledge his indebtedness to his wife, Margaret Snow Linebarger, for her patient assistance in preparing this volume for the press.

Paul M. A. Linebarger.

December, 1936.

Introduction.

The Problem of the San Min Chu I.

The Materials.

Sun Yat-sen played many rôles in the history of his times. He was one of those dramatic and somewhat formidable figures who engage the world's attention at the very outset of their careers. In the late years of the nineteenth century, he was already winning some renown in the West; it was picturesque that a Cantonese, a Christian physician, should engage in desperate conspiracies against the Manchu throne. Sun became known as a political adventurer, a forerunner, as it were, of such mutually dissimilar personages as Trotsky, Lawrence, and Major-General Doihara. With the illusory success of the revolution of 1911, and his Presidency of the first Republic, Sun ceased being a conspirator in the eyes of the world's press, and became the George Washington of China. It is in this rôle that he is most commonly known, and his name most generally recalled. After the world war, in the atmosphere of extreme tension developed, perhaps, by the Bolshevik revolution, Sun was regarded as an enigmatic leader, especially significant in the struggle between Asiatic nationalisms allied with the Soviets against the traditional capitalist state-system. It was through him that the Red anti-imperialist policy was pushed to its greatest success, and he was hated and admired, ridiculed and feared, down to the last moments of his life. When he died, American reporters in Latvia cabled New York their reports of Russian comments on the event.[3] More, perhaps, than any other Chinese of modern times, Sun symbolized the entrance of China into [pg 002] world affairs, and the inevitable confluence of Western and Far Eastern history.

It is characteristic of Sun that he should have appeared in another and final rôle after his death. He had been thought of as conspirator, statesman, and mass leader; but with the advent of his party to power it became publicly apparent that he had also been a political philosopher. The tremendous prestige enjoyed by him as state-founder and party leader was enhanced by his importance as prophet and law-giver. His doctrines became the state philosophy of China, and for a while his most zealous followers sought to have him canonized in a quite literal fashion, and at one stroke to make him replace Confucius and the Sons of Heaven. After the extreme enthusiasms of the Sun Yat-sen cult subsided, Sun remained the great national hero-sage of modern China. Even in those territories where the authority of his political heirs was not completely effective, his flag was flown and his doctrines taught.

His doctrines have provided the theories upon which the Nationalist revolution was based; they form the extra-juridical constitution of the National Government of China. When the forces hostile to Sun Yat-sen and his followers are considered, it is amazing that his ideas and ideals should have survived. An empire established with the aid of Japanese arms, and still under Japanese hegemony, controls Manchuria; parts of north China are ruled by a bastard government, born of a compromise between enemies; a largely unrecognized but powerful Soviet Republic exists in outer Mongolia; the lamaist oligarchy goes on in Tibet; and somewhere, in central and western China, a Soviet group, not quite a government but more than a conspiracy, is fighting for existence. It is quite probable that nowhere else in the world can there be found a greater variety of principles, each scheme of principles fostered by an armed organization struggling with its [pg 003] rivals. In this chaos the National Government has made the most effective bid for authority and the greatest effort for the reëstablishment of order; through it the principles of Sun Yat-sen rule the political life of a population greater than that of the United States or of the Soviet Union.

It is difficult to evaluate the importance of political doctrines. Even if The Three Principles is judged by the extent of the population which its followers control, it has achieved greater results in practical politics in fifteen years than has Marxism in ninety. Such a criterion may well be disputed, but, whatever the test, it cannot be denied that the thought of Sun Yat-sen has played a major part in the political development of his native land. It may continue into the indefinitely remote future, or may succumb to the perils that surround its advocates; in any case, these doctrines have been taught long enough and broadly enough to make an impress on the age, and have been so significant in political and cultural history that they can never sink into complete obscurity.

What are these doctrines? Sun Yat-sen was so voluminous a writer that it would be impossible for his followers to digest and codify all his writings into one neat and coherent handbook; he himself did not provide one. Before printing became common, there was a certain automatic process of condensation which preserved the important utterances of great men, and let their trivial sayings perish. Sun, however, must have realized that he was leaving a vast legacy of materials which are not altogether coherent or consistent with one another. Certain of his works were naturally more important than others, but, to make the choice definitive, he himself indicated four sources which his followers might draw upon for a definitive statement of his views.[4]

His Political Testament cites the Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction), the Chien Kuo Ta Kang (The Outline of National Reconstruction), the San Min Chu I (The Triple Demism, also translated as The Three Principles of the People), and the Manifesto issued by the first national congress of the Party.[5] These four items differ quite sharply from one another in form. No one of them can be relied upon to give the whole of Sun's doctrines.

The Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction) is in reality three works, only remotely related to one another. The first item in the trilogy is the Sun Wên Hsüeh Shê (The Philosophy of Sun Wên); it is a series of familiar essays on the Chinese way of thought.[6] The second is the Min Ch'üan Ts'u Pu, The Primer of Democracy, which is little more than a text on parliamentary law.[7] The third is the Shih Yeh Chi Hua, known in English as The International Development [pg 005]of China, which Sun wrote in both English and Chinese.[8] These three works, under the alternate titles of “The Program of Psychological Reconstruction,” “The Program of Social Reconstruction,” and “The Program of Material Reconstruction” form The Program of National Reconstruction.

The Chien Kuo Ta Kang, The Outline of National Reconstruction, is an outline of twenty-five points, giving the necessary steps towards the national reconstruction in their most concise form.[9]

The San Min Chu I is Sun's most important work. It comprises sixteen lectures setting forth his socio-political theories and his programs. The title most commonly used in Western versions is The Three Principles of the People.[10]

The last document mentioned in Sun Yat-sen's will was the Manifesto of the first national congress of the Kuomintang. This was not written by himself, but was drafted by Wang Ch'ing-wei, one of his closest followers, and embodies essentially the same ideas as do the other three items, even though Borodin—the emissary of the Third International—had been consulted in its preparation.[11]

Sun undoubtedly regretted leaving such a heterogeneous and ill-assembled group of works as his literary bequest. [pg 006] Throughout the latter years of his life he was studying political science in the hope that he might be able to complete a great treatise which he had projected, an analysis and statement of the programs of the Chinese nationalists. One attempt toward actualization of this work was frustrated when Sun's manuscripts and a great part of his library were burned in the attack launched against him by Ch'en Ch'iung-ming in 1922. His apology for the makeshift volume on the San Min Chu I is pathetic: “As I had neither time to prepare nor books to use as references, I could do nothing else in these lectures but improvise after I ascended the platform. Thus I have omitted and forgotten many things which were in my original manuscript. Although before having them printed, I revised them, added (passages) and eliminated (others), yet, those lectures are far from coming up to my original manuscripts, either in the subject matter itself, or in the concatenations of the discussion, or in the facts adduced as proofs.”[12] Sun was in all probability a more assiduous and widely read student of political science than any other world leader of his day except Wilson; he studied innumerable treatises on government, and was surprisingly familiar with the general background of Western politics, in theory and practice. He was aware of the shabby appearance that these undigested occasional pieces would present when put forth as the bible of a new China, and earnestly enjoined his followers to carry on his labors and bring them to fruition.[13]

The various works included in the Chien Kuo Fang Lo, while satisfactory for the purposes Sun had in mind when he wrote them, are not enough to outline the fundamentals both of political theory and a governmental plan. The familiar essays have an important bearing on the formation of the ideology of a new China; the primer [pg 007] of democracy, less; the industrial plan is one of those magnificent dreams which, in the turn of a decade, may inspire an equally great reality. The outline and the manifesto are no more suited to the rôle of classics; they are decalogues rather than bibles.[14] There remains the San Min Chu I.

The San Min Chu I is a collection of sixteen lectures delivered in Canton in 1924. There were to have been eighteen, but Sun was unable to give the last two. Legend has it that Borodin persuaded Sun to give the series.[15] Whatever the cause of their being offered, they attracted immediate attention. Interest in Sun and in his ideas was at a fever heat; his friends turned to the printed lectures for guidance; his enemies, for statements which could be turned against him. Both friends and enemies found what they wanted. To the friends, the San Min Chu I presented a fairly complete outline of Sun's political and social thought in such a form that it could be preserved and broadcast readily. There was danger, before the book appeared, that the intrinsic unity in Sun's thinking would be lost sight of by posterity, that his ideas would appear as a disconnected jumble of brilliant inspirations. The sixteen lectures incorporated a great part of the doctrines which he had been preaching for more than a generation. To the enemies of Sun, the work was welcome. They pointed out the numerous simplifications and inconsistencies, the frequent contradictions in matters of detail, the then outrageous denunciations of the economic and political system predominant in the Far East. They ridiculed Sun because he was Chinese, and because he was not Chinese enough, and backed up their criticisms with passages from the book.[16]

When Sun gave the lectures, he was a sick man. He carried an ivory-headed sword cane with him on the platform; occasionally, holding it behind him and locking his arms through it, he would press it against his back to relieve the intolerable pain.[17] The business awaiting him after each lecture was vitally important; the revolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. The lectures are the lectures of a sick man, given to a popular audience in the uproar of revolution, without adequate preparation, improvised in large part, and offered as one side of a crucial and bitterly disputed question. The secretaries who took down the lectures may not have succeeded in following them completely; Sun had no leisure to do more than skim through the book before releasing it to the press.

These improvised lectures have had to serve as the fundamental document of Nationalist China. Sun Yat-sen died without writing the treatise he had planned. The materials he left behind were a challenge to scholars and to his followers. Many persons set to work interpreting them, each with a conscious or unconscious end in view. A German Marxian showed Sun to be a forerunner of bolshevism; an American liberal showed Sun to be a bulwark against bolshevism. A Chinese classicist demonstrated Sun's reverence for the past; a Jesuit father explained much by Sun's modern and Christian background. His works have been translated into Western [pg 009] languages without notes; the improvised lectures, torn from their context of a revolutionary crisis, have served poorly to explain the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and his long range political, social, and economic plans.

The Necessity of an Exposition.

Followers of Sun who knew him personally, or were members of that circle in which his ideas and opinions were well known, have found the San Min Chu I and other literary remains helpful; they have been able to turn to the documents to refresh their memories of Sun on some particular point, or to experience the encouraging force of his faith and enthusiasm again. They need not be reminded of the main tenets of his thought, or of the fundamental values upon which he based his life and his political activities. His sense of leadership, which strangers have at times thought fantastic, is one which they admire in him, since they, too, have felt the power of his personality and have experienced that leadership in the course of their own lives. His voice is ringing in their consciences; they feel no need of a guide to his mind. At the present day many members of Sun's own family, and a considerable number of his veteran disciples are still living; the control of the National Government is in their hands. They are people who need no commentary on Sun Yat-sen; to them, he died only yesterday.

Others, who met Sun only casually, or who could know him only through his writings, have a quite different impression of his thought. They perforce assume that he thought as he wrote, and fail to realize that virtually all his writings and speeches were occasional pieces, improvisations designed as propaganda. One of the most respected American authorities on China says that in the San Min Chu I “... there is a combination of sound social analysis, keen comment on comparative political [pg 010] science, and bombast, journalistic inaccuracy, jejune philosophizing and sophomoric economics.”[18] This view is one which can scarcely be attacked, if one considers only the printed lectures, and overlooks the other utterances and the personality of Sun. To apply this, or any similar estimate (and there are many of them), to all of Sun Yat-sen's thought would be woefully inaccurate. It is not the critic's fault that Sun never found time to write a sober, definitive political treatise expressing his ideas; it is, nevertheless, the critic's responsibility to weigh the value of the San Min Chu I, and consider the importance which Sun himself attached to it, before judging Sun's whole philosophy by a hastily-composed and poorly written book.

Yet, if the Western student of modern Chinese history were to look elsewhere for some general exposition of Sun Yat-sen's political ideas, he would find none. He could discover several excellent translations of the sixteen lectures, and parts of the other work of Sun. He would be helped by the prefatory notes to some of these translations.[19] A few treatises would be available to him on special phases of Sun's thought: the influence of Maurice William, and the influence of the Russian Communists.[20] In addition, there would be the biographies, of which there are more than a dozen, and a few other useful although not general works. None of these sifts Sun's thought, seeking to separate the transitory from the permanent in his ideas. For this the searcher would have to rely on brief outlines of Sun's ideas, to be found in [pg 011] works dealing with modern China or the Chinese revolution.[21]

This relative scarcity of exegetic material concerning the ideology and programs of Sun is not the result of any inadequacy on the part of those persons, both Chinese and Western, who have devoted thought and time to his life or to the translation of his works. It is one thing to point out a task that has yet to be done; and quite another, actually to perform it. An interpretation or exposition of Sun's thought, to be worthy of the great significance of the original, must be very thorough; but scarcely enough time has elapsed to allow a perspective of all the materials, let alone an orientation of Sun in the Far Eastern scene. Yet the importance of Sun demands that something be done to bring his thought to the attention of the world, so that the usual distortion of his personality—arising from the lack of commentaries—may be avoided in present day works. In a sense, the time is not ripe for a definitive treatment of Sun, either as a figure in history or as a contributor to the significant and enduring political thought of modern times; any work now done will, as time passes, fall grotesquely far short of adequacy. On the other hand, there is so much material of a perishable nature—anecdotes and legends not yet committed to print, and the memories of living men—now available, that a present-day work on Sun may gain [pg 012] in color and intimacy what it loses in judgment and objectivity, may gain in proximity what it has to forgo in detachment. And, lastly, the complete absence of any systematic presentation of Sun's ideas in any Western language is so great a deficiency in the fields of Far Eastern history and world political thought, that even a relatively inadequate exposition of the thought of Sun Yat-sen may prove to be not without value. Sun himself never explained his philosophy, whether theoretical or applied, in any broad, systematic fashion; nor has anyone else done so.

If the permissibility of an exposition of Sun Yat-sen's thought be conceded, there still remains the vexing problem of a choice of method. While the far-flung peripheries of Sun's thought touch almost every field of knowledge and opinion, a systematic condensation of his views cannot hope to survey the same broad ranges. The problem of proportion, of just emphasis, involves the nice appraisal of the degree of importance which each of Sun's minor rôles had in his intellectual career as a whole. Nor do the difficulties concerning method end with the consideration of proportion; they merely begin, for there remains the far more important and perplexing problem of a technique of interpretation.

Interpretation obviously relates to the problem of language. The translation of theoretical terms from Chinese into English constitutes a formidable difficulty which proves, in several instances, to be insuperable. No satisfactory equivalent for min shêng (usually rendered “livelihood”) can be found in English; even simpler and less specialized terms are extremely difficult to render. Sometimes it would be convenient to employ four or five alternative translations for one Chinese term. Sun uses the word “nationalism” in the sense that a Westerner would, in advocating national consciousness in a China hitherto unfamiliar with the conception of nation-states; but, in [pg 013] a different context, he uses it in the sense of “patriotism.”[22] These difficulties must be faced and, somehow or other, overcome. When the Western reader encounters a familiar term in an unexpected place, he must be prepared to meet a shift of meaning. No amount of definition can make a Chinese term, which has no exact Western equivalent, completely clear. It is simpler to grow accustomed to the term, to gather together its connotations, to understand something of the frame of reference wherein it is set, and thereby to learn it as a child learns a word. A dictionary is no help to a baby; in a realm of unfamiliar ideas even scholars must learn terms step by step.

Less obviously than language, the translation of ideas and of values is also involved in interpretation. In dealing with the intellectual content of a civilization as alien as that of China, the Westerner must be wary of the easy analogy. The full, forceful application of Western ideas and values in a world to which they are completely irrelevant produced strange results during the nineteenth century. Western notions of goodness and reasonableness did not fit the Chinese scheme of things. Under such a test a wildly distorted image of China was obtained. China seemed peculiar, topsy-turvy, fantastic. To themselves the Chinese still seemed quite matter-of-fact, and the Westerners thought even this odd and ridiculous: not only was China upside-down, but the Chinese did not know it! In any case, the present-day scholar, to whom so much material concerning the Chinese is available and China so near, has little justification for applying Western tests of virtue and rationality to things Chinese.

If the application of Western values to China is avoided, there is still the danger that the Chinese scheme of things may not be interpreted at all. The literal translation [pg 014] of Chinese terms strips them of their contexts. The result may be unintelligibility. The Chinese term jên is frequently rendered “benevolence,” a Western word which, while at times an approximate equivalent, fails to carry the full burden of meaning. Sun speaks of an interpretation of history antagonistic to dialectical materialism—the interpretation of history by jên. A “benevolent” interpretation of history means nothing whatever to a Westerner. If jên is translated into a different configuration of words, and given as “group-consciousness” or “social fellow-feeling,” the result, while still not an exact equivalent of the Chinese, is distinctly more intelligible.

To effect this translation of ideas and values, several methods are available. The issue cannot be dodged by a denial of its existence; the mere act of explanation involves some process, whether deliberate or unconscious, of translation and transvaluation. If the interpreter refuses to deal with the problem consciously, he will nevertheless be guided by his unrevealed assumptions. To give an accounting for what he has done, he must, first, admit that he is interpreting, and second, seek to make plain what he is doing, so that his readers may allow for the process. The demonstration of the consequences of interpretation minimizes their possible adverse effects. The simplest way to allow for the alterations (beyond mere reproduction) arising from interpretation would be to adopt a technique so widely known that others could, in their own minds, try to re-trace the steps of the process and negate the changes. Among such widely known techniques are the Marxian and the sociological.

Both these scarcely seem adapted to the problems presented by an interpretation of Sun Yat-sen. The Marxian terminology is so peculiarly suited to the ulterior purposes the Marxians keep in mind, and is so esoteric when applied to matters not related to the general fields in which the Marxians are interested, that it could scarcely [pg 015] be applied in the present instance. A non-Marxian would find it a hazardous task. The interpreter of Sun Yat-sen must interpret into something; what, depends on the audience. Dialectical materialism, in the abstract excellent as a technique, would scarcely make Sun understandable to most Americans of the present day. Sun himself rejected the Marxian method of interpretation; an American audience would also reject it; these two factors outweigh all the conceivable advantages.

The sociological technique of interpretation is quite another question. The various methods of analysis developed by each of the schools of sociologists are still the objects rather than the tools of study. Such men as Max Weber and Vilfredo Pareto have made contributions to Western social thought which enrich the scope and method of the social studies. Their methods of analysis are not weighted down by a body of extraneous considerations, as is the Marxian, and they promise an objectivity not otherwise attainable. On the other hand, they are still at that stage of development where the technique obtrudes itself; it has not, as has the inductive method in general, become so much taken for granted as to be invisible.

The sociological approach need not, however, be carried to the full extent thought necessary by its advocates. In the study of law, the consideration of extra-juridical materials is called sociological in contrast to the strictly juristic. If the legal scholar goes beyond the strict framework of the law, and considers other elements in man's behavior and knowledge while dealing with legal problems, he is apt to be called a sociological jurist. In doing so he is not committed, however, to belief in or use of any particular form of what is known as the science of society or sociology. He may adopt almost any sort of social outlook, or may be committed to any one of many doctrines of social value and to any one of widely varying methods of social study.

This negative, broad sense of the sociological, when applied to the study of politics, has commonly meant that the scholars employing it began with the notion of the political, but, finding it too narrow, touched upon related fields. An interpretation of Sun Yat-sen's politics might be based on this method. It would still be a political work, in that it sought to associate his ideas with the ideas concerning government to be found in the West, but would be free, nevertheless, to touch upon non-political materials relevant to Sun's politics. The Chinese have had notions of authority and control radically different from those developed in the West; a purely juristic interpretation of the various Chinese politics would simply scrape the lacquer off the screen.

The Chinese have not had the sharp distinction of disciplines which runs through all Western learning. Since one of the most conspicuous ingredients in their thought—conspicuous, that is, to Westerners looking in from outside—has been the ethical, many Westerners have dismissed Chinese historical, political and more strictly philosophical thought as being loosely and amiably ethical but never getting anywhere. The Chinese did not departmentalize their learning to any considerable degree. Politics was not the special activity of a definite group of men, or the study of a select body of scholars. Politics ran through and across most of the activities in society, and was largely the interest of that intellectual élite by which China has been so distinguished on the roster of civilizations. In becoming everything, politics ceased being politics; that is, those elements in man's thought and behavior which Westerners have termed political were not separated and labelled. The Westerner must say that politics was everything in China, or that it was nothing.

An interpretation of Sun Yat-sen must keep in mind these differences between Chinese and Western categories. In doing so it will pass beyond the limits of what is commonly [pg 017] known as politics, since no sharp boundaries of “politics” are to be found in China. Yet, as an interpretation designed to serve Western readers, it must return again and again to Western politics, making comparisons when they are justified, pointing out differences between China and the West as they become relevant and clear. The interpretation will thus weave back and forth between conventional Western political science, with its state-mindedness, and the wholly different material of traditions and customs out of which Sun sought to construct an ideology and a system of working politics for China in the modern world.

How can this interpretation seek to avoid the misfortunes and errors into which so many similar attempts have fallen? It must proceed without the aid of such specialized techniques as dialectical-materialistic or Paretian analysis, and yet aim at the scientific, the rationally defensible, the objective. In seeking to apply a method in the interpretation of Sun Yat-sen, the work must face criticism of its method, must make the method explicit and simple enough to allow criticism. If the thought of Sun really is to emerge from the exposition, the exposition must allow itself to be judged, so that it can be appraised, and so that, one way or another, it may not interfere with the just evaluation of the materials which it seeks to present. Sun Yat-sen should not be judged poor because of a poor interpretation; nor, on the other hand, should his thought be adjudged more excellent or more exact than it seems to the Chinese, merely because the expositor has suggested an interpretation possibly more precise.

The technique adopted in the present work is a relatively simple one. It is an attempt to start de novo with certain concepts of society and government. Several simple although novel terms are introduced, to provide a foundation upon which the procedure may rest. One of [pg 018] these, for instance, is “ideology,” which in the present work refers to the whole psychological conditioning of a group of persons.[23] No attempt is made, at the beginning or at any later phase of the exposition, to distinguish between the ideology as belief and the ideology as truth. Whether the Chinese were and are right, or the Westerners, are questions, not for the student of comparative political science, but for the philosopher and the psychologist. The interpretation seeks, as far as possible, to transpose certain parts of the traditional Chinese ideology, as they were, and as Sun Yat-sen re-shaped them, into one frame of reference provided by the ideology of twentieth-century America. What the “real truth” is, does not matter; the Marxians would say that both ideologies were inexact; so might the Roman Catholics. If the [pg 019] ideology of old China, and the ideology that Sun wished to see developed in the minds of the Chinese people of the future, can be made comprehensible in terms of contemporary American beliefs, of fact or of value, this venture will have been successful.

The Chinese ideology cannot be explained in its own terms; these exist only in the Chinese language. If Sun Yat-sen's own arrangement of his works is inadequate for the Chinese, rearrangement is a task for the Chinese and not for the Western scholars to perform. The Westerners who deal with Sun can contribute substantially only if they give what the Chinese cannot—enough of a reference to their own ideology to permit a broader scale for the analysis and the appreciation of Sun's thought. Their knowledge of their own world of ideas is the special tool which justifies their intervention in this Chinese field of knowledge.

In avoiding the unjustifiable imposition of Western ideas and values upon the Chinese, and yet orienting Sun's thought with respect to the West, the interpretation will have to resort to several fairly evident means. In the first place, it will have to transpose Chinese ideas into the Western ideology, and yet avoid distortions of meaning. This can be partly done by the use of neutral terms, of terms which are simple and clear enough to reproduce the Chinese, and nevertheless not so heavily burdened with connotations that they will cause a reading-in of Western ideas not relevant to the point in question. More simply, the Chinese ideas must be represented by terms which approximate the same set of values in the West that their originals have in China. This will sometimes require the use of unfamiliar periphrases: the words “music” and “rites” may be given as “the rhythm of life” and “conformity to the ideology.” Secondly, the Chinese ideology need not be given as a whole; it is improbable that it could, without a terrific expansion [pg 020] of the Western ideology to accommodate it; but enough of the Chinese ideology must be given to explain the significant differences between the Chinese system of controlling the behavior of men, and the Western. This latter involves the choice of material, and is therefore by its nature challengeable.

Again, in demonstrating significant differences instead of merely seeking analogous (and probably misleading) examples, the interpretation might turn to certain aspects of Chinese philosophy which appear as strikingly illustrative of the point of view of the Chinese. Confucius the political thinker is only a small part of Confucius the man and the philosopher; Chinese political thought, although a vast field, is only a small part of the social thought of the Chinese. Only an infinitesimal part of this comparatively minor area of Chinese study will suffice to make clear some, at least, of the sharp differences of outlook between China and the West.

A recapitulation of this declaration of technique may be found helpful, for an understanding of Sun Yat-sen by Westerners is necessary because of the vastly different background of his thought. Even apart from the strangeness of his thought to the West, it is scattered in the original, and must be pieced together. An exposition of his ideas which would, at one and the same time, present a systematic outline of his ideas, and transpose them into a frame of reference where Western scholars might grasp them, might be a labor meriting performance. His terms would have to be rendered by neutral words (not overladen with particular Western contexts) or by neologisms, or simply left in the original, to develop meaning as a configuration of related ideas is built up about them. The problem of interpretation cannot, however, be solved by settling the difficulty of language: there still remains the question of a technique which can pretend to the scientific, the exact, the rationally defensible. Despite their great [pg 021] merits, the Marxian and Paretian techniques are not suited to the present task. The point of view and means of study of political science may be kept, if a few necessary borrowings from sociological thought (not necessarily sociology) are introduced. Such borrowing includes the use of notions such as non-political society, patterns of authority, and ideology, none of which are to be found in the more law-minded part of political science. By seeking to point out the Chinese, then the Western, ideas involved, without confusing the two, the presentation may succeed in transposing the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, as well as his beliefs concerning working politics, into the English language and into an explanatory but not distorting background. To do this, a small sampling of certain aspects of old Chinese social thought and behavior will be a required preliminary.

Chapter I. The Ideological, Social, and Political Background.

The Rationale of the Readjustment.

The San Min Chu I and related works of Sun Yat-sen represent in their entirety one of the most ambitious bodies of doctrine ever set forth by a political leader. They differ from such a document as the Communist Manifesto in that they comprehend a much greater range of subject matter and deal with it in much greater detail. They pertain not merely to the reconstitution of an economic or political system; they propose a plan for the reconstruction of a whole civilization, the reformation of a way of thought customary among a great part of the human race, and a consequent transformation of men's behavior. Conceived in the bold flights of a penetrating, pioneering mind, avowedly experimental at the time of their first utterance, these works of Sun have already played a most significant rôle in the Far East and may continue to affect history for a long time to come. They may quite legitimately be called the bible of new China.

Social change is a consequence of maladjustment. The thought of Sun Yat-sen is a program of change—change which, if it is to be understood, must be seen at its beginning and its end. The background from which Sun emerged and which was an implicit condition of all his utterances must be mentioned, so that the problems he faced may be understood. Only then will it be possible to turn to the plans he devised for the rethinking of Chinese tradition and the reorganization of Chinese polity. A vast maladjustment between the Chinese and the world outside led to the downfall of the Manchu Empire in China and has threatened the stability of every government [pg 023] erected since that time; Chinese society is in a state of profound unrest and recurrent turmoil. Sun Yat-sen contributed to the change, and sought a new order, to be developed from the disorder which, voluntarily or not, he helped in part to bring about.

The old order that failed, the interregnum (in the etymological sense of the word), and the new order proposed by Sun must be taken all together in order to obtain a just understanding of Sun's thought. No vast history need be written, no Decline and Fall of the Chinese Empire is necessary, but some indication of the age-old foundations and proximate conditions of Sun's thought must be obtained.

These may, perhaps, be found in a sampling of certain data from the thought and behavior of the Chinese as a group under the old system, and the selection of a few important facts from the history of China since the first stages of the maladjustment. An exposition of Sun's thought must not slur the great importance of the past, yet it dare not linger too long on this theme lest the present—in which, after all, uncounted millions of Chinese are desperately struggling for life—come to seem insignificant.

Confucianism is a philosophy so broad and so highly developed that any selection does violence to its balance and proportion, which are among its chief merits.[24] Yet [pg 024] only those few facts can be taken from the history and thought of the Chinese which may assist the Westerner in becoming familiar with a few terms which recur again and again in the works of Sun Yat-sen. If the present work purported to be a study of Chinese history, or a complete analysis of the Chinese social system, such an extreme selectivity could not be condoned; since it, however, tries only to outline Sun's thought, the selection of a few Confucian doctrines and the complete ignoring of others, may be forgiven. All the schools of the past, and the literary traditions which developed from them, and social tendencies that were bound up with these have to be omitted, and those few ideas and customs described which bear directly on one single point—the most significant ideological differences between the Chinese and the West with respect to the political order, i. e. the control of men in society in the name of all society.[25]

Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity.

The Confucian system, against which Sun Yat-sen reacted in part and in part sought to preserve, was a set of ideas and institutions developed as a reaction against certain conditions in ancient China. These conditions may be roughly described as having arisen from a system of proto-nationalisms, at a time when the old—perhaps prehistorically ancient—Chinese feudal system was rapidly declining and an early form of capitalism and of states was taking its place. The Chou dynasty (ca. 1150-221 B.C.) was in power at the time of this transition; under its rule the golden age of Chinese philosophy appeared—Confucius (552-479 B.C.) and Lao Tzŭ (ca. 570-ca. 490 B.C.) lived and taught.

Their philosophies, contrary to the popular Western beliefs concerning Chinese philosophies, were protests against a world which seemed to them well-nigh intolerable. The old Chinese system, which may seem to Westerners a highly mystical feudal organization, was in its century-long death-agonies; the virtues it had taught were not the virtues of the hour; the loyalties it had set up were loyalties which could scarcely be maintained in a time when rising states, acting more and more as states have acted in the West, were disrupting the earlier organization [pg 026] of society, waging struggles—in the manner that, centuries later, Machiavelli was to portray—of intrigue and warfare for the eventual hegemony over that whole area of eastern Asia which the Chinese of that time regarded as the civilized world.

The political aspects of the transition from the feudal to the proto-national system is described by one of the most eminent of the Western authorities on China in the following terms: “The aim of all the Leaders was to control western Ho-nan. There is the heart of ancient China.... All around about, in vaster regions occupied no doubt by less dense and more shifting populations, great States formed, increasing first towards the exterior, seeking (as we have seen in the case of China) to cut the communication of their rivals with the Barbarians, mutually forcing each other to change the directions of the expansion, exercising on each other a pressure from behind, and a converging pressure on the central overlordships. All schemed to conquer them. Thus an amalgamation was achieved. Whilst in the centre the Chinese nation was coming into being, on the outer borders States were being formed which, aiming at annexing the centre of China, ended by themselves also becoming Chinese.”[26] Not only did the newer, political organization of society begin to make itself distinct from the family, feudal, and religious organization; it began to engage in activities which increased its resemblance to the Western system of nations. Tributes of textiles, horses, and compulsory labor were demanded. A non-feudal economy was encouraged; [pg 027] the state of Ch'i encouraged artisans and merchants, and favored the trade in fish and salt. Mining, metallurgy and currency were studied. State monopolies were created out of the products of forests, lakes, marshes, shell-fish beds, and salt pans. Mines also became “treasures of the state.”[27]

The history of these states reads like a page torn out of the history of early modern Europe. The struggle was half diplomatic and half military. From the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 B.C.) to the end of the Age of Warring States (491-221 B.C.), China was subject to frequent war and unstable peace. The character of war itself changed, from a chivalrous exercise almost ritualistic in nature, to a struggle of unrestricted force. The units of government which were to develop into states, and almost into nations, began as feudal overlordships; traditional hatreds and sentiments were developed; diplomatic and military policies crystallized and became consistent; and activities of a state nature became increasingly prominent.

Concurrently, other factors operated to prevent an indefinite continuance of these struggles of proto-national states and to avoid the appearance of a permanent system of armed nations such as that which has appeared in modern Europe. The feudal system of China left a strong ethnical, linguistic and intellectual heritage of unity, which was stronger than the cultural disunities and particularities appearing in certain of the states. (The state of Chêng was particularly conspicuous in developing a peculiar state culture.)[28] As the states became larger and larger with the passing of time, they tended not only to develop certain large differences between themselves, but to eradicate the minute local peculiarities of the old [pg 028] system, and in so doing to increase the general homogeneity which was also a heritage of the past ages. This general homogeneity found a living symbol in the persons of the Chou Emperors who, possessed of no more power than the Tennos under the Shogunate, acted, as did their Japanese analogues two thousand years later, as the quasi-religious personifications of the whole general community. It thus occurred that the old feudal system was destroyed by the growth of a general non-feudal economy and political order, which, in its turn, led to the development of the great imperial system under which China continued for many centuries. The period of the transition, during which the traditional feudal unity had been shaken and the new imperial unity not yet established, was a tumultuous and bloody one. The presence of a confederation under the hegemony of some one state—the so-called Presidency—provided a suitable framework for rivalries toward power, without particularly increasing the general peace.

The transition, as it took place, was neither apparent nor agreeable. The political turmoil was but slightly less than the intellectual unrest and disturbance. Everywhere faith and acceptance seemed to have been lost to humanity; licentiousness and impiety fed discord. The lack of harmony, made doubly vivid by the presence of a strong tradition of primeval Arcadian peace and unity under the mythological Emperors, was bitter to the scholars and men of virtue of the time. It was quite inevitable that protests should be raised which would hasten the advent, or return, of unity and peace. These protests form the subject of the work of Confucius and the other great philosophers, and schools of thinkers, of the Chou dynasty. It was, in later ages, upon these philosophies that the great structure of Chinese society developed and continued down until modern times.

The Theory of the Confucian World-Society.

The various types of protest against the development of states and the consequent anarchy of the Chinese society considered as a whole cannot be considered in this work; many were primarily religious; Taoism, while ranking as one of the most conspicuous religions of the world, has little bearing on politics. Even Confucianism, which merits careful study, must be summarized and re-stated as briefly as possible. Confucianism has suffered from an ambiguity and exoticism of terms, when presented to the West; its full significance as a political philosophy can become fully apparent only when it is rendered in the words of the hour.

What was it that Confucius did in protest against the established discord of the world he knew? He struck directly at the foundations of politics. His criticisms and remedies can be fully appreciated only by reference to a theory of ideology.

Confucius perceived that the underlying problem of society was that of ideology; he seems to have realized that the character of a society itself essentially depends upon the character of the moral ideas generally prevalent among the individuals composing it, and that where there is no common body of ideas a society can scarcely be said to exist.[29] He did not consider, as did Han Fei-tzŭ and the legalist school of philosophers, questions of law the preëminent social problem. He realized that state and law were remedies, and that the prime questions of organization were those anterior to the political, and that the state existed for the purpose of filling out the shortcomings of social harmony.[30]

In a society—such as Confucius dreamed of—where there was no disagreement in outlook, policy would not be a governmental question; if there were no disharmony of thought and of behavior, there would be no necessity of enforcing conformance to the generally accepted criteria of conduct. From this standpoint, government itself is socially pathological, a remedy for a poorly ordered society. Men are controlled indirectly by the examples of virtue; they do good because they have learned to do good and do it unquestioningly and simply. Whatever control is exercised over men is exercised by their ideology, and if other men desire control they must seek it through shaping the ideas of others. At its full expression, such a doctrine would not lead to mere anarchy; but it would eliminate the political altogether from the culture of man, replacing it with an educational process. Ideological control would need to be supplemented by political only if it failed to cover the total range of social behavior, and left loopholes for conflict and dispute.

This doctrine is framed in quite different terms by Confucius, who spoke and wrote in an age when the mystical elements of the old feudal ideology still exercised powerful and persuasive influence, and when there was no other society than his own which he might make the object of his study. The central point of his teachings is the doctrine of jên. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, one of the most brilliant modern exponents of ancient Chinese philosophy, wrote of this:

In the simplest terms, “Jen” means fellow-feeling for one's kind. Once Fan Chih, one of his disciples, asked Confucius what [pg 031] “Jen” meant. Confucius replied, “To love fellow-men”; in other words this means to have a feeling of sympathy toward mankind....

Intellectually the relationship becomes common purpose; emotionally it takes the form of fellow-feeling.[31]

This doctrine appears more specific in its application when it is realized that Confucius regarded his own society and mankind as coterminous. Barbarians, haunting the fringes of the world, were unconscious of jên; not being in sympathy with mankind, they were not as yet fully human.

Jên is a word which cannot be exactly translated into English. It is laden with a burden of connotations which it has acquired through the centuries; its variability of translation may be shown by the fact that, in the standard translations of the Chinese classics, it is written “Benevolence.” It might equally well be given as “consciousness of one's place and function in society.” The man who followed jên was one who was aware of his place in society, and of his participation in the common endeavors of mankind.

Jên, or society-mindedness, leads to an awareness of virtue and propriety (têh and yi). When virtue and propriety exist, it is obligatory that men follow them. Behavior in accordance with virtue and propriety is li. Commonly translated “ethics,” this is seen as the fruition of the force of jên in human society. Jên underlies and establishes society, from the existence of which spring virtue and propriety; these prescribe principles for human conduct, the formulation of which rules is li.[32] Auxiliary to li is chêng ming. Chêng ming is the rightness of names: [pg 032] li, the appropriateness of relationships. Li, it may be noted, is also translated “rites” or “ceremonies”; a rendering which, while not inexact, fails to convey the full import of the term.

Chêng ming, the rectification of names, may be regarded as a protest against the discords in language that had developed during the transitional period from feudalism to eventual unity. Confucius, of course, did not have as sharp an issue confronting him as do the modern Western innovators in social and political ideology. Nevertheless, the linguistic difficulty was clear to him. The expansion of the Chinese written language was so great at that time that it led to the indiscriminate coining of neologisms, and there was a tendency towards a sophisticated hypocrisy in the use of words.[33]

Confucius saw that, in obtaining harmony, language needed to be exact; otherwise long and fruitless disputes over empty words might be engaged in or, what was even worse, words might not conform to the realities of social life, and might be used as instruments of ill-doing. Confucius did not, however, present a scheme of word-worship. He wanted communication to cement society, to be an instrument of concord. He wanted, in modern terms, a terminology which by its exactness and suitability would of itself lead to harmony.[34] In advocating the rectification of names, Confucius differed from many other founders of philosophies and religions; they, too, wanted names rectified—terminology reorganized—to suit their particular doctrines; but there they stopped short. Confucius regarded the rectification of names as a continuous process, one which had to be carried on unceasingly if communication, for the sake of social harmony, was to remain just and exact.

Chêng ming is highly significant in Confucian thought, and exhibits the striking difference between the Chinese and the older Western political study. If the terms by means of which the communication within a society is effected, and in which the group beliefs of fact or of value are to be found, can be the subject of control, there is opened up a great field of social engineering. Chêng ming states, in recognizable although archaic terms, the existence of ideology, and proposes the strengthening of ideology. In recognizing the group (in his case, mankind) as dependent upon ideology for group existence, Confucius delivered Chinese political thought from any search for an ontology of the real state. It became possible to continue, in the traditional pragmatic manner,[35] thinking of men in simple terms referring only to individual men, avoiding the hypostatizations common in the West. In pointing out the necessity for the control of ideology by men, Confucius anticipated theories of the “pedagogical state” by some twenty centuries.

Li, in the terminology of the present work, is the conformity of the individual to the moral ideology, or, stated in another manner, the control of men by the ideology.[36]

Li, conformity to the ideology, implies, of course, conformity to those parts of it which determine value. Li [pg 034] prescribes the do-able, the thinkable. In so far as the ideology consists of valuations, so far do those valuations determine li. Hsü lists the operations of li in six specific categories:

(1) it furnishes the principles of political organization; (2) it furnishes details for the application of the doctrine of ratification; (3) it discusses the functions of government; (4) it prescribes the limitations of governmental authority; (5) it advances principles of social administration; and (6) it provides a foundation for crime and lawsuits. These are only the political functions of li. Its force is to be regarded as equally effective in every other type of human behavior.[37]

The approach to society contained in the doctrines of jên, chêng ming, and li is, therefore, one which largely eliminates the necessity for politics. Its influence may be estimated from three points of view: (1) to what degree was government different from what it might have been had it followed the line of development that government did in the West? (2) what was the range of governmental action in such a system? and (3) what was the relation of government to the other institutions of a Confucian society?

In regard to the first point, it will be seen immediately that government, once chêng ming has been set in motion, is not a policy-making body. There is no question of policy, no room for disagreement, no alternative. What is right is apparent. Politics, in the narrow sense of the word, ceases to be a function of government; only administration remains.

Secondly, government needs to administer only for two purposes. The chief of these is the maintenance of the ideology. Once right views are established, no individual is entitled to think otherwise. Government must treat the heterodox as malefactors. Their crime is greater than ordinary crime, which is a mere violation of right behavior; [pg 035] they pollute right thought, set in motion the forces of discord, and initiate evils which may work on and on through the society, even after the evil-thinkers themselves are dead. To protect the society actively against discord, the government must encourage the utterance of the accepted truth. The scholar is thus the highest of all the social classes; it is he who maintains agreement and order. The government becomes, in maintaining the ideology, the educational system. The whole political life is education, formal or informal. Every act of the leader is a precept and an example. The ruler does not compel virtue by law; he spreads it by his conspicuous example.

The other function of the government in maintaining the ideology lies in the necessity of dealing with persons not affected by the ideology. Barbarians are especially formidable, since both heretics and criminals may be restored to the use of their reason, while barbarians may not, so long as they remain barbarians. Accordingly, the government is also a defense system. It is a defense against open and physical disruption from within—as in the case of insurrectionaries or bandits—and a defense against forces from without which, as veritable powers of darkness, cannot be taught and are amenable only to brute force.

In connection with the third point, government itself appears as subject to li. It has no right to do wrong. The truth is apparent to everyone, and especially to the scholars. In this wise the Chinese governments were at the mercy of their subjects. No divine right shielded them when public opinion condemned them; ill-doing governments were twice guilty and contemptible, because of the great force of their examples. An evil emperor was not only a criminal; he was a heresiarch, leading many astray, and corrupting the virtue upon which society rested—virtue being the maintenance of a true and moral ideology, and conformity to it.

The consequence of these teachings was such that we may say, without sacrificing truth to paradox, that the aim of Chinese government was anarchy—not in the sense of disorder, but in the sense of an order so just and so complete that it needed no governing. The laissez-faire of the Chinese was not only economic; it was political. The Great Harmony of Confucius, which was his Utopia, was conceived of as a society where the excellence of ideology and the thoroughness of conformity to ideology had brought perfect virtue, perfect happiness.

The other doctrines of Confucius, his practical teachings on statesmanship, his discourses on the family—these cannot be entered into here. Enough has, perhaps, been shown to demonstrate the thoroughness of Confucius' reaction against state and nation.[38] This reaction was to continue, and to become so typical that the whole Chinese system of subsequent centuries was called Confucian,[39] until the exigencies of a newer, larger, and more perilous world led to Sun Yat-sen's teaching of modern Chinese nationalism. Before taking up the doctrine of min tsu, it may be worthwhile to summarize the manner in which Chinese society, deliberately and accidentally, each in part, followed out the doctrines of Confucius in its practical organization.

The Chinese World-Society of Eastern Asia.

It would be, of course, absurd to pretend to analyze the social system of China in a few paragraphs; and yet [pg 037] it is necessary to the study of Sun Yat-sen that certain characteristics be at least mentioned. Several problems appear which are quite outstanding. What was the social position and function of each individual? How were refractory individuals to be disciplined in accordance with the requirements that the general opinion of society imposed? What were the ultimate ends which the organization of Chinese society was to realize? How were the educational system and the frontier defenses to be maintained? What was to be the position and power of the political organization?

At the outset it is necessary that a working demarcation of the political be established. Accepting, by definition, those coercive controls as political which are operated for the preservation of society as a whole, and are recognized within the society as so doing, we see immediately that the range of the political must have been much less in old China than it has been in the West. Western societies tend, at least in law, to emphasize the relationship between the individual and the society as a whole; free and unassociated individuals tend to become extraordinarily unstable. In the old Chinese society the control of the individual was so much an ideological one, that political control was infinitely narrower than in the West. But, in order to effectuate ideological control, there must be an organization which will permit pressure to be exercised on the individual in such a compelling manner that the exercise of external coercion becomes unnecessary. In a society in which the state has withered away, after an enormous expansion in the subject-matter of its control,[40] the totalitarian state is succeeded by the totalitarian [pg 038] tradition, if—and the qualification is an important one—the indoctrination has been so effective that the ideology can maintain itself in the minds of men without the continuing coercive power of the state to uphold it. If the ideology is secure, then control of the individual will devolve upon those persons making up his immediate social environment, who—in view of the uniform and secure notions of right and justice prevailing—can be relied upon to attend to him in a manner which will be approved by the society in general.

In China the groups most conspicuous within the society were the family system, the village and district, and the hui (association; league; society, in the everyday sense of the word).

The family was an intricate structure. A fairly typical instance of family organization within a specific village has been described in the following terms: “The village is occupied by one sib, a uni-lateral kinship group, exogamous, monogamous but polygynous, composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the natural family, the economic-family, the religious-family, and the sib.”[41] The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The economic family may have had a natural family as its core, but commonly extended through several degrees of kinship, and may have included from thirty to one hundred persons, who formed a single economic unit, living and consuming collectively. The religious family was an aggregate of economic families, of which it would be very difficult to give any specified number as an average. It [pg 039] was religious in that it provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of ancestors, and maintained an ancestral shrine where the proper genealogical records could be kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern times. The sib corresponded roughly to the clan, found in some Western communities; its rôle was determined by the immediate environment. In some cases—as especially in the south—the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one or more sibs dominated whole communities; in the greater part of China it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite the various local religious families which constituted it.

Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality of the human race; it oriented the individual, not only philosophically, but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant heights of nobility or falling to the degradation of a slavery in which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by outsiders or the menace of his own potential follies. It was largely through the family system, with its religious as well as economic and social foundation, that the Chinese solved the problem of adequate mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole, and gave to that stability a clear and undeniable purpose—the continued generation of the human race through the continuity of a multitude of families, each determined upon survival.

The family was the most obviously significant of the [pg 040] groupings within the society, but it was equalled if not excelled in importance by the village.[42]

Had the family been the only important social grouping, it might have been impossible for any democracy to develop in China. It so occurred that the family pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the importance of villages in Chinese life negated the too sharp influence of a familistic government. It would have been the most awful heresy, as it is in Japan today, to revolt against and depose an unrighteous father; there was nothing to prevent the deposition or destruction of an evil village elder. In times of concord, the Emperor was the father of the society; at other times, when his rule was less successful, he was a fellow-villager subject to the criticism of the people.

The village was the largest working unit of non-political administration; that is to say, groups within and up to the village were almost completely autonomous and not subject to interference, except in very rare cases, from outside. The village was the smallest unit of the political. The District Magistrate, as the lowest officer in the political-educational system, was in control of a district containing from one to twenty villages, and negotiated, in performing the duties imposed upon him, with the village leaders. The villages acted as self-ruling communes, at times very democratic.[43]

Next in importance, among Chinese social groups, after the family and the village was the hui. It was in all probability the last to appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, the association found its justification in the deeply ingrained propensities of the Chinese to coöperate. Paralleling and supplementing the former two, the hui won for itself a definite and unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The kinds of hui may be classified into six categories:[44] 1) the fraternal societies; 2) insurance groups; 3) economic guilds; 4) religious societies; 5) political societies; and 6) organizations of militia and vigilantes. The hui made up, in their economic form, the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and provided the system of vocational education for persons not destined to literature and administration. Politically, it was the hui—under such names as the Triad and the Lotus—that provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever objectionable social or economic conditions developed.

The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, [pg 042] villages, and hui, comprised a whole “known world.” Its strength was like that of a dinosaur in modern fable; having no one nerve-centre, the world-society could not be destroyed by inroads of barbarians, or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The ideology which has been called Confucian continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation of persons emancipated from the tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government went forward, even though dynasties fell and the whole country was occasionally over-run by conquerors. The absence of any juristically rigid organization permitted the Chinese to maintain a certain minimum of order, even in the absence of an emperor, or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.

The governmental superstructure cemented the whole Chinese world together in a formal manner; it did not create it. The family, the village, and the hui were fit subjects for imperial comment, but there was nothing in their organization to persuade the student that the Emperor—by virtue of some Western-type Kompetenz Kompetenz—could remove his sanction from their existence and thereby annihilate them. There was no precarious legal personality behind the family, the village, and the hui, which could be destroyed by a stroke of law. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland clan of the MacGregor—“the proscribed name”—without liquidating the members of the clan in toto. In China the Emperor beheld a family as a quasi-individual, and when enraged at them was prone to wipe them out with massacre. Only in a very few cases was it possible for him to destroy an organization without destroying the persons composing it; he could, for example, remove the privilege of a scholarship system from a district, prefecture, or province without necessarily disposing of all the scholars involved in the [pg 043] move. The government of China—which, in the normal run of affairs, had no questions of policy, because policy was traditional and inviolable—continued to be an administration dedicated to three main ends—the maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the society as a whole against barbarians (military affairs) and against the adverse forces of nature (public works on the most extensive—and not intensive—scale), and the collection of funds for the fulfillment of the first two ends (revenue). The Emperor was also the titular family head of the Chinese world.

The educational system was identical with the administrative, except in the case of the foreign dynasties. (Under the Manchus, for example, a certain quota of Manchu officials were assigned throughout the government, irrespective of their scholastic rank in contrast to the Chinese.) It was a civil service, an educational structure, and a ritualist organization. Selected from the people at large, scholars could—at least in theory—proceed on the basis of sheer merit to any office in the Empire excepting the Throne. Their advancement was graduated on a very elaborate scale of degrees, which could be attained only by the passing of examinations involving an almost perfect knowledge of the literature of antiquity and the ability to think in harmony with and reproduce that literature. The Chinese scholar-official had to learn to do his own thinking by means of the clichés which he could learn from the classics; he had to make every thought and act of his life conform to the pattern of the ideology. Resourceful men may have found in this a proper fortification for their originality, as soon as they were able to cloak it with the expressions of respect; mediocre persons were helpless beyond the bounds of what they had learned.

The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. [pg 044] It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar class, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded—except in rare instances—on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was assured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government assistance. The educational system also served as the substitute for a nobility. Hereditary class distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.[45] In a society [pg 045] which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful nobility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order.

The scholars, once they had passed the examinations, were given either subsistence allowances or posts, according to the rank which they had secured in the tests. (This was, of course, the theory; in actuality bribery and nepotism played rôles varying with the time and the locality.) They made up the administration of the civilized world. They were not only the officials but the literati.

It would be impossible even to enumerate the many posts and types of organization in the administration of imperial China.[46] Its most conspicuous features may be enumerated as follows: China consisted of half a million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, each to a large extent autonomous.[47] These were divided among, roughly, two thousand hsien, in each of which an over-burdened District Magistrate sought to carry out all the recognized functions of government in so far as they applied to his locality. He did this largely by negotiation with the [pg 046] leaders of the social groups in his bailiwick, the heads of families, the elders of villages, the functionaries of hui. He was supervised by a variety of travelling prefects and superintendents, but the next officer above him who possessed a high degree of independence was the viceroy or governor—whichever type happened to rule the province or group of provinces. Except for their non-hereditability, these last offices were to all intents and purposes satrapies. The enormous extent of the Chinese civilized world, the difficulty of communicating with the capital, the cumbersomeness of the administrative organization, the rivalry and unfriendliness between the inhabitants of various provinces—all these encouraged independence of a high degree. If Chinese society was divided into largely autonomous communes, the Chinese political system was made up of largely autonomous provinces. Everywhere there was elasticity.

At the top of the whole structure stood the Emperor. In the mystical doctrines which Confucianism transmitted from the animism of the feudal ages of China, the Emperor was the intermediary between the forces of nature and mankind. The Son of Heaven became the chief ritualist; in more sophisticated times he was the patron of civilization to the scholars, and the object of supernatural veneration to the uneducated. His function was to provide a constant pattern of propriety. He was to act as chief of the scholars. To the scholars the ideology was recognized as an ideology, albeit the most exact one; to the common people it was an objective reality of thought and value. As the dictates of reason were not subject to change, the power and the functions of the Emperor were delimited; he was not, therefore, responsible to himself alone. He was responsible to reason, which the people could enforce when the Emperor failed. Popular intervention was regarded as de jure in proportion to its effectiveness de facto. The Imperial structure might be called, [pg 047] in Western terms, the constitutionalism of common sense.[48] The Dragon Throne did not enjoy the mysterious and awful prestige which surrounds the modern Tenno of Nippon; although sublime in the Confucian theory, it was, even in the theory, at the mercy of its subjects, who were themselves the arbiters of reason. There was no authority higher than reason; and no reason beyond the reason discovered and made manifest in the ages of antiquity.

The Impact of the West.

Mere physical shock could not derange the old Chinese society as easily as it might some other, dependent for its stability upon complex, fragile political mechanisms. China was over-run many times by barbarians; the continuity of its civilization was undisturbed. Each group of conquerors added to the racial composition of the Chinese, but contributed little to the culture. The Ch'in, the Mongols, the Manchus—all ruled China as Chinese rulers.

This strength of the Chinese society—in contrast to the Roman—must not, however, lead us to suppose that there were any extraordinary virtues in the Chinese social organization that made Chinese civilization indestructible. On the contrary, the continued life of the Chinese society may be ascribed, among others, to four conditions acting definitely and overwhelmingly in its favor: China's greater physical extent, homogeneity, wealth, and culture.

No barbarian conqueror, with the possible exception of the Mongol, would have been a match for an orderly and [pg 048] united China. Without exception, the barbarian incursions occurred in times of social and political disorder and weakness. That this is no freakish coincidence, may be shown by the contrast between China and any of the peripheral realms. None approached China in extent, in heaviness of population. Conquest of China was always conquest by sufferance of the Chinese.

Second, China's neighbors were divided among themselves. There was never any coalition extensive enough to present a genuine threat to a thriving China. The Chinese, in spite of diversities of spoken language, were united—so far as they were literate—by a common writing and literature; the common ideology had, moreover, fostered an extreme sympathy of thought and behavior among the Chinese. Persons speaking mutually unintelligible dialects, of different racial composition, and in completely different economic and geographical environments displayed—and, for all that, still display in modern times—an uncanny uniformity of social conditioning. China faced barbarians on many fronts; China was coördinated, homogeneous; the barbarians of North and South did not, in all probability, know anything of each other's existence, except what they heard from the Chinese.

Third, China's wealth was a socially fortifying factor. In all Eastern Asia, no other society or form of social organization appeared which could produce a higher scale of living. The Chinese were always materially better off than their neighbors, with the possible exception of the Koreans and Japanese.

Fourth, Eastern Asia was Chinese just as Europe was Graeco-Roman. The peripheral societies all owed a great part, if not all, of their culture to the Chinese. China's conquerors were already under the spell of Chinese civilization when they swept down upon it. None of them were anxious to destroy the heritage of science, arts, and invention which the Chinese had developed.

With these advantages in mind, it is easy to understand the peculiarity of the Westerners, as contrasted with the other peoples whom the Chinese met and fought. The formidable physical power of the Chinese was, after the first few decades of intercourse, seen to be quite unequal to the superior military technique of the West. The Westerners, although different from one another at home, tended to appear as united in the Far East. In any case, Chinese unity availed little in the face of greater military power. The economic factor, while a great attraction to the Westerners, was no inducement to them to become Chinese; they were willing to gain Chinese wealth, and dreamed of conquering it, but not of making wealth in the Chinese manner. And lastly, and most importantly, the Westerners presented a culture of their own which—after the first beginnings of regular intercourse—was quite well able to hold its own against the Chinese.[49]

To the utter certainty of the Chinese way of life, the Westerners presented the equally unshakable dogma of Christianity. They regarded the Chinese—as did the Chinese them—as outlanders on the edge of the known world. They exhibited, in short, almost the same attitude toward the Chinese that the Chinese had toward barbarians. Consequently, each group regarded the other as perverse. The chief distinction between the Chinese and the Westerners lay in the fact that the Chinese would in all probability have been satisfied if the West had minded its own business, while the West, feverish with expansionism, cajoled and fought for the right to come, trade, and teach.[50]

At times, the two races met on agreeable and equal terms. The Jesuit missionaries ingratiated themselves with the Chinese and, by respecting Chinese culture, won a certain admiration for their own. The eighteenth century in Europe was the century of chinoiserie, when Chinese models exercised a profound influence on the fine and domestic arts of Europe.[51] The great upsurge of economic power in the period of the European industrial revolution led to increased self-assurance on the part of the Europeans. The new standards of value alienated them from those features of Chinese culture which the eighteenth century had begun to appreciate, and placed them in a position to sell to the Chinese as well as buy. More and more the economic position of the two societies changed about; the Westerners had come to purchase the superior artizan-made goods of China, giving in exchange metals or raw materials. A tendency now developed for them to sell their own more cheaply, and, in some cases, better manufactured products to the Chinese. The era of good feeling and mutual appreciation, which had never been very strong, now drew to a close.

The vassal states of China were conquered. The British fought the Chinese on several occasions, and conquered each time. The full extent of Western military superiority was revealed in the capture of Peking in 1860, and in the effectiveness—entirely disproportionate to their numbers—that Western-trained Imperial troops had in suppressing the Chinese T'ai-p'ing rebels.

When Sun Yat-sen was a boy, the country was afire with fear and uncertainty. Barbarians who could neither be absorbed nor defeated had appeared. Instead of adopting Chinese thought and manners, they were vigorously teaching their own to the Chinese. The traditional Chinese mechanisms of defense against barbarians were not working.[52] Something was vitally wrong. The Chinese could not be persuaded, as some other non-European peoples conquered in the age of Western world-dominion seem to have been, that all error lay with themselves, and that their own ideology was not worth the saving; nor could they, in face of the unfortunate facts, still believe that they themselves were completely right, or, at least, that their own notions of rightness were completely expedient. In view of the pragmatic foundations of the whole Chinese ideology and way of life, the seriousness of these consequences cannot be over-estimated. Little wonder that China was disturbed! The pragmatic, realistic method of organization that the Chinese had had, no longer worked in a new environment rising, as it were, from the sea.

The Western impact, consequently, affected China in two ways. In the first place, the amorphous Chinese society was threatened and dictated to by the strong, clearly organized states of the West. In the second place, [pg 052] the introduction of disharmonious values from the West destroyed, in large part, that appearance of universality, upon which the effectiveness of the Chinese ideology depended, and shocked Chinese thought and action until even their first premises seemed doubtful.

This, in short, was the dilemma of the Chinese at the advent of Sun Yat-sen. His life was to be dedicated to its solution; it is his analyses that are to be studied in the explanation of the Chinese society in the modern world.

The Continuing Significance of the Background.

Before proceeding to the exposition of Sun Yat-sen's theories and programs, it is necessary that a superlatively important consideration be emphasized: namely, that Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese, that the nation he worked for was China, and that the intellectual and social background of his labors was one completely different from that of the Euramerican world. A great part of the vaporous disputation which has hidden Chinese politics in a cloud of words has been the consequence of the ignoring, by Westernized Chinese as well as by Westerners, of the monumental fact that China is in only a few respects comparable to the West, and that the ideas and methods of the West lose the greater part of their relevance when applied to the Chinese milieu. Political dialecticians in China split Marxian hairs as passionately and sincerely as though they were in nineteenth-century Germany.[53] Sun Yat-sen, though accused of this fantastic fault by some of [pg 053] his adversaries, was—as his theories show upon close examination—much less influenced by Western thought than is commonly supposed to be the case, and in applying Western doctrines to Chinese affairs was apt to look upon this as a fortunate coincidence, instead of assuming the universal exactness of recent Western social and political thought.

What are the features of the Chinese background that must be remembered in order to throw a just light upon the beliefs of Sun Yat-sen? Primarily, it must have become apparent, from the foregoing discussion of Confucianism and the old social order, that China, under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, was beginning to draw away from an order of things which the West—or at least a part of the West—aspires to achieve: a world-society in which the state had withered away. This ideal, while never completely realized in China, was perhaps more closely attained than it has ever been in any other society. Modern actualities led away from this ideal. The West, dreaming of world unity, was divided and armed; China too had to abandon the old notions of universal peace, and arm. The West, seeking social stability, was mobile; China too had to move.

The old society was in its controls totalitarian. Diffuse and extensive controls operated fairly evenly throughout the system. The West possessed a state system which was fundamentally different. By limiting the range of law to the reinforcement of certain particular mores, the Westerners were able to obtain a terrific concentration of political power within the sphere of what they conceived to be legitimate state control. On the other hand the presence of a large number of activities not subject to state control led individuals to cherish their freedom—a freedom which in most cases did not impair the military and political effectiveness of the state in external action.

Since Fascism seeks to reëstablish order and certainty, as does Communism (although an order and certainty of a different kind), by the extension of state activities; and since Sun Yat-sen proposed to improve the political position of China by developing a modern state (of narrow, but intense activities in contrast to the loose general controls of the old society), the drift in China may be regarded, in this respect, as Fascism in reverse. Beginning with the same premises—the regeneration of the nation—Mussolini was led to a course of policy diametrically opposite to that plotted by Sun Yat-sen.

Even, however, with his plans for developing a “machine state” in a society where states had long since perished, Sun Yat-sen did not propose to destroy Chinese morality and non-political discipline for the sake of instituting a sharp juristic law-and-order organization. He was anxious that the old Chinese morality and social knowledge be applied. In this, he differed from most of the other modern leaders of China, who were for veneering China with a Parliament and police without delay. Sun Yat-sen realized that a state was necessary in China, and hoped to establish one; he also hoped that, beyond the limits of the new state activity, individualism and disorder would not come to prevail, but that the old controls would continue to operate.

Accordingly, Sun Yat-sen's thought cannot be studied as a mere offshoot of recent Western thought. It must be realized that he proposed two ends which, of all the countries of the world, would be mutually compatible only in China: the development of a state, and the full continuation of non-political controls.[54]

In fostering the continuation of ideological control, Sun Yat-sen hoped to modify the old ideology so that it would become applicable to the new situations. As will be made clear later, he was redefining the old world-view so that, without disturbing the consequences to which it would lead, it might apply in a novel and unprecedentedly disturbed world. He was, in short, switching the premises and trying to preserve the conclusions, modifying the actual behavior of the Chinese only in so far as it was necessary for the purpose of strengthening and invigorating the whole body politic of China.

Another strain of the ancient thought penetrates Sun Yat-sen's theories. Ideological control was not to the Confucians, as some Marxian critics aver,[55] a rather naïve duplicity by which the gentry of China could maintain themselves in power indefinitely. Confucius can not be accused, save on the basis of unwarrantable reading-in, of insincerity in his teaching of order. He was conservative, and knew what he was doing, in seeking for the general self-discipline of men, and the rule of precept and virtue; but to believe that he desired one public philosophy and another private one goes beyond the realm of historically justifiable interpretation. An ideology may, of course, be deceptive to its promulgators, but the absence of any genuine class-society—as known in the West—must serve as a testimonial to the sincerity of Confucian teachings. The Confucian ideology was to the ancients not only an instrument for good; it was common sense.

Sun Yat-sen did not, as a Western leader in his position might have done, seek to befuddle the masses for their own good. Since he proposed to entrust China's destinies to the votes of the masses, he could scarcely have believed them liable to fall victims to deceit over a great length of time. In teaching of the race-nation, and of the nature of Chinese society, Sun Yat-sen was telling the people what it would be good for them to believe; it was good for them because it was the truth—that is, most in accord with the actual situation of China in the general society of the world.

Few today would dare say what is really in the minds of European leaders such as Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. These men may themselves believe what they say; or, not believing it, say it nevertheless because they think it the right thing for the masses, in the masses' own interests, to believe. Their respective enemies accuse them of saying what they do in order to mislead the masses and to dominate the masses for hidden purposes of their own. No such accusation has been levelled against Sun Yat-sen. Apart from his personal sincerity, his belief in the qualities of the common people was such that he did not consider it necessary to deceive them, even for their own good.

Consequently, in dealing with the various doctrines that Sun preached, it must be remembered that he himself believed what he was saying. He did not merely think that the people should regard the Chinese society as a race-nation; he thought that China was a race-nation. The modifications of the Confucian philosophy were to be contemplated, as was the original philosophy, as pragmatically true.[56]

These two factors must be reckoned with—that Sun Yat-sen was teaching and working in the Chinese milieu, and that his ideology was an ideology not in the older pejorative sense of the word, which connoted duplicity, but an ideology in the sense of a scheme of exact knowledge which, by its very truthfulness, was a political and social instrument.

Chapter II The Theory of Nationalism.

The Emergence of the Chinese Race-Nation.

It could, at first thought, be supposed that the reconstruction of Chinese society might have been necessitated by internal weakness just as much as by a changed environment. The process of organizing and developing a tight, clear scheme of political control organizations within the society (stateification), and delimiting the extent and aims of the society (nationalism) were the chief characteristics of this reconstruction.

It is only by means of a disregard of actual conditions that the supposition of an internal weakness so great as to require radical change can be maintained. While the latter days of the Manchu Empire represented a decline, it was a decline no more serious than others through which Chinese culture had passed and resurged many times in its history. It is still a debatable matter as to whether China had actually become intellectually and artistically sterile during this period. In any event, it is questionable whether the completely revolutionary reorganization of Chinese society—of the type that Sun Yat-sen found it necessary to support—would have been either worth-while or probable in the absence of Euramerican aggression, and the appearance, all about China, of a new, hostile, and unstable environment. If it had not been for the impact of the West it is conceivable—although all comment on this must remain mere speculation—that a social revolution such as those which occurred under Wang Mang (usurper-founder of the unrecognized Hsin Dynasty, 9-25 A.D.), Wang An-shih (prime minister, 1069-1076 A.D., under the Sung dynasty), or Hung Hsiu-ch'üan (founder of the rebel T'ai P'ing dynasty, 1849-1865), [pg 059] might have adjusted matters by a general redistribution of wealth and administrative reorganization.

In his earliest agitations Sun Yat-sen was opposed to the Manchus.[57] In this connection he developed a peculiar and interesting theory concerning nationalism. He held, briefly, that the Chinese had, at the noon-day glory of their Empire, fallen under the lure of a cosmopolitanism which was not in accord with the realities of political existence. It was this lack of distinction between themselves and outsiders which had permitted hundreds of millions of Chinese to fall prey to one hundred thousand Manchus in the early seventeenth century,[58] with the consequence that the Manchus, once on the throne of China, made every effort to erase their barbarian origin from the minds of the Chinese, and, with this end in view, did everything possible, as modern Japan is doing in Korea, to destroy the national consciousness of the Chinese.[59] China, to Sun Yat-sen, had always been a nation, but its inhabitants did not believe it a nation. They had lost the precious treasure of nationalism. Without contradicting Sun Yat-sen, but differing from him only in the use of words, Westerners might say that the Chinese had once known nationalism as members of the antique Chinese states, but had later formed—in the place of a nation—a cosmopolitan society which comprehended the civilized world of Eastern Asia.[60]

Sun Yat-sen did not blame Confucius for cosmopolitanism. There is, indeed, nowhere in his works the implication that Confucianism was an evil in itself, deserving destruction; why then did Sun Yat-sen believe that, even though the old ideology was not invalid for the organization of China internally, the old world-view had broken down as an effective instrument for the preservation of China?

First of all, Sun stated, in terms more general than did the ancients, the necessity of establishing the ideology on the basis of pragmatism. He stated:

We cannot say in general that ideas, as ideas, are good or bad. We must judge whether, when put into practice, they prove useful to us or not. If they are of practical value to us, they are good; if they are impractical, they are bad. If they are useful to the world, they are good; if they are not useful to the world, they are not good.[61]

He states, also, that if the Chinese race is to survive, it must adopt nationalism. “... if we now want to save China, if we wish to see the Chinese race survive forever, we must preach Nationalism.”[62] Hitherto they had been no more conscious of race than were the Europeans of the middle ages. To be sure, they were barbarians, whose features were strange; but the Chinese were not conscious of themselves as a racial unity in competition and conflict with other equal or superior racial unities. The self-consciousness of the Chinese was a cultural rather than a racial one, and the juxtaposition that presented itself to the Chinese mind was between “Ourselves of the Central Realm” and “You the Outsiders.”[63] Sun Yat-sen became intensely conscious of being a Chinese by race,[64] and so did many other of his compatriots, by the extraordinary race-pride of the White Men in China. In common with many others of his generation, Sun Yat-sen turned to race-consciousness as the name for Chinese solidarity.

There is nowhere in his works, so far as the writer knows, any attempt to find a value higher than the necessity of perpetuating the Chinese race. Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese; his followers were Chinese; whatever benefits they contemplated bestowing upon the world as a whole were incidental to their work for a powerful and continued [pg 062] China. At various times Sun Yat-sen and his followers expressed sympathy with the whole world, with the oppressed of the earth, or with all Asia, but the paramount drive behind the new movement has been the defense and reconstruction of China, no longer conceived of as a core-society maintaining the flower of human civilization, but regarded as a race abruptly plunged into the chaos of hostile and greedy nations.

Throughout his life, Sun Yat-sen called China a nation. We may suppose that he never thought that Chinese society need not necessarily be called a nation, even in the modern world. What he did do, though, was to conceive of China as a unique type of nation: a race-nation. He stated that races could be distinguished by a study of physical characteristics, occupation, language, religion and folkways or customs.[65] Dividing the world first into the usual old-style five primary races (white, black, yellow, brown, and red), he divides these races into sub-races in the narrow sense of the term. The Chinese race, in the narrow sense of the term, is both a race and a nation. The Anglo-Saxons are divided between England and America, the Germans between Germany and Austria, the Latins among the Mediterranean nations, and so forth; but China is at the same time both the Chinese race and the Chinese nation. If the Chinese wish their race to perpetuate itself forever, they must adopt and follow the doctrine of Nationalism.[66] Otherwise China faces the tragedy of being "despoiled as a nation and extinct as a race."[67]

Sun Yat-sen felt that China was menaced and oppressed ethnically, politically and economically. Ethnically, he believed that the extraordinary population increase of the [pg 063] white race within the past few centuries represented a trend which, if not counterbalanced, would simply result in the Chinese race being crowded off the earth. Politically he observed that the Chinese dependencies had been alienated by the Western powers and Japan; that China was at the mercy of any military nation that chose to attack; that it was a temporary deadlock between the conquering powers rather than any strength of China that prevented, at least for the time being, the partition of China and that a diplomatic attack, which could break the deadlock of the covetous states, would be even more deadly and drastic than simple military attack.[68]

It must be remembered that Sun Yat-sen saw a nation while the majority of his compatriots still envisioned the serene, indestructible society of the Confucians. Others may have realized that the Western impact was more than a frontier squabble on a grand scale; they may have thought it to have assumed epic proportions. But Sun Yat-sen, oppressed by his superior knowledge of the Western nations, obtained at the cost of considerable sympathy with them, struggled desperately to make his countrymen aware of the fact, irrefutable to him, that China was engaged in a conflict different not only in degree but in kind from any other in Chinese history. The Great Central Realm had become simply China. Endangered and yet supine, it faced the imperative necessity of complete reconstitution, with the bitter alternative of decay and extinction—a race tragedy to be compounded of millions of individual tragedies. And yet reconstitution could not be of a kind that would itself be a surrender and treason to the past; China must fit itself for the modern [pg 064] world, and nevertheless be China. This was the dilemma of the Chinese world-society, suddenly become a nation. Sun Yat-sen's life and thought were devoted to solving it.

The Necessity of Nationalism.

An abstract theorist might observe that the Chinese, finding their loose-knit but stable society surrounded by compact and aggressive nations, might have solved the question of the perpetuation of Chinese society in the new environment by one of two expedients: first, by nationalizing, as it were, their non-national civilization; or second, by launching themselves into a campaign against the system of nations as such. The second alternative does not seem to have occurred to Sun Yat-sen. Though he never ventured upon any complete race-war theory, he was nevertheless anxious to maintain the self-sufficient power of China as it had been until the advent of the West. In his negotiations with the Communists, for example, neither he nor they suggested—as might have been done in harmony with communist theory—the fusion of China and the Soviet Union under a nuclear world government. We may assume with a fair degree of certainty that, had a suggestion been made, Sun Yat-sen would have rejected it with mistrust if not indignation. He had spent a great part of his life in the West. He knew, therefore, the incalculable gulf between the civilizations, and was unwilling to entrust the destinies of China to persons other than Chinese.[69]

Once the possibility of a successful counter-attack upon the system of nations is discounted, nationalism is seen as the sole solution to China's difficulties. It must, however, be understood that, whereas nationalism in the West implies an intensification of the already definite national consciousness of the peoples, nationalism in China might mean only as little as the introduction of such an awareness of nationality. Nationalism in China might, as a matter of logic, include the possibility of improved personal relations between the Chinese and the nationals of other states since, on the one hand, the Chinese would be relieved of an intolerable sense of humiliation in the face of Western power, and, on the other, be disabused of any archaic notions they might retain concerning themselves as the sole civilized people of the earth.[70]

A brief historical reference may explain the apparent necessity of nationalism in China. In the nineteenth century [pg 066] foreigners in China generally suffered reverses when they came into conflict with a village, a family, or a guild. But when they met the government, they were almost always in a position to bully it. It was commonly of little or no concern to the people what their government did to the barbarians; the whole affair was too remote to be much thought about. We find, for example, that the British had no trouble in obtaining labor auxiliaries in Canton to fight with the British troops against the Imperial government at Peking in 1860; it is quite probable that these Cantonese, who certainly did not think that they were renegades, had no anti-dynastic intentions. Chinese served the foreign enemies of China at various times as quasi-military constabulary, and served faithfully. Before the rise of Chinese nationalism it was not beyond possibility that China would be partitioned into four or five colonies appurtenant to the various great powers and that the Chinese in each separate colony, if considerately and tactfully treated, would have become quite loyal to their respective foreign masters. The menace of such possibilities made the need of Chinese nationalism very real to Sun Yat-sen; the passing of time may serve further to vindicate his judgment.

Sun Yat-sen's nationalism, though most vividly clear when considered as a practical expedient of social engineering, may also be regarded more philosophically as a derivation of, or at least having an affinity with, certain older ideas of the Chinese. Confucian thinking, as re-expressed in Western terms, implants in the individual a sense of his responsibility to all humanity, united in space and time. Confucianism stressed the solidarity of humanity, continuous, immortal, bound together by the closest conceivable ties—blood relationships. Sun Yat-sen's nationalism may represent a narrowing of this conception, and the substitution of the modern Chinese race [pg 067] for Confucian humanity. In fairness to Sun Yat-sen it must, however, be admitted that he liked to think, in Christian and Confucian terms, of the brotherhood of man; one of his favorite expressions was “under heaven all men shall work for the common good.”[71]

Nationalism was to Sun Yat-sen the prime condition of his movement and of his other principles. The Communists of the West regard every aspect of their lives significant only in so far as it is instrumental in the class struggle. Sun Yat-sen, meeting them, was willing to use the term “class struggle” as an instrument for Chinese nationalism. He thought of China, of the vital and immediate necessity of defending and strengthening China, and sacrificed everything to the effectuation of a genuine nationalism. To him only nationalism could tighten, organize, and clarify the Chinese social system so that China, whatever it was to be, might not be lost.

The early philosophers of China, looking upon a unicultural world, saw social organization as the supreme criterion of civilization and humanity. Sun Yat-sen, in a world of many mutually incomprehensible and hostile cultures saw nationalism (in the sense of race solidarity) as the supreme condition for the survival of the race-nation China. Democracy and social welfare were necessary to the stability and effectiveness of this nationalism, but the preservation and continuation of the race-nation was always to remain the prime desideratum.

The Return to the Old Morality.

Sun Yat-sen quite unequivocally stated the necessity for establishing a new Nationalist ideology in order to effectuate the purposes of China's regeneration. He spoke of the two steps of ideological reconstitution and political reconstitution [pg 068] as follows: “In order today to restore our national standing we must, first of all, revive the national spirit. But in order to revive the national spirit, we must fulfill two conditions. First, we must realize that we are at present in a very critical situation. Second ... we must unite ... and form a large national association.”[72] He evidently regarded the ideological reconstitution as anterior to the political, although he adjusted the common development of the two quite detailedly in his doctrine of tutelage.

He proposed three ideological methods for the regeneration of China, which might again make the Chinese the leading society (nation) of the world. There were: first, the return to the ancient Chinese morality; second, the return to the ancient Chinese learning; and third, the adoption of Western science.[73]

Sun Yat-sen's never-shaken belief in the applicability of the ancient Chinese ethical system, and in the wisdom of old China in social organization, is such that of itself it prevents his being regarded as a mere imitator of the West, a barbarized Chinese returning to barbarize his countrymen. His devotion to Confucianism was so great that Richard Wilhelm, the greatest of German sinologues, wrote of him: “The greatness of Sun Yat-sen rests, therefore, upon the fact that he has found a living synthesis between the fundamental principles of Confucianism and the demands of modern times, a synthesis which, beyond the borders of China, can again become significant to all humanity. Sun Yat-sen combined in himself the brazen consistency of a revolutionary and the great love of humanity of a renewer. Sun Yat-sen has been the kindest of all the revolutionaries of mankind. And this kindness [pg 069] was taken by him from the heritage of Confucius. Hence his intellectual work stands as a connecting bridge between the old and the modern ages. And it will be the salvation of China, if it determinedly treads that bridge.”[74] And Tai Chi-tao, one of Sun Yat-sen's most respected followers, had said: “Sun Yat-sen was the only one among all the revolutionaries who was not an enemy to Confucius; Sun Yat-sen himself said that his ideas embodied China, and that they were derived from the ideas of Confucius.”[75] The invocation of authorities need not be relied upon to demonstrate the importance of Sun Yat-sen's demand for ideological reconstruction upon the basis of a return to the traditional morality; he himself stated his position in his sixth lecture on nationalism: “If we now wish to restore to our nation its former position, besides uniting all of us into a national body, we must also first revive our own ancient morality; when we have achieved that, we can hope to give back to our nation the position which she once held.”[76]

What are the chief elements of the old morality? These are: 1) loyalty and filial piety, 2) humanity and charity, 3) faithfulness and justice, and 4) peace. These four, however, are all expressions of humanity, to which knowledge [pg 070] and valor must be joined, and sincerity employed in expressing them.

The problem of loyalty was one very difficult to solve. Under the Empire it was easy enough to consider the Emperor as the father of the great society, and to teach loyalty to him. This was easy to grasp, even for the simplest mind. Sun Yat-sen urged loyalty to the people, and loyalty to duty, as successors to the loyalty once owed to the sovereign. He deplored the tendency, which appeared in Republican times, for the masses to assume that since there was no more Emperor, there was no more loyalty; and it has, since the passing of Sun Yat-sen, been one of the efforts of the Nationalists to build up a tradition of loyalty to the spirit of Sun Yat-sen as the timeless and undying leader of modern China.

Sun Yat-sen was also deeply devoted to filial piety in China, which was—in the old philosophy—simply a manifestation, in another direction, of the same virtue as loyalty. He called filial piety indispensable, and was proud that none of the Western nations had ever approached the excellence of the Chinese in this virtue.[77] At the time that he said this, Sun Yat-sen was accused of being a virtual Communist, and of having succumbed to the lure of Soviet doctrines. It is at least a little strange that a man supposedly infatuated with Marxism should praise that most conservative of all virtues: filial piety!

Sun Yat-sen then commented on each of the other virtues, pointing out their excellence in old China, and their necessity to modern China. In the case of faithfulness, for example, he cited the traditional reliability of the Chinese in commercial honor. Concerning justice, he pointed out that the Chinese political technique was one fundamentally just; an instance of the application of this was Korea, [pg 071] which was-allowed to enjoy peace and autonomy as a Chinese vassal state for centuries, and then was destroyed shortly after becoming a Japanese protectorate. Chinese faithfulness and justice were obviously superior to that of the Japanese.

In politics the two most important contributions of the old morality to the Nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen were (1) the doctrine of wang tao, and (2) the social interpretation of history.

Wang tao is the way of kings—the way of right as opposed to pa tao, the way of might. It consisted, in the old ideology, of the course of action of the kingly man, who ruled in harmony with nature and did not violate the established proprieties of mankind. Sun Yat-sen's teachings afford us several applications of wang tao. In the first place, a group which has been formed by the forces of nature is a race; it has been formed according to wang tao. A group which has been organized by brute force is a state, and is formed by pa tao. The Chinese Empire was built according to wang tao; the British Empire by pa tao. The former was a natural organization of a homogeneous race; the latter, a military outrage against the natural order of mankind.[78]

Wang tao is also seen in the relation between China and her vassal states, a benevolent relationship which stood in sharp contrast, at times, though not always, to the methods later to be used by the Europeans in Asia.[79] [pg 072] Again, economic development on a basis of the free play of economic forces was regarded as wang tao by Sun Yat-sen, even though its consequences might be adverse. Pa tao appeared only when the political was employed to do violence to the economic.[80] This doctrine of good and bad aspects of economic relationships stands in distinct contrast to the Communist theory. He believed that the political was frequently employed to bring about unjust international economic relationships, and extenuated adverse economic conditions simply because they were the free result of the operations of a laissez-faire economy.

Economically, the interpretation of history was, according to Sun Yat-sen, to be performed through the study of consumption, and not of the means of production. In this he was indebted to Maurice William—at least in part.[81] The social interpretation of history is, however, associated not only with economic matters, but with the ancient Chinese moral system as well. Tai Chi-tao, whose work has most clearly demonstrated the relationship between Confucianism and Sunyatsenism, points out in his diagram of Sun Yat-sen's ethical system that humanity (jên) was to Sun Yat-sen the key to the interpretation of history. We have already seen that jên is the doctrine of social consciousness, of awareness of membership in society.[82] Sun Yat-sen, according to Tai Chi-tao, regarded man's development as a social animal, the development of his humanity, as the key to history. This would include, of course, among other things, his methods of production [pg 073] and of consumption. The distinction between Sun Yat-sen and the Western Marxian thinkers lies in the fact that the latter trace their philosophical genealogy back through the main currents of Western philosophy, while Sun Yat-sen derives his from Confucius. Nothing could be further from dialectical materialism than the socio-ethical interpretation that Sun Yat-sen developed from the Confucian theories.

The rôle played by the old Chinese morality in the ideology of Sun Yat-sen is, it is apparent, an important one. First, Sun Yat-sen believed that Chinese nationalism and the regeneration of the Chinese people had to be based on the old morality of China, which was superior to any other morality that the world had known, and which was among the treasures of the Chinese people. Second, he believed that, in practical politics as well as national ideology, the application of the old virtues would be fruitful in bringing about the development of a strong China. Third, he derived the idea of wang tao, the right, the royal, the natural way, from antiquity. He pointed out that violence to the established order—of race, as in the case of the British Empire, of economics, as in the case of the political methods of imperialism—was directly antithetical to the natural, peaceful way of doing things that had led to the supreme greatness of China in past ages. Fourth, he employed the doctrine of jên, of social-consciousness, which had already been used, by the Confucians, and formed the cornerstone of their teaching, as the key to his interpretation. In regard to the individual, this was, as we have seen, consciousness of social orientation; with regard to the group, it was the development of strength and harmony. It has also been translated humanity, which broadly and ethically, carries the value scheme with which jên is connected.

Even this heavy indebtedness to Chinese antiquity in adopting and adapting the morality of the ancients for [pg 074] the salvation of their children in the modern world, was not the total of Sun Yat-sen's political traditionalism. He also wished to renew the ancient Chinese knowledge, especially in the fields of social and political science. Only after these did he desire that Western technics be introduced.

The Return to the Ancient Knowledge.

Sun Yat-sen's doctrine of the return to the ancient Chinese knowledge may be divided into three parts. First, he praised the ancient Chinese superiority in the field of social science, but distinctly stressed the necessity of Western knowledge in the field of the physical and applied sciences alone.[83] Second, he pointed out the many practical accomplishments of the ancient Chinese knowledge, and the excellence and versatility of Chinese invention.[84] Third, his emphasis upon the development of talents in the material sciences hints at, although it does not state, a theory of national wealth based upon labor capacity.

Sun Yat-sen said, “Besides reviving our ancient Chinese morality, we must also revive our wisdom and ability.... If today we want to revive our national spirit, we must revive not only the morality which is proper to us, but we must revive also our own knowledge.”[85] He goes on to say that the peculiar excellence of the ancient Chinese knowledge lay in the field of political philosophy, and states that the Chinese political philosophy surpassed the Western, at least in clearness.

He quotes The Great Learning for the summation, in a few words, of the highlights of this ancient Chinese social knowledge: “Investigate into things, attain the [pg 075] utmost knowledge, make the thoughts sincere, rectify the heart, cultivate the person, regulate the family, govern the country rightly, pacify the world.”[86] This is, as we have seen, what may be called the Confucian doctrine of ideological control. Sun Yat-sen lavished praise upon it. “Such a theory, so detailed, minute, and progressive, was neither discovered nor spoken of by any foreign political philosopher. It is a peculiar intellectual treasure pertaining to our political philosophy, which we must preserve.”[87] The endorsement is doubly significant. In the first place, it demonstrates the fact that Sun Yat-sen thought of himself as a rebuilder and not as a destroyer of the ancient Chinese culture, and the traditional methods of organization and control. In the second place, it points out that his Chinese background was most clear to him, and that he was in his own mind the transmitter of the Chinese heritage.

In speaking of Chinese excellence in the field of the social science, Sun Yat-sen did not confine his discussion to any one time. Whenever he referred to a political theory, he mentioned its Chinese origin if it were one of those known to Chinese antiquity: anarchism, communism, democracy. He never attacked Chinese intellectual knowledge for being what it was, but only for what it omitted: physical science.[88] He was undoubtedly more conservative than many of his contemporaries, who were actually hostile to the inheritance.

The summary of Sun Yat-sen's beliefs and position in respect to the ancient intellectual knowledge is so well given by Tai Chi-tao that any other statement would almost have to verge on paraphrase. Tai Chi-tao wrote:

Sun Yat-sen (in his teachings) completely includes the true ideas of China as they recur again and again from Yao and Shun, Confucius and Mencius. It will be clear to us, therefore, that Sun Yat-sen is the renewal of Chinese moral culture, unbroken for two thousand years ... we can see that Sun Yat-sen was convinced of the truth of his own words, and at the same time we can also recognize that his national revolution was based upon the re-awakening of Chinese culture. He wanted to call the creative power of China to life again, and to make the value of Chinese culture useful to the whole world, and in that way to realize cosmopolitanism.[89]

Accordingly, Sun Yat-sen's doctrines may not only be regarded as having been based upon the tacit premises of the Chinese intellectual milieu, but as having been incorporated in them as supports. Sun Yat-sen's theories were, therefore, consciously as well as unconsciously Chinese.

Sun Yat-sen was proud of the accomplishment of the Chinese in physical and applied knowledge. He praised Chinese craftsmanship and skill, and extolled the talents of the people which had invented the mariner's compass, printing, porcelain, gunpowder, tea, silks, arches, and suspension bridges.[90] He urged the revival of the talents of the Chinese, and the return of material development. This teaching, in conjunction with his advocacy of Western knowledge, leads to another suggestive point.

Sun Yat-sen pointed out that wealth was to the modern Chinese what liberty was to the Europeans of the eighteenth century—the supreme condition of further progress.[91] The way to progress and wealth was through social reorganization, and through the use of the capacities of the people. It may be inferred, although it cannot be stated positively, that Sun Yat-sen measured wealth not merely in metals or commodities, but in the productive capacities of the country, which, as they depend upon the labor skill of the workers, are in the last analysis cultural and psychological rather than exclusively physical in nature.[92]

China, following the ancient morality, conscious of its [pg 078] intellectual and social heritage, and of its latent practical talents, needed only one more lesson to learn: the need of Western science.

Western Physical Science in the New Ideology.

The third element of the nationalist ideology proposed by Sun Yat-sen was the introduction of Western science. It is upon this that his break with the past arose; it is this that gives his ideology its partially revolutionary character, for the ideology was, as we have seen, strongly reconstitutional in two of its elements. Sun Yat-sen was, however, willing to tear down if he could rebuild, and rebuild with the addition of Western science. These questions immediately arise: why did he wish to add Western science to the intellectual background of modern China? what, in Western science, did he wish to add? to what degree did he wish Western science to play its rôle in the development of a new ideology for China?

Sun Yat-sen did not have to teach the addition of Western science to the Chinese ideology. In his own lifetime the terrific swing from arrogant self-assurance to abject imitativeness had taken place. Sun Yat-sen said that the Boxer Rebellion was the last surge of the old Chinese nationalism, “But the war of 1900 was the last manifestation of self-confidence thoughts and self-confidence power on the part of the Chinese to oppose the new civilization of Europe and of America.... They understood that the civilization of Europe and of America was really much superior to the ancient civilization of China.”[93] He added that this superiority was naturally evident in the matter of armaments. This illustrates both consequences of the impact of the West—the endangered position of the Chinese society, and the consequent instability of the Chinese ideology.

Sun Yat-sen did not regard the introduction of Western science into Chinese life as merely remedial in nature, but, on the contrary, saw much benefit in it. This was especially clear to him as a physician; his training led him to see the abominable practices of many of the Chinese in matters of diet and hygiene.[94] He made a sweeping claim of Western superiority, which is at the same time a sharp limitation of it in fields which the conservative European would be likely to think of as foremost—politics, ethics, religion. “Besides the matter of armaments, the means of communication ... are far superior.... Moreover, in everything else that relates to machinery or daily human labor, in methods of agriculture, of industry, and of commerce, all (foreign) methods by far surpass those of China.”[95]

Sun Yat-sen pointed out the fact that while manuals of warfare become obsolete in a very few years in the West, political ideas and institutions do not. He cited the continuance of the same pattern of government in the United States, and the lasting authority of the Republic of Plato, as examples of the stagnation of the Western social sciences as contrasted with physical sciences. Already prepossessed in favor of the Chinese knowledge and morality in non-technical matters, he did not demand the introduction of Western social methods as well. He had lived long enough in the West to lose some of the West-worship that characterized so many Chinese and Japanese of his generation. He was willing, even anxious, that the experimental method, by itself, be introduced into Chinese thought in all fields,[96] but not particularly impressed with the general superiority of Western social thought.

Sun Yat-sen's own exposition of the reasons for his desiring to limit the rôle played by Western science in China is quite clear.[97] In the first place, Sun Yat-sen was vigorously in favor of adopting the experimental method in attaining knowledge. He stood firmly for the pragmatic foundation of knowledge, and for the exercise of the greatest care and most strenuous effort in discovering it. Secondly, he believed in taking over the physical knowledge of the Westerners, although—in his emphasis on Chinese talent—he by no means believed that Western physical knowledge would displace that of the Chinese altogether. “We can safely imitate the material civilization of Europe and of America; we may follow it blindly, and if we introduce it in China, it will make good headway.”[98] Thirdly, he believed that the social science of the West, and especially its political philosophy, might lead the Chinese into gross error, since it was derived from a quite different ideology, and not relevant to Chinese conditions. “It would be a gross error on our part, if, disregarding our own Chinese customs and human sentiments, we were to try to force upon (our people) a foreign type of social government just as we copy a foreign make of [pg 081] machinery.”[99] Fourthly, even apart from the difference between China and the West which invalidated Western social science in China, he did not believe that the West had attained to anything like the same certainty in social science that it had in physical science.[100] Fifthly, Sun Yat-sen believed that the Chinese should profit by observing the experiments and theories of the West in regard to social organization, without necessarily following them.

The great break between Sun Yat-sen's acceptance of Western physical science and his rejection of Western social science is demonstrated by his belief that government is psychological in its foundations. “Laws of human government also constitute an abstract piece of machinery—for that reason we speak of the machinery of an organized government—but a material piece of machinery is based on nature, whereas the immaterial machinery of government is based on psychology.”[101] Sun Yat-sen pointed out, although in different words, that government was based upon the ideology and that the ideology of a society was an element in the last analysis psychological, however much it might be conditioned by the material environment.

Of these three elements—Chinese morality, Chinese social and political knowledge, and Western physical science—the new ideology for the modern Chinese society [pg 082] was to be formed. What the immediate and the ultimate forms of that society were to be, remains to be studied.

The Consequences of the Nationalist Ideology.

What are the consequences of this Nationalistic ideology? What sort of society did Sun Yat-sen envision? How much of it was to be Chinese, and how much Western? Were the Chinese, like some modern Japanese, to take pride in being simultaneously the most Eastern of Eastern nations and the most Western of Western or were they to seek to remain fundamentally what their ancestors had been for uncounted centuries?

In the first place, Sun Yat-sen's proposed ideology was, as we have seen, to be composed of four elements. First, the essential core of the old ideology, to which the three necessary revivifying elements were to be added. This vast unmentioned foundation is highly significant to the assessment of the nature of the new Chinese ideology. (It is quite apparent that Sun Yat-sen never dreamed, as did the Russians, of overthrowing the entire traditional order of things. His three modifications were to be added to the existing Chinese civilization.) Second, he wished to revive the old morality. Third, he desired to restore the ancient knowledge and skill of the Chinese to their full creative energy. Fourth, he desired to add Western science. The full significance of this must be realized in a consideration of Chinese nationalism. Sun Yat-sen did not, like the Meiji Emperor, desire to add the whole front of Western culture; he was even further from emulating the Russians in a destruction of the existing order and the development of an entirely new system. His energies were directed to the purification and reconstitution of the Chinese ideology by the strengthening of its own latent moral and intellectual values, and by the innovation of Western [pg 083] physical science and the experimental method. Of the range of the ideology, of the indescribably complex intellectual conditionings in which the many activities of the Chinese in their own civilization were carried on, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify only those which could be improved by a reaction to the excellencies of Chinese antiquity, or benefited by the influence of Western science. Sun Yat-sen was, as Wilhelm states, both a revolutionary and a reconstitutionary. He was reconstitutionary in the ideology which he proposed, and a revolutionary by virtue of the political methods which he was willing to sanction and employ in carrying the ideology into the minds of the Chinese populace.

In the second place, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify the old ideology not only with respect to content but also with regard to method of development. The Confucians had, as we have seen, provided for the continual modification and rectification of the ideology by means of the doctrine of chêng ming. It is a matter of dispute as to what degree that doctrine constituted a scientific method for propagating knowledge.[102] Whatever the method of the ancients, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify it in three steps: the acknowledgment of the pragmatic foundations of social ideas, the recognition of the necessity for knowledge before action, and the introduction of the experimental method. His pragmatic position shows no particular indication of having been derived from any specific source; it was a common enough tendency in old Chinese thought, from the beginning; in advocating it, Sun Yat-sen may have been revolutionary only in his championing of an idea which he may well have had since early childhood. His stress upon the necessity of ideological clarity as antecedent [pg 084] to revolutionary or any other kind of action is negatively derived from Wang Yang-ming, whose statement of the converse Sun Yat-sen was wont to attack. The belief in the experimental method is clearly enough the result of his Western scientific training—possibly in so direct a fashion as the personal influence of one of his instructors, Dr. James Cantlie, later Sir James Cantlie, of Queen's College, Hongkong. Sun Yat-sen was a physician; his degree Dr. was a medical and not an academic one; and there is no reason to overlook the influence of his vocation, a Western one, in estimating the influence of the Western experimental method.[103]

The overwhelming preponderance of Chinese elements in the new ideology proposed by Sun Yat-sen must not hide the fact that, in so stable an ideology as that of old China, the modifications which Sun advocated were highly significant. In method, experimentalism;[104] in background, the whole present body of Western science—these were to move China deeply, albeit a China that remained [pg 085] Chinese. There is a fundamental difference between Sun's doctrine of ideological extension (“the need for knowledge”) and Confucius' doctrine of ideological rectification (chêng ming). Confucius advocated the establishment of a powerful ideology for the purpose of extending ideological control and thereby of minimizing the then pernicious effects of the politically active proto-nations of his time. Sun Yat-sen, reared in a world subject to ideological control, saw no real necessity for strengthening it; what he desired was to prepare China psychologically for the development of a clear-cut conscious nation and a powerful government as the political instrument of that nation. In spite of the great Chinese emphasis which Sun pronounced in his ideology, and in spite of his many close associations with old Chinese thought, his governmental principles are in a sense diametrically opposed to Confucianism. Confucius sought to establish a totalitarian system of traditional controls which would perpetuate society and civilization regardless of the misadventures or inadequacies of government. Sun Yat-sen was seeking to build a strong liberal protective state within the framework of an immemorial society which was largely non-political; his doctrine, which we may call totalitarianism in reverse, tended to encourage intellectual freedom rather than any rigid ideological coördination. The mere fact that Sun Yat-sen trusted the old Chinese ideology to the ordeal of free criticism is, of course, further testimony to his belief in the fundamental soundness of the old intellectual order—an order which needed revision and supplementation to guide modern China through the perils of its destiny.

Before passing to a brief consideration of the nature of the society to be developed through this nationalist ideology, it may be interesting to note the value-scheme in the ideology. There was but one value—the survival of the Chinese people with their own civilization. All [pg 086] other considerations were secondary; all other reforms were means and not ends. Nationalism, democracy, and min shêng were each indispensable, but none was superior to the supreme desideratum, Chinese survival. That this survival was a vivid problem to Sun, almost any of his lectures will testify. Tai Chi-tao, one of the inner circle of Sun Yat-sen's disciples, summarized the spirit of this nationalism when he wrote; “We are Chinese, and those things that we have to change first lie in China. But if all things in China have become worthless, if Chinese culture no longer has any significance in the cultural history of the world, if the Chinese people has lost its power of holding its culture high, we might as well wait for death with bound hands—what would be the use of going on with revolution?”[105] Sun Yat-sen made concessions to cosmopolitanism, which he saw as ideal to be realized in the remote future. First and last, however, he was concerned with his own people, the Chinese.

What was to be the nature of the society which would arise from the knowledge and application of the new ideology? Sun planned to introduce the idea of a race-nation into the Chinese ideology, to replace the definite but formless we-you outlook which the Chinese of old China had had toward outsiders almost indiscriminately.[106] The old anti-barbarian sentiment had from time to time in the past been very powerful; Sun Yat-sen called this nationalism also, not distinguishing it from the new kind of nationalism which he advocated—a modern nationalism [pg 087] necessarily connoting a plurality of equal nations. The self-consciousness of the Chinese he wished to restore, although on a basis of justice and the mutual recognition by the nations of each other's right to exist. But this nationalism was not to be a complete break with the past, for the new China was to continue the traditional function of old China—of being the teacher and protectress of Eastern Asia. It was the duty of China to defend the oppressed among the nations, and to smite down the Great Powers in their oppressiveness. We may suppose that this benevolence of the Chinese race-nation would benefit the neighbors of China only so long as those neighbors, quickened themselves by nationalist resurgences, did not see something sinister in the benevolent manifest destiny of the Chinese.

It was a matter of policy, rather than of ideology, as to what the Chinese nation was to include. There were possibilities of a conflict with the Communists over the question of Outer Mongolia. Physically, Sun saw the Mongols as one of the five component peoples of the Great Chung-hua Republic. At another time he suggested that they might become assimilated. He never urged the Mongols to separate from China and join the Soviet Union, or even continue as a completely independent state.[107] There was always the possibility of uncertainty in the case of persons who were—by the five principle elements of race (according to Sun Yat-sen, blood, livelihood, language, religion, and mores)[108]—members of the Chinese race-nation but did not consider themselves such.

Chinese nationalism was to lead to cosmopolitanism. Any attempt to foster cosmopolitanism before solving the [pg 088] national problem was not only Utopian but perverse. The weakness of the Chinese had in great part been derived from their delusions of world-order in a world that was greater than they imagined, and the true solution to the Chinese question was to be found, not in any vain theory for the immediate salvation of the world as a whole, but in the diligent and patriotic activities of the Chinese in their own country. China was to help the oppressed nations of the earth, not the oppressed classes. China was to help all Asia, and especially the countries which had depended upon China for protection, and had been failed in their hour of need by the impotent Manchu Dynasty. China was, indeed, to seek the coöperation of the whole world, and the promotion of universal peace. But China was to do all this only when she was in a position to be able to do so, and not in the meantime venture forth on any splendid fantasies which would profit no people.

The survival of China was the supreme aim of Sun Yat-sen. How did he propose that China, once conscious of itself, should control itself to survive and go onwards to the liberation and enrichment of mankind? These are questions that he answered in his ideology of democracy and of min shêng.

Chapter III. The Theory of Democracy.

Democracy in the Old World-Society.

In describing a few of the characteristics of the old ideology and the old society which may assist the clarification of the principle of democracy, it may prove useful to enter into a brief examination of what the word may mean in the West, to refer to some of the ideas and institutions of old China that were or were not in accord with the Western notion of democracy, and, finally, to see what connection Sun Yat-sen's theory of democracy may have either with the Western term or with elements in the Chinese background. Did Sun Yat-sen propound an entirely new theory as the foundation of his theory of democracy for the Chinese race-nation, or did he associate several hitherto unrelated ideas and systems to make a new whole?

The European word democracy may, for the purposes of this examination, be taken to have two parts to its meaning; first, with regard to the status of individuals in society; second, with respect to the allocation of political power in society. In the former sense, democracy may refer to an equalitarianism of status, or to a social mobility so easy and so general as to encourage the impression that position is a consequence of the behavior of the individual, and a fair gauge to his merit. In the latter part of the meaning, democracy may refer to the identification of the governed and the governors, or to the coincidence of the actions of the governors with the wishes of the governed. Each of these ideas—equalitarianism, free mobility, popular government, and representative government—has been referred to as the essence of democracy. One of them [pg 090] may lead to the discovery of a significance for democracy relevant to the scheme of things in the old Chinese society.

Egalitarianism and mobility were both present in old Chinese society. The Chinese have had neither an hereditary aristocracy equivalent to the Western, nor a caste-system resembling that of India or Japan, since the breakdown of the feudal system twenty-three centuries ago.[109] The extra-legal egalitarianism of the Chinese has been so generally remarked upon by persons familiar with that nation, that further discussion of it here is superfluous. Birth has probably counted less in China than it has in any other country in the world.

The egalitarianism of intercourse was a powerful aid to social mobility. The Chinese never pretended to economic, political, or intellectual equality; the mere statement of such a doctrine would have been sufficient refutation of it to the members of the old society. Yet there were no gradations of weight beyond educational, political, and economic distinctions, and the organization of the old society was such that mobility in these was relatively free. Movement of an individual either upwards or downwards in the economic, political, or academic scale was retarded by the influence of the family, which acted as a drag either way. Movement was nevertheless continuous and conspicuous; a proof of this movement is to be found in the fact that there are really no supremely great families in China, comparable to the great names of Japan or of the Euramerican nations. (The closest approximation to this is the K'ung family, the family of Confucius; since the family is large, its eminence is scarcely more than nominal and it has no political power.).

Mobility in China was fostered by the political arrangements. The educational-administrative system provided a [pg 091] channel upwards and downwards. The government tended, for the most part, to be the way up, while the economic system was the way down for prominent official families. Few families managed to remain eminent for more than a few generations, and—with the great size of families—there was always room at the top. If a man were not advancing himself, there was always the possibility that a kinsman might win preferment, to the economic and political advantage of the whole family group.

Social relations—in the narrowest sense of the word—were characterized by an extreme attention to form as such, and great contempt for it otherwise. Ritualism never became a chivalry or a cult of honor. There was always the emphasis upon propriety and courtesy but, once the formalities were done with, there was little social distinction between members of different economic, political, or academic classes.[110]

In connection with control and representation, a great deal more can be said. In the first place, the relations between the governing ideologue in the Confucian teachings,[111] and the governed accepters of the ideology in the Confucian system were to be discovered through yüeh.

Yüeh, commonly translated “music” or “harmony,” plays a peculiar rôle in the Confucian teachings. It is the mass and individual emotional pattern, as li is the behavior pattern. If the people follow the proper behavior pattern, their emotional pattern must also be good. Consequently, the function of a truly excellent ruler was the scrutiny of yüeh. If he were a man of superior penetration, he should be able to feel the yüeh about him, and thus discover the temper of the populace, without reference to electoral machinery or any other government instrumentality. Yüeh is to be seen in the tone of voices, in the rhythm of behavior. If it is good, it will act with increasing effect upon itself. If bad, it serves as a warning to the authorities. As Prof. Hsü says, “For rulers and administrators yüeh has two uses; first, it enables them to ascertain the general sentiment of the people toward the government and political life; and second, it cultivates a type of individual attitude that is most harmonious with the environment. The joint work of li and yüeh would produce social harmony and social happiness—which is the ultimate aim of the State.”[112]

Yüeh is, however, a peculiar phenomenon, which can scarcely be called either representation or control. It is an idea rooted in the curiously pragmatic-mystical world-view of the Confucians, that same world-view which elevated virtue almost to the level of a physical substance, subject to the same sort of laws of disruption or transmission. Nothing like yüeh can be found in Western political thought; however significant it may have been in China, any attempt to deal with it in a Western language would have more than a touch of futility, because of the great chasm of strangeness that separates the two intellectual worlds at so many places.

A more concrete illustration of the old Chinese ideas of [pg 093] popular control may be found in the implications of political Confucianism, as Hsü renders them:

From the Confucian doctrine of stewardship, namely, that the king is an ordinary person selected by God upon his merit to serve as the steward of God in the control of the affairs of the people for the welfare of the people, there are deduced five theories of political democracy. In the first place, the government must respect public opinion. The will of the people is the will of God, and thus the king should obey both the will of the people and the will of God....

In the second place, government should be based upon the consent of the governed....

In the third place, the people have a duty as well as a right to carry on revolution as the last resort in stopping tyranny.... Revolution is regarded as a natural blessing; it guards against tyranny and promotes the vitality of the people. It is in complete harmony with natural law.

In the fourth place, the government exists for the welfare of the people.

In the fifth place, liberty, equality and equity should be preserved. The State belong equally to all; and so hereditary nobility, hereditary monarchy, and despotism are deplored. Confucius and his disciples seem to advocate a democracy under the form of an elective monarchy or a constitutional monarchy....

Local self-government is recognized in the Confucian system of government.... The Confucian theory of educational election suggests the distinctly new idea of representation.[113]

This summary could scarcely be improved upon although it represents a considerable latitude of interpretation in the subject-matter of the classics. The voice of the people was the voice of God. From other political writers of antiquity—Mêng Tzŭ, Mo Ti, Han Fei Tzŭ and the Legalists, and others—the Chinese received a variety of political interpretations, none of which fostered the development of autocracy as it developed in Europe.

The reason for this is simple. In addition to the eventual popular control of government, and the necessity for the close attention of the government to the wishes of the people, the classical writers, for the most part, did not emphasize the position of government. With the increasing ideological solidarity of the Chinese world, the increasing antiquity and authority of tradition, and the stability of the social system, the Chinese states withered away—never completely, but definitely more so than their analogues in the West. There appeared, consequently, in China a form of laissez-faire that surpassed that of Europe completely in thoroughness. Not only were the economic functions of the state reduced to a minimum—so was its police activity. Old China operated with a government in reserve, as it were; a government which was nowhere nearly so important to its subjects as Western governments commonly are. The government system was one democratic in that it was rooted in a society without intransigeant class lines, with a considerable degree of social mobility for the individual, with the total number of individuals exercising a terrific and occasionally overwhelming pressure against the political system. And yet it was not the governmental system upon which old China might have based its claim to be a democracy. It could have, had it so wished, claimed that name because of the weakness or the absence of government, and the presence of other social organizations permitting the individual a considerable amount of latent pressure to exercise upon his social environment.

This arose from the nature of the large non-political organizations which sustained Chinese civilization even more than did the educational-administrative authorities. It is obvious that, in theory, a free and unassociated individual in a laissez-faire polity would be defenseless against extra-politically organized persons. The equities [pg 095] of modern democracy lie largely in the development of a check and balance system of pressure groups, affording each individual adequate means of exercising pressure on behalf of his various interests. It was this function—the development of a just statement of pressure-groups—which the old Chinese world-society developed for the sufficient representation of the individual.

There was no illusion of complete personal liberty. Such a notion was scarcely thinkable. Every individual had his family, his village, and—although this was by no means universally true—his hui, whether one or, less commonly, several. He was never left solitary and defenseless against powerfully organized interests. No more intimate community of interests could be discovered than that of a family, since the community of interests there would verge on the total. Ancient Chinese society provided the individual with mechanisms to make his interests felt and effective, through the family, the village, and the association.

In the West the line of influence runs from the individual, who feels a want, to the group which assists him in expressing it, to the government, upon which the group exercises pressure, in order that the government may use its power to secure what the first group wants from some other group. The line runs, as it were, in the following manner: individual-group-government-group. In China the group exercised its pressure for the most part directly. The individual need not incorporate himself in a group to secure the recognition and fulfillment of his interests; he was by birth a member of the group, and with the group was mobile. In a sense old Chinese society was thoroughly democratic.

On the basis of such a background, Sun Yat-sen did not believe that the Chinese had too much government, but, rather, too little. He did not cry for liberty; he denounced its excess instead. On the basis of the old social organization, which was fluid and yet stable, he sought to create a [pg 096] democracy which would pertain to the interests of the nation as a whole, not to the interests of individuals or groups. These could go on in the traditional manner. The qualifications implicit in Sun Yat-sen's championship of democracy must be kept in mind, and his acquaintance with the democratic techniques of the old society be allowed for. Otherwise his advocacy of the recognition of nationalist rights and his neglect or denunciation of individual liberties might be taken for the dogma of a lover of tyranny or dictatorship.

Old China possessed a considerable degree of egalitarianism, of social mobility, of popular control, and of popular participation, through the civil service, in what little government there was. In addition, ideological control ensured a minimum of conflicts of interests and consequently a maximum facility for self-expression without conflict with other individuals, groups, or society as a whole. Finally, the protection and advancement of individuals' rights and interests were fostered by a system of group relationships which bound virtually every individual into a group and left none to fall, solitary, at the mercy of others who were organized.

Why then did Sun Yat-sen advocate democracy? What were his justifications for it, in a society already so democratic?

Five Justifications of a Democratic Ideology.

Sun Yat-sen, realizing the inescapable necessity of nationalism, did not immediately turn to democracy as a necessary instrument for its promotion. He hated the Manchus on the Dragon Throne—human symbols of China's subjugation—but at first considered replacing them with a new Chinese dynasty. It was only after he had found the heirs of the Ming dynasty and the descendants [pg 097] of Confucius to be unworthy that he turned to republicanism and found democracy, with its many virtues.[114] He early became enamored of the elective system, as found in the United States, as the only means of obtaining the best governors.[115] In the final stage he had departed so far from his earlier way of thinking that he criticized Dr. Goodnow severely for recommending the re-introduction of a monarchy in China.

Sun Yat-sen, as a good nationalist, made earnest efforts to associate his doctrines with those of the sages and to avoid appearing as a proponent of Western civilization. It is, consequently, not unusual to discover him citing Confucius and Mencius on vox populi vox dei, and saying,

“The government of Yao and Shun was monarchical in name but democratic in practice, and for that reason Confucius honored these men.”[116]

He considered that democracy was to the sages an “ideal that could not be immediately realized,”[117] and therefore implied that modern China, in realizing democracy, was attaining an ideal cherished by the past. Democracy, other things apart, was a filial duty. This argument, while persuasive in Chinese, can scarcely be considered Sun Yat-sen's most important one in favor of democracy.

His most cogent and perhaps most necessary argument was based on his conception of national liberty as opposed to the liberty of the individual. He delivered a spirited denunciation of those foreigners who criticized the Chinese for being without liberty, and in the next breath complained that the Chinese had no government, that they were “loose sand.” (Another fashionable way of expressing this idea is by saying that “China is a geographical expression.”) He said: “If, for instance, the foreigners say that China is ‘loose sand,’ what do they finally mean by that expression? They mean to say that each individual is free, that everybody is free, that each one takes the maximum of liberty, and that, as a result, they are ‘loose sand’.”[118] He pointed out that the Chinese had not suffered from the loose autocracy in the Empire, and that they had no historical justification for parroting the cry “Liberty!” simply because the Westerners, who had really lacked it, had cried and fought for it. He cited John Millar's definition of liberty, given in The Progress of Science Relative to Law and Government, 1787: “True liberty consists in this: that the liberty of each individual is limited by the non-infringement on the liberty of others; when it invades the liberty of others, it is no longer liberty.”[119] Sun Yat-sen had himself defined liberty as [pg 099] follows: “Liberty consists in being able to move, in having freedom of action within an organized group.”[120] China, disorganized, had no problem of individual liberty. There was, as a matter of fact, too much liberty.[121] What the Chinese had to do was to sacrifice some of their individual liberty for the sake of the organized nation. Here we find a curious turn of thought of which several other examples may be found in the San Min Chu I: Sun Yat-sen has taken a doctrine which in the West applies to the individual, and has applied it to the nation. He believes in liberty; but it is not the liberty of the individual which is endangered in China. It is the liberty of the nation—which has been lost before foreign oppression and exploitation. Consequently he preaches national and not individual liberty. Individual liberty must be sacrificed for the sake of a free nation.[122] Without discipline there is no order; without order the nation is weak and oppressed. The first step to China's redemption is min tsu, the union (nationalism) of the people. Then comes min ch'üan, the power of the people. The liberty of the nation is expressed through the power of the people.

How is the power of the people to be exercised? It is to be exercised by democratic means. To Sun Yat-sen, the liberty of the nation and the power of the people were virtually identical. If the Chinese race gained its freedom, that freedom, exercised in an orderly manner, could mean only democracy. It is this close association of nationalism (min tsu) and democracy (min ch'üan), this consideration of democracy as the expression of nationalism, that forms, within the framework of the San Min Chu I, what is probably the best nationalist argument for democracy—best, that is, in being most coherent with the Three Principles as a whole.

If the view of democracy just expressed be considered an exposition of the fundamental necessity of democracy, the third argument may be termed the dialectical or historical championship of democracy. Sun Yat-sen believed in the existence of progress, and considered that there was an inevitable tendency toward democracy: the overthrow of the Manchus was a result of the “... world tide. That world current can be compared to the course of the Yangtze or the Yellow River. The flow of the stream turns perhaps in many directions, now toward the north, now toward the south, but in the end flows toward the east in spite of all obstacles; nothing can stem it. In the same way the world-tide passes ...; now it has arrived at democracy, and there is no way to stem it.”[123] This belief in the inevitability as well as the justice of his cause encouraged Sun, and has lent to his movement—as his followers see it—something of the impressive sweep that the Communists see in their movement.

Sun Yat-sen did not devise any elaborate scheme of dialectical materialism or economic determinism to bolster his belief in the irreversibility of the flow to democracy. With infinite simplicity, he presented an exposition of democracy in space and time. In time, he saw a change from the rule of force to theocracy, then to monarchy, and then to democracy; this change was a part of the progress of mankind, which to him was self-evident and inevitable.[124] In space he perceived that increasingly great numbers of people threw off monarchical rule and turned to democracy. He hailed the breakdown of the great empires, Germany and Russia, as evidence of the power of [pg 101] democracy. “... if we observe (things) from all angles, we see that the world progresses daily, and we realize that the present tide has already swept into the age of democracy; and that no matter how great drawbacks and failures may be, democracy will maintain itself in the world for a long time (to come). For that reason, thirty years ago, we promoters of the revolution, resolved that it was impossible to speak of the greatness of China or to carry out the revolution without advocating democracy.”[125]

A fourth argument in favor of democracy, and one which cannot be expanded here, since it involves reference to Sun Yat-sen's practical plans for the political regeneration of China, was his assertion that democracy was an adjunct to appropriate and effective public administration. Sun Yat-sen's plans concerning the selection of officials in a democratic state showed that he believed the merging of the Chinese academic-civil service technique with Western democracy would produce a paragon among practicable governments.

Fifthly and finally, Sun regarded democracy as an essential modernizing force.[126] In the introduction of Western material civilization, which was always an important consideration to his mind, he felt that a certain ideological and political change had to accompany the economic and technological revolution that—in part natural and in part to be stimulated by nationalist political interference—was to revolutionize the min shêng of China, the economic and social welfare of the Chinese people. While this argument in favor of democracy is similar to the historical argument, it differs from the latter in that Sun Yat-sen saw the technique of democracy influencing not only the political, but the economic and social, life of the people as well. The growth of corporate responsibility, the development [pg 102] of a more rigid ethical system in matters of finance, the disappearance of too strict an emphasis upon the personal element in politics (which has clouded Chinese politics with a fog of conspiracy and intrigue for centuries), a trust in mathematics (as shown in reliance upon the voting technique for ascertaining public opinion), and the development of a new kind of individual aggressiveness and uprightness were among the changes which, necessary if China was to compete in the modern world, democracy might assist in effecting. While these desiderata do not seem large when set down in the vast field of political philosophy, they are of irritating importance in the inevitable trivalities upon which so much of day-to-day life depends, and would undoubtedly improve the personal tone of Sino-Western relations. Sun never divorced the theoretical aspects of his thought from the practical, as has been done here for purposes of exposition, and even the tiniest details of everyday existence were the objects of his consideration and criticism. In itself, therefore, the modernizing force of democracy, as seen in Sun's theory, may not amount to much; nevertheless, it must not be forgotten.[127]

Democracy, although secondary in point of time to his theory, is of great importance in Sun's plans for the political nature of the new China. He justified democracy because it was (1) an obligation laid upon modern China by the sages of antiquity; (2) a necessary consequence of nationalism, since nationalism was the self-rule of a free people, and democracy the effectuation of that self-rule, and democracy the effectuation of that self-rule; (3) the government of the modern age; China, along with the rest of the world, was drawn by the tide of progress into the [pg 103] age of democratic achievement; (4) the political form best calculated for the obtaining of good administration; and (5) a modernizing force that would stir and change the Chinese people so as to equip them for the competitions of the modern world.

In the lecture in which he criticized the inadequacies of democracy as applied in the West, Sun Yat-sen made an interesting comment on the proletarian dictatorship which had recently been established in Russia. “Recently Russia invented another form of government. That government is not representative; it is absolute popular government. In what does that absolute popular government really consist? As we know very little about it, we cannot judge it aright, but we believe that this (absolute popular government) is evidently much better than a representative government.”[128] He went on immediately to say that the Three Principles were what China needed, and that the Chinese should not imitate the political systems advocated in Europe and America, but should adapt democracy in their own way. In view of his objection to a permanent class dictatorship, as opposed to a provisional party dictatorship, and the very enthusiastic advocacy of democracy represented by the arguments described above, it appears unlikely in the extreme that Sun Yat-sen, had he lived beyond 1925, would have abandoned his own plan of democracy for China in favor of “absolute popular government.” The phrase was, at the time, since Sun Yat-sen was seeking Russian assistance, expedient for a popular lecture. Its importance might easily be exaggerated.

The Three Natural Classes of Men.

Having in mind the extreme peril in which the Chinese race-nation stood, its importance in a world of Western or [pg 104] Western-type states, and seeing nationalism as the sole means of defending and preserving China, Sun Yat-sen demanded that the Chinese ideology be extended by the acquisition of knowledge. If this modernizing and, if a neologism be permitted, stateizing process were to succeed, it must needs be fostered by a well-prepared group of persons within the society.

In the case of the Confucian social theory, it was the scholars who took the ideology from the beliefs and traditions of the agrarian masses or whole people, rectified it, and gave it back to them. This continuous process of ideological maintenance by means of conformity (li) and, when found necessary, rectification (chêng ming) was carried on by an educational-political system based upon a non-hereditary caste of academician-officials called Mandarins by the early Western travellers. In the case of those modern Western states which base their power upon peculiar ideologies, the philosophy-imposing caste has been a more or less permanent party- or class-dictatorship. Superficially, the party-dictatorship planned by Sun Yat-sen would seem to resemble these. His theory, however, presents two bases for a class of ideologues: one theoretical, and presumably based upon the Chinese; and one applied, which is either of his own invention or derived from Western sources. The class of ideological reformers proposed in what may be called the applied aspect of his theory was to be organized by means of the party-dictatorship of the Kuomintang. His other basis for finding a class of persons whose influence over the ideology was to be paramount was more theoretical, and deserves consideration among the more abstract aspects of his doctrines.

He hypothecated a tripartite division of men:

Men may be divided into three classes according to their innate ability or intelligence. The first class of men may be called hsien chih hsien cho or the “geniuses.” The geniuses are endowed with [pg 105]unusual intelligence and ability. They are the creators of new ideas, fathers of invention, and originators of new achievements. They think in terms of group welfare and so they are the promoters of progress. Next are the hou chih hou cho or the “followers.”Being less intelligent and capable than the hsien chih hsien cho, they do not create or invent or originate, but they are good imitators and followers of the first class of men. The last are the pu chih pu cho, or the “unthinking,” whose intelligence is inferior to that of the other two classes of men. These people do what the others instruct them to do, but they do not think about it. In every sphere of activity all three classes of men are present. In politics, for example, there are the creators or inventors of new ideas and movements, then the propagators of these ideas and movements, and lastly the mass of men who are taught to practice these ideas.[129]

The harmony of this conception with the views of Confucius is evident. Presbyter is Priest writ large; genius is another name for scholar. Sun, although bitterly opposed to the mandarinate of the Empire and the pseudo-Republic, could not rid himself of the age-old Chinese idea of a class organization on a basis of intellect rather than of property. He could not champion a revolutionary creed based upon an economic class-war which he did not think existed, and which he did not wish to foster, in his own country. He continued instead the consistent theory of an aristocracy of intellect, such as had controlled China before his coming.

The aristocracy of intellect is not to be judged, however, by the old criteria. Under the old regime, a scholar-ruler was one who deferred to the wisdom of the ancients, who was fit to perpetuate the mysteries of the written language and culture for the benefit of future ages, and who was [pg 106] meanwhile qualified by his training to assume the rôle of counsellor and authority in society. In the theory of Sun Yat-sen, the genius leader is not the perpetuator but the discoverer. He is the social engineer. His work is similar to that of the architect who devises plans for a building which is to be built by workers (the unthinking) under the guidance of foremen (the followers).[130] In this guise, the new intellectual aristocrat is a figure more akin to the romantic Western pioneers and inventors than to the serene, conservative scholars of China in the past.

The break with Western thought comes in Sun's distinguishing three permanent, natural classes of men. Though in their aptitudes the hsien chih hsien cho are more like modern engineers than like archaic literary historians, they form a class that is inevitably the ruling class. To Marxism this is anathema; it would imply that the Communist party is merely the successor of the bourgeoisie in leading the unthinking masses about—a more benevolent successor, to be sure, but still a class distinct from the led proletariat of the intellect. To Western democratic thought, this distinction would seem at first glance to invalidate any future advocacy of democracy. To the student interested in contrasting ideological control and political government, the tripartite division of Sun Yat-sen is significant of the redefinition in modern terms, and in an even more clear-cut manner, of the Confucian theory of scholarly leadership.

How were the geniuses of the Chinese resurgence to make their knowledge useful to the race-nation? How could democracy be recognized with the leadership and ideological control of an intellectual class? To what [pg 107] degree would such a reconciliation, if effected, represent a continuation, in different terms, of the traditions and institutions of the old Chinese world? Questions such as these arise from the fusion of the old traditions and new necessities.

Ch'üan and Nêng.

The contrast between ch'üan and nêng is one of the few aspects of Sun Yat-sen's theory of democracy which persons not interested in China may, conceivably, regard as a contribution to political science. There is an extraordinarily large number of possible translations for each of these words.[131] A version which may prove convenient and not inaccurate, can be obtained by translating each Chinese term according to its context. Thus, a fairly clear idea of ch'üan may be obtained if one says that, applied to the individual, it means “power,” or “right,” and when applied to the exercise of political functions, it means “sovereignty” or “political proprietorship.” Nêng, applied to the individual, may mean “competency” (in the everyday sense of the word), “capacity” or “ability to administer.” Applied to the individual, the contrast is between the ability to have political rights in a democracy, and the ability to administer public affairs. Applied to the nation, the contrast is between sovereignty and administration.[132]