The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Part 7

The Democratic Machine State.

Throughout pre-modern Chinese thought there runs the idea of personal behavior and personal controls. The Chinese could not hypostatize in the manner of the West. Looking at men they saw men and nothing more.

Considering the problems and difficulties which men encountered, they sought solutions in terms of men and the conditioning intimacies of each individual's life. The Confucian Prince was not so much an administrator as a moral leader; his influence, extending itself through imitation on the part of others, was personal and social rather than political.(134) In succeeding ages, the scholars thought of themselves as the leaven of virtue in society. They stressed deportment and sought, only too frequently by means of petty formalities, to impress their own excellence and pre-eminence upon the people. Rarely, if ever, did the scholar-official appeal to formal political law. He was more likely to invoke propriety and proceed to exercise his authority theoretically in accordance with it.

Sun Yat-sen did not feel that further appeal to the intellectual leaders was necessary. In an environment still dominated by the past, an exhortation for the traditional personal aspect of leaders.h.i.+p would probably have appeared as a centuries-old triteness. The far-seeing men, the geniuses that Sun saw in all society, owed their superiority not to artificial inequality but to natural inequality;(135) by their ability they were outstanding. Laws and customs could outrage this natural inequality, or conceal it behind a legal facade of artificial inequality or equally artificial equality. Laws and customs do not change the facts.

The superior man was innately the superior man.

Nevertheless, the geniuses of the Chinese revolution could not rely upon the loose and personal system of influence hitherto trusted. To organize Chinese nationalism, to give it direction as well as force, the power of the people must be run through a machine-the State.

A distinction must be made here. The term "machine," applied to government, was itself a neologism introduced from the j.a.panese.(136) Not only was the word but the thing itself was alien to the Chinese, since the same term (_ch'i_) meant machinery, tool, or instrument. The introduction of the view of the state as a machine does not imply that Sun Yat-sen wished to introduce a specific form of Western state-machine into China-as will be later explained (in the pages which concern themselves with the applied political science of Sun Yat-sen).

Sun was careful, moreover, to explain that his a.n.a.logy between industrial machinery and political machinery was merely an a.n.a.logy. He said, "The machinery of the government is entirely composed of human beings. All its motions are brought about by men and not by material objects. Therefore, there is a very great difference between the machinery of the government and the manufacturing machine ... the machinery of the government is moved by human agency whereas the manufacturing machine is set in motion by material forces."(137)

Even after allowance has been made for the fact that Sun Yat-sen did not desire to import Western governmental machinery, nor even to stress the machine and state a.n.a.logy too far, it still remains extraordinarily significant that he should have impressed upon his followers the necessity of what may be called a mechanical rather than an organic type of government. The administrative machine of the Ch'ing dynasty, insofar as it was a machine at all, was a chaotic ma.s.s of political authorities melting vaguely into the social system. Sun's desire to have a clear-cut machine of government, while not of supreme importance in his ideological projects, was of great significance in his practical proposal. In his theory the state machine bears the same resemblance to the old government that the Chinese race-nation bears to the now somewhat ambiguous civilized humanity of the Confucians. In both instances he was seeking sharper and more distinct lines of demarcation.

In putting forth his proposals for the reconst.i.tution of the Chinese government he was thinking, in speaking of a state-machine, of the more or less clearly understood juristic states of the West.(138) His concrete proposals dealing with the minutiae of administrative organization, his emphasis on const.i.tution and law, and his interest in the exact allocation of control all testify to his complete acceptance of a sharply delimited state. On the other hand, he was extraordinary for his time in demanding an unusual extent, both qualitative and quant.i.tative, of power for the state which he wished to hammer out on the forges of the nationalist social and political revolution.

In summarizing this description of the instrument with which Sun Yat-sen hoped to organize the intellectual leaders of China so as to implement the force of the revolution, it may be said that it was to be a state-machine, as opposed to a totalitarian state, based upon Western juristic theory in general but organized out of the materials of old Chinese political philosophy and the Imperial experience in government.(139) The state machine was to be built along lines which Sun Yat-sen laid out in some detail. Yet, even with his elaborate plans already prepared, and in the midst of a revolution, he pointed out the difficulty of political experimentation, in the following words:

... the progress of human machinery, as government organizations and the like, has been very slow. What is the reason? It is that once a manufacturing machine has been constructed, it can easily be tested, and after it has been tried out, it can easily be put aside if it is not good, and if it is not perfect, it can easily be perfected. But it is very difficult to try out a human machine and more difficult still to perfect it after it has been tried out. It is impossible to perfect it without bringing about a revolution. The only other way would be to regard it as a useless material machine which can easily be turned into sc.r.a.p iron. But this is not workable.(140)

Democratic-Political Versus Ideological Control.

Sun Yat-sen accepted an organization of society based upon intellectual differences, despite his belief in the justifiability and necessity of formal democracy, and his reconciliation of the two at first contradictory theses in a plan for a machine state to be based upon a distinction between _ch'uan_ and _neng_. It may now be asked, why did Sun Yat-sen, familiar with the old method of ideological control, and himself proposing a new ideology which would not only restore internal harmony but also put China into harmony with the actual political condition of the world, desire to add formal popular control to ideological control?

The answer is not difficult, although it must be based for the most part on inference rather than on direct citation of Sun Yat-sen's own words. In the consideration of the system of ideological control fostered by the Confucians, ideological control presented two distinct aspects: the formation of the ideology by men, and control of men by the ideology. The ideology controlled men; some men sought to control the ideology; the whole ideological control system was based upon the continuous interaction of cause and effect, wherein tradition influenced the men who sought to use the system as a means of mastery, while the same men succeeded in a greater or less degree in directing the development of the ideology.

In the old Chinese world-society the control of the ideology was normally vested in the _literati_ who were either government officials or hoped to become such. The populace, however, acting in conformity with the ideology, could overthrow the government, and, to that extent, consciously control the content and the development of the ideology. Moreover, as the efficacy of an ideology depends upon its greater acceptance, the populace had the last word in control of the ideology both consciously and unconsciously. Politics, however, rarely comes to the last word. In the normal and ordinary conduct of social affairs, the populace was willing to let the _literati_ uphold the cla.s.sics and modify their teachings in accordance with the development of the ideology-in the name of _cheng ming_. The old ideology was so skilfully put together out of traditional elements that are indissociable from the main traits of Chinese culture, together with the revisions made by Confucius and his successors, that it was well-nigh unchallengeable. The whole Confucian method of government was based, as previously stated, on the control of men through the control of their ideas by men-and these latter men, the ideologues, were the scholar administrators of successive dynasties. The identification of the _literati_ and officials, the respect in which learning was held, the general distribution of a leaven of scholars through all the families of the Empire, and the completeness-almost incredible to a Westerner-of traditional orthodoxy, permitted the interpreters of the tradition also to mould and transform it to a considerable degree. As a means of adjusting the mores through the course of centuries, interpretation succeeded in gradually changing popular ideas, where open and revolutionary heterodoxy would have failed.

Now, in modern times, even though men might still remain largely under the control of the ideology (learn to behave rightly instead of being governed), the ideology was necessarily weakened in two ways: by the appearance of men who were recalcitrant to the ideology, and by the emergence of conceptions and ideas which could not find a place in the ideology, and which consequently opened up extra-ideological fields of individual behavior. In other words, _li_ was no longer all-inclusive, either as to men or as to realms of thought. Its control had never, of course, been complete, for in that case all inst.i.tutions of government would have become superfluous in China and would have vanished; but its deficiencies in past ages had never been so great; either with reference to insubordinate individuals or in regard to una.s.similable ideas, as they were in modern times.

Hence the province of government had to be greatly extended. The control of men by the ideology was incomplete wherever the foreign culture had really struck the Chinese-as, for instance, in the case of the newly-developed Chinese proletariat, which could not follow the Confucian precepts in the slums of twentieth-century industry. The family system, the village, and the guild were to the Chinese proletarians mere shadows of a past; they were faced individually with the problems of a foreign social life suddenly interjected into that of the Chinese. True instances of the interpenetration of opposites, they were Chinese from the still existing old society of China suddenly transposed into an industrial world in which the old ideology was of little relevance. If they were to remain Chinese they had to be brought again into the fold of the Chinese ideology; and, meanwhile, instead of being controlled ideologically, they must be controlled by the sharp, clear action of government possessing a monopoly of the power of coercion. The proletarians were not, indeed, the only group of Chinese over whom the old ideology had lost control. There were the overseas Chinese, the new Chinese finance-capitalists, and others who had adjusted their personal lives to the Western world. These had done so incompletely, and needed the action of government to s.h.i.+eld them not only from themselves and from one another, but from their precarious position in their relations with the Westerners.

Other groups had not completely fallen away from the ideology, but had found major sections of it to be unsuitable to the regulation of their own lives. Virtue could not be found in a family system which was slowly losing its polygynous character and also slowly giving place to a sort of social atomism; the intervention of the machine state was required to serve as a subst.i.tute for ideological regulation until such a time as the new ideology should have developed sufficiently to restore relevance to traditions.

Indeed, throughout all China, there were few people who were not touched to a greater or less degree by the consequences of the collision of the two intellectual worlds, the nationalistic West and the old Chinese world-society. However much Chinese might desire to continue in their traditional modes of behavior, it was impossible for them to live happy and progressive lives by virtue of having memorized the cla.s.sics and paid respect to the precepts of tradition, as had their forefathers. In all cases where the old ideas failed, state and law suddenly acquired a new importance-almost overwhelming to some Chinese-as the establishers of the new order of life. Even etiquette was established by decree, in the days of the parliamentary Republic at Peking; the age-old a.s.surance of Chinese dress and manners was suddenly swept away, and the government found itself forced to decree frock-coats.

Successive governments in the new China had fallen, not because they did too much, but because they did too little. The sphere of state activity had become enormous in contrast to what it had been under more than a score of dynasties, and the state had perforce to intervene in almost every walk of life, and every detail of behavior. Yet this intervention, although imperative, was met by the age-old Chinese contempt for government, by the determined adherence to traditional methods of control in the face of situations to which now they were no longer relevant. It was this paradox, the ever-broadening necessity of state activity in the face of traditional and unrealistic opposition to state activity, which caused a great part of the turmoil in the new China. Officials made concessions to the necessity for state action by drafting elaborate codes on almost every subject, and then, turning about, also made concessions to the traditional non-political habits of their countrymen by failing to enforce the codes which they had just promulgated. The leaders of the Republic, and their followers in the provinces, found themselves with laws which could not possibly be introduced in a nation unaccustomed to law and especially unaccustomed to law dealing with life in a Western way; thus baffled, but perhaps not disappointed, the pseudo-republican government officials were content with developing a shadow state, a shadow body of law, and then ignoring it except as a tool in the vast pandemonium of the tuchunates-where state and law were valued only in so far as they served to aggrandize or enrich military rulers and their hangers-on.

This tragic dilemma led Sun Yat-sen to call for a new kind of state, a state which was to be democratic and yet to lead back to ideological control. The emergency of imperialism and internal impotence made it imperative that the state limit its activities to those provinces of human behavior in which it could actually effectuate its decrees, and that, after having so limited the field of its action, it be well-nigh authoritarian within that field. Yet throughout the whole scheme, Sun Yat-sen's deep faith in the common people required him to demand that the state be democratic in principle and practice.

It may begin to be apparent that, at least for Sun Yat-sen, the control of the race-nation by the ideology was not inconsistent with the political control of the race-nation by itself. In the interval between the old certainty and the new, political authority had to prevail. This authority was to be directed by the people but actually wielded by the geniuses of the revolution. The new ideology was to emerge from the progress of knowledge not, as before, among a special cla.s.s of literary persons, but through all the people. It was to be an ideology based on practical experience and on the experimental method, and consequently, perhaps, less certain then the old Confucian ideology, which was in its foundations religious. To fill in the gaps where uniformity of thought and behavior, on the basis of truth, had not been established, the state was to act, and the state had to be responsible to the people.

At this point it may be remembered that Sun Yat-sen was among the very few Chinese leaders of his day who could give the historians of the future any valid reasons for supposing that they believed in republican principles.

Too many of the militarists and scholar-politicians of the North and South paid a half-contemptuous lip-service to the republic, primarily because they could not agree as to which one of them should have the Dragon Throne, or, at the least, the honor of restoring the Manchu Emperor-who stayed on in the Forbidden City until 1924.(141) Sun Yat-sen had a deep faith in the judgment and trustworthiness of the uncounted swarms of coolies and farmers whom most Chinese leaders ignored. He was perhaps the only man of his day really loved by the illiterate cla.s.ses that knew of him, and was always faithful to their love. Other leaders, both Chinese and Western, have praised the ma.s.ses but refused to trust them for their own good. Sun's implicit belief in the political abilities of the common people in all matters which their knowledge equipped them to judge, was little short of ludicrous to many of his contemporaries, and positively irritating to some persons who wished him well personally but did not-at least privately-follow all of his ideas.

To return to the consideration of the parts played by ideology and popular government in social control: there was another point of great difference between the old ideology and the new. The old was the creation, largely, of a special cla.s.s of scholars, who for that purpose ranked highest in the social hierarchy of old China. Now even though the three natural cla.s.ses might continue to be recognized in China, the higher standard of living and the increased literacy of the populace was to enlarge the number of persons partic.i.p.ating in the life of ideas. The people were to form the ideology in part, and in part control the government under whose control the revolutionary geniuses were to form the rest of the ideology, and propagate it through a national educational program. In all respects the eventual control was to rest with the people of the Chinese race-nation, united, self-ruling, and determined to survive.

How, then, does the pattern of _min ch'uan_ fit into the larger scheme of the continuation of Confucian civilization and ideological control? First, the old was to continue undisturbed where it might. Second, those persons completely lost to the discipline of the old ideology must be controlled by the state. Third, those areas of behavior which were disturbed by the Western impact required state guidance. Fourth, the machine state was to control both these fields, of men, and of ideas, and within this limited field was to be authoritarian ("an all-powerful state") and yet democratic ("nevertheless subject to the control of the people"). Fifth, the ideology was to arise in part from the general body of the people. Sixth, the other parts of it were to be developed by the intellectuals, a.s.sisted by the government, which was to be also under the control of the people. Seventh, since the world was generally in an unstable condition, and since many wrongs remained to be righted, it was not immediately probable that the Chinese would settle down to ideological serenity and certainty, and consequently State policy would still remain as a governmental question, to be decided by the will of the whole race-nation.

To recapitulate, then the people was to rule itself until the reappearance of perfect tranquility-_ta t'ung_-or its nearest mundane equivalent. The government was to serve as a ca.n.a.lization of the power of the Chinese race-nation in fighting against the oppressor-nations of the world for survival.

The last principle of the nationalist ideology remains to be studied. _Min tsu_, nationalism, was to provide an instrumentality for self-control and for external defense in a world of armed states. But these two would remain ineffectual in a starved and backward country, if they were not supplemented by a third principle designed to relieve the physical impotence of the nation, to promote the material happiness of its individual members and to guarantee the continued survival of the Chinese society as a whole. Union and self-rule could be frustrated by starvation.

China needed not only to become united and free as a nation; it had also to become physically healthy and wealthy. This was to be effected through _min sheng_, the third of the three principles.

CHAPTER IV. THE THEORY OF _MIN SHeNG_.

_Min Sheng_ in the Ideology.

The principle of _min sheng_ has been the one most disputed. Sun Yat-sen made his greatest break with the old ideology in promulgating this last element in his triune doctrine; the original Chinese term carried little meaning that could be used in an approach to the new meaning that Sun Yat-sen gave it. He himself stated that the two words had become rather meaningless in their old usage, and that he intended to use them with reference to special conditions in the modern world.(142) He then went on to state the principle in terms so broad, so seemingly contradictory, that at times it appears possible for each man to read in it what he will, as he may in the Bible. The Communists and the Catholics each approve of the third principle, but translate it differently; the liberals render it by a term which is not only innocuous but colorless.(143) Had Sun Yat-sen lived to finish the lectures on _min sheng_, he might have succeeded in rounding off his discussion of the principle.

There are two methods by means of which the principle of _min sheng_ may be examined. It might be described on the basis of the various definitions which Sun Yat-sen gave it in his four lectures and in other speeches and papers, and outlined, point by point, by means of the various functions and limits that he set for it. This would also permit some consideration of the relation of _min sheng_ to various other theories of political economy. The other approach may be a less academic one, but perhaps not altogether unprofitable. By means of a reconsideration of the first two principles, and of the structure and meaning of the three principles as a whole, it is possible to surmise, if not to establish, the meaning of _min sheng_, that is, to discover it through a sort of political triangulation: the first two principles being given, to what third principle do they lead?

This latter method may be taken first, since it will afford a general view of the three principles which will permit the orientation of _min sheng_ with reference to the nationalist ideology as a whole, and prepare the student for a solution of some of the apparent contradictions which are to be found in the various specific definitions of _min sheng_.

Accepting the elementary thesis of the necessary awakening of the race-nation, and its equally necessary self-rule, both as a nation _vis-a-vis_ other nations, and as a world by itself, one may see that these are each social problems of organization which do not necessarily involve the physical conditions of the country, although, as a matter of application, they would be ineffectual in a country which did not have the adequate means of self-support. Sun Yat-sen was interested in seeing the Chinese people and Chinese civilization survive, and by survival he meant not only the continuation of social organization and moral and intellectual excellence, but, more than these, the actual continued existence of the great bulk of the population. The most vital problem was that of the continued existence of the Chinese as a people, which was threatened by the constant expansion of the West and might conceivably share the fate of the American Indians-a remnant of a once great race living on the charity of their conquerors. Sun Yat-sen expressly recognized this problem as the supreme one, requiring immediate attention.(144) Nationalism and democracy would have no effect if the race did not survive to practise them.

The old Chinese society may be conceived as a vast system of living men, who survived by eating and breeding, and who were connected with one another in time by the proper attention to the ancestral cults, and in s.p.a.ce by a common consciousness of themselves as the standard-bearers of the civilization of the world. Sun Yat-sen, although a Christian, was not unmindful of this outlook; he too was sensible of the meaning of the living race through the centuries. He dutifully informed the Emperor T'ai Tsung of Ming that the Manchus had been driven from the throne, and some years later he expressed the deepest reverence for the ancestral cult.(145) But in facing the emergency with which his race was confronted, Sun Yat-sen could not overlook the practical question of physical survival.

He was, therefore, materialistic in so far as his recognition of the importance of the material well-being of the race-nation made him so. At this point he may be found sympathetic with the Marxians, though his ideology as a whole is profoundly Chinese. The dest.i.tution, the economic weakness, the slow progress of his native land were a torture to his conscience. In a world of the most grinding poverty, where war, pestilence, and famine made even mere existence uncertain, he could not possibly overlook the problem of the adequate material care of the vast populace that const.i.tuted the race-nation.

_Min sheng_, accordingly, meant primarily the survival of the race-nation, as nationalism was its awakening, and democracy its self-control. No one of these could be effective without the two others. In the fundamentals of Sun Yat-sen's ideology, the necessity for survival and prosperity is superlative and self-evident. All other features of the doctrine are, as it were, optional. The first two principles definitely required a third that would give them a body of persons upon which to operate; they did not necessarily require that the third principle advance any specific doctrine. If this be the case, it is evident that the question of the content of _min sheng_, while important, is secondary to the first premises of the _San Min Chu I_. The need for a third principle-one of popular subsistence-in the ideology is vital; the _San Min Chu I_ would be crippled without it.

The Economic Background of _Min Sheng_.

What was the nature of the background which decided Sun Yat-sen to draw an economic program into the total of his nationalist ideology for the regeneration of China through a nationalist revolution? Was Sun Yat-sen dissatisfied with the economic order of the old society? Was he interested in a reconst.i.tution of the economic system for the sake of defense against Western powers?

He was unquestionably dissatisfied with the economic order of things in the old society, but it was a dissatisfaction with what the old order had failed to achieve rather than a feeling of the injustice of the Chinese distributive system. He was bitter against a taxation system which worked out unevenly,(146) and against the extortions of the internal-transit revenue officials under the Empire.(147) He was deeply impressed by his first encounter with Western mechanical achievement-the S. S. _Grannoch_, which took him from Kw.a.n.gtung to Honolulu.(148) But he had served in the shop of his brother as a young boy,(149) and knew the small farm life of South China intimately. On the basis of this first-hand knowledge, and his many years of a.s.sociation with the working people of China, he was not likely to attack the old economic system for its injustice so much as for its inadequacy.(150)