The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Part 8

That there were injustices in the old system of Chinese economy, no one can deny, but these injustices were scarcely sufficient to provoke, of themselves alone, the complete alteration of economic outlook that Sun Yat-sen proposed. Chinese capitalism had not reached the state of industrial capitalism until after its contact with the West; at the most it was a primitive sort of usury-capitalism practised by the three economically dominant groups of old China-landholders, officials, and merchant-usurers.(151) The disturbances which hurt the economic condition of the country, and thereby led to greater disturbances, had involved China in a vicious cycle of decline which could scarcely be blamed on any one feature or any one group in the old economy. The essential fault lay with the condition of the country as a whole, directly affected by the economic consequences of Western trade and partial industrialization.(152)

Sun Yat-sen's positive dissatisfaction with the economy of his time arose from the position which he felt China had in the modern business world. He believed that, by virtue of the economic oppression of the Chinese by the Western powers, China had been degraded to the position of the lowest nation on earth-that the Chinese were even more unfortunate than "slaves without a country," such as the Koreans and the Annamites.(153) The particular forms of this oppression, and Sun Yat-sen's plans for meeting it, may be more aptly described in the consideration of his program of economic national regeneration.(154) The Chinese nation occupied the ignominious position of a sub-colony or-as Sun himself termed it-"a hypo-colony"; "Our people are realizing that to be a semi-colony is a national disgrace; but our case is worse than that; our country is in the position of a sub-colony (since it is the colony of all the Great Powers and not merely subject to one of them), a position which is inferior to an ordinary colony such as Korea and Annam."(155)

What, then, were the positive implications of the principle of _min sheng_ in the nationalist ideology?

The Three Meanings of _Min Sheng_.

First, _min sheng_ is the doctrine leading the nationalist democracy on its road to a high position among the nations of the earth; only through the material strength to be found in _min sheng_ can the Chinese attain a position by which they can exert the full force of their new-formed state against the invaders and oppressors, and be able to lift up the populace so that democracy will possess some actual operative meaning. _Min sheng_ is "... the center of politics, of economics, of all kinds of historical movements; it is similar to the center of gravity in s.p.a.ce."(156) It provides the implementation of nationalism and democracy.

Secondly, _min sheng_ means national enrichment. The problem of China is primarily one of poverty. Sun wanted consideration of the problem of the livelihood of the people to begin with the supreme economic reality in China. What was this reality? "It is the poverty from which we all suffer.

The Chinese in general are poor; among them there is no privileged wealthy cla.s.s, but only a generality of ordinary poor people."(157) However this enrichment was to be brought about, it was imperative.

Thirdly, _min sheng_, as the doctrine of enrichment, was also the doctrine of economic justice. If the nation was to become economically healthy, it could only do so on the basis of the proper distribution of property among its citizens. Its wealth would not bring about well-being unless it were properly distributed.

More briefly, _min sheng_ may be said to be the thesis of the indispensability of: 1) a national economic revolution against imperialism and for democracy; 2) an industrial revolution for the enrichment of China; and 3) a prophylactic against social revolution.

The significance of _min sheng_ as the economic implementation of nationalism and democracy is clear enough to require no further discussion. Its significance as a doctrine for the promotion of the industrial revolution is considerable, and worth attention.

Western science was to sow the seed. _Min sheng_ economy was to reap the harvest. By means of the details in Sun Yat-sen's programs which he believed sufficient for the purposes, the modernization of China, which was to be a consequence of Western science in the ideology, was to lead at the same time to the actual physical enrichment of the economic goods and services of the country. The advocacy of industrial development is, of course, a commonplace in the Western world, but in China it was strikingly novel. Sun Yat-sen did not regard industrialism as a necessary evil; he considered it a positive blessing, as the means of increasing the material welfare of the Chinese people.

Time and time again, Sun Yat-sen emphasized the necessity of modernization. His theory of nationalism led him to urge the introduction of Western physical science into the ideology. His theory of democracy was justified in part by the fact that democracy was to be regarded as a modernizing force. Now his principle of _min sheng_ was also to lead to that great end-the modernization of China to a degree to permit the race-nation to regain in the modern world, which encompa.s.sed the whole planet, the position it had once had in the smaller world of Eastern Asia.

The wealth of old China had been one of the factors enabling it to resist destruction at the spear-points of its barbarian conquerors. Sun Yat-sen knew this, and knew also that the position of the United States-which had probably the greatest concentration of social and physical wealth and power under one political system that the world had ever known-made that nation impregnable in the modern world. Seeing that wealth was not only a blessing to individuals, but to nations as well, he was anxious that his beloved China should be guarded and a.s.sisted by the strength that the ideology of _min sheng_, once accepted and effectuated, could give it.

_Min sheng_ is more than a vague aspiration for national welfare. The general theory of nationalism and democracy required an additional point to make them effective in the realities of international politics, and _min sheng_ was to supply the hygienic and economic strength that the Chinese race-nation needed for compet.i.tion and survival; but it was to do more.

_Min sheng_ is at the same time the last step of Chinese resistance and the first of Chinese submission to Western culture. In seeking an economic policy and an ideology which would lead to increased wealth of the nation, the Chinese were preparing to resist the West with its own weapons. _Min sheng_ is a submission in that it is a deliberate declaration of industrial revolution.

It is beside the point to consider the ideological bases of the Western industrial revolution. It was perhaps neither a voluntary nor a deliberate process at all; no man in the first few decades of the nineteenth century could have foretold what the end of a process of mechanization would bring, or was likely to advocate the intentional following of a policy which would transform the orientation and organization of man more thoroughly than had any previous religious, political, and economic transition. The industrial revolution of Euramerica, when viewed from the outside, presents the appearance of a colossal accident, whether for good or for bad, which was but half-perceived by the partic.i.p.ants in it. Even today, when the ideology and the inst.i.tutional outline of the agrarian-handicraft past is fading swiftly away in the new brilliance of Western machine-culture, the new certainty, the new order have not yet appeared. The great transition works its way beyond the knowledge or the intervention of individual men.

This was decidedly not the case in China. Industrialism was something which could be studied from the outside, which could be appraised, and then acclaimed or resisted. Emperor Meiji and his Genro, with a flash of intuition or an intellectual penetration almost unparalleled in the political history of the world, guided j.a.pan into the swift current of mechanical progress; the island empire swept ahead of Asia, abreast of the most powerful states of the world. The Chinese court, under the resolute, but blind, guidance of the Empress Dowager, made a few feeble gestures in favor of modernization, but vigorously opposed any change which might seriously modify the order of Chinese society or the position of the Manchus. In the shadow of the foreign guns, industrialism crept into China, along the coasts and up the banks of the navigable rivers. One might suppose that the Chinese were in a position to choose, deliberately, for or against industrialism. They were not; in China, as in the West, the machine age first appeared largely as an accident.

It is here that the significance of Sun Yat-sen's _min sheng_ becomes apparent. Above all other subsidiary meanings, it is a deliberate declaration of the industrial revolution. Modernism had been an accident; Sun Yat-sen wished to transform it into a program. What would be the ideological consequences of such an att.i.tude?

In the first place, a plan was indicated for almost every type of human behavior. Sun Yat-sen himself drafted a preliminary scheme for a modern manufacturing and communications system.(158) The road that China was to take would not be the miserable, halting progress of industrialism, complicated by delays and wars, which the West had known in the painful centuries of readjustment from the medieval to modern civilization; China would not stumble forward, but would deliberately select the swiftest and easiest way to a sound industrialism, and then take it.

_Min sheng_ thus not only provides the Chinese with a way to make their nationalism, their democracy, and their stateification felt in the hour of their ultimate triumph; it gives them something to do to bring about that triumph.

On the basis of the outlines of the ideology and the social system that Sun Yat-sen proposed, viewed from the perspective of the old Confucian world-society, the reader will realize that this declaration of the industrial revolution is the boldest of Sun Yat-sen's acts, and that the meaning of _min sheng_ as a program of complete modernization and reconstruction is superior to other possible meanings it may have, in regard to theoretical national or social revolution. There is nothing remote or philosophical about the significance of _min sheng_ when so viewed; it is a plan to which a Lenin or a Henry Ford might subscribe with equal fervor-although a Tagore would deplore it. It is here that Sun Yat-sen appears as the champion of the West against the traditional technological stagnation of China. Yet just there, at the supreme point of his Westernism, we must remember what he was fighting for: the life of a race-nation and a civilization that was contradictory to the West. The stability of Confucianism could not serve as a cloak for reaction and stagnant thought. For its own good, nay, its own life, Chinese civilization had to modernize (i. e., Westernize economically) in order to compete in a West-ruled world. But what, more specifically, was the socio-economic position of Sun Yat-sen? Was he a Marxian? Was he a liberal? Was he neither?

Western Influences: Henry George, Marxism and Maurice William.

As previously stated there are three parts which may be distinguished in the ideology of the principle of _min sheng_. _Min sheng_ is, first, the economic aspect of the national revolution-the creation of an active race-nation of China implementing its power by, second, technological revolution. Third, it connotes also the necessity of a social revolution of some kind. Western commentators have been p.r.o.ne to ignore the significance of _min sheng_ in the first two of these meanings, and have concentrated on disputation concerning the third part. The question of the right system of distribution has become so prominent in much Western revolutionary thought that, to many, it sums up the whole moral issue concerning what is good and bad in society.(159) They are uninterested in or ignorant of the great importance that the first two aspects of _min sheng_ possess for the Chinese mind. The third part, the application of _min sheng_ to the problems that are in the West the cause of social revolution, and to the possible application of social revolution to China, is important, but is by no means the complete picture.

In attempting to state the definitive position of Sun Yat-sen on this question several points must be kept in mind. The first is that Sun Yat-sen, born a Chinese of the nineteenth century, had the intellectual orientation of a member of the world-society, and an accepter of the Confucian ideology. Enough has been shown of the background of his theories to demonstrate their harmony with and relevance to society which had endured in China for centuries before the coming of the West. The second point to be remembered is that Westerners are p.r.o.ne to overlook this background and see only the Western influences which they are in such a good position to detect. Sun Yat-sen's mind grew and changed. His preferences in Western beliefs changed frequently. A few Westerners, seeing only this, are apt to call Sun unstable and devoid of reason.(160)

It would, indeed, be strange to find any Western political or ideological leader who thought in precisely the same terms after the world war and the Russian revolution as before. Sun Yat-sen was, like many other receptive-minded leaders, sensitive to the new doctrines of Wilson and Lenin as they were shouted through the world. He was, perhaps, less affected by them than Western leaders, because his ideology was so largely rooted in the ideology of old China.

Apart from the winds of doctrine that blew through the world during Sun's life-period, and the generally known Western influences to which he was exposed,(161) there were three writers whose influence has been supposed to have been critical in the development of his thinking. These three were Henry George, Karl Marx, and Maurice William of New York. A much greater amount of material is needed for a detailed study of the influences of various individual theories on Sun Yat-sen than for a general exposition of his political doctrines as a whole. At the present time scarcely enough has been written to permit any really authoritative description of the relations between the ideology of Sun Yat-sen and the thought of these three men. It is possible, nevertheless, to trace certain general outlines which may serve to clarify the possible influence that was exercised on Sun, and to correct some current misapprehensions as to the nature and extent of that influence.

Sun Yat-sen's opposition to the "unearned increment" shows the influence of the thought of Henry George. Sun proposed an ingenious scheme for the government confiscation of unearned increment in an economy which would nevertheless permit private owners.h.i.+p of land. (Incidentally, he terms this, in his second lecture on _min sheng_, "communism," which indicates a use of the word different, in this respect at least, from the conventional Western use.)(162) The land problem was of course a very old one in China, although accentuated in the disorders resulting from the impact of the West. There can be little question that Sun's particular method of solving the problem was influenced by the idea of unearned increment.

He knew of Henry George in 1897, the year the latter died,(163) and advocated redistribution of the land in the party oath, the platform, and the slogans of the _Tung Meng Hui_ of 1905.(164) Since, even at the time of the Canton-Moscow Entente, his land policy never approached the Marxist-Leninist program of nationalization or collectivization of land, but remained one of redistribution and confiscation of unearned increment, it is safe to say that Sun kept the theory of George in mind, although he by no means followed George to the latter's ultimate conclusions.(165) It may thus be inferred that the influence of Henry George upon the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen was slight, but permanent. An idea was borrowed; the scheme of things was not.

Sun Yat-sen encountered Marxism for the first recorded time in London in 1897, when he met a group of Russian revolutionaries and also read in the subject. The fact that Sun was exposed to Marxism proves little except that he had had the opportunity of taking up Marxism and did not do so.(166) Again, the _Tung Meng Hui_ manifesto of 1905 may have been influenced by Marxism. It was not, however, until the development of his _Three Principles_ that the question of Marxian influence was raised. Sun Yat-sen made his first speech on the _Principles_ in Brussels in the spring of 1905.(167) By 1907 the three principles had taken on a clear form: nationalism, democracy, and _min sheng_, which the Chinese of that time seem to have translated _socialism_ when referring to it in Western languages.(168)

The most careful Marxian critic of Sun Yat-sen, writing of the principle of _min sheng_ and its two main planks, land reform and state capitalism, says: "This very vague program, which does not refer to cla.s.s interests nor to the cla.s.s struggle as the means of breaking privileged cla.s.s interests, was objectively not socialism at all, but something else altogether: Lenin coined the formula, 'subjective socialism,' for it."(169) He adds, later: "Hence Sun's socialism meant, on the lips of the Chinese bourgeoisie, nothing but a sort of declaration for a 'social'

economic policy, that is, a policy friendly to the ma.s.ses."(170) T'ang Liang-li declares that the third principle at this time adopted "a frankly socialistic att.i.tude,"(171) but implies elsewhere that its inadequacy was seen by a Chinese Marxist, Chu Chih-hsin.(172) This evidence, as far as it goes, shows that Sun Yat-sen had had the opportunity to become acquainted with Marxism, and that even on the occasion of the first formulation of the principle of _min sheng_ he used none of its tenets. The revolutionary critic, T'ang Liang-li, who, a devoted and brilliant Nationalist in action, writes with a sort of European left-liberal orientation, suggests that the Third Principle grew with the growth of capitalist industrialism in China.(173) This is true: economic maladjustment would emphasize the need for ideological reconstruction with reference to the economy. There is no need to resort to Marxian a.n.a.lysis.

That the third principle meant something to Sun Yat-sen is shown by the fact that when Sung Chiao-jen, who a few years later was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs of the revolution, suggested in the period of the first provisional Republic at Nanking that the Third Principle had better be omitted altogether, Sun was enraged, and declared that if _min sheng_ were to be given up, the whole revolution might as well be abandoned.(174)

Since _min sheng_, in its third significance, that of the development of a socially just distributive system, was not Marxian nor yet unimportant, it may be contrasted once again with the communist doctrines, and then studied for its actual content. In contrasting it with Marxism, it might be of value to observe, first, the criticism that the Marxians levy against it, and second, the distinctions that nationalist and European critics make between _min sheng_ and communism.

Dr. Karl Wittfogel, the German Marxist whose work on Sun Yat-sen is the most satisfactory of its kind, points out the apparent contradictions in the _San Min Chu I_: on the one hand, statements which are not only objectively but subjectively friendly to capitalism (on the excellence of the Ford plant; on the necessity for the cooperation of capital and labor)-on the other, the unmerciful condemnation of capitalism; on the one hand, the declaration that there is no capitalism in China-on the other, that capitalism must be destroyed as it appears; on the right, the statement that communism and _min sheng_ are opposed-on the left, that the communist doctrines are a subsidiary part of the ideology of _min sheng_.(175) How, asks Wittfogel, does this all fit together? He answers by pointing out the significance of Sun's theses when considered in relation to the dialectical-materialist interpretation of recent Far Eastern history:

His three principles incorporate

in their _development_ the objective change in the socio-economic situation of China, in their _contradictions_ the real contradictions of the Chinese revolution, in their _latest tendencies_ the transposition of the social center of gravity of the revolution, which sets the cla.s.ses in action, and whose aim is no longer a bourgeois capitalist one, but proletarian-socialist and peasant agrarian-revolutionary.

Sun Yat-sen is according to this not only the hitherto most powerful representative of the bourgeois-national, anti-imperialist revolutions of awakening Asia; he points at the same time outwards over the bourgeois cla.s.s limitations of the first step of the Asiatic movement for liberation. To deny this were portentuous, even for the proletarian communist movement of Eastern Asia.(176)

The modifications which the Marxians have introduced into their programs with respect to the cla.s.s struggle in colonial countries do not imply a corresponding modification of their ideology. The determinism adopted from Hegel, the economic interpretation of history-these and other dogmas are held by the Marxians to be universally valid despite their Western origin.

We have seen what Sun's chief Marxian exegete thinks of him. Now it may be worth while to consider the actual relations of Sun's doctrines with some of those in Marxism. In the first place, Sun Yat-sen, during his stay in Shanghai, 1919-1922 (with interruptions), was very much interested in Communism and friendly to the Russian people, but not at all inclined to adopt its ideology.(177)

In reference to specific points of the Communist ideology, Sun Yat-sen was indebted to the Communists for the application of the principle of nationalism, as a means of propaganda, as anti-imperialism, although, as we have seen, it was fundamentally a thesis for the readjustment of the Chinese society from the ideological basis of a world-society over to a national state among national states.(178) Second, his habit of taking Western doctrines and applying them to the Chinese nation instead of to Chinese individuals, led him to apply nationalism to the cla.s.s war of the oppressed nations against the oppressing nations. There was no justification of intra-national cla.s.s war in the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen.(179) In his doctrine of democracy, his application of a cla.s.s-system based on intellect was a flat denial of the superior significance of the Marxian economic-cla.s.s ideology, as was his favoring of the development of a five-power liberal government through _ch'uan_ and _neng_ in place of a dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat operating through soviets. Finally, in relation to _min sheng_, his use of the Confucian philosophy-the interpretation of history through _jen_-was a contradiction of the materialist interpretation of history by the Marxians. It also contradicted the cla.s.s struggle; the loyalty of the Chinese to the race-nation was to be the supreme loyalty; it was to develop from the _ta chia_, the great family of all Chinese; and cla.s.s lines within it could not transcend its significance. Furthermore, purely as a matter of economic development, Sun Yat-sen regarded the cla.s.s struggle as _pathological_ in society. He said, "Out of his studies of the social question, Marx gained no other advantage than a knowledge of the diseases of social evolution; he failed to see the principle of social evolution.

Hence we can say that Marx was a pathologist rather than a physiologist of society."(180) Finally, he did not accept the Marxian theory of surplus value or of the inevitable collapse of capitalism. He even spoke of capitalism and socialism as "two economic forces of human civilization"

which might "work side by side in future civilization."(181)

All in all, it may safely be said that Sun Yat-sen's ideology, as an adjustment of the old Chinese ideology to the modern world, was not inspired by the Marxist; that through the greater part of his life, he was acquainted with Marxism, and did not avail himself of the opportunities he had for adopting it, but consistently rejected it; and that while the Communists were of great use to him in the formulation and implementation of his program, they affected his ideology, either generally or with reference to _min sheng_, imperceptibly if at all.

This conclusion is of significance in the estimation of the influence of Maurice William upon the thought of Sun Yat-sen. It is, briefly, the thesis of Dr. William that it was his own book which saved China from Bolshevism by making an anti-Marxian out of Sun after he had fallen prey to the Bolshevist philosophy. Dr. William writes of the lectures on Nationalism and Democracy; "In these lectures Dr. Sun makes clear that his position is strongly pro-Russian and pro-Marxian, that he endorses the cla.s.s struggle, repudiates Western democracy, and advocates China's cooperation with Bolshevist Russia against capitalist nations."(182) Dr.

William then goes on to show, quite convincingly, that Sun Yat-sen, with very slight acknowledgments, quoted William's _The Social Interpretation of History_ almost verbatim for paragraph after paragraph in the lectures on _min sheng_.

It would be unjust and untruthful to deny the great value that William's book had for Sun Yat-sen, who did quote it and use its arguments.(183) On the other hand, it is a manifest absurdity to a.s.sume that Sun Yat-sen, having once been a communist, suddenly reversed his position after reading one book by an American of whom he knew nothing. Even Dr. William writes with a tone of mild surprise when he speaks of the terrific _volte-face_ which he thinks Sun Yat-sen performed.

There are two necessary comments to be made on the question of the influence of Maurice William. In the first place, Sun Yat-sen had never swerved from the interpretation of history by _jen_, which may be interpreted as the humane or social interpretation of history. Enough of the old Chinese ideology has been outlined above to make clear what this outlook was.(184) Sun Yat-sen, in short, never having been a Marxian, was not converted to the social interpretation of history as put forth by Dr.

William. He found in the latter's book, perhaps more clearly than in any other Western work an a.n.a.lysis of society that coincided with his own, which he had developed from the old Chinese philosophy and morality as rendered by Confucius. Consequently he said of William's rejection of the materialistic interpretation of history, "That sounds perfectly reasonable ... the greatest discovery of the American scholar _fits in perfectly_ with the (third) principle of our Party."(185) The accomplishment of Maurice William, therefore, was a great one, but one which has been misunderstood. He formulated a doctrine of social evolution which tallied perfectly with Chinese ideology, and did this without being informed on Chinese thought. He did not change the main currents of Sun's thought, which were consistent through the years. He did present Sun with several telling supplementary arguments in Western economic terms, by means of which he could reconcile his interpretation of social history not only with Confucian _jen_ but also with modern Western economics.