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
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 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
[pg 030]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.
[pg 033]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:
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.
[pg 036]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.
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
[pg 041]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.
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.
[pg 049]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
[pg 050]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.
[pg 051]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.
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.
[pg 054]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
[pg 055]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.
[pg 056]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
[pg 057]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.