Introduction.
The Problem of the San Min Chu I.
The Materials.
Sun Yat-sen played many rôles in the history of his times. He was one of those dramatic and somewhat formidable figures who engage the world's attention at the very outset of their careers. In the late years of the nineteenth century, he was already winning some renown in the West; it was picturesque that a Cantonese, a Christian physician, should engage in desperate conspiracies against the Manchu throne. Sun became known as a political adventurer, a forerunner, as it were, of such mutually dissimilar personages as Trotsky, Lawrence, and Major-General Doihara. With the illusory success of the revolution of 1911, and his Presidency of the first Republic, Sun ceased being a conspirator in the eyes of the world's press, and became the George Washington of China. It is in this rôle that he is most commonly known, and his name most generally recalled. After the world war, in the atmosphere of extreme tension developed, perhaps, by the Bolshevik revolution, Sun was regarded as an enigmatic leader, especially significant in the struggle between Asiatic nationalisms allied with the Soviets against the traditional capitalist state-system. It was through him that the Red anti-imperialist policy was pushed to its greatest success, and he was hated and admired, ridiculed and feared, down to the last moments of his life. When he died, American reporters in Latvia cabled New York their reports of Russian comments on the event.[3] More, perhaps, than any other Chinese of modern times, Sun symbolized the entrance of China into [pg 002] world affairs, and the inevitable confluence of Western and Far Eastern history.
It is characteristic of Sun that he should have appeared in another and final rôle after his death. He had been thought of as conspirator, statesman, and mass leader; but with the advent of his party to power it became publicly apparent that he had also been a political philosopher. The tremendous prestige enjoyed by him as state-founder and party leader was enhanced by his importance as prophet and law-giver. His doctrines became the state philosophy of China, and for a while his most zealous followers sought to have him canonized in a quite literal fashion, and at one stroke to make him replace Confucius and the Sons of Heaven. After the extreme enthusiasms of the Sun Yat-sen cult subsided, Sun remained the great national hero-sage of modern China. Even in those territories where the authority of his political heirs was not completely effective, his flag was flown and his doctrines taught.
His doctrines have provided the theories upon which the Nationalist revolution was based; they form the extra-juridical constitution of the National Government of China. When the forces hostile to Sun Yat-sen and his followers are considered, it is amazing that his ideas and ideals should have survived. An empire established with the aid of Japanese arms, and still under Japanese hegemony, controls Manchuria; parts of north China are ruled by a bastard government, born of a compromise between enemies; a largely unrecognized but powerful Soviet Republic exists in outer Mongolia; the lamaist oligarchy goes on in Tibet; and somewhere, in central and western China, a Soviet group, not quite a government but more than a conspiracy, is fighting for existence. It is quite probable that nowhere else in the world can there be found a greater variety of principles, each scheme of principles fostered by an armed organization struggling with its [pg 003] rivals. In this chaos the National Government has made the most effective bid for authority and the greatest effort for the reëstablishment of order; through it the principles of Sun Yat-sen rule the political life of a population greater than that of the United States or of the Soviet Union.
It is difficult to evaluate the importance of political doctrines. Even if The Three Principles is judged by the extent of the population which its followers control, it has achieved greater results in practical politics in fifteen years than has Marxism in ninety. Such a criterion may well be disputed, but, whatever the test, it cannot be denied that the thought of Sun Yat-sen has played a major part in the political development of his native land. It may continue into the indefinitely remote future, or may succumb to the perils that surround its advocates; in any case, these doctrines have been taught long enough and broadly enough to make an impress on the age, and have been so significant in political and cultural history that they can never sink into complete obscurity.
What are these doctrines? Sun Yat-sen was so voluminous a writer that it would be impossible for his followers to digest and codify all his writings into one neat and coherent handbook; he himself did not provide one. Before printing became common, there was a certain automatic process of condensation which preserved the important utterances of great men, and let their trivial sayings perish. Sun, however, must have realized that he was leaving a vast legacy of materials which are not altogether coherent or consistent with one another. Certain of his works were naturally more important than others, but, to make the choice definitive, he himself indicated four sources which his followers might draw upon for a definitive statement of his views.[4]
His Political Testament cites the Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction), the Chien Kuo Ta Kang (The Outline of National Reconstruction), the San Min Chu I (The Triple Demism, also translated as The Three Principles of the People), and the Manifesto issued by the first national congress of the Party.[5] These four items differ quite sharply from one another in form. No one of them can be relied upon to give the whole of Sun's doctrines.
The Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction) is in reality three works, only remotely related to one another. The first item in the trilogy is the Sun Wên Hsüeh Shê (The Philosophy of Sun Wên); it is a series of familiar essays on the Chinese way of thought.[6] The second is the Min Ch'üan Ts'u Pu, The Primer of Democracy, which is little more than a text on parliamentary law.[7] The third is the Shih Yeh Chi Hua, known in English as The International Development [pg 005]of China, which Sun wrote in both English and Chinese.[8] These three works, under the alternate titles of “The Program of Psychological Reconstruction,” “The Program of Social Reconstruction,” and “The Program of Material Reconstruction” form The Program of National Reconstruction.
The Chien Kuo Ta Kang, The Outline of National Reconstruction, is an outline of twenty-five points, giving the necessary steps towards the national reconstruction in their most concise form.[9]
The San Min Chu I is Sun's most important work. It comprises sixteen lectures setting forth his socio-political theories and his programs. The title most commonly used in Western versions is The Three Principles of the People.[10]
The last document mentioned in Sun Yat-sen's will was the Manifesto of the first national congress of the Kuomintang. This was not written by himself, but was drafted by Wang Ch'ing-wei, one of his closest followers, and embodies essentially the same ideas as do the other three items, even though Borodin—the emissary of the Third International—had been consulted in its preparation.[11]
Sun undoubtedly regretted leaving such a heterogeneous and ill-assembled group of works as his literary bequest. [pg 006] Throughout the latter years of his life he was studying political science in the hope that he might be able to complete a great treatise which he had projected, an analysis and statement of the programs of the Chinese nationalists. One attempt toward actualization of this work was frustrated when Sun's manuscripts and a great part of his library were burned in the attack launched against him by Ch'en Ch'iung-ming in 1922. His apology for the makeshift volume on the San Min Chu I is pathetic: “As I had neither time to prepare nor books to use as references, I could do nothing else in these lectures but improvise after I ascended the platform. Thus I have omitted and forgotten many things which were in my original manuscript. Although before having them printed, I revised them, added (passages) and eliminated (others), yet, those lectures are far from coming up to my original manuscripts, either in the subject matter itself, or in the concatenations of the discussion, or in the facts adduced as proofs.”[12] Sun was in all probability a more assiduous and widely read student of political science than any other world leader of his day except Wilson; he studied innumerable treatises on government, and was surprisingly familiar with the general background of Western politics, in theory and practice. He was aware of the shabby appearance that these undigested occasional pieces would present when put forth as the bible of a new China, and earnestly enjoined his followers to carry on his labors and bring them to fruition.[13]
The various works included in the Chien Kuo Fang Lo, while satisfactory for the purposes Sun had in mind when he wrote them, are not enough to outline the fundamentals both of political theory and a governmental plan. The familiar essays have an important bearing on the formation of the ideology of a new China; the primer [pg 007] of democracy, less; the industrial plan is one of those magnificent dreams which, in the turn of a decade, may inspire an equally great reality. The outline and the manifesto are no more suited to the rôle of classics; they are decalogues rather than bibles.[14] There remains the San Min Chu I.
The San Min Chu I is a collection of sixteen lectures delivered in Canton in 1924. There were to have been eighteen, but Sun was unable to give the last two. Legend has it that Borodin persuaded Sun to give the series.[15] Whatever the cause of their being offered, they attracted immediate attention. Interest in Sun and in his ideas was at a fever heat; his friends turned to the printed lectures for guidance; his enemies, for statements which could be turned against him. Both friends and enemies found what they wanted. To the friends, the San Min Chu I presented a fairly complete outline of Sun's political and social thought in such a form that it could be preserved and broadcast readily. There was danger, before the book appeared, that the intrinsic unity in Sun's thinking would be lost sight of by posterity, that his ideas would appear as a disconnected jumble of brilliant inspirations. The sixteen lectures incorporated a great part of the doctrines which he had been preaching for more than a generation. To the enemies of Sun, the work was welcome. They pointed out the numerous simplifications and inconsistencies, the frequent contradictions in matters of detail, the then outrageous denunciations of the economic and political system predominant in the Far East. They ridiculed Sun because he was Chinese, and because he was not Chinese enough, and backed up their criticisms with passages from the book.[16]
When Sun gave the lectures, he was a sick man. He carried an ivory-headed sword cane with him on the platform; occasionally, holding it behind him and locking his arms through it, he would press it against his back to relieve the intolerable pain.[17] The business awaiting him after each lecture was vitally important; the revolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. The lectures are the lectures of a sick man, given to a popular audience in the uproar of revolution, without adequate preparation, improvised in large part, and offered as one side of a crucial and bitterly disputed question. The secretaries who took down the lectures may not have succeeded in following them completely; Sun had no leisure to do more than skim through the book before releasing it to the press.
These improvised lectures have had to serve as the fundamental document of Nationalist China. Sun Yat-sen died without writing the treatise he had planned. The materials he left behind were a challenge to scholars and to his followers. Many persons set to work interpreting them, each with a conscious or unconscious end in view. A German Marxian showed Sun to be a forerunner of bolshevism; an American liberal showed Sun to be a bulwark against bolshevism. A Chinese classicist demonstrated Sun's reverence for the past; a Jesuit father explained much by Sun's modern and Christian background. His works have been translated into Western [pg 009] languages without notes; the improvised lectures, torn from their context of a revolutionary crisis, have served poorly to explain the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and his long range political, social, and economic plans.
The Necessity of an Exposition.
Followers of Sun who knew him personally, or were members of that circle in which his ideas and opinions were well known, have found the San Min Chu I and other literary remains helpful; they have been able to turn to the documents to refresh their memories of Sun on some particular point, or to experience the encouraging force of his faith and enthusiasm again. They need not be reminded of the main tenets of his thought, or of the fundamental values upon which he based his life and his political activities. His sense of leadership, which strangers have at times thought fantastic, is one which they admire in him, since they, too, have felt the power of his personality and have experienced that leadership in the course of their own lives. His voice is ringing in their consciences; they feel no need of a guide to his mind. At the present day many members of Sun's own family, and a considerable number of his veteran disciples are still living; the control of the National Government is in their hands. They are people who need no commentary on Sun Yat-sen; to them, he died only yesterday.
Others, who met Sun only casually, or who could know him only through his writings, have a quite different impression of his thought. They perforce assume that he thought as he wrote, and fail to realize that virtually all his writings and speeches were occasional pieces, improvisations designed as propaganda. One of the most respected American authorities on China says that in the San Min Chu I “... there is a combination of sound social analysis, keen comment on comparative political [pg 010] science, and bombast, journalistic inaccuracy, jejune philosophizing and sophomoric economics.”[18] This view is one which can scarcely be attacked, if one considers only the printed lectures, and overlooks the other utterances and the personality of Sun. To apply this, or any similar estimate (and there are many of them), to all of Sun Yat-sen's thought would be woefully inaccurate. It is not the critic's fault that Sun never found time to write a sober, definitive political treatise expressing his ideas; it is, nevertheless, the critic's responsibility to weigh the value of the San Min Chu I, and consider the importance which Sun himself attached to it, before judging Sun's whole philosophy by a hastily-composed and poorly written book.
Yet, if the Western student of modern Chinese history were to look elsewhere for some general exposition of Sun Yat-sen's political ideas, he would find none. He could discover several excellent translations of the sixteen lectures, and parts of the other work of Sun. He would be helped by the prefatory notes to some of these translations.[19] A few treatises would be available to him on special phases of Sun's thought: the influence of Maurice William, and the influence of the Russian Communists.[20] In addition, there would be the biographies, of which there are more than a dozen, and a few other useful although not general works. None of these sifts Sun's thought, seeking to separate the transitory from the permanent in his ideas. For this the searcher would have to rely on brief outlines of Sun's ideas, to be found in [pg 011] works dealing with modern China or the Chinese revolution.[21]
This relative scarcity of exegetic material concerning the ideology and programs of Sun is not the result of any inadequacy on the part of those persons, both Chinese and Western, who have devoted thought and time to his life or to the translation of his works. It is one thing to point out a task that has yet to be done; and quite another, actually to perform it. An interpretation or exposition of Sun's thought, to be worthy of the great significance of the original, must be very thorough; but scarcely enough time has elapsed to allow a perspective of all the materials, let alone an orientation of Sun in the Far Eastern scene. Yet the importance of Sun demands that something be done to bring his thought to the attention of the world, so that the usual distortion of his personality—arising from the lack of commentaries—may be avoided in present day works. In a sense, the time is not ripe for a definitive treatment of Sun, either as a figure in history or as a contributor to the significant and enduring political thought of modern times; any work now done will, as time passes, fall grotesquely far short of adequacy. On the other hand, there is so much material of a perishable nature—anecdotes and legends not yet committed to print, and the memories of living men—now available, that a present-day work on Sun may gain [pg 012] in color and intimacy what it loses in judgment and objectivity, may gain in proximity what it has to forgo in detachment. And, lastly, the complete absence of any systematic presentation of Sun's ideas in any Western language is so great a deficiency in the fields of Far Eastern history and world political thought, that even a relatively inadequate exposition of the thought of Sun Yat-sen may prove to be not without value. Sun himself never explained his philosophy, whether theoretical or applied, in any broad, systematic fashion; nor has anyone else done so.
If the permissibility of an exposition of Sun Yat-sen's thought be conceded, there still remains the vexing problem of a choice of method. While the far-flung peripheries of Sun's thought touch almost every field of knowledge and opinion, a systematic condensation of his views cannot hope to survey the same broad ranges. The problem of proportion, of just emphasis, involves the nice appraisal of the degree of importance which each of Sun's minor rôles had in his intellectual career as a whole. Nor do the difficulties concerning method end with the consideration of proportion; they merely begin, for there remains the far more important and perplexing problem of a technique of interpretation.
Interpretation obviously relates to the problem of language. The translation of theoretical terms from Chinese into English constitutes a formidable difficulty which proves, in several instances, to be insuperable. No satisfactory equivalent for min shêng (usually rendered “livelihood”) can be found in English; even simpler and less specialized terms are extremely difficult to render. Sometimes it would be convenient to employ four or five alternative translations for one Chinese term. Sun uses the word “nationalism” in the sense that a Westerner would, in advocating national consciousness in a China hitherto unfamiliar with the conception of nation-states; but, in [pg 013] a different context, he uses it in the sense of “patriotism.”[22] These difficulties must be faced and, somehow or other, overcome. When the Western reader encounters a familiar term in an unexpected place, he must be prepared to meet a shift of meaning. No amount of definition can make a Chinese term, which has no exact Western equivalent, completely clear. It is simpler to grow accustomed to the term, to gather together its connotations, to understand something of the frame of reference wherein it is set, and thereby to learn it as a child learns a word. A dictionary is no help to a baby; in a realm of unfamiliar ideas even scholars must learn terms step by step.
Less obviously than language, the translation of ideas and of values is also involved in interpretation. In dealing with the intellectual content of a civilization as alien as that of China, the Westerner must be wary of the easy analogy. The full, forceful application of Western ideas and values in a world to which they are completely irrelevant produced strange results during the nineteenth century. Western notions of goodness and reasonableness did not fit the Chinese scheme of things. Under such a test a wildly distorted image of China was obtained. China seemed peculiar, topsy-turvy, fantastic. To themselves the Chinese still seemed quite matter-of-fact, and the Westerners thought even this odd and ridiculous: not only was China upside-down, but the Chinese did not know it! In any case, the present-day scholar, to whom so much material concerning the Chinese is available and China so near, has little justification for applying Western tests of virtue and rationality to things Chinese.
If the application of Western values to China is avoided, there is still the danger that the Chinese scheme of things may not be interpreted at all. The literal translation [pg 014] of Chinese terms strips them of their contexts. The result may be unintelligibility. The Chinese term jên is frequently rendered “benevolence,” a Western word which, while at times an approximate equivalent, fails to carry the full burden of meaning. Sun speaks of an interpretation of history antagonistic to dialectical materialism—the interpretation of history by jên. A “benevolent” interpretation of history means nothing whatever to a Westerner. If jên is translated into a different configuration of words, and given as “group-consciousness” or “social fellow-feeling,” the result, while still not an exact equivalent of the Chinese, is distinctly more intelligible.
To effect this translation of ideas and values, several methods are available. The issue cannot be dodged by a denial of its existence; the mere act of explanation involves some process, whether deliberate or unconscious, of translation and transvaluation. If the interpreter refuses to deal with the problem consciously, he will nevertheless be guided by his unrevealed assumptions. To give an accounting for what he has done, he must, first, admit that he is interpreting, and second, seek to make plain what he is doing, so that his readers may allow for the process. The demonstration of the consequences of interpretation minimizes their possible adverse effects. The simplest way to allow for the alterations (beyond mere reproduction) arising from interpretation would be to adopt a technique so widely known that others could, in their own minds, try to re-trace the steps of the process and negate the changes. Among such widely known techniques are the Marxian and the sociological.
Both these scarcely seem adapted to the problems presented by an interpretation of Sun Yat-sen. The Marxian terminology is so peculiarly suited to the ulterior purposes the Marxians keep in mind, and is so esoteric when applied to matters not related to the general fields in which the Marxians are interested, that it could scarcely [pg 015] be applied in the present instance. A non-Marxian would find it a hazardous task. The interpreter of Sun Yat-sen must interpret into something; what, depends on the audience. Dialectical materialism, in the abstract excellent as a technique, would scarcely make Sun understandable to most Americans of the present day. Sun himself rejected the Marxian method of interpretation; an American audience would also reject it; these two factors outweigh all the conceivable advantages.
The sociological technique of interpretation is quite another question. The various methods of analysis developed by each of the schools of sociologists are still the objects rather than the tools of study. Such men as Max Weber and Vilfredo Pareto have made contributions to Western social thought which enrich the scope and method of the social studies. Their methods of analysis are not weighted down by a body of extraneous considerations, as is the Marxian, and they promise an objectivity not otherwise attainable. On the other hand, they are still at that stage of development where the technique obtrudes itself; it has not, as has the inductive method in general, become so much taken for granted as to be invisible.
The sociological approach need not, however, be carried to the full extent thought necessary by its advocates. In the study of law, the consideration of extra-juridical materials is called sociological in contrast to the strictly juristic. If the legal scholar goes beyond the strict framework of the law, and considers other elements in man's behavior and knowledge while dealing with legal problems, he is apt to be called a sociological jurist. In doing so he is not committed, however, to belief in or use of any particular form of what is known as the science of society or sociology. He may adopt almost any sort of social outlook, or may be committed to any one of many doctrines of social value and to any one of widely varying methods of social study.
This negative, broad sense of the sociological, when applied to the study of politics, has commonly meant that the scholars employing it began with the notion of the political, but, finding it too narrow, touched upon related fields. An interpretation of Sun Yat-sen's politics might be based on this method. It would still be a political work, in that it sought to associate his ideas with the ideas concerning government to be found in the West, but would be free, nevertheless, to touch upon non-political materials relevant to Sun's politics. The Chinese have had notions of authority and control radically different from those developed in the West; a purely juristic interpretation of the various Chinese politics would simply scrape the lacquer off the screen.
The Chinese have not had the sharp distinction of disciplines which runs through all Western learning. Since one of the most conspicuous ingredients in their thought—conspicuous, that is, to Westerners looking in from outside—has been the ethical, many Westerners have dismissed Chinese historical, political and more strictly philosophical thought as being loosely and amiably ethical but never getting anywhere. The Chinese did not departmentalize their learning to any considerable degree. Politics was not the special activity of a definite group of men, or the study of a select body of scholars. Politics ran through and across most of the activities in society, and was largely the interest of that intellectual élite by which China has been so distinguished on the roster of civilizations. In becoming everything, politics ceased being politics; that is, those elements in man's thought and behavior which Westerners have termed political were not separated and labelled. The Westerner must say that politics was everything in China, or that it was nothing.
An interpretation of Sun Yat-sen must keep in mind these differences between Chinese and Western categories. In doing so it will pass beyond the limits of what is commonly [pg 017] known as politics, since no sharp boundaries of “politics” are to be found in China. Yet, as an interpretation designed to serve Western readers, it must return again and again to Western politics, making comparisons when they are justified, pointing out differences between China and the West as they become relevant and clear. The interpretation will thus weave back and forth between conventional Western political science, with its state-mindedness, and the wholly different material of traditions and customs out of which Sun sought to construct an ideology and a system of working politics for China in the modern world.
How can this interpretation seek to avoid the misfortunes and errors into which so many similar attempts have fallen? It must proceed without the aid of such specialized techniques as dialectical-materialistic or Paretian analysis, and yet aim at the scientific, the rationally defensible, the objective. In seeking to apply a method in the interpretation of Sun Yat-sen, the work must face criticism of its method, must make the method explicit and simple enough to allow criticism. If the thought of Sun really is to emerge from the exposition, the exposition must allow itself to be judged, so that it can be appraised, and so that, one way or another, it may not interfere with the just evaluation of the materials which it seeks to present. Sun Yat-sen should not be judged poor because of a poor interpretation; nor, on the other hand, should his thought be adjudged more excellent or more exact than it seems to the Chinese, merely because the expositor has suggested an interpretation possibly more precise.
The technique adopted in the present work is a relatively simple one. It is an attempt to start de novo with certain concepts of society and government. Several simple although novel terms are introduced, to provide a foundation upon which the procedure may rest. One of [pg 018] these, for instance, is “ideology,” which in the present work refers to the whole psychological conditioning of a group of persons.[23] No attempt is made, at the beginning or at any later phase of the exposition, to distinguish between the ideology as belief and the ideology as truth. Whether the Chinese were and are right, or the Westerners, are questions, not for the student of comparative political science, but for the philosopher and the psychologist. The interpretation seeks, as far as possible, to transpose certain parts of the traditional Chinese ideology, as they were, and as Sun Yat-sen re-shaped them, into one frame of reference provided by the ideology of twentieth-century America. What the “real truth” is, does not matter; the Marxians would say that both ideologies were inexact; so might the Roman Catholics. If the [pg 019] ideology of old China, and the ideology that Sun wished to see developed in the minds of the Chinese people of the future, can be made comprehensible in terms of contemporary American beliefs, of fact or of value, this venture will have been successful.
The Chinese ideology cannot be explained in its own terms; these exist only in the Chinese language. If Sun Yat-sen's own arrangement of his works is inadequate for the Chinese, rearrangement is a task for the Chinese and not for the Western scholars to perform. The Westerners who deal with Sun can contribute substantially only if they give what the Chinese cannot—enough of a reference to their own ideology to permit a broader scale for the analysis and the appreciation of Sun's thought. Their knowledge of their own world of ideas is the special tool which justifies their intervention in this Chinese field of knowledge.
In avoiding the unjustifiable imposition of Western ideas and values upon the Chinese, and yet orienting Sun's thought with respect to the West, the interpretation will have to resort to several fairly evident means. In the first place, it will have to transpose Chinese ideas into the Western ideology, and yet avoid distortions of meaning. This can be partly done by the use of neutral terms, of terms which are simple and clear enough to reproduce the Chinese, and nevertheless not so heavily burdened with connotations that they will cause a reading-in of Western ideas not relevant to the point in question. More simply, the Chinese ideas must be represented by terms which approximate the same set of values in the West that their originals have in China. This will sometimes require the use of unfamiliar periphrases: the words “music” and “rites” may be given as “the rhythm of life” and “conformity to the ideology.” Secondly, the Chinese ideology need not be given as a whole; it is improbable that it could, without a terrific expansion [pg 020] of the Western ideology to accommodate it; but enough of the Chinese ideology must be given to explain the significant differences between the Chinese system of controlling the behavior of men, and the Western. This latter involves the choice of material, and is therefore by its nature challengeable.
Again, in demonstrating significant differences instead of merely seeking analogous (and probably misleading) examples, the interpretation might turn to certain aspects of Chinese philosophy which appear as strikingly illustrative of the point of view of the Chinese. Confucius the political thinker is only a small part of Confucius the man and the philosopher; Chinese political thought, although a vast field, is only a small part of the social thought of the Chinese. Only an infinitesimal part of this comparatively minor area of Chinese study will suffice to make clear some, at least, of the sharp differences of outlook between China and the West.
A recapitulation of this declaration of technique may be found helpful, for an understanding of Sun Yat-sen by Westerners is necessary because of the vastly different background of his thought. Even apart from the strangeness of his thought to the West, it is scattered in the original, and must be pieced together. An exposition of his ideas which would, at one and the same time, present a systematic outline of his ideas, and transpose them into a frame of reference where Western scholars might grasp them, might be a labor meriting performance. His terms would have to be rendered by neutral words (not overladen with particular Western contexts) or by neologisms, or simply left in the original, to develop meaning as a configuration of related ideas is built up about them. The problem of interpretation cannot, however, be solved by settling the difficulty of language: there still remains the question of a technique which can pretend to the scientific, the exact, the rationally defensible. Despite their great [pg 021] merits, the Marxian and Paretian techniques are not suited to the present task. The point of view and means of study of political science may be kept, if a few necessary borrowings from sociological thought (not necessarily sociology) are introduced. Such borrowing includes the use of notions such as non-political society, patterns of authority, and ideology, none of which are to be found in the more law-minded part of political science. By seeking to point out the Chinese, then the Western, ideas involved, without confusing the two, the presentation may succeed in transposing the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, as well as his beliefs concerning working politics, into the English language and into an explanatory but not distorting background. To do this, a small sampling of certain aspects of old Chinese social thought and behavior will be a required preliminary.
Chapter I. The Ideological, Social, and Political Background.
The Rationale of the Readjustment.
The San Min Chu I and related works of Sun Yat-sen represent in their entirety one of the most ambitious bodies of doctrine ever set forth by a political leader. They differ from such a document as the Communist Manifesto in that they comprehend a much greater range of subject matter and deal with it in much greater detail. They pertain not merely to the reconstitution of an economic or political system; they propose a plan for the reconstruction of a whole civilization, the reformation of a way of thought customary among a great part of the human race, and a consequent transformation of men's behavior. Conceived in the bold flights of a penetrating, pioneering mind, avowedly experimental at the time of their first utterance, these works of Sun have already played a most significant rôle in the Far East and may continue to affect history for a long time to come. They may quite legitimately be called the bible of new China.
Social change is a consequence of maladjustment. The thought of Sun Yat-sen is a program of change—change which, if it is to be understood, must be seen at its beginning and its end. The background from which Sun emerged and which was an implicit condition of all his utterances must be mentioned, so that the problems he faced may be understood. Only then will it be possible to turn to the plans he devised for the rethinking of Chinese tradition and the reorganization of Chinese polity. A vast maladjustment between the Chinese and the world outside led to the downfall of the Manchu Empire in China and has threatened the stability of every government [pg 023] erected since that time; Chinese society is in a state of profound unrest and recurrent turmoil. Sun Yat-sen contributed to the change, and sought a new order, to be developed from the disorder which, voluntarily or not, he helped in part to bring about.
The old order that failed, the interregnum (in the etymological sense of the word), and the new order proposed by Sun must be taken all together in order to obtain a just understanding of Sun's thought. No vast history need be written, no Decline and Fall of the Chinese Empire is necessary, but some indication of the age-old foundations and proximate conditions of Sun's thought must be obtained.
These may, perhaps, be found in a sampling of certain data from the thought and behavior of the Chinese as a group under the old system, and the selection of a few important facts from the history of China since the first stages of the maladjustment. An exposition of Sun's thought must not slur the great importance of the past, yet it dare not linger too long on this theme lest the present—in which, after all, uncounted millions of Chinese are desperately struggling for life—come to seem insignificant.
Confucianism is a philosophy so broad and so highly developed that any selection does violence to its balance and proportion, which are among its chief merits.[24] Yet [pg 024] only those few facts can be taken from the history and thought of the Chinese which may assist the Westerner in becoming familiar with a few terms which recur again and again in the works of Sun Yat-sen. If the present work purported to be a study of Chinese history, or a complete analysis of the Chinese social system, such an extreme selectivity could not be condoned; since it, however, tries only to outline Sun's thought, the selection of a few Confucian doctrines and the complete ignoring of others, may be forgiven. All the schools of the past, and the literary traditions which developed from them, and social tendencies that were bound up with these have to be omitted, and those few ideas and customs described which bear directly on one single point—the most significant ideological differences between the Chinese and the West with respect to the political order, i. e. the control of men in society in the name of all society.[25]
Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity.
The Confucian system, against which Sun Yat-sen reacted in part and in part sought to preserve, was a set of ideas and institutions developed as a reaction against certain conditions in ancient China. These conditions may be roughly described as having arisen from a system of proto-nationalisms, at a time when the old—perhaps prehistorically ancient—Chinese feudal system was rapidly declining and an early form of capitalism and of states was taking its place. The Chou dynasty (ca. 1150-221 B.C.) was in power at the time of this transition; under its rule the golden age of Chinese philosophy appeared—Confucius (552-479 B.C.) and Lao Tzŭ (ca. 570-ca. 490 B.C.) lived and taught.
Their philosophies, contrary to the popular Western beliefs concerning Chinese philosophies, were protests against a world which seemed to them well-nigh intolerable. The old Chinese system, which may seem to Westerners a highly mystical feudal organization, was in its century-long death-agonies; the virtues it had taught were not the virtues of the hour; the loyalties it had set up were loyalties which could scarcely be maintained in a time when rising states, acting more and more as states have acted in the West, were disrupting the earlier organization [pg 026] of society, waging struggles—in the manner that, centuries later, Machiavelli was to portray—of intrigue and warfare for the eventual hegemony over that whole area of eastern Asia which the Chinese of that time regarded as the civilized world.
The political aspects of the transition from the feudal to the proto-national system is described by one of the most eminent of the Western authorities on China in the following terms: “The aim of all the Leaders was to control western Ho-nan. There is the heart of ancient China.... All around about, in vaster regions occupied no doubt by less dense and more shifting populations, great States formed, increasing first towards the exterior, seeking (as we have seen in the case of China) to cut the communication of their rivals with the Barbarians, mutually forcing each other to change the directions of the expansion, exercising on each other a pressure from behind, and a converging pressure on the central overlordships. All schemed to conquer them. Thus an amalgamation was achieved. Whilst in the centre the Chinese nation was coming into being, on the outer borders States were being formed which, aiming at annexing the centre of China, ended by themselves also becoming Chinese.”[26] Not only did the newer, political organization of society begin to make itself distinct from the family, feudal, and religious organization; it began to engage in activities which increased its resemblance to the Western system of nations. Tributes of textiles, horses, and compulsory labor were demanded. A non-feudal economy was encouraged; [pg 027] the state of Ch'i encouraged artisans and merchants, and favored the trade in fish and salt. Mining, metallurgy and currency were studied. State monopolies were created out of the products of forests, lakes, marshes, shell-fish beds, and salt pans. Mines also became “treasures of the state.”[27]
The history of these states reads like a page torn out of the history of early modern Europe. The struggle was half diplomatic and half military. From the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 B.C.) to the end of the Age of Warring States (491-221 B.C.), China was subject to frequent war and unstable peace. The character of war itself changed, from a chivalrous exercise almost ritualistic in nature, to a struggle of unrestricted force. The units of government which were to develop into states, and almost into nations, began as feudal overlordships; traditional hatreds and sentiments were developed; diplomatic and military policies crystallized and became consistent; and activities of a state nature became increasingly prominent.
Concurrently, other factors operated to prevent an indefinite continuance of these struggles of proto-national states and to avoid the appearance of a permanent system of armed nations such as that which has appeared in modern Europe. The feudal system of China left a strong ethnical, linguistic and intellectual heritage of unity, which was stronger than the cultural disunities and particularities appearing in certain of the states. (The state of Chêng was particularly conspicuous in developing a peculiar state culture.)[28] As the states became larger and larger with the passing of time, they tended not only to develop certain large differences between themselves, but to eradicate the minute local peculiarities of the old [pg 028] system, and in so doing to increase the general homogeneity which was also a heritage of the past ages. This general homogeneity found a living symbol in the persons of the Chou Emperors who, possessed of no more power than the Tennos under the Shogunate, acted, as did their Japanese analogues two thousand years later, as the quasi-religious personifications of the whole general community. It thus occurred that the old feudal system was destroyed by the growth of a general non-feudal economy and political order, which, in its turn, led to the development of the great imperial system under which China continued for many centuries. The period of the transition, during which the traditional feudal unity had been shaken and the new imperial unity not yet established, was a tumultuous and bloody one. The presence of a confederation under the hegemony of some one state—the so-called Presidency—provided a suitable framework for rivalries toward power, without particularly increasing the general peace.
The transition, as it took place, was neither apparent nor agreeable. The political turmoil was but slightly less than the intellectual unrest and disturbance. Everywhere faith and acceptance seemed to have been lost to humanity; licentiousness and impiety fed discord. The lack of harmony, made doubly vivid by the presence of a strong tradition of primeval Arcadian peace and unity under the mythological Emperors, was bitter to the scholars and men of virtue of the time. It was quite inevitable that protests should be raised which would hasten the advent, or return, of unity and peace. These protests form the subject of the work of Confucius and the other great philosophers, and schools of thinkers, of the Chou dynasty. It was, in later ages, upon these philosophies that the great structure of Chinese society developed and continued down until modern times.
The Theory of the Confucian World-Society.
The various types of protest against the development of states and the consequent anarchy of the Chinese society considered as a whole cannot be considered in this work; many were primarily religious; Taoism, while ranking as one of the most conspicuous religions of the world, has little bearing on politics. Even Confucianism, which merits careful study, must be summarized and re-stated as briefly as possible. Confucianism has suffered from an ambiguity and exoticism of terms, when presented to the West; its full significance as a political philosophy can become fully apparent only when it is rendered in the words of the hour.
What was it that Confucius did in protest against the established discord of the world he knew? He struck directly at the foundations of politics. His criticisms and remedies can be fully appreciated only by reference to a theory of ideology.
Confucius perceived that the underlying problem of society was that of ideology; he seems to have realized that the character of a society itself essentially depends upon the character of the moral ideas generally prevalent among the individuals composing it, and that where there is no common body of ideas a society can scarcely be said to exist.[29] He did not consider, as did Han Fei-tzŭ and the legalist school of philosophers, questions of law the preëminent social problem. He realized that state and law were remedies, and that the prime questions of organization were those anterior to the political, and that the state existed for the purpose of filling out the shortcomings of social harmony.[30]
In a society—such as Confucius dreamed of—where there was no disagreement in outlook, policy would not be a governmental question; if there were no disharmony of thought and of behavior, there would be no necessity of enforcing conformance to the generally accepted criteria of conduct. From this standpoint, government itself is socially pathological, a remedy for a poorly ordered society. Men are controlled indirectly by the examples of virtue; they do good because they have learned to do good and do it unquestioningly and simply. Whatever control is exercised over men is exercised by their ideology, and if other men desire control they must seek it through shaping the ideas of others. At its full expression, such a doctrine would not lead to mere anarchy; but it would eliminate the political altogether from the culture of man, replacing it with an educational process. Ideological control would need to be supplemented by political only if it failed to cover the total range of social behavior, and left loopholes for conflict and dispute.
This doctrine is framed in quite different terms by Confucius, who spoke and wrote in an age when the mystical elements of the old feudal ideology still exercised powerful and persuasive influence, and when there was no other society than his own which he might make the object of his study. The central point of his teachings is the doctrine of jên. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, one of the most brilliant modern exponents of ancient Chinese philosophy, wrote of this:
In the simplest terms, “Jen” means fellow-feeling for one's kind. Once Fan Chih, one of his disciples, asked Confucius what [pg 031] “Jen” meant. Confucius replied, “To love fellow-men”; in other words this means to have a feeling of sympathy toward mankind....
Intellectually the relationship becomes common purpose; emotionally it takes the form of fellow-feeling.[31]
This doctrine appears more specific in its application when it is realized that Confucius regarded his own society and mankind as coterminous. Barbarians, haunting the fringes of the world, were unconscious of jên; not being in sympathy with mankind, they were not as yet fully human.
Jên is a word which cannot be exactly translated into English. It is laden with a burden of connotations which it has acquired through the centuries; its variability of translation may be shown by the fact that, in the standard translations of the Chinese classics, it is written “Benevolence.” It might equally well be given as “consciousness of one's place and function in society.” The man who followed jên was one who was aware of his place in society, and of his participation in the common endeavors of mankind.
Jên, or society-mindedness, leads to an awareness of virtue and propriety (têh and yi). When virtue and propriety exist, it is obligatory that men follow them. Behavior in accordance with virtue and propriety is li. Commonly translated “ethics,” this is seen as the fruition of the force of jên in human society. Jên underlies and establishes society, from the existence of which spring virtue and propriety; these prescribe principles for human conduct, the formulation of which rules is li.[32] Auxiliary to li is chêng ming. Chêng ming is the rightness of names: [pg 032] li, the appropriateness of relationships. Li, it may be noted, is also translated “rites” or “ceremonies”; a rendering which, while not inexact, fails to convey the full import of the term.
Chêng ming, the rectification of names, may be regarded as a protest against the discords in language that had developed during the transitional period from feudalism to eventual unity. Confucius, of course, did not have as sharp an issue confronting him as do the modern Western innovators in social and political ideology. Nevertheless, the linguistic difficulty was clear to him. The expansion of the Chinese written language was so great at that time that it led to the indiscriminate coining of neologisms, and there was a tendency towards a sophisticated hypocrisy in the use of words.[33]
Confucius saw that, in obtaining harmony, language needed to be exact; otherwise long and fruitless disputes over empty words might be engaged in or, what was even worse, words might not conform to the realities of social life, and might be used as instruments of ill-doing. Confucius did not, however, present a scheme of word-worship. He wanted communication to cement society, to be an instrument of concord. He wanted, in modern terms, a terminology which by its exactness and suitability would of itself lead to harmony.[34] In advocating the rectification of names, Confucius differed from many other founders of philosophies and religions; they, too, wanted names rectified—terminology reorganized—to suit their particular doctrines; but there they stopped short. Confucius regarded the rectification of names as a continuous process, one which had to be carried on unceasingly if communication, for the sake of social harmony, was to remain just and exact.
Chêng ming is highly significant in Confucian thought, and exhibits the striking difference between the Chinese and the older Western political study. If the terms by means of which the communication within a society is effected, and in which the group beliefs of fact or of value are to be found, can be the subject of control, there is opened up a great field of social engineering. Chêng ming states, in recognizable although archaic terms, the existence of ideology, and proposes the strengthening of ideology. In recognizing the group (in his case, mankind) as dependent upon ideology for group existence, Confucius delivered Chinese political thought from any search for an ontology of the real state. It became possible to continue, in the traditional pragmatic manner,[35] thinking of men in simple terms referring only to individual men, avoiding the hypostatizations common in the West. In pointing out the necessity for the control of ideology by men, Confucius anticipated theories of the “pedagogical state” by some twenty centuries.
Li, in the terminology of the present work, is the conformity of the individual to the moral ideology, or, stated in another manner, the control of men by the ideology.[36]
Li, conformity to the ideology, implies, of course, conformity to those parts of it which determine value. Li [pg 034] prescribes the do-able, the thinkable. In so far as the ideology consists of valuations, so far do those valuations determine li. Hsü lists the operations of li in six specific categories:
(1) it furnishes the principles of political organization; (2) it furnishes details for the application of the doctrine of ratification; (3) it discusses the functions of government; (4) it prescribes the limitations of governmental authority; (5) it advances principles of social administration; and (6) it provides a foundation for crime and lawsuits. These are only the political functions of li. Its force is to be regarded as equally effective in every other type of human behavior.[37]
The approach to society contained in the doctrines of jên, chêng ming, and li is, therefore, one which largely eliminates the necessity for politics. Its influence may be estimated from three points of view: (1) to what degree was government different from what it might have been had it followed the line of development that government did in the West? (2) what was the range of governmental action in such a system? and (3) what was the relation of government to the other institutions of a Confucian society?
In regard to the first point, it will be seen immediately that government, once chêng ming has been set in motion, is not a policy-making body. There is no question of policy, no room for disagreement, no alternative. What is right is apparent. Politics, in the narrow sense of the word, ceases to be a function of government; only administration remains.
Secondly, government needs to administer only for two purposes. The chief of these is the maintenance of the ideology. Once right views are established, no individual is entitled to think otherwise. Government must treat the heterodox as malefactors. Their crime is greater than ordinary crime, which is a mere violation of right behavior; [pg 035] they pollute right thought, set in motion the forces of discord, and initiate evils which may work on and on through the society, even after the evil-thinkers themselves are dead. To protect the society actively against discord, the government must encourage the utterance of the accepted truth. The scholar is thus the highest of all the social classes; it is he who maintains agreement and order. The government becomes, in maintaining the ideology, the educational system. The whole political life is education, formal or informal. Every act of the leader is a precept and an example. The ruler does not compel virtue by law; he spreads it by his conspicuous example.
The other function of the government in maintaining the ideology lies in the necessity of dealing with persons not affected by the ideology. Barbarians are especially formidable, since both heretics and criminals may be restored to the use of their reason, while barbarians may not, so long as they remain barbarians. Accordingly, the government is also a defense system. It is a defense against open and physical disruption from within—as in the case of insurrectionaries or bandits—and a defense against forces from without which, as veritable powers of darkness, cannot be taught and are amenable only to brute force.
In connection with the third point, government itself appears as subject to li. It has no right to do wrong. The truth is apparent to everyone, and especially to the scholars. In this wise the Chinese governments were at the mercy of their subjects. No divine right shielded them when public opinion condemned them; ill-doing governments were twice guilty and contemptible, because of the great force of their examples. An evil emperor was not only a criminal; he was a heresiarch, leading many astray, and corrupting the virtue upon which society rested—virtue being the maintenance of a true and moral ideology, and conformity to it.
The consequence of these teachings was such that we may say, without sacrificing truth to paradox, that the aim of Chinese government was anarchy—not in the sense of disorder, but in the sense of an order so just and so complete that it needed no governing. The laissez-faire of the Chinese was not only economic; it was political. The Great Harmony of Confucius, which was his Utopia, was conceived of as a society where the excellence of ideology and the thoroughness of conformity to ideology had brought perfect virtue, perfect happiness.
The other doctrines of Confucius, his practical teachings on statesmanship, his discourses on the family—these cannot be entered into here. Enough has, perhaps, been shown to demonstrate the thoroughness of Confucius' reaction against state and nation.[38] This reaction was to continue, and to become so typical that the whole Chinese system of subsequent centuries was called Confucian,[39] until the exigencies of a newer, larger, and more perilous world led to Sun Yat-sen's teaching of modern Chinese nationalism. Before taking up the doctrine of min tsu, it may be worthwhile to summarize the manner in which Chinese society, deliberately and accidentally, each in part, followed out the doctrines of Confucius in its practical organization.
The Chinese World-Society of Eastern Asia.
It would be, of course, absurd to pretend to analyze the social system of China in a few paragraphs; and yet [pg 037] it is necessary to the study of Sun Yat-sen that certain characteristics be at least mentioned. Several problems appear which are quite outstanding. What was the social position and function of each individual? How were refractory individuals to be disciplined in accordance with the requirements that the general opinion of society imposed? What were the ultimate ends which the organization of Chinese society was to realize? How were the educational system and the frontier defenses to be maintained? What was to be the position and power of the political organization?
At the outset it is necessary that a working demarcation of the political be established. Accepting, by definition, those coercive controls as political which are operated for the preservation of society as a whole, and are recognized within the society as so doing, we see immediately that the range of the political must have been much less in old China than it has been in the West. Western societies tend, at least in law, to emphasize the relationship between the individual and the society as a whole; free and unassociated individuals tend to become extraordinarily unstable. In the old Chinese society the control of the individual was so much an ideological one, that political control was infinitely narrower than in the West. But, in order to effectuate ideological control, there must be an organization which will permit pressure to be exercised on the individual in such a compelling manner that the exercise of external coercion becomes unnecessary. In a society in which the state has withered away, after an enormous expansion in the subject-matter of its control,[40] the totalitarian state is succeeded by the totalitarian [pg 038] tradition, if—and the qualification is an important one—the indoctrination has been so effective that the ideology can maintain itself in the minds of men without the continuing coercive power of the state to uphold it. If the ideology is secure, then control of the individual will devolve upon those persons making up his immediate social environment, who—in view of the uniform and secure notions of right and justice prevailing—can be relied upon to attend to him in a manner which will be approved by the society in general.
In China the groups most conspicuous within the society were the family system, the village and district, and the hui (association; league; society, in the everyday sense of the word).
The family was an intricate structure. A fairly typical instance of family organization within a specific village has been described in the following terms: “The village is occupied by one sib, a uni-lateral kinship group, exogamous, monogamous but polygynous, composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the natural family, the economic-family, the religious-family, and the sib.”[41] The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The economic family may have had a natural family as its core, but commonly extended through several degrees of kinship, and may have included from thirty to one hundred persons, who formed a single economic unit, living and consuming collectively. The religious family was an aggregate of economic families, of which it would be very difficult to give any specified number as an average. It [pg 039] was religious in that it provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of ancestors, and maintained an ancestral shrine where the proper genealogical records could be kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern times. The sib corresponded roughly to the clan, found in some Western communities; its rôle was determined by the immediate environment. In some cases—as especially in the south—the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one or more sibs dominated whole communities; in the greater part of China it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite the various local religious families which constituted it.
Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality of the human race; it oriented the individual, not only philosophically, but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant heights of nobility or falling to the degradation of a slavery in which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by outsiders or the menace of his own potential follies. It was largely through the family system, with its religious as well as economic and social foundation, that the Chinese solved the problem of adequate mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole, and gave to that stability a clear and undeniable purpose—the continued generation of the human race through the continuity of a multitude of families, each determined upon survival.
The family was the most obviously significant of the [pg 040] groupings within the society, but it was equalled if not excelled in importance by the village.[42]
Had the family been the only important social grouping, it might have been impossible for any democracy to develop in China. It so occurred that the family pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the importance of villages in Chinese life negated the too sharp influence of a familistic government. It would have been the most awful heresy, as it is in Japan today, to revolt against and depose an unrighteous father; there was nothing to prevent the deposition or destruction of an evil village elder. In times of concord, the Emperor was the father of the society; at other times, when his rule was less successful, he was a fellow-villager subject to the criticism of the people.
The village was the largest working unit of non-political administration; that is to say, groups within and up to the village were almost completely autonomous and not subject to interference, except in very rare cases, from outside. The village was the smallest unit of the political. The District Magistrate, as the lowest officer in the political-educational system, was in control of a district containing from one to twenty villages, and negotiated, in performing the duties imposed upon him, with the village leaders. The villages acted as self-ruling communes, at times very democratic.[43]
Next in importance, among Chinese social groups, after the family and the village was the hui. It was in all probability the last to appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, the association found its justification in the deeply ingrained propensities of the Chinese to coöperate. Paralleling and supplementing the former two, the hui won for itself a definite and unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The kinds of hui may be classified into six categories:[44] 1) the fraternal societies; 2) insurance groups; 3) economic guilds; 4) religious societies; 5) political societies; and 6) organizations of militia and vigilantes. The hui made up, in their economic form, the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and provided the system of vocational education for persons not destined to literature and administration. Politically, it was the hui—under such names as the Triad and the Lotus—that provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever objectionable social or economic conditions developed.
The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, [pg 042] villages, and hui, comprised a whole “known world.” Its strength was like that of a dinosaur in modern fable; having no one nerve-centre, the world-society could not be destroyed by inroads of barbarians, or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The ideology which has been called Confucian continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation of persons emancipated from the tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government went forward, even though dynasties fell and the whole country was occasionally over-run by conquerors. The absence of any juristically rigid organization permitted the Chinese to maintain a certain minimum of order, even in the absence of an emperor, or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.
The governmental superstructure cemented the whole Chinese world together in a formal manner; it did not create it. The family, the village, and the hui were fit subjects for imperial comment, but there was nothing in their organization to persuade the student that the Emperor—by virtue of some Western-type Kompetenz Kompetenz—could remove his sanction from their existence and thereby annihilate them. There was no precarious legal personality behind the family, the village, and the hui, which could be destroyed by a stroke of law. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland clan of the MacGregor—“the proscribed name”—without liquidating the members of the clan in toto. In China the Emperor beheld a family as a quasi-individual, and when enraged at them was prone to wipe them out with massacre. Only in a very few cases was it possible for him to destroy an organization without destroying the persons composing it; he could, for example, remove the privilege of a scholarship system from a district, prefecture, or province without necessarily disposing of all the scholars involved in the [pg 043] move. The government of China—which, in the normal run of affairs, had no questions of policy, because policy was traditional and inviolable—continued to be an administration dedicated to three main ends—the maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the society as a whole against barbarians (military affairs) and against the adverse forces of nature (public works on the most extensive—and not intensive—scale), and the collection of funds for the fulfillment of the first two ends (revenue). The Emperor was also the titular family head of the Chinese world.
The educational system was identical with the administrative, except in the case of the foreign dynasties. (Under the Manchus, for example, a certain quota of Manchu officials were assigned throughout the government, irrespective of their scholastic rank in contrast to the Chinese.) It was a civil service, an educational structure, and a ritualist organization. Selected from the people at large, scholars could—at least in theory—proceed on the basis of sheer merit to any office in the Empire excepting the Throne. Their advancement was graduated on a very elaborate scale of degrees, which could be attained only by the passing of examinations involving an almost perfect knowledge of the literature of antiquity and the ability to think in harmony with and reproduce that literature. The Chinese scholar-official had to learn to do his own thinking by means of the clichés which he could learn from the classics; he had to make every thought and act of his life conform to the pattern of the ideology. Resourceful men may have found in this a proper fortification for their originality, as soon as they were able to cloak it with the expressions of respect; mediocre persons were helpless beyond the bounds of what they had learned.
The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. [pg 044] It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar class, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded—except in rare instances—on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was assured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government assistance. The educational system also served as the substitute for a nobility. Hereditary class distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.[45] In a society [pg 045] which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful nobility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order.
The scholars, once they had passed the examinations, were given either subsistence allowances or posts, according to the rank which they had secured in the tests. (This was, of course, the theory; in actuality bribery and nepotism played rôles varying with the time and the locality.) They made up the administration of the civilized world. They were not only the officials but the literati.
It would be impossible even to enumerate the many posts and types of organization in the administration of imperial China.[46] Its most conspicuous features may be enumerated as follows: China consisted of half a million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, each to a large extent autonomous.[47] These were divided among, roughly, two thousand hsien, in each of which an over-burdened District Magistrate sought to carry out all the recognized functions of government in so far as they applied to his locality. He did this largely by negotiation with the [pg 046] leaders of the social groups in his bailiwick, the heads of families, the elders of villages, the functionaries of hui. He was supervised by a variety of travelling prefects and superintendents, but the next officer above him who possessed a high degree of independence was the viceroy or governor—whichever type happened to rule the province or group of provinces. Except for their non-hereditability, these last offices were to all intents and purposes satrapies. The enormous extent of the Chinese civilized world, the difficulty of communicating with the capital, the cumbersomeness of the administrative organization, the rivalry and unfriendliness between the inhabitants of various provinces—all these encouraged independence of a high degree. If Chinese society was divided into largely autonomous communes, the Chinese political system was made up of largely autonomous provinces. Everywhere there was elasticity.
At the top of the whole structure stood the Emperor. In the mystical doctrines which Confucianism transmitted from the animism of the feudal ages of China, the Emperor was the intermediary between the forces of nature and mankind. The Son of Heaven became the chief ritualist; in more sophisticated times he was the patron of civilization to the scholars, and the object of supernatural veneration to the uneducated. His function was to provide a constant pattern of propriety. He was to act as chief of the scholars. To the scholars the ideology was recognized as an ideology, albeit the most exact one; to the common people it was an objective reality of thought and value. As the dictates of reason were not subject to change, the power and the functions of the Emperor were delimited; he was not, therefore, responsible to himself alone. He was responsible to reason, which the people could enforce when the Emperor failed. Popular intervention was regarded as de jure in proportion to its effectiveness de facto. The Imperial structure might be called, [pg 047] in Western terms, the constitutionalism of common sense.[48] The Dragon Throne did not enjoy the mysterious and awful prestige which surrounds the modern Tenno of Nippon; although sublime in the Confucian theory, it was, even in the theory, at the mercy of its subjects, who were themselves the arbiters of reason. There was no authority higher than reason; and no reason beyond the reason discovered and made manifest in the ages of antiquity.