The Five Rights.
Sun Yat-sen implemented his theory of democracy by assigning Four Powers to the people and Five Rights to the government. This latter doctrine is one of the most disputed points in his proposal. Some writers see in it nothing more than a crass conjunction of the theory of Montesquieu and the practices of the Chinese Imperial system.[278] His followers are disposed to regard the doctrine [pg 222] of the Five Rights as the product of intrepid imagination, which succeeded in reconciling the traditional scheme of Chinese things with the requirements of modern self-government.
Sun made the point that both Chinese and Western governments had in the past had tripartite governments. He illustrated this by a diagram:[279]
Constitution of China
The Examining Power (Kao Shih ch'üan)
The Imperial Power (Chun ch'üan)
The Legislative Power
The Executive Power
The Judicial Power
The Power to Impeach (Tan k'ê ch'üan)
Foreign Constitutions
The Legislative Power combined with the Power to Impeach
The Executive Power combined with the Examining Power
The Judicial Power
Sun Yat-sen believed that in separating the Five Rights from one another he would make clear certain differentiations [pg 223] of function which had led to numberless disputes in the past, and would present to the world a model government.
Thus far, the Five Rights seem the complement of the Four Powers. The two sets of controls, of people over the government, and of the government over the people, assure China that a neo-democratic administration will have no less continuity and power than did its Imperial predecessor, and nevertheless be subject to the will of the majority of the four hundred odd million sovereigns. Contemplated in this manner, the Five Rights are an amalgamation of the Western theory upon the Chinese, and significant as a novelty in democratic administrative theory rather than as institutions altering the fundamental premises and methods of democracy.
If, however, a further step is taken, and the Five Powers are associated with Sun Yat-sen's doctrine of the three naturally unequal classes of men, they assume a somewhat less superficial significance. If the rule of the people is placed over the administration by the geniuses, the geniuses must be assured a method of entering the government service. The oligarchy of the intellectuals is to be reconciled with the dictatorship of the majority. The old Chinese system of a trained class of scholars, entrance to which was open on a competitive system to members of almost all classes of society, had to be preserved in the new China, and at the same time disciplined and purified of unworthy or unsuitable elements, while simultaneously subject to the policy-making authority of the majority.
The preservation of a leader class was to be assured by an examination division in the new democratic government, and its purification and discipline continued by a supervisory or censoring division. The administrative setup of the nationalist democracy would appear as follows, [pg 224] when the present official translations of the Chinese names for the divisions (Yuan) are adopted:
| 1. | The division of the executive (Executive Yuan). |
|---|---|
| 2. | The division of the legislative (Legislative Yuan). |
| 3. | The division of the judicial (Judicial Yuan). |
| 4. | The division of censorship, impeachment and accounting (Control Yuan). |
| 5. | And the division of the examination system (Examination Yuan). |
It is an illustration of the further difference between the democracy of Sun Yat-sen and Western democracy, that each of the divisions, even the legislative, was to have a single head. The whole government was to be departmentally, not camerally, organized.
The system of Five Powers emphasizes the implied dyarchy of government and people in the San Min Chu I by assigning to the government itself functions which, in the usual course of events, are supposed to be exercised by the people themselves in Western democracies. The people are supposed to eliminate unfit officials and decide on the merits and trustworthiness of incumbents. By the expedient of non-reëlection, the people are supposed to remove officials, who are incapable or unsuitable for public office. The two functions have been taken over by the Examination and Control Yuans, respectively; the Four Powers of the people are not, in all probability, instruments for continual popular intrigue and meddling in government, but almost revolutionary implements for shifting the course or composition of the government.
The Five Rights are instruments for the self-government of the official class (Examination and Control), and for the government of the people by the official class (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial). The Four Powers are the instruments for the government of the official class [pg 225] by the people. Out of the checks and balances of government and people the integrity, efficacy, and stability of Sun Yat-sen's democracy was to be assured.
The exercise of the Four Rights of the people could, in the theory of Sun Yat-sen, be used to check the development of an arrogant, inefficient or irresponsible bureaucracy, in that the people would assist in the selection of officials and would be able to remove incompetents at any time. The civil service mechanism of the government would, on the other hand, resist the too free play of popular caprice. No incompetent person would be elected to office, since the civil service would extend even to elective offices. The voters could remove a bad official but they could not replace him with an untrained person; they would have to select their candidate from the roster of scholar-officials eligible for the rank of the office in question. The people were to supervise the operations of the age-old Chinese civil service, as revivified by the nationalists; they were to appoint and remove officers, to repeal and enact laws; but in no case were they to tear down the structure of the civil service and inaugurate a spoils democracy such as that found in the United States. This blending of extreme democracy and traditional administrative hierarchy would result, said Sun Yat-sen, in perfect government.
The democratic nationalist government was to supersede the Empire. In between there was no central government, since the various military leaders paid scant respect to the unfortunate clique of diplomats and officials who carried on the few functions left to the powerless Peking government.[280] The new government was not, therefore, [pg 226] so much a new political order to be set up in place of the old as a political order to be built up out of military chaos. The social system, although shaken and affected by Western ideas, continued much as usual, and was to be woven into the new socio-political patterns that Sun Yat-sen projected.
The Nationalist government was to be the nation's answer to the foreign aggression. The White Peril, which had flooded Asia, could only be held back by the dykes of a militant nationalist movement, expressing itself in a formal state such as the Westerners themselves had developed, and which fitted them to undertake the conquest of the world. This government was to be the agent of the whole Chinese people who, casting off the oppression of the militarists and the imperialists, was to rise again with its ancient power, formidable and ready to fight if necessary, more ready to bring about world-coöperation and peace if possible. It was to be a government made up of a trained officialdom such as ancient China had possessed for centuries, which had led to the integration of control and culture (in the narrowest sense of the word), and of a people ruling by checking that officialdom: an all-powerful state-machine ruled by an all-powerful people.[281] A state was to appear in the world of states and enclose the Chinese people, by political power, more effectively than could the Great Wall.
This aspect of democracy, the self-rule of the Chinese society vis-à-vis the linked despotism of militarists, renegades and imperialists, was, although the most important facet of democracy, not the whole story. In order to systematize the loose democracy of old China, in order to [pg 227] lead all force to the top, where it could be exerted outwards, the democratic plan had to plan links with the traditional system. The government could not be democratic if it were not tied to the people. The people could not govern themselves, as apart from governing the officialdom making up the National government, unless they had mechanisms with which to do so. Although the family, the hui and the hsien provided self-government, this self-government had to be associated with the scheme of nationalist and national self-government in order to guarantee the latter's effectiveness. Beyond or beneath the national democracy of China there was to be a system of democracy (the politicalization, as it were, of the old social organs) running through society. What these separate or subordinate organs were to be, what relations they were to have with the national government, and what other intermediate institutions were to facilitate those relations must be studied to gain a complete picture of the democracy of Sun Yat-sen.
Confederacy Versus Centralism.
One of the most involved questions in the political thought of the Chinese revolution has been the problem of provincial autonomy. The Chinese provinces differ considerably more from one another in economic conditions, language and race than do the American states; it has been said that one of the causes of the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy was the encroachment of the Imperial central power, in its last desperate attempts to modernize itself and cope with the last crisis, upon the old autonomy of the provinces.[282] Institutionally, the provinces were relatively independent; this degree of independence was, however, minimized by the general unimportance of government [pg 228] in Chinese society. The Chinese, toward each other, feel conscious of family, village and provincial ties; face to face with the foreigners, they are beginning to know themselves as Chinese. Until the wave of nationalism swept the country, provincial rivalry was a live issue; even today, it cannot be called forgotten.
Sun Yat-sen's opinions on many points of government remained stable through his life. The fundamental ideas and ideals seem to have been expanded, rather than changed, as his theory met the test of his growing experience and the lessons of the revolution; but even with expansion, they remain, for the most part, consistent. Sun Yat-sen was steadfast in his beliefs.
This cannot be said of his and his successors' opinions on the problem of province versus nation. There is no one doctrine dealing with the question of provincial autonomy. There may be a trend, however, which can be described as a swing from definite emphasis upon the province toward neglect of that unit of administration. This trend may be illustrated by several points.
At the time of the first Republic the provinces were treated much as are states in the United States. The members of the Senate of the Republic (Ts'an Yi Yuan) were to be elected by the Assemblies of the provinces, and, when representing persons not under the jurisdiction of a provincial Assembly, by Electoral Colleges. The House of Representatives was to be elected directly by the people, in the proportion of one member to each eight hundred thousand of population, with the reservation—again in propitiation of provincial vanity—that no province should have less than ten representatives.[283] The [pg 229] first Republic was distinctly federal although by no means confederate.
Sun Yat-sen did not immediately shift from this position. As late as 1919-1922, when he was preparing his official biography, he spoke enthusiastically to his biographer of the potentialities of democratic provincial home rule.[284] He still believed in the importance of the provinces as units of a future democracy in China.
From the time that Sun went South, and the Kuomintang was reorganized, to the present, the tendency in the Sun-Kuomintang theory seems to have been toward minimization of the importance of the provinces in the democracy to be set up. The Party Declaration of the Kuomintang at its First National Convention in 1924 in Canton criticised several political viewpoints prevalent; among these was that of the Confederalists, so called. The Declaration states, in part: “Undoubtedly regional self-government is in entire accord with the spirit of democracy and is a great need of our nation. But a true regional self-government can be realized only when our national independence is won, for without national freedom, local freedom is impossible.... Many social, economic and political problems facing the individual provinces can be solved only by the nation as a whole. So the success of the peoples' revolution is a prerequisite to the realization of provincial autonomy.”[285]
Sun Yat-sen himself stated, a few months earlier, a point of view which may seem inconsistent with the Party Declaration:
18. The Hsien is the unit of self-government. The province links up and provides means of co-operation between the Central Government and the local governments of the districts.[286]
Whatever the occasion for the slight difference of opinion, it has been the policy of the Kuomintang to emphasize hsien rather than provinces as units of self-government. The Party itself is quite centralized. The Resumé of the Kuomintang Third National Congress Resolutions Concerning Political Matters, adopted March 27, 1929, states unequivocally: “The traditional policy of attaching greater importance to provincial government than to Hsien or district government must be corrected or even reversed.” It adds, “The provincial government, on the other hand, shall act only as a supervisor of local self-government, standing in between the Hsien or district government on the one hand, and the Central Government on the other.”[287]
The province is thus reduced to the lowest possible level. It is not probable that this tendency was influenced by Marxism, but it certainly resembled the Marxian idea of a vast confederation of self-governing communes, acting, by some proletarian metempsychosis, as a highly centralized instrument of revolution.[288] The doctrine of the hsien-province-nation relationship which places emphasis upon the first and the last is the authoritative one, and is quite harmonious with the earlier picture of Imperial China which, apart from the strictly governmental, was a vast confederacy of largely autonomous communities. In the picture of the new democratic national government which emerges from this doctrine, the central government may be regarded as a centralism versus the provinces, and a super-government in relation to the hsien; that is, while the [pg 231] people govern themselves as groups in the hsien, they will govern themselves as one people in the National Government. The province will remain as a convenient intermediary between the two.
This is one of the few doctrines of Sun Yat-sen upon which no one definitive and final pronouncement is to be found and concerning which, consequently, recourse must be had to the history of the development of the Sun Yat-sen political philosophy.