The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu I

by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

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.