Few today would dare say what is really in the minds of European leaders such as Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. These men may themselves believe what they say; or, not believing it, say it nevertheless because they think it the right thing for the masses, in the masses' own interests, to believe. Their respective enemies accuse them of saying what they do in order to mislead the masses and to dominate the masses for hidden purposes of their own. No such accusation has been levelled against Sun Yat-sen. Apart from his personal sincerity, his belief in the qualities of the common people was such that he did not consider it necessary to deceive them, even for their own good.
Consequently, in dealing with the various doctrines that Sun preached, it must be remembered that he himself believed what he was saying. He did not merely think that the people should regard the Chinese society as a race-nation; he thought that China was a race-nation. The modifications of the Confucian philosophy were to be contemplated, as was the original philosophy, as pragmatically true.[56]
These two factors must be reckoned with—that Sun Yat-sen was teaching and working in the Chinese milieu, and that his ideology was an ideology not in the older pejorative sense of the word, which connoted duplicity, but an ideology in the sense of a scheme of exact knowledge which, by its very truthfulness, was a political and social instrument.
Chapter II The Theory of Nationalism.
The Emergence of the Chinese Race-Nation.
It could, at first thought, be supposed that the reconstruction of Chinese society might have been necessitated by internal weakness just as much as by a changed environment. The process of organizing and developing a tight, clear scheme of political control organizations within the society (stateification), and delimiting the extent and aims of the society (nationalism) were the chief characteristics of this reconstruction.
It is only by means of a disregard of actual conditions that the supposition of an internal weakness so great as to require radical change can be maintained. While the latter days of the Manchu Empire represented a decline, it was a decline no more serious than others through which Chinese culture had passed and resurged many times in its history. It is still a debatable matter as to whether China had actually become intellectually and artistically sterile during this period. In any event, it is questionable whether the completely revolutionary reorganization of Chinese society—of the type that Sun Yat-sen found it necessary to support—would have been either worth-while or probable in the absence of Euramerican aggression, and the appearance, all about China, of a new, hostile, and unstable environment. If it had not been for the impact of the West it is conceivable—although all comment on this must remain mere speculation—that a social revolution such as those which occurred under Wang Mang (usurper-founder of the unrecognized Hsin Dynasty, 9-25 A.D.), Wang An-shih (prime minister, 1069-1076 A.D., under the Sung dynasty), or Hung Hsiu-ch'üan (founder of the rebel T'ai P'ing dynasty, 1849-1865), [pg 059] might have adjusted matters by a general redistribution of wealth and administrative reorganization.