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

by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

In the second place, government should be based upon the consent of the governed....

In the third place, the people have a duty as well as a right to carry on revolution as the last resort in stopping tyranny.... Revolution is regarded as a natural blessing; it guards against tyranny and promotes the vitality of the people. It is in complete harmony with natural law.

In the fourth place, the government exists for the welfare of the people.

In the fifth place, liberty, equality and equity should be preserved. The State belong equally to all; and so hereditary nobility, hereditary monarchy, and despotism are deplored. Confucius and his disciples seem to advocate a democracy under the form of an elective monarchy or a constitutional monarchy....

Local self-government is recognized in the Confucian system of government.... The Confucian theory of educational election suggests the distinctly new idea of representation.[113]

This summary could scarcely be improved upon although it represents a considerable latitude of interpretation in the subject-matter of the classics. The voice of the people was the voice of God. From other political writers of antiquity—Mêng Tzŭ, Mo Ti, Han Fei Tzŭ and the Legalists, and others—the Chinese received a variety of political interpretations, none of which fostered the development of autocracy as it developed in Europe.

The reason for this is simple. In addition to the eventual popular control of government, and the necessity for the close attention of the government to the wishes of the people, the classical writers, for the most part, did not emphasize the position of government. With the increasing ideological solidarity of the Chinese world, the increasing antiquity and authority of tradition, and the stability of the social system, the Chinese states withered away—never completely, but definitely more so than their analogues in the West. There appeared, consequently, in China a form of laissez-faire that surpassed that of Europe completely in thoroughness. Not only were the economic functions of the state reduced to a minimum—so was its police activity. Old China operated with a government in reserve, as it were; a government which was nowhere nearly so important to its subjects as Western governments commonly are. The government system was one democratic in that it was rooted in a society without intransigeant class lines, with a considerable degree of social mobility for the individual, with the total number of individuals exercising a terrific and occasionally overwhelming pressure against the political system. And yet it was not the governmental system upon which old China might have based its claim to be a democracy. It could have, had it so wished, claimed that name because of the weakness or the absence of government, and the presence of other social organizations permitting the individual a considerable amount of latent pressure to exercise upon his social environment.

This arose from the nature of the large non-political organizations which sustained Chinese civilization even more than did the educational-administrative authorities. It is obvious that, in theory, a free and unassociated individual in a laissez-faire polity would be defenseless against extra-politically organized persons. The equities [pg 095] of modern democracy lie largely in the development of a check and balance system of pressure groups, affording each individual adequate means of exercising pressure on behalf of his various interests. It was this function—the development of a just statement of pressure-groups—which the old Chinese world-society developed for the sufficient representation of the individual.

There was no illusion of complete personal liberty. Such a notion was scarcely thinkable. Every individual had his family, his village, and—although this was by no means universally true—his hui, whether one or, less commonly, several. He was never left solitary and defenseless against powerfully organized interests. No more intimate community of interests could be discovered than that of a family, since the community of interests there would verge on the total. Ancient Chinese society provided the individual with mechanisms to make his interests felt and effective, through the family, the village, and the association.

In the West the line of influence runs from the individual, who feels a want, to the group which assists him in expressing it, to the government, upon which the group exercises pressure, in order that the government may use its power to secure what the first group wants from some other group. The line runs, as it were, in the following manner: individual-group-government-group. In China the group exercised its pressure for the most part directly. The individual need not incorporate himself in a group to secure the recognition and fulfillment of his interests; he was by birth a member of the group, and with the group was mobile. In a sense old Chinese society was thoroughly democratic.