Nevertheless, the geniuses of the Chinese revolution could not rely upon the loose and personal system of influence hitherto trusted. To organize Chinese nationalism, to give it direction as well as force, the power of the people must be run through a machine—the State.
A distinction must be made here. The term “machine,” applied to government, was itself a neologism introduced from the Japanese.[136] Not only was the word but the thing itself was alien to the Chinese, since the same term (ch'i) meant machinery, tool, or instrument. The introduction of the view of the state as a machine does not imply that [pg 111] Sun Yat-sen wished to introduce a specific form of Western state-machine into China—as will be later explained (in the pages which concern themselves with the applied political science of Sun Yat-sen).
Sun was careful, moreover, to explain that his analogy between industrial machinery and political machinery was merely an analogy. He said, “The machinery of the government is entirely composed of human beings. All its motions are brought about by men and not by material objects. Therefore, there is a very great difference between the machinery of the government and the manufacturing machine ... the machinery of the government is moved by human agency whereas the manufacturing machine is set in motion by material forces.”[137]
Even after allowance has been made for the fact that Sun Yat-sen did not desire to import Western governmental machinery, nor even to stress the machine and state analogy too far, it still remains extraordinarily significant that he should have impressed upon his followers the necessity of what may be called a mechanical rather than an organic type of government. The administrative machine of the Ch'ing dynasty, insofar as it was a machine at all, was a chaotic mass of political authorities melting vaguely into the social system. Sun's desire to have a clear-cut machine of government, while not of supreme [pg 112] importance in his ideological projects, was of great significance in his practical proposal. In his theory the state machine bears the same resemblance to the old government that the Chinese race-nation bears to the now somewhat ambiguous civilized humanity of the Confucians. In both instances he was seeking sharper and more distinct lines of demarcation.
In putting forth his proposals for the reconstitution of the Chinese government he was thinking, in speaking of a state-machine, of the more or less clearly understood juristic states of the West.[138] His concrete proposals dealing with the minutiae of administrative organization, his emphasis on constitution and law, and his interest in the exact allocation of control all testify to his complete acceptance of a sharply delimited state. On the other hand, he was extraordinary for his time in demanding an unusual extent, both qualitative and quantitative, of power for the state which he wished to hammer out on the forges of the nationalist social and political revolution.
In summarizing this description of the instrument with which Sun Yat-sen hoped to organize the intellectual leaders of China so as to implement the force of the revolution, it may be said that it was to be a state-machine, as opposed to a totalitarian state, based upon Western juristic theory in general but organized out of the materials of old Chinese political philosophy and the Imperial experience in government.[139] The state machine was to be [pg 113] built along lines which Sun Yat-sen laid out in some detail. Yet, even with his elaborate plans already prepared, and in the midst of a revolution, he pointed out the difficulty of political experimentation, in the following words:
... the progress of human machinery, as government organizations and the like, has been very slow. What is the reason? It is that once a manufacturing machine has been constructed, it can easily be tested, and after it has been tried out, it can easily be put aside if it is not good, and if it is not perfect, it can easily be perfected. But it is very difficult to try out a human machine and more difficult still to perfect it after it has been tried out. It is impossible to perfect it without bringing about a revolution. The only other way would be to regard it as a useless material machine which can easily be turned into scrap iron. But this is not workable.[140]
Democratic-Political Versus Ideological Control.
Sun Yat-sen accepted an organization of society based upon intellectual differences, despite his belief in the justifiability and necessity of formal democracy, and his reconciliation of the two at first contradictory theses in a plan for a machine state to be based upon a distinction between ch'üan and nêng. It may now be asked, why did Sun Yat-sen, familiar with the old method of ideological control, and himself proposing a new ideology which would not only restore internal harmony but also put China into harmony with the actual political condition of the world, desire to add formal popular control to ideological control?