Sun Yat-sen joined neither of these particular pan-Asiatic outlooks. The foreign policy of the Chinese race-nation was to fight oppressors, and to join the rest of Asia in a struggle against white imperialist domination. But—here is the distinction—how was China to do these things? Sun Yat-sen never urged the Chinese to accept the leadership of the Western or Japanese states, however friendly they might be. China was to follow a policy of friendship and coöperation with those powers which were friendly to her and to the cause of justice throughout the world. Sun praised the old system of Eastern Asia, by which the peripheral states stood in vassalage to China, a vassalage which he regarded as mutually voluntary and not imperialistic in the unpleasant sense of the word.
In the end, he believed Chinese society should resume the duty which it had held for so many centuries in relation to its barbarian neighbors. China should be rightly governed and should set a constant instance of political propriety. Sun even advocated ultimate intervention by [pg 203] the Chinese, a policy of helping the weak and lifting up the fallen. He concluded his sixth lecture on nationalism by saying: “If we want to ‘govern the country rightly and pacify the world,’ we must, first of all, restore our nationalism together with our national standing, and unify the world on the basis of the morality and peach which are proper (to us), in order to achieve an ideal government.”[268]
We may conclude that his racial sub-principle in a program of nationalism involved: 1) orientation of Chinese foreign policy on the basis of blood kinship as well as on the basis of class war of the nations; 2) advocacy of a pan-Asiatic movement; and 3) use of China's resurgence of national power to restore the benevolent hegemony which the Chinese had exercised over Eastern Asia, and possibly to extend it over the whole world.
The General Program of Nationalism.
It may be worthwhile to attempt a view of the nationalist program of Sun Yat-sen as a whole. The variety of materials covered, and the intricate system of cross-reference employed by Sun, make it difficult to summarize this part of his doctrines on a simple temporal basis. The plans for the advancement of the Chinese race-nation do not succeed each other in an orderly pattern of future years, one stage following another. They mirror, rather, the deep conflict of forces in the mind of Sun, and bring to the surface of his teachings some of the almost irreconcilable attitudes and projects which he had to put together. In the ideological part of his doctrines we do not find such contrasts; his ideology, a readjustment of the ideology of old China, before the impact of the new world, to conditions developing after that impact, is fairly homogeneous and consistent. It does not possess the rigid and iron-bound consistency required to meet the logic of [pg 204] the West; but, in a country not given to the following of absolutes, it was as stable as it needed to be. His programs do not display the same high level of consistency. They were derived from his ideology, but, in being derived from it, they had to conform with the realities of the revolutionary situation in words addressed to men in that situation. As Wittfogel has said, the contradictions of the actual situation in China were reflected in the words of Sun Yat-sen; Marxians, however, would suppose that these contradictions ran through the whole of the ideology and plans. It may be found that in the old security transmitted by Sun from the Confucian ideology to his own, there is little contradiction; in his programs we shall find much more.
This does not mean, of course, that Sun Yat-sen planned things which were inherently incompatible with one another. What he did do was to advocate courses of action which might possibly have all been carried out at the same time, but which might much more probably present themselves as alternatives. His ardor in the cause of revolution, and his profound sincerity, frequently led him to over-assess the genuineness of the cordial protestations of others; he found it possible to praise Japan, Turkey, and the Soviet Union in the same speech, and to predict the harmonious combination, not only of the various Asiatic nationalisms with each other, but of all the nations of Asia with Western international communism. The advantage, therefore, of the present treatment, which seeks to dissever the ideology of Sun Yat-sen from his plans, may rest in large part upon the fact that the ideology, based in the almost timeless scheme of things in China, depended little upon the political situations of the moment, while his plans, inextricably associated with the main currents of the contemporary political situation, may have been invalidated as plans by the great political changes that occurred after his death. That is not to say, [pg 205] however, that his plans are no longer of importance. The Chinese nationalists may still refer to them for suggestions as to their general course of action, should they wish to remain orthodox to the teachings of Sun. The plans also show how the ideology may be developed with reference to prevailing conditions.
Clearly, some changes in the plans will have to be made; some of the changes which have been made are undoubtedly justified. Now that war between the Soviet Union and Japan has ceased to be improbable, it is difficult to think of the coördination of a pan-Asiatic crusade with a world struggle against imperialism. Chinese nationalists, no longer on good terms with the Japanese—and on worse terms with the Communists—must depend upon themselves and upon their own nation much more than Sun expected. At the time of his death in 1925 the Japanese hostility to the Kuomintang, which became so strikingly evident at Tsinanfu in 1928-9, and the fundamental incompatibility of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China, had not manifested themselves. On the other hand, he could not have foreseen that the imperialist nations, by no means cordial to the Chinese Nationalists, would become as friendly to the Chinese nationalism as they have. The United States, for instance, while not acting positively against the political restrictions of Western imperialism (including its own) in China, has been friendly to the Nanking government, and as far as a rigid policy of neutrality permitted it, took the side of China against Japan in the Manchurian conflict in and after 1931. Such developments cannot easily be reconciled to the letter of the plans of Sun Yat-sen, and, unless infallibility is expected of him, there is no reason why they should.
His plans possess an interest far more than academic. It is not the province of this work to judge the degree to which the Nationalists carried out the doctrines of Sun, nor to assess the relative positions of such leaders as Chiang Chieh-shih and Wang Ching-wei with respect to orthodoxy. The plans may be presented simply as a part of the theory of Sun Yat-sen, and where there is possibility of disagreement, of his theory in its final and most authoritative stage: the sixteen lectures of 1924, and the other significant writings of the last years of his life.
The first part of his plans for China—those dealing with the applications of nationalism—may be more easily digested in outline form: