The Necessity of an Exposition.
Followers of Sun who knew him personally, or were members of that circle in which his ideas and opinions were well known, have found the San Min Chu I and other literary remains helpful; they have been able to turn to the documents to refresh their memories of Sun on some particular point, or to experience the encouraging force of his faith and enthusiasm again. They need not be reminded of the main tenets of his thought, or of the fundamental values upon which he based his life and his political activities. His sense of leadership, which strangers have at times thought fantastic, is one which they admire in him, since they, too, have felt the power of his personality and have experienced that leadership in the course of their own lives. His voice is ringing in their consciences; they feel no need of a guide to his mind. At the present day many members of Sun's own family, and a considerable number of his veteran disciples are still living; the control of the National Government is in their hands. They are people who need no commentary on Sun Yat-sen; to them, he died only yesterday.
Others, who met Sun only casually, or who could know him only through his writings, have a quite different impression of his thought. They perforce assume that he thought as he wrote, and fail to realize that virtually all his writings and speeches were occasional pieces, improvisations designed as propaganda. One of the most respected American authorities on China says that in the San Min Chu I “... there is a combination of sound social analysis, keen comment on comparative political [pg 010] science, and bombast, journalistic inaccuracy, jejune philosophizing and sophomoric economics.”[18] This view is one which can scarcely be attacked, if one considers only the printed lectures, and overlooks the other utterances and the personality of Sun. To apply this, or any similar estimate (and there are many of them), to all of Sun Yat-sen's thought would be woefully inaccurate. It is not the critic's fault that Sun never found time to write a sober, definitive political treatise expressing his ideas; it is, nevertheless, the critic's responsibility to weigh the value of the San Min Chu I, and consider the importance which Sun himself attached to it, before judging Sun's whole philosophy by a hastily-composed and poorly written book.
Yet, if the Western student of modern Chinese history were to look elsewhere for some general exposition of Sun Yat-sen's political ideas, he would find none. He could discover several excellent translations of the sixteen lectures, and parts of the other work of Sun. He would be helped by the prefatory notes to some of these translations.[19] A few treatises would be available to him on special phases of Sun's thought: the influence of Maurice William, and the influence of the Russian Communists.[20] In addition, there would be the biographies, of which there are more than a dozen, and a few other useful although not general works. None of these sifts Sun's thought, seeking to separate the transitory from the permanent in his ideas. For this the searcher would have to rely on brief outlines of Sun's ideas, to be found in [pg 011] works dealing with modern China or the Chinese revolution.[21]
This relative scarcity of exegetic material concerning the ideology and programs of Sun is not the result of any inadequacy on the part of those persons, both Chinese and Western, who have devoted thought and time to his life or to the translation of his works. It is one thing to point out a task that has yet to be done; and quite another, actually to perform it. An interpretation or exposition of Sun's thought, to be worthy of the great significance of the original, must be very thorough; but scarcely enough time has elapsed to allow a perspective of all the materials, let alone an orientation of Sun in the Far Eastern scene. Yet the importance of Sun demands that something be done to bring his thought to the attention of the world, so that the usual distortion of his personality—arising from the lack of commentaries—may be avoided in present day works. In a sense, the time is not ripe for a definitive treatment of Sun, either as a figure in history or as a contributor to the significant and enduring political thought of modern times; any work now done will, as time passes, fall grotesquely far short of adequacy. On the other hand, there is so much material of a perishable nature—anecdotes and legends not yet committed to print, and the memories of living men—now available, that a present-day work on Sun may gain [pg 012] in color and intimacy what it loses in judgment and objectivity, may gain in proximity what it has to forgo in detachment. And, lastly, the complete absence of any systematic presentation of Sun's ideas in any Western language is so great a deficiency in the fields of Far Eastern history and world political thought, that even a relatively inadequate exposition of the thought of Sun Yat-sen may prove to be not without value. Sun himself never explained his philosophy, whether theoretical or applied, in any broad, systematic fashion; nor has anyone else done so.
If the permissibility of an exposition of Sun Yat-sen's thought be conceded, there still remains the vexing problem of a choice of method. While the far-flung peripheries of Sun's thought touch almost every field of knowledge and opinion, a systematic condensation of his views cannot hope to survey the same broad ranges. The problem of proportion, of just emphasis, involves the nice appraisal of the degree of importance which each of Sun's minor rôles had in his intellectual career as a whole. Nor do the difficulties concerning method end with the consideration of proportion; they merely begin, for there remains the far more important and perplexing problem of a technique of interpretation.
Interpretation obviously relates to the problem of language. The translation of theoretical terms from Chinese into English constitutes a formidable difficulty which proves, in several instances, to be insuperable. No satisfactory equivalent for min shêng (usually rendered “livelihood”) can be found in English; even simpler and less specialized terms are extremely difficult to render. Sometimes it would be convenient to employ four or five alternative translations for one Chinese term. Sun uses the word “nationalism” in the sense that a Westerner would, in advocating national consciousness in a China hitherto unfamiliar with the conception of nation-states; but, in [pg 013] a different context, he uses it in the sense of “patriotism.”[22] These difficulties must be faced and, somehow or other, overcome. When the Western reader encounters a familiar term in an unexpected place, he must be prepared to meet a shift of meaning. No amount of definition can make a Chinese term, which has no exact Western equivalent, completely clear. It is simpler to grow accustomed to the term, to gather together its connotations, to understand something of the frame of reference wherein it is set, and thereby to learn it as a child learns a word. A dictionary is no help to a baby; in a realm of unfamiliar ideas even scholars must learn terms step by step.
Less obviously than language, the translation of ideas and of values is also involved in interpretation. In dealing with the intellectual content of a civilization as alien as that of China, the Westerner must be wary of the easy analogy. The full, forceful application of Western ideas and values in a world to which they are completely irrelevant produced strange results during the nineteenth century. Western notions of goodness and reasonableness did not fit the Chinese scheme of things. Under such a test a wildly distorted image of China was obtained. China seemed peculiar, topsy-turvy, fantastic. To themselves the Chinese still seemed quite matter-of-fact, and the Westerners thought even this odd and ridiculous: not only was China upside-down, but the Chinese did not know it! In any case, the present-day scholar, to whom so much material concerning the Chinese is available and China so near, has little justification for applying Western tests of virtue and rationality to things Chinese.
If the application of Western values to China is avoided, there is still the danger that the Chinese scheme of things may not be interpreted at all. The literal translation [pg 014] of Chinese terms strips them of their contexts. The result may be unintelligibility. The Chinese term jên is frequently rendered “benevolence,” a Western word which, while at times an approximate equivalent, fails to carry the full burden of meaning. Sun speaks of an interpretation of history antagonistic to dialectical materialism—the interpretation of history by jên. A “benevolent” interpretation of history means nothing whatever to a Westerner. If jên is translated into a different configuration of words, and given as “group-consciousness” or “social fellow-feeling,” the result, while still not an exact equivalent of the Chinese, is distinctly more intelligible.