Government in Republican China Part 11

[3] _Ibid._, 1926, p. 1065.

[4] _Ibid._, p. 1062.

[5] See above, pp. 51 ff.

[6] See above, pp. 58 ff.

[7] Gilbert, _loc. cit._, 1928, pp. 1283-1285.

[8] _Ibid._, 1931, pp. 251 ff.

[9] Source confidential.

[10] John H. Jouett, "War Planes over China," _Asia_, vol. 37, pp.

827-830, 1937.

[11] See below, pp. 167 ff.

[12] _The China Year Book_, 1936, p. 427.

[13] j.a.panese Chamber of Commerce of New York, _The Sino-j.a.panese Crisis_, 1937, p. 18, New York, 1937.

[14] Walter H. Mallory, "j.a.pan Attacks, China Resists," _Foreign Affairs_, vol. 16, pp. 135-136, 1937.

[15] Paschal M. d'Elia, S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_, pp.

252-273, Wuchang, 1931. This is one of the most useful translations of Sun Yat-sen's lectures on the _San Min Chu I_. Others are Frank Price, _San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People_, Shanghai, 1930; and L. S. Hsu, _Sun Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals_, Los Angeles, 1933.

[16] See below, pp. 167 ff. It is to be noted that the Nanking government did not secure international recognition until 1928--the year following its establishment.

[17] Among the more recent discussions of economics in Chinese history is Chi Chao-ting, _Key Areas in Chinese Economic History_, New York, 1936.

[18] See Karl August Wittfogel, _Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas_, Leipzig, 1931, and the same author's outline of one of the boldest programs of Chinese studies, "A Large-Scale Investigation of China's Socio-Economic Structure," _Pacific Affairs_, vol. 11, pp. 81-94, 1938.

[19] R. H. Tawney, _Land and Labour in China_, p. 77, New York, 1932.

[20] Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic_, pp.

67-71, New York, 1924.

[21] See Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, New York, 1934; and Paul M. A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 132-156, Baltimore, 1937, for discussion of the development of Sun's economic programs.

[22] Jefferson D. H. Lamb (Lin Tung-hai), _The Development of the Agrarian Movement and Agrarian Legislation in China_, p. 134, Shanghai, 1934.

[23] _Ibid._, p. 221.

[24] _Ibid._, p. 77.

[25] See _Pacific Affairs_ for 1934 and 1935, for articles by George Taylor and others dealing with reconstruction.

[26] Linebarger, _op. cit._ in note 21, chap. VII, "The Programs of Min Sheng," discusses these points at greater length.

[27] See P. H. B. Kent, _The Twentieth Century in the Far East_, p.

364, London, 1937, for an extract from the mandate sent by the Chinese-Manchu Emperor Ch'ien-lung to England's George III.

[28] See G. E. Hubbard, _Eastern Industrialization and Its Effect on the West_, London, 1935, for a very illuminating survey. J. E. Orchard, _j.a.pan's Economic Position_, New York, 1930, is equally informative.

Much current information will be found in _Far Eastern Survey_ (semimonthly, New York), and _Amerasia_ (monthly, New York) on economic matters. _Pacific Affairs_ (quarterly, New York) and _International Affairs_ (bimonthly, London) possess book review sections which are useful guides to the literature. The _Bulletin of Far Eastern Bibliography_ (quarterly, Washington, D. C.) is the most complete guide of its kind, but has just completed its initial volumes.

THIRD PART

GOVERNMENTS

_Chapter_ VI

THE EMPIRE

The governing of China is not and has not been confined to governments.

In many instances the working of specific inst.i.tutions called _governments_ has been of less importance than that of other establishments and organizations. The problems of government in Republican China are affected but not determined by the fate of individual governments. Movements and armies have predetermined action; governments have reflected it. Government in China may be divided into three chief periods. The first extends from prehistory to 221 B. C. The second is the imperial period.[1] The third--the Republican epoch--did not begin until 1912, although it was foreshadowed in the nineteenth century.

_Government to the End of the Warring States_

In the semihistoric Shang dynasty, which ruled China during the second millennium B. C., there was a central overlordship which might well have claimed primacy over all offices of the world. In its own territory, Shang rule seems to have been based not upon a feudal system such as developed later in the time of the charioteering lords but upon the reduction of defeated princes to positions of va.s.saldom. History cannot yet tell of the exact relations between the Shang overlord and his va.s.sal princes, nor of other monarchs who, in the shadowy bypaths of present knowledge, stand forth vaguely from complete obscurity as rivals to the hegemony of Shang. The rulers of twenty-five or twenty-six centuries ago are recognized by modern Chinese as the direct predecessors of the Ch'ing emperor who in turn yielded to the Republic.

This is no case of a Mussolini seeking to weave together the long-broken threads between Augustan and modern Rome; in China the succession is as direct as that from St. Pius I to Pius XI. The central monarchy comes over the edge of history as an identifiable inst.i.tution.

In rudimentary form this monarchy already suggests the features of bureaucracy. Like the Prussian kings thousands of years later, the Shang monarchs seem to have relied upon commoners as their royal officials, and for the same reasons. A commoner strengthened the position of the monarch: "He could not easily usurp the place of his master, even if he had the power. And if he was disobedient he could be executed on the spot, with complete impunity; he had no powerful clan to exact vengeance."[2] Whether or not the system of loose overlordship be termed _feudalism_, social forms not too unlike European feudalism originated under the next dynasty, the Chou (traditionally dated 1122-256 B. C.).

Conquering the great city of the Shang, the Chou turned to feudalism for means of internal control and defense. Powerful va.s.sals arose, however, so that after the eighth century B. C. the original Chou dynasty was no longer in actual command. From the eighth to the third century B. C., when China was consolidated under the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, a rapid spread of feudal organization brought about a state system resembling that of early modern Europe.

Before the Chou rulers lost their power and became the faraway a.n.a.logues of the late Holy Roman emperors or the Tennos of shogunal j.a.pan, there emerged from their house one of the most remarkable of all Chinese political leaders. The Duke of Chou, who lived in the eleventh century B. C., seems to have done most in founding the system which later ages called _Confucian_--after Confucius had reformed it, clarified it, and given it ethical stature. He is also regarded as the father of the Const.i.tution of Chou, a plan for a bureaucratic monarchy with an emperor, three Great Dukes, and six ministers (in charge of administrative, educational and economic, religious and historiographic, military, judicial, and engineering matters, respectively) ruling over nine large provinces.[3] The Duke of Chou is finally credited with the authorship of several important treatises. He has served as the archetype of intellectual statesmanship in Chinese legend. His work may have contributed in great part to the long life of the Chou dynasty, as a _de jure_ ruling house, since a family which had produced such an eminent member was not to be set aside lightly.

In the earlier part of this period the feudal order seems to have ensured relative stability, but in the later part a system of states arose. The greatest Chinese philosophers, Confucius (Kung Fu-tz[)u]) and Lao Tz[)u], lived in interstate turmoil. They saw all about them the displacement of virtues which had long been recognized, the advance of states which subst.i.tuted greed for morality, the centralization of power, the destruction of the feudal economy, the transformation of ceremonial warfare into outright slaughter, and the rising disrespect of the advancing kings for the Chou overlord. Lao Tz[)u] preached a philosophy devoid of constructive politics; he had little use for the state and for the organization of society. Not quite an anarchist, his programs are probably closer to those of Herbert Spencer than of any other Western thinker. But the spiritual and psychological background from which he wrote is roughly identical with that of the world's great mystical intuitionists. Confucius (551-479 B. C.) preached a system of ethics and education which was to rationalize and systematize preceding Chinese thought and lead to the system of ideological control known as Confucian.

Chinese historians themselves term the closing period of the Chou the Age of Warring States. Diplomacy lubricated the machinery of conflict, smoothing struggle without eliminating it. The regional governments fought each other for centuries, though at times venturing into collective security pacts entrusting authority to a preeminent king for defense against the outer barbarians. The last years of interstate wars, however, were marked by an ever increasing awareness of the meaningless character of a struggle which had enveloped the Chinese world. Legalism and militarism, twin media of centralized monarchy, blossomed forth.

While the Western political system, molded by geography and conditioned by language, has frozen into a pattern of theoretically sovereign and theoretically eternal states--the "mortal G.o.ds" of Hobbes's imagination--without promise of workable universal government, China's states were swept aside by the conqueror Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who established imperial unity for Chinese government. With the rise to domination of the state of Ch'in, its king took the t.i.tle of _Shih_ (First) _Huang Ti_ (Emperor), and the Chinese Empire was established.

_The Chinese Imperial Government_

The Shih Huang Ti was not revered by succeeding ages for the great mission which he performed. His methods were those not of a cautious reformer but of a bullying conqueror. With the aid and advice of a legalist philosopher, he organized all of China (covering the area of much of modern China) into a strongly centralized and despotic military monarchy. He destroyed all books not of obvious practical use, completely eradicating the histories of rival states and the works of philosophers whose opinions might undermine his regime. His tyranny brought his house to a rapid end; his heirs held the throne only a short while. But the work he had done was done. He had persecuted the worship of the past. He had extirpated a large part of the literature which might have survived as a source of dissent. He had cleared China of all military power but his own. He had brought operative law into being and had spread the inst.i.tution of private ownership of land. Feudalism might remain as a form, but its economic and political realities were lost.

In 206 B. C. there began the reign of the Han dynasty. They effected a compromise between the past and the governmental, military, and political system created by the Shih Huang Ti. They retained legalism in practice but turned more and more to Confucianism. Under them the cult of Confucius grew into the major influence on the state.[4] The Han allowed the imperial system to grow, whereas the Shih Huang Ti had sought to build it. In consequence, Han rule--although interrupted in the time of Christ by a Utopian usurper--lasted from the third century B. C. to the third century A. D. There followed the turbulent Chinese middle ages, extending until the reinst.i.tution of organized government with the Chin and the Sui.[5]

Out of the earliest tradition attributed to the Duke of Chou and put in definite shape by Confucius, out of the arbitrary military despotism of the conqueror of the Chinese world, Shih Huang Ti, and out of the actual practices of the Han, there evolved a governmental system which, though altered dynasty by dynasty and epoch by epoch, nevertheless retained its general form down into the days of men now living. It never became, however, the prime agency of government, even of the men governing.

Ritual and scholarship were more significant functions of the dominant hierarchy than was administration itself. The emperor was the head of the country's family structure, the focal point in the social sphere, the outstanding member of the community at large, the chief examiner and model of the scholars, the pontiff of the quasi-religious hierarchy, the moral scapegoat and intermediary between destiny and mankind, and the autocrat of a despotism const.i.tutionalized, as it were, by the power of traditional practices.