The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Part 13

It is apparent that, even with tutelage, the democratic techniques of the West could impair the attainment of democracy in China were they applied in an unmodified form, and without concession to the ideological and inst.i.tutional backgrounds of the Chinese. The Westerner need only contemplate the political structure of the Roman Republic to realize how much this modern democracy is the peculiar inst.i.tution of his race, bred in his bone and running, sacred and ancient, deep within his mind. The particular methods of democracy, so peculiarly European, which the modern-that is, Western or Westernized-world employs, is no less alien to the imperial anarchy of traditional China than is the Papacy. Sun Yat-sen, beholding the accomplishments of the West in practical matters, had few illusions about the excellence of democratic shibboleths, such as parliamentarism or liberty, and was profoundly concerned with effecting the self-rule of the Chinese people without leading them into the labyrinth of a strange and uncongenial political system.

In advocating democracy he did not necessarily advocate the adoption of strange devices from the West. While believing, as we have seen, in the necessity of the self-rule of the Chinese race-nation, he by no means desired to take over the particular parliamentary forms which the West had developed.(272) He criticised the weakness of Western political and social science as contrasted with the strength of Western technology: "It would be a gross error to believe that just as we imitate the material sciences of the foreigners, so we ought likewise to copy their politics. The material civilization of the foreigners changes from day to day; we attempt to imitate it, and we find it difficult to keep step with it. But there is a vast difference between the progress of foreign politics and the progress of material civilization; the speed of (the first) is very slow."(273) And he said later, in speaking of the democracy of the first Republic: "China wanted to be in line with foreign countries and to practice democracy; accordingly she set up her representative government.

But China has not learned anything about the good sides of representative governments in Europe and in America, and as to the bad sides of these governments, they have increased tenfold, a hundredfold in China, even to the point of making swine, filthy and corrupt, out of government representatives, a thing which has not been witnessed in other countries since the days of antiquity. This is truly a peculiar phenomenon of representative government. Hence, China not only failed to learn well anything from the democratic governments of other countries, but she learned evil practices from them."(274) This farce-democracy was as bad as no government at all. Sun Yat-sen had to reject any suggestion that China imitate the example of some of the South American nations in borrowing the American Const.i.tution and proclaiming a "United States of China." The problem was not to be solved so easily.

In approaching Sun Yat-sen's solution the Western student must again remember two quite important distinctions between the democracy of Sun Yat-sen and the democracy of the West. Sun Yat-sen's principle of _min ch'uan_ was the self-control of the whole people first, and a government by the ma.s.s of individuals making up the people secondarily. The Chinese social system was well enough organized to permit the question of democracy to be a question of the nation as a whole, rather than a question of the reconciliation of particular interests within the nation.

Special interests already found their outlet in the recognized social patterns-so reminiscent of the inst.i.tutions envisaged by the pluralists-of the ancient order. In the second place, China was already a society which was highly organized socially, although politically in ruins; the democratic government that Sun Yat-sen planned had infinitely less governing to do than did Western governments. The new Nationalist government had to fit into rather than supplant the old order. As a consequence of these distinctions, one may expect to find much less emphasis on the exact methods of popular control of the government than one would in a similar Western plan; and one must antic.i.p.ate meeting the ancient devices and offices which the usage of centuries had hallowed and made true to the Chinese.

One may find that democracy in China is not so radical a novelty as it might at first thought be esteemed. A figure of speech, which somewhat antic.i.p.ates the exposition, may serve to prepare one for some of the seeming omissions of Sun Yat-sen's plan for a democracy. The suggestion is this: that the democracy of Sun Yat-sen is, roughly, a modernization of the old Imperial system, with the Emperor (as the head of the academic civil service) removed, and the majority placed in his stead. Neither in the old system nor in the new were the minorities the object of profound concern, for, to the Chinese, the notion of a minority (as against the greater ma.s.s of the tradition-following people) is an odd one. The rule of the Son of Heaven (so far as it was government at all) was to be replaced by the rule of the whole people (_min_, which is more similar to the German _Volk_ than the English _people_). The first Sun Yat-sen called monarchy; the second, democracy.

The old ideology was to yield to the new, but even the new as a review of it has shown, was not broad enough completely to supplant the old. The essential continuity of Chinese civilization was not to be broken.

Democracy as a Western inst.i.tution could be nothing more than a sham, as the parliaments at Peking had showed; democracy in China had to be not only democracy, but Chinese as well.

It is not, therefore, extraordinarily strange to find the ancient inst.i.tutions of the Empire surviving by the side of the most extreme methods of popular government. The censorate and the referendum, the examination system and the recall, all could work together in the democracy planned by Sun Yat-sen. Even with the idea of popular rule adopted in the formal Western manner, Sun Yat-sen proposed to continue the idea of natural and ineradicable cla.s.s differences between men. The Chinese democracy was not to be any mere imitation of the West; it was to be the fundamentally new fusion of Chinese and Western methods, and offered as the solution for the political readjustment of the Chinese society in a world no longer safe for it.

The Four Powers.

Sun Yat-sen divided all men into three categories: the geniuses, the followers, and the unthinking. To reconcile this theory of natural inequality with democracy, he distinguished between _ch'uan_, the right to rule as sovereign, and _neng_, the right to administer as an official. He furthermore considered the state similar to a machine. How should the unthinking, who would possess _ch'uan_, the right to rule, be granted that right without attempting to usurp _neng_?

This was to be accomplished by two means. The Four Powers were to be given to the people, in order to a.s.sure their possession of _ch'uan_. The Five Rights were to a.s.sure that the government might be protected in its right to _neng_, in its right to have only the most competent officials.

Together the Four Powers and the Five Rights implement a scheme of government so novel that Sun Yat-sen himself believed it to be a definite contribution to political method. The learned Jesuit translator of the _San Min Chin I_ does not even term it democracy, but neo-democracy instead.(275)

The Four Powers represent an almost extreme limit of popular control. Sun Yat-sen divided the four into two groups: the first two are powers of the people over the administrators-the power of election and the power of recall; the second two are powers of the people over the laws-the power of initiative and the power of referendum. Having secured the government from undue interference, Sun Yat-sen had no reluctance in giving these powers to the people. He said: "As for our China, since she had no old democratic system, she ought to be able to make very good use of this most recent and excellent invention."(276)

These four powers are perhaps the most Western element in the whole theory of Sun. History does not record the technique by which the Chinese chose Yao to be their Emperor, and even where actions comparable to elections were performed, it was not by use of the ballot-box or the voting machine, or drilling on an appointed field. The Chinese way of getting things done never tended that much to formality. A man who wanted to be a village head might be quietly chosen head by a cabal of the most influential persons, or at a meeting of many of the villagers. He might even decide to be head, and act as head, in the hope that people would pay attention to him and think that he was head. The Four Powers represent a distinct innovation in Chinese politics for, apart from a few ridiculous comic-opera performances under the first Republic, and the spurious plebiscite on the attempted usurpation of Yuan Shih-k'ai, the voting method has been a technique unknown in China. It is distinctly Western.

Another distinction may be made with a certain degree of reservation and hesitancy. It is this: the Chinese, without the elaborate system of expedient fictions which the West terms juristic law, were and are unable to conceive of corporate action. A law pa.s.sed by the Peking parliament was not pa.s.sed by the dictator in parliament, or the people in parliament; it was simply pa.s.sed by parliament, and was parliament's responsibility. The only kind of law that the people could pa.s.s would be one upon which they themselves had voted.

Seen in this light, the Four Powers a.s.sume a further significance greater than the Western political scientist might attribute to them. In America there is little difference between a law which the people of Oregon pa.s.s in the legislature, and one which they pa.s.s in a referendum. To the Chinese there is all the difference in the world. The one is an act of the government, and not of the people; the other, the act of the people, and not of the government. The people may have powers over the government, but never, by the wildest swing of imagination, can they discover themselves personified in it. A Chinese democracy is almost a dyarchy of majority and officialdom, the one revising and checking the other.

Sun Yat-sen did not comment on the frequency with which he expected these powers to be exercised, nor has the political development of democratic China gone far enough to afford any test of experience; it is consequently impossible to state whether these powers were to be, or shall be, exercised constantly as a matter of course, or whether they shall be employed by the people only as courses for emergency action, when the government arouses their displeasure. The latter seems the more probable, in view of the background of Chinese tradition, and the strong propensities of the Chinese to avoid getting involved in anything which does not concern them immediately and personally. This probability is made the more plausible by the self-corrective devices in the governmental system, which may seem to imply that an extensive use of the popular corrective power was not contemplated by Sun Yat-sen.

Sun Yat-sen said:

Now we separate power from capacity and we say _that the people are the engineers and the government is the machine_. On the one hand, we want the machinery of the government to be all-powerful, able to do anything, and on the other hand we want the engineer, the people, to have great power so as to be able to control that all-powerful machine.

But what must be the mutual rights of the people and of the government in order that they might balance? We have just explained that. On the people's side there should be the four rights of _election_, _recall_, _initiative_, and _referendum_. On the government's side there must be five powers.... If the four governing powers of the people control the five administrative powers of the government, then we shall have _a perfect political-democratic machine_....(277)

The Five Rights.

Sun Yat-sen implemented his theory of democracy by a.s.signing Four Powers to the people and Five Rights to the government. This latter doctrine is one of the most disputed points in his proposal. Some writers see in it nothing more than a cra.s.s conjunction of the theory of Montesquieu and the practices of the Chinese Imperial system.(278) His followers are disposed to regard the doctrine of the Five Rights as the product of intrepid imagination, which succeeded in reconciling the traditional scheme of Chinese things with the requirements of modern self-government.

Sun made the point that both Chinese and Western governments had in the past had tripart.i.te governments. He ill.u.s.trated this by a diagram:(279)

CONSt.i.tUTION OF CHINA

The Examining Power (_Kao Shih ch'uan_) The Imperial Power (_Chun ch'uan_) The Legislative Power The Executive Power The Judicial Power The Power to Impeach (_Tan k'e ch'uan_)

FOREIGN CONSt.i.tUTIONS

The Legislative Power combined with the Power to Impeach The Executive Power combined with the Examining Power The Judicial Power

Sun Yat-sen believed that in separating the Five Rights from one another he would make clear certain differentiations of function which had led to numberless disputes in the past, and would present to the world a model government.

Thus far, the Five Rights seem the complement of the Four Powers. The two sets of controls, of people over the government, and of the government over the people, a.s.sure China that a neo-democratic administration will have no less continuity and power than did its Imperial predecessor, and nevertheless be subject to the will of the majority of the four hundred odd million sovereigns. Contemplated in this manner, the Five Rights are an amalgamation of the Western theory upon the Chinese, and significant as a novelty in democratic administrative theory rather than as inst.i.tutions altering the fundamental premises and methods of democracy.

If, however, a further step is taken, and the Five Powers are a.s.sociated with Sun Yat-sen's doctrine of the three naturally unequal cla.s.ses of men, they a.s.sume a somewhat less superficial significance. If the rule of the people is placed over the administration by the geniuses, the geniuses must be a.s.sured a method of entering the government service. The oligarchy of the intellectuals is to be reconciled with the dictatorship of the majority. The old Chinese system of a trained cla.s.s of scholars, entrance to which was open on a compet.i.tive system to members of almost all cla.s.ses of society, had to be preserved in the new China, and at the same time disciplined and purified of unworthy or unsuitable elements, while simultaneously subject to the policy-making authority of the majority.

The preservation of a leader cla.s.s was to be a.s.sured by an examination division in the new democratic government, and its purification and discipline continued by a supervisory or censoring division. The administrative setup of the nationalist democracy would appear as follows, when the present official translations of the Chinese names for the divisions (_Yuan_) are adopted:

1. The division of the executive (Executive Yuan).

2. The division of the legislative (Legislative Yuan).

3. The division of the judicial (Judicial Yuan).

4. The division of censorship, impeachment and accounting (Control Yuan).

5. And the division of the examination system (Examination Yuan).

It is an ill.u.s.tration of the further difference between the democracy of Sun Yat-sen and Western democracy, that each of the divisions, even the legislative, was to have a single head. The whole government was to be departmentally, not camerally, organized.

The system of Five Powers emphasizes the implied dyarchy of government and people in the _San Min Chu I_ by a.s.signing to the government itself functions which, in the usual course of events, are supposed to be exercised by the people themselves in Western democracies. The people are supposed to eliminate unfit officials and decide on the merits and trustworthiness of inc.u.mbents. By the expedient of non-reelection, the people are supposed to remove officials, who are incapable or unsuitable for public office. The two functions have been taken over by the Examination and Control Yuans, respectively; the Four Powers of the people are not, in all probability, instruments for continual popular intrigue and meddling in government, but almost revolutionary implements for shifting the course or composition of the government.

The Five Rights are instruments for the self-government of the official cla.s.s (Examination and Control), and for the government of the people by the official cla.s.s (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial). The Four Powers are the instruments for the government of the official cla.s.s by the people. Out of the checks and balances of government and people the integrity, efficacy, and stability of Sun Yat-sen's democracy was to be a.s.sured.

The exercise of the Four Rights of the people could, in the theory of Sun Yat-sen, be used to check the development of an arrogant, inefficient or irresponsible bureaucracy, in that the people would a.s.sist in the selection of officials and would be able to remove incompetents at any time. The civil service mechanism of the government would, on the other hand, resist the too free play of popular caprice. No incompetent person would be elected to office, since the civil service would extend even to elective offices. The voters could remove a bad official but they could not replace him with an untrained person; they would have to select their candidate from the roster of scholar-officials eligible for the rank of the office in question. The people were to supervise the operations of the age-old Chinese civil service, as revivified by the nationalists; they were to appoint and remove officers, to repeal and enact laws; but in no case were they to tear down the structure of the civil service and inaugurate a spoils democracy such as that found in the United States.

This blending of extreme democracy and traditional administrative hierarchy would result, said Sun Yat-sen, in perfect government.

The democratic nationalist government was to supersede the Empire. In between there was no central government, since the various military leaders paid scant respect to the unfortunate clique of diplomats and officials who carried on the few functions left to the powerless Peking government.(280) The new government was not, therefore, so much a new political order to be set up in place of the old as a political order to be built up out of military chaos. The social system, although shaken and affected by Western ideas, continued much as usual, and was to be woven into the new socio-political patterns that Sun Yat-sen projected.

The Nationalist government was to be the nation's answer to the foreign aggression. The White Peril, which had flooded Asia, could only be held back by the d.y.k.es of a militant nationalist movement, expressing itself in a formal state such as the Westerners themselves had developed, and which fitted them to undertake the conquest of the world. This government was to be the agent of the whole Chinese people who, casting off the oppression of the militarists and the imperialists, was to rise again with its ancient power, formidable and ready to fight if necessary, more ready to bring about world-cooperation and peace if possible. It was to be a government made up of a trained officialdom such as ancient China had possessed for centuries, which had led to the integration of control and culture (in the narrowest sense of the word), and of a people ruling by checking that officialdom: an all-powerful state-machine ruled by an all-powerful people.(281) A state was to appear in the world of states and enclose the Chinese people, by political power, more effectively than could the Great Wall.

This aspect of democracy, the self-rule of the Chinese society _vis-a-vis_ the linked despotism of militarists, renegades and imperialists, was, although the most important facet of democracy, not the whole story. In order to systematize the loose democracy of old China, in order to lead all force to the top, where it could be exerted outwards, the democratic plan had to plan links with the traditional system. The government could not be democratic if it were not tied to the people. The people could not govern themselves, as apart from governing the officialdom making up the National government, unless they had mechanisms with which to do so.

Although the family, the _hui_ and the _hsien_ provided self-government, this self-government had to be a.s.sociated with the scheme of nationalist and national self-government in order to guarantee the latter's effectiveness. Beyond or beneath the national democracy of China there was to be a system of democracy (the politicalization, as it were, of the old social organs) running through society. What these separate or subordinate organs were to be, what relations they were to have with the national government, and what other intermediate inst.i.tutions were to facilitate those relations must be studied to gain a complete picture of the democracy of Sun Yat-sen.

Confederacy Versus Centralism.

One of the most involved questions in the political thought of the Chinese revolution has been the problem of provincial autonomy. The Chinese provinces differ considerably more from one another in economic conditions, language and race than do the American states; it has been said that one of the causes of the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy was the encroachment of the Imperial central power, in its last desperate attempts to modernize itself and cope with the last crisis, upon the old autonomy of the provinces.(282) Inst.i.tutionally, the provinces were relatively independent; this degree of independence was, however, minimized by the general unimportance of government in Chinese society.