The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Part 2

The transition, as it took place, was neither apparent nor agreeable. The political turmoil was but slightly less than the intellectual unrest and disturbance. Everywhere faith and acceptance seemed to have been lost to humanity; licentiousness and impiety fed discord. The lack of harmony, made doubly vivid by the presence of a strong tradition of primeval Arcadian peace and unity under the mythological Emperors, was bitter to the scholars and men of virtue of the time. It was quite inevitable that protests should be raised which would hasten the advent, or return, of unity and peace. These protests form the subject of the work of Confucius and the other great philosophers, and schools of thinkers, of the Chou dynasty. It was, in later ages, upon these philosophies that the great structure of Chinese society developed and continued down until modern times.

The Theory of the Confucian World-Society.

The various types of protest against the development of states and the consequent anarchy of the Chinese society considered as a whole cannot be considered in this work; many were primarily religious; Taoism, while ranking as one of the most conspicuous religions of the world, has little bearing on politics. Even Confucianism, which merits careful study, must be summarized and re-stated as briefly as possible. Confucianism has suffered from an ambiguity and exoticism of terms, when presented to the West; its full significance as a political philosophy can become fully apparent only when it is rendered in the words of the hour.

What was it that Confucius did in protest against the established discord of the world he knew? He struck directly at the foundations of politics.

His criticisms and remedies can be fully appreciated only by reference to a theory of ideology.

Confucius perceived that the underlying problem of society was that of ideology; he seems to have realized that the character of a society itself essentially depends upon the character of the moral ideas generally prevalent among the individuals composing it, and that where there is no common body of ideas a society can scarcely be said to exist.(29) He did not consider, as did Han Fei-tzu and the legalist school of philosophers, questions of law the preeminent social problem. He realized that state and law were remedies, and that the prime questions of organization were those anterior to the political, and that the state existed for the purpose of filling out the shortcomings of social harmony.(30)

In a society-such as Confucius dreamed of-where there was no disagreement in outlook, policy would not be a governmental question; if there were no disharmony of thought and of behavior, there would be no necessity of enforcing conformance to the generally accepted criteria of conduct. From this standpoint, government itself is socially pathological, a remedy for a poorly ordered society. Men are controlled indirectly by the examples of virtue; they do good because they have learned to do good and do it unquestioningly and simply. Whatever control is exercised over men is exercised by their ideology, and if other men desire control they must seek it through shaping the ideas of others. At its full expression, such a doctrine would not lead to mere anarchy; but it would eliminate the political altogether from the culture of man, replacing it with an educational process. Ideological control would need to be supplemented by political only if it failed to cover the total range of social behavior, and left loopholes for conflict and dispute.

This doctrine is framed in quite different terms by Confucius, who spoke and wrote in an age when the mystical elements of the old feudal ideology still exercised powerful and persuasive influence, and when there was no other society than his own which he might make the object of his study.

The central point of his teachings is the doctrine of _jen_. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, one of the most brilliant modern exponents of ancient Chinese philosophy, wrote of this:

In the simplest terms, "Jen" means fellow-feeling for one's kind.

Once Fan Chih, one of his disciples, asked Confucius what "Jen"

meant. Confucius replied, "To love fellow-men"; in other words this means to have a feeling of sympathy toward mankind....

Intellectually the relationship becomes common purpose; emotionally it takes the form of fellow-feeling.(31)

This doctrine appears more specific in its application when it is realized that Confucius regarded his own society and mankind as coterminous.

Barbarians, haunting the fringes of the world, were unconscious of _jen_; not being in sympathy with mankind, they were not as yet fully human.

_Jen_ is a word which cannot be exactly translated into English. It is laden with a burden of connotations which it has acquired through the centuries; its variability of translation may be shown by the fact that, in the standard translations of the Chinese cla.s.sics, it is written "Benevolence." It might equally well be given as "consciousness of one's place and function in society." The man who followed _jen_ was one who was aware of his place in society, and of his partic.i.p.ation in the common endeavors of mankind.

_Jen_, or society-mindedness, leads to an awareness of virtue and propriety (_teh_ and _yi_). When virtue and propriety exist, it is obligatory that men follow them. Behavior in accordance with virtue and propriety is _li_. Commonly translated "ethics," this is seen as the fruition of the force of _jen_ in human society. _Jen_ underlies and establishes society, from the existence of which spring virtue and propriety; these prescribe principles for human conduct, the formulation of which rules is _li_.(32) Auxiliary to _li_ is _cheng ming_. _Cheng ming_ is the rightness of names: _li_, the appropriateness of relationships. _Li_, it may be noted, is also translated "rites" or "ceremonies"; a rendering which, while not inexact, fails to convey the full import of the term.

_Cheng ming_, the rectification of names, may be regarded as a protest against the discords in language that had developed during the transitional period from feudalism to eventual unity. Confucius, of course, did not have as sharp an issue confronting him as do the modern Western innovators in social and political ideology. Nevertheless, the linguistic difficulty was clear to him. The expansion of the Chinese written language was so great at that time that it led to the indiscriminate coining of neologisms, and there was a tendency towards a sophisticated hypocrisy in the use of words.(33)

Confucius saw that, in obtaining harmony, language needed to be exact; otherwise long and fruitless disputes over empty words might be engaged in or, what was even worse, words might not conform to the realities of social life, and might be used as instruments of ill-doing. Confucius did not, however, present a scheme of word-worship. He wanted communication to cement society, to be an instrument of concord. He wanted, in modern terms, a terminology which by its exactness and suitability would of itself lead to harmony.(34) In advocating the rectification of names, Confucius differed from many other founders of philosophies and religions; they, too, wanted names rectified-terminology reorganized-to suit their particular doctrines; but there they stopped short. Confucius regarded the rectification of names as a continuous process, one which had to be carried on unceasingly if communication, for the sake of social harmony, was to remain just and exact.

_Cheng ming_ is highly significant in Confucian thought, and exhibits the striking difference between the Chinese and the older Western political study. If the terms by means of which the communication within a society is effected, and in which the group beliefs of fact or of value are to be found, can be the subject of control, there is opened up a great field of social engineering. _Cheng ming_ states, in recognizable although archaic terms, the existence of ideology, and proposes the strengthening of ideology. In recognizing the group (in his case, mankind) as dependent upon ideology for group existence, Confucius delivered Chinese political thought from any search for an ontology of the _real state_. It became possible to continue, in the traditional pragmatic manner,(35) thinking of men in simple terms referring only to individual men, avoiding the hypostatizations common in the West. In pointing out the necessity for the control of ideology by men, Confucius antic.i.p.ated theories of the "pedagogical state" by some twenty centuries.

_Li_, in the terminology of the present work, is the conformity of the individual to the moral ideology, or, stated in another manner, the control of men by the ideology.(36)

_Li_, conformity to the ideology, implies, of course, conformity to those parts of it which determine value. _Li_ prescribes the do-able, the thinkable. In so far as the ideology consists of valuations, so far do those valuations determine _li_. Hsu lists the operations of _li_ in six specific categories:

(1) it furnishes the principles of political organization; (2) it furnishes details for the application of the doctrine of ratification; (3) it discusses the functions of government; (4) it prescribes the limitations of governmental authority; (5) it advances principles of social administration; and (6) it provides a foundation for crime and lawsuits. These are only the political functions of _li_. Its force is to be regarded as equally effective in every other type of human behavior.(37)

The approach to society contained in the doctrines of _jen_, _cheng ming_, and _li_ is, therefore, one which largely eliminates the necessity for politics. Its influence may be estimated from three points of view: (1) to what degree was government different from what it might have been had it followed the line of development that government did in the West? (2) what was the range of governmental action in such a system? and (3) what was the relation of government to the other inst.i.tutions of a Confucian society?

In regard to the first point, it will be seen immediately that government, once _cheng ming_ has been set in motion, is not a policy-making body.

There is no question of policy, no room for disagreement, no alternative.

What is right is apparent. Politics, in the narrow sense of the word, ceases to be a function of government; only administration remains.

Secondly, government needs to administer only for two purposes. The chief of these is the maintenance of the ideology. Once right views are established, no individual is ent.i.tled to think otherwise. Government must treat the heterodox as malefactors. Their crime is greater than ordinary crime, which is a mere violation of right behavior; they pollute right thought, set in motion the forces of discord, and initiate evils which may work on and on through the society, even after the evil-thinkers themselves are dead. To protect the society actively against discord, the government must encourage the utterance of the accepted truth. The scholar is thus the highest of all the social cla.s.ses; it is he who maintains agreement and order. The government becomes, in maintaining the ideology, the educational system. The whole political life is education, formal or informal. Every act of the leader is a precept and an example. The ruler does not compel virtue by law; he spreads it by his conspicuous example.

The other function of the government in maintaining the ideology lies in the necessity of dealing with persons not affected by the ideology.

Barbarians are especially formidable, since both heretics and criminals may be restored to the use of their reason, while barbarians may not, so long as they remain barbarians. Accordingly, the government is also a defense system. It is a defense against open and physical disruption from within-as in the case of insurrectionaries or bandits-and a defense against forces from without which, as veritable powers of darkness, cannot be taught and are amenable only to brute force.

In connection with the third point, government itself appears as subject to _li_. It has no right to do wrong. The truth is apparent to everyone, and especially to the scholars. In this wise the Chinese governments were at the mercy of their subjects. No divine right shielded them when public opinion condemned them; ill-doing governments were twice guilty and contemptible, because of the great force of their examples. An evil emperor was not only a criminal; he was a heresiarch, leading many astray, and corrupting the virtue upon which society rested-virtue being the maintenance of a true and moral ideology, and conformity to it.

The consequence of these teachings was such that we may say, without sacrificing truth to paradox, that the aim of Chinese government was anarchy-not in the sense of disorder, but in the sense of an order so just and so complete that it needed no governing. The _laissez-faire_ of the Chinese was not only economic; it was political. The Great Harmony of Confucius, which was his Utopia, was conceived of as a society where the excellence of ideology and the thoroughness of conformity to ideology had brought perfect virtue, perfect happiness.

The other doctrines of Confucius, his practical teachings on statesmanship, his discourses on the family-these cannot be entered into here. Enough has, perhaps, been shown to demonstrate the thoroughness of Confucius' reaction against state and nation.(38) This reaction was to continue, and to become so typical that the whole Chinese system of subsequent centuries was called Confucian,(39) until the exigencies of a newer, larger, and more perilous world led to Sun Yat-sen's teaching of modern Chinese nationalism. Before taking up the doctrine of _min tsu_, it may be worthwhile to summarize the manner in which Chinese society, deliberately and accidentally, each in part, followed out the doctrines of Confucius in its practical organization.

The Chinese World-Society of Eastern Asia.

It would be, of course, absurd to pretend to a.n.a.lyze the social system of China in a few paragraphs; and yet it is necessary to the study of Sun Yat-sen that certain characteristics be at least mentioned. Several problems appear which are quite outstanding. What was the social position and function of each individual? How were refractory individuals to be disciplined in accordance with the requirements that the general opinion of society imposed? What were the ultimate ends which the organization of Chinese society was to realize? How were the educational system and the frontier defenses to be maintained? What was to be the position and power of the political organization?

At the outset it is necessary that a working demarcation of the political be established. Accepting, by definition, those coercive controls as political which are operated for the preservation of society as a whole, and are recognized within the society as so doing, we see immediately that the range of the political must have been much less in old China than it has been in the West. Western societies tend, at least in law, to emphasize the relationship between the individual and the society as a whole; free and una.s.sociated individuals tend to become extraordinarily unstable. In the old Chinese society the control of the individual was so much an ideological one, that political control was infinitely narrower than in the West. But, in order to effectuate ideological control, there must be an organization which will permit pressure to be exercised on the individual in such a compelling manner that the exercise of external coercion becomes unnecessary. In a society in which the state has withered away, after an enormous expansion in the subject-matter of its control,(40) the totalitarian state is succeeded by the totalitarian tradition, if-and the qualification is an important one-the indoctrination has been so effective that the ideology can maintain itself in the minds of men without the continuing coercive power of the state to uphold it. If the ideology is secure, then control of the individual will devolve upon those persons making up his immediate social environment, who-in view of the uniform and secure notions of right and justice prevailing-can be relied upon to attend to him in a manner which will be approved by the society in general.

In China the groups most conspicuous within the society were the family system, the village and district, and the _hui_ (a.s.sociation; league; society, in the everyday sense of the word).

The family was an intricate structure. A fairly typical instance of family organization within a specific village has been described in the following terms: "The village is occupied by one sib, a uni-lateral kinship group, exogamous, monogamous but polygynous, composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the natural family, the economic-family, the religious-family, and the sib."(41) The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The economic family may have had a natural family as its core, but commonly extended through several degrees of kinship, and may have included from thirty to one hundred persons, who formed a single economic unit, living and consuming collectively. The religious family was an aggregate of economic families, of which it would be very difficult to give any specified number as an average. It was religious in that it provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of ancestors, and maintained an ancestral shrine where the proper genealogical records could be kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern times. The sib corresponded roughly to the clan, found in some Western communities; its role was determined by the immediate environment. In some cases-as especially in the south-the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one or more sibs dominated whole communities; in the greater part of China it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite the various local religious families which const.i.tuted it.

Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality of the human race; it oriented the individual, not only philosophically, but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant heights of n.o.bility or falling to the degradation of a slavery in which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by outsiders or the menace of his own potential follies. It was largely through the family system, with its religious as well as economic and social foundation, that the Chinese solved the problem of adequate mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole, and gave to that stability a clear and undeniable purpose-the continued generation of the human race through the continuity of a mult.i.tude of families, each determined upon survival.

The family was the most obviously significant of the groupings within the society, but it was equalled if not excelled in importance by the village.(42)

Had the family been the only important social grouping, it might have been impossible for any democracy to develop in China. It so occurred that the family pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the importance of villages in Chinese life negated the too sharp influence of a familistic government. It would have been the most awful heresy, as it is in j.a.pan today, to revolt against and depose an unrighteous father; there was nothing to prevent the deposition or destruction of an evil village elder. In times of concord, the Emperor was the father of the society; at other times, when his rule was less successful, he was a fellow-villager subject to the criticism of the people.

The village was the largest working unit of non-political administration; that is to say, groups within and up to the village were almost completely autonomous and not subject to interference, except in very rare cases, from outside. The village was the smallest unit of the political. The District Magistrate, as the lowest officer in the political-educational system, was in control of a district containing from one to twenty villages, and negotiated, in performing the duties imposed upon him, with the village leaders. The villages acted as self-ruling communes, at times very democratic.(43)

Next in importance, among Chinese social groups, after the family and the village was the _hui_. It was in all probability the last to appear.

Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, the a.s.sociation found its justification in the deeply ingrained propensities of the Chinese to cooperate. Paralleling and supplementing the former two, the _hui_ won for itself a definite and unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure.

The kinds of _hui_ may be cla.s.sified into six categories:(44) 1) the fraternal societies; 2) insurance groups; 3) economic guilds; 4) religious societies; 5) political societies; and 6) organizations of militia and vigilantes. The _hui_ made up, in their economic form, the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and provided the system of vocational education for persons not destined to literature and administration. Politically, it was the _hui_-under such names as the Triad and the Lotus-that provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever objectionable social or economic conditions developed.

The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, villages, and _hui_, comprised a whole "known world." Its strength was like that of a dinosaur in modern fable; having no one nerve-centre, the world-society could not be destroyed by inroads of barbarians, or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The ideology which has been called Confucian continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation of persons emanc.i.p.ated from the tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government went forward, even though dynasties fell and the whole country was occasionally over-run by conquerors. The absence of any juristically rigid organization permitted the Chinese to maintain a certain minimum of order, even in the absence of an emperor, or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.

The governmental superstructure cemented the whole Chinese world together in a formal manner; it did not create it. The family, the village, and the _hui_ were fit subjects for imperial comment, but there was nothing in their organization to persuade the student that the Emperor-by virtue of some Western-type _Kompetenz Kompetenz_-could remove his sanction from their existence and thereby annihilate them. There was no precarious legal personality behind the family, the village, and the _hui_, which could be destroyed by a stroke of law. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland clan of the MacGregor-"the proscribed name"-without liquidating the members of the clan _in toto_. In China the Emperor beheld a family as a quasi-individual, and when enraged at them was p.r.o.ne to wipe them out with ma.s.sacre. Only in a very few cases was it possible for him to destroy an organization without destroying the persons composing it; he could, for example, remove the privilege of a scholarship system from a district, prefecture, or province without necessarily disposing of all the scholars involved in the move. The government of China-which, in the normal run of affairs, had no questions of policy, because policy was traditional and inviolable-continued to be an administration dedicated to three main ends-the maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the society as a whole against barbarians (military affairs) and against the adverse forces of nature (public works on the most extensive-and not intensive-scale), and the collection of funds for the fulfillment of the first two ends (revenue). The Emperor was also the t.i.tular family head of the Chinese world.

The educational system was identical with the administrative, except in the case of the foreign dynasties. (Under the Manchus, for example, a certain quota of Manchu officials were a.s.signed throughout the government, irrespective of their scholastic rank in contrast to the Chinese.) It was a civil service, an educational structure, and a ritualist organization.

Selected from the people at large, scholars could-at least in theory-proceed on the basis of sheer merit to any office in the Empire excepting the Throne. Their advancement was graduated on a very elaborate scale of degrees, which could be attained only by the pa.s.sing of examinations involving an almost perfect knowledge of the literature of antiquity and the ability to think in harmony with and reproduce that literature. The Chinese scholar-official had to learn to do his own thinking by means of the cliches which he could learn from the cla.s.sics; he had to make every thought and act of his life conform to the pattern of the ideology. Resourceful men may have found in this a proper fortification for their originality, as soon as they were able to cloak it with the expressions of respect; mediocre persons were helpless beyond the bounds of what they had learned.

The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar cla.s.s, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded-except in rare instances-on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was a.s.sured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government a.s.sistance. The educational system also served as the subst.i.tute for a n.o.bility. Hereditary cla.s.s distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.(45) In a society which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful n.o.bility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order.