CHAPTER VIII

RECONSTRUCTION 167

The National Government of China 167

The Chinese Soviet Republic 182

Other Governments in China 184

The Growth of Government in China 186

CONCLUSION 191

The Collapse of the Imperial Society 191

The Nature of the Transformation 192

The Problems of Government in China 193

The Question of Chinese Political Survival 195

CHRONOLOGY OF DYNASTIES 197

INDEX 199

INTRODUCTION

The origins of Chinese society may reach half a million years into the

past. Anthropologists have suggested that Sinanthropus Pekinensis, among

the earliest forms of man, resembles the modern Chinese more closely

than he does any other modern race. In what specific period the earliest

ancestors of the Chinese came to China is not known. It is certain,

however, that about 1500 B. C. there existed a well-developed

civilized society in the Yellow River valley, and that this same society

has lived on--modified by the centuries, but in unbroken

continuity--down into the present. China has outlasted Crete, Tyre,

Greece, and Rome. The Aztec empire, which arose in Mexico when China was

already ancient, has become only a memory, while China is still vital.

How is it that China's institutions survive, while those of other

nations did not? How real are Chinese institutions today? What,

precisely, is the Republic of China?

_Duality or Confluence?_

The phrase _Republican China_ indicates an era rather than a system. The

preceding ages of China have been known by the names of great dynasties.

T'ang China (620-906 A. D.) overawed and instructed all eastern Asia.

Sung China (A. D. 960-1279) flourished, civilian and tolerant, in a

world marked by bigotry and arms. Well into the past century the West

remained distant and vague. Republican China struggles in the presence

of the modern world and subject to its superior force; her very name is

a capitulation to the twentieth century. The problems of the Republican

era are not merely the problems of republican government; they involve

the broad question of the meeting and interpenetration of civilizations.

How are the Chinese, schooled for thousands of years in the effective

operation of their own political system, to adapt themselves fast enough

to the Western scheme? What happens when they must and yet cannot

effectuate such adaptation? These are not queries to be answered simply

in the routine terms of Western politics.

For the past three thousand years and more the eastern end of the

European-Asiatic land mass has formed a world to itself. Most of this

time it was larger, richer, and more civilized than the European world.

Down to the nineteenth century of the Christian era the Chinese had no

reason to suppose that theirs was not the most advanced and powerful of

civilized societies. They looked upon the Far East as the all-inclusive

universe of civilization; to them, their way of life was the

common-sense way. The Europeans did likewise, with reference to their

own sphere. When the European realm expanded so as to include the whole

planet, when Western civilization began to dominate the earth, and the

Christian family of nations became the world-wide international system,

the Chinese were forced to concede that the Far East could not be kept

to itself. They have found it indispensable to respond, as individuals

and as a people, to the new environment closing in on them. Doing so has

necessitated the reexamination and restatement of nearly all basic

values of Chinese life.

Since the nineteenth century the Chinese have been faced with the

alternative of adhering to their own traditions or accepting those of

the West. Institutions and practices which are so well established that

they seem to rest on sheer common sense in each of the competing

civilizations have been placed in juxtaposition. As a result, the

Chinese now know two kinds of common sense to justify a course of

action. The ensuing difficulty at times goes deeper; for they may be

said to have even two kinds of sanity. In old China a man who wanted no

sons seemed a patent lunatic; in the Western world he might be perfectly

sane. A modern Chinese faces thousands of such choices.

_The Peculiarities of Old China_

Obviously, government in Republican China cannot be understood without

analysis of the foundations upon which it is built. Such an analysis

requires an inquiry, however cursory, into the peculiarities of old

China and those of contemporary China. Some of the difficulties of

modern China arise from the very adequacy of the old system. Had the

Chinese of the past been less satisfied with their society, they might

have become more accustomed to change and transience.

China from the first millennium B. C. occupied the central position in

the Far East. No other country in that part of the earth was so powerful

or so civilized. India, despite important contributions to Chinese

religious thought, was too far away to impinge greatly upon the Chinese.

Japan was heavily indebted to the Chinese, and encouraged the Chinese in

viewing themselves as the most civilized of peoples. This had important

consequences. As China was unified most of the time, and as there was no

other polity to compare with the Chinese, their political system took on

the appearance of a universal empire. The neighboring states paid formal

tribute, and the Chinese were unprepared to meet another people who

might claim political equality as an organized state. Even today, in the

attitudes of the Chinese and Japanese toward one another, there are

strong traces of this traditional point of view and indications that the

Japanese would like to restore a closed Far Eastern order with

themselves in supremacy.

Since old China was rarely confronted with international problems, the

Chinese were not aware of their realm as a nation-state. There was no

sharp territorial limit to the Chinese polity, and no requirement that

within certain boundaries one authority be defined as supreme. The

Chinese were able to make their adjustments in the interplay of social

and political controls with less frequent resort to theory than the

Westerners. Nor was the Chinese ruler ever so firmly entrenched as to

eliminate the chance of being overthrown or to preclude the existence of

other--pluralistic--independent social controls. The power of government

was indeed limited. It maintained the peace of the Chinese world,

directed education, supported the social proprieties, and was ornamental

rather than efficient for the greater part of its activities.

The Chinese lived primarily under the dominance of nonpolitical

agencies. These were the family (comparable to the Western clan), the

village and district, and the _hui_ (association, guild, society--in the

narrowest sense of the term). The family was intimately bound up with

the Chinese religious system, which stressed the continuity of each

individual in the flesh. A personal immortality was to be secured with

greatest certainty through the survival of one's own blood. The village

was the main economic unit, and the union of villages into districts

(_hsien_) provided an administrative division of importance: below the

_hsien_ level, common interests were fostered by community home rule;

above it, by the government. This meant that elders, clans in council,

village bosses, and other nongovernmental agencies carried on police

work, all local public construction, and most of the activities which

are regarded in the modern West as falling under the jurisdiction of the

state. The _hui_ was able to supplement the family and the village; in

guild form, it provided the chief framework of commercial and industrial

organization.

If the government was weak and limited, and social control ensured

primarily by nongovernmental agencies, how did the Chinese achieve so

great a political stability? Why did their polity not break up into a

wilderness of tiny social groups, each jealous and particularistic, like

medieval Europe? The answer is to be found in the psychological controls

which the Chinese established. They devised a system of indoctrination

unequaled by that of any other people.

The Chinese sought to guide men through the guidance of their ideas:

government by education, or government by propaganda. For this purpose

scholarship and administration were closely allied. The government was

made up of scholars, who thereby occupied the position of greatest

prestige in the society; the scholars were trained to serve as

government officials. Few officials were not scholars; few scholars

pursued a nonpolitical course. This led to a profound uniformity of

thought, and was in accord with the dictates of the Confucian

tradition.[1]

From the earliest times Chinese thought was social and political in

emphasis, rather than metaphysical and scientific. For thousands of

years scholars studied problems of society, government, and ethics. They

appealed to tradition, and interpreted it. They organized the primitive

religion of the Chinese into a sophisticated social philosophy, and over

the centuries their work took effect. Chinese of different racial

backgrounds, using different spoken languages and unable to communicate

with one another by writing, living under different climatic and

economic conditions, came to show a startling uniformity of behavior.

Custom and common sense were woven into a solid pattern by the scholars

and accepted by the masses. Everything in human life bore some relation

to everything else, and the life of man was related to the world of

nature. There was no sharp distinction between natural science and

social philosophy.

The educational integration of government, mores, and physical existence

created a system of control which has exceeded all others in lasting

power. The group in command was the scholastic bureaucracy, but

membership in it was not hereditary. Scholar-officials were recruited by

civil service examinations, and to this degree the society was a

democratic one. Every child in the society had the theoretical

opportunity of becoming prime minister. Furthermore, the power exercised

by the scholar-officials was different in its nature from that of legal

rulers in the West. Government was preventive rather than remedial.

Constitutionality was not confined to legal matters; in a broader sense

it extended to all subjects. The scholars were as much subject to

established tradition as the humblest Chinese, and everyone knew the

tradition. The scholars excelled only in knowing it more thoroughly.

It may be stated as a truism that under any government the actual scope

of its intervention is confined to a certain category of affairs,

bounded on the one hand by matters which are so trivial or so unexplored

that they are left to the citizen's free choice and on the other by

subjects in which there is such general agreement as to make political

action unnecessary. This latter sphere might be called ideological

compliance--control of men brought about by the inculcation of broad

uniform patterns of belief and behavior. If men are induced to agree

upon a traditionally fixed mode of behavior, they will unite in

persecuting dissenters and will not be conscious of the tyranny of

ideological doctrine. But if they think in many different ways, they

will be able to gain security only by promises of mutual

noninterference. Liberty--as absence of governmental restraint--may thus

result either from a complete concord, in which every man is free to do

as he wishes since all men wish to do basically the same, or from a

specific guarantee of each individual's freedom to follow his own

interest or caprice within a defined limit. The old system of China was

a free society in so far as dissent calling for government interference

was relatively negligible, and at the same time a society rigidly

controlled with respect to the uniformity of individual behavior.

This tradition was pragmatic and realistic. The Chinese ideological

controls operated successfully because they corresponded reasonably well

with the actualities of social and economic existence. With the coming

of the West, the old Chinese system was affected in two ways: First, the

amorphous Chinese society was threatened by the strong, effectively

organized states of the West. Secondly, the competitive accomplishments

of Western civilization destroyed, in large part, the assumption of

universality upon which much Chinese tradition depended, and thereby

impaired the power of the scholar-officials. The twentieth century

brought China a new freedom, unaccustomed and unsought. The old system

was threatened with ruin, and modern China faced the problem:

replacement or reconstitution? Or, more dangerously: chaos or political

extinction?

_The Peculiarities of Modern China_

The lifetime of one man can span the gap between old China and new.

There are men living in Peking today who can remember when the Forbidden

City (the palace-city of the emperors) was sacred and inviolate, and

when the mandarinate ruled in accordance with immemorial usage. These

may regard all Western science as a confusion, a wild torrent of exotic

words, which answers no problems, gives human life no aim and no

dignity, and is bound to return to the alien dust whence it came.

Opposing them are younger Chinese who hate the dead hand of the past and

look forward to a Westernized, scientific, industrial China which will

differ from Europe and America only in being even more modern than they.

Most Chinese fall into neither of these groups. Many of them, however,

have a definite conception of the West and of the benefits which Western

civilization has to bestow. They also realize the threat which it

contains for those who do not master it. Yet they have been nurtured in

the serene humanity of ancient custom and hold to it with the

effortlessness of habit long transmitted. Out of this dual standard

there spring daily problems of ethics and conduct, of private life and

public policy. Administrative organization versus family loyalty and

nepotism, promptness versus leisureliness, discipline versus courtesy:

these and many others are omnipresent antitheses.

Anachronism is China's second self. There is no set scheme of things.

Modern Western civilization has not been adopted so fully as to make the

traditional habits seem outmoded, nor has the past survived to an extent

as to make everything modern appear ridiculous. The notion of world

government, for example, is gone from China, and the notion of

multi-national government not yet clear. The relation of the individual

to society and of the parts of society to the whole are not yet

reformulated; this affects such matters as criminal law, political

organization, and economic development. Virtually every adaptation in

China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and

even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think

after the fashion of the West--scientifically and logically--or are they

to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner?

It is thus patent that the new Chinese world which is appearing must

grow out of the background of the past and the necessities of the

present. It cannot readily be planned because there are not enough

formulas common to the old Far Eastern and the new Western worlds. New

China must be a blending, from use, from habit, from new skills imposed

upon old. Out of the dangers and misfortunes of the years since 1912 the

Chinese have developed a small body of political methods which is

temporarily workable. But the greater part of their social and

governmental thought and custom has yet to go through the process of

reevaluation by practice. Chinese political development has perforce to

be emergent and not planned.

According to either time scheme, that of her long past or of the modern

world, modern China is anachronistic. The transformation of the Chinese

world of the past to the China of the future involves the creation of a

whole set of transitional institutions designed to lead from one to the

other. Contemporary Chinese institutions are neither those of the past

nor those of the future; they are a peculiar scheme of more recent

origin and bound to be replaced. Old China is gone. Modern China is

novel and unstable; in time it too will yield to a China of which

prophecy affords but few glimpses.

_The World Significance of Chinese Government_

If government in Republican China is an extemporized and doomed system,

rooted in no past, committed to no future, why should it be scrutinized

at all? A number of reasons for examining Chinese government suggest

themselves. Some of these are of sufficient significance to merit

statement, so as to suggest facts and issues worthy of special notice.

If certain points of key importance are kept in mind, they may serve as

references whereby the relative ranking of any specific topic may be

ascertained.

First, the mere geographic extent of China is such as to make her

government necessary to a picture of contemporary governments. At least

every fifth human being now living is a Chinese.

Second, in international relations China has been of great passive

importance. The wars between Western and Far Eastern nations have all

been fought over the so-called Chinese question. The partition of China

and the open door in China have been issues of international concern.

Since 1931 the Chinese have been active participants in the struggle for

the control of China, and the nature of their government determines in

large part the effectiveness of their resistance. China is a vast

market, and an even vaster reserve of man power--for troops or for

industrial labor.

Third, the pathology of government deserves attention. Chronic social

disorder may provide a great variety of political facts wherewith to

gauge the nature of political power. Well-governed societies do not

supply similar material because they rarely need to probe political

fundamentals.

Fourth, old China offers a challenging demonstration of secular,

civilian, pacific world government. The Chinese commonwealth of the past

was supernational; it seemed to the Chinese like unified civilized

humanity. Among the conflicting currents of present world politics,

there are some which drift toward world unity; old China may present

significant analogies to the international institutions of today.

Fifth, the universal features of government may be more fruitfully

scrutinized in a novel cultural and social setting. China presents a

background radically different from the Western one, and affords a

unique test whereby Western political patterns and those of world-wide

significance may be distinguished from one another.

Sixth, the question of method in political science may meet

qualifications after being applied to Chinese political thought. The

Chinese did not seek that illusory precision which has been one of the

chief goals of Western thought ever since logical procedure was

established by the Greeks. The Western man in the street, however,

depends very little on mathematics or logic in his everyday thinking.

Indirectly, the effect of inductive and deductive method has been

revolutionary, but their importance in routine operation or

unspecialized thought is open to question--especially in view of the

findings of modern psychology. It may well be that Chinese thought can

assist in the interpretation of everyday experience in the West,

precisely because it is not too specialized or scientific.

Seventh, the Chinese may contribute in a practical way to political

knowledge and leadership throughout the world. These contributions may

be anticipated by a consideration of past and present Chinese

government.

Eighth, the Chinese have lived in a peculiar historical environment,

consideration of which may broaden our outlook. Most Western "world

histories"--with few exceptions such as H. G. Wells's brilliant

_Outline_--are histories of the West Asiatic and European worlds, with

only perfunctory references to China.

The relative novelty of Chinese materials to Western research explains

in great part the neglect accorded them in the Western social sciences.

With the narrowing of the world by modern means of transport and

communication the situation is changing. The science of Sinology

(systematic study of China through Chinese texts) has won its place

among the archaeological disciplines. Sinologists have made available to

Westerners a great deal of material, but its value depends in large part

upon the degree to which it is incorporated into the generally

accessible and usable body of knowledge.

_The Main Factors in Modern Chinese Government_

In the consideration of modern Chinese government a somewhat novel

approach to government is called for: one which distinguishes different

elements and levels of control and makes plain their interrelation. The

narrow consideration of the formal structure would be puzzling and

discouraging, since the various governments of modern China have been

the ornaments rather than the engines of political power. An attempt to

explain modern China in terms of constitutional legal development alone

would lead to exasperation or frustration; the ideological and

institutional context which might convey meaning would be lost.

How can government be studied when politics are antecedent to

government? If the rulers make and unmake the form of government almost

at will, where is the real source of their power? If armies can dissolve

overnight and be reassembled under different banners on the morrow,

military power may seem tenuous and dependent on other factors. What are

these? If property is insecure and the standards of wealth subject to

variation, how can economic power be treated as an ultimate determinant?

How do men wield authority of any sort, while they create or destroy the

machinery of authority?

For centuries China had been held together by a close-knit system

dependent upon tradition. This tradition, the ideology called

_Confucian_, was the device whereby the scholar-officials of the old

imperial bureaucracy controlled society. Government itself was

subordinate to the moral and social leadership of the intellectuals, who

relegated the economic and military professions to the less honored

categories of society. The whole fabric of Chinese life was made up of

interlocking patterns; the West, by destroying a part, tore the whole

asunder. Modern China faces more than political problems; a totalitarian

revolution has engulfed it. China has been proceeding not from partial

control to complete control, as are Italy,[2] Germany,[3] and the

Soviets,[4] but from complete control to something not far from

universal license--freedom all-pervading, unwanted, and terrifying. The

problem of modern Chinese government is the problem of re-creating

government out of its raw materials: land, people, doctrine, force, and

law.

In this problem certain factors stand forth as preeminent: ideological

movements, military and economic factors, governments.

First, the movements. These supplant the ancient tradition and the old

hierarchy of scholars. In the place of one settled authority over all

subjects, there suddenly appeared thousands of little authorities.

Anarchism, dress reform, Christianity, feminism, nationalism,

pro-Japanism, communism, atheism, capitalism--discordant and partially

contradictory, these all compete for the authority or a part of the

authority once held by the old system. China undergoes intellectual,

moral, educational, political, economic, military, scientific, and

industrial revolutions all at once, and all for the same reason--the

passing of the old unified order. Imagine the Renaissance, the

Reformation, the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, the Gold

Rush of '49, the World War, and the Russian Revolution all happening in

the same country in the same generation! This is a common-place

comparison, frequently made. Movements determined the loyalty of troops,

the title to property, the form of government. Power inhered in them,

since they determined the conditions under which men would seek and

wield power. A great part of the control of China has been exerted

directly, by means of the movements themselves.

Second, the armies took the power which goes with military force, simply

because theirs was military force. They did not have to seek power. It

accrued to them, out of the disorder of society. Along with military

power went economic power as the most tangible and negotiable. Guns and

property seem very realistic indices of power, as long as the troops are

loyal and the property safe from confiscation or devaluation.

Third, the governments. Between ideological movements, which sought to

rebuild the ideas and habits of men, and armies wielding a brief but

nearly unrestricted authority, government played its tertiary role. It

was at times of ludicrous unimportance, and on some occasions possessed

power in its own right. It leaped to a sharply improved position after

1928, but never possessed the generality of assent or the monopoly of

force to the degree common in the West.

_The Approach_

Government may mean the control (or attempted control) of society by men

professing to act in the name of all society. In this sense it includes

propagandists and educators who seek to reconstitute society, leaders of

movements, soldiers, economic leaders of all classes, and government

leaders (so far as they use government establishments as an actual means

of control). Viewed thus, the political processes of modern China are

manifold and significant. Here is power stripped naked, power without

ornament, power resting squarely upon the brains or guns of men. Men

rise and fall in the contest for power; they rise and fall absolutely,

not in a fictitious scheme which establishes a fictitious order of

constitutional offices sometimes providing asylum for popular leaders in

eclipse.

Government may also mean the structure and function of that formally

organized group in society which claims to act upon the mandate of legal

sovereignty. When the concept of sovereignty itself is vague, confused,

or absent, government by title may be merely one among several factors

of power. Government in China is broader than the governments of China;

the two should be distinguished from one another.

In outlining government in Republican China, the present analysis

follows the broader construction of the word _government_. The

governments proper are accordingly discussed in the last part, the first

two being devoted to the ideological movements and to the military and

economic factors. For the purpose of defining the three sets of controls

as clearly as possible, each is treated separately. This has

necessitated a corresponding arrangement of the historical data, though

in each part presented from a different point of view. But it is highly

desirable that the long-range Chinese chronology be kept in mind. To

this end a table of Chinese dynasties has been provided.[5] As a result

of separate analysis the movements, the armies, and the governments may

appear in bolder relief than would otherwise be possible, and the role

of government in the broadest sense may be made clearer, not only for

China but for the West as well.

NOTES

[1] For a description of this system see below, pp. 18 ff.

[2] _Cf._ H. Arthur Sterner, _Government in Fascist Italy_, New York and

London, 1938.

[3] _Cf._ Fritz Morstein Marx, _Government in the Third Reich_, 2d ed.,

New York and London, 1937.

[4] _Cf._ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, _Soviet Communism_, 2d ed., New

York, 1937.

[5] See below, p. 197.

FIRST PART

MOVEMENTS

_Chapter_ I

CONFUCIANISM

The continuity of Chinese civilization depends not alone upon its

political virtues, but upon its working effectiveness in all relevant

spheres of human activity. In emphasizing certain aspects of old China,

it is impossible to trace the entire broad evolution.[1] In fact, the

emergence of those devices which, along with government in the narrow

sense, guided China in her long past dates back to prehistory.

Throughout the ages, however, Chinese life has preserved its identity.

Chinese culture is unique in its continuity. Its most striking

characteristic is a capacity for change without disruption. It would

appear that that characteristic goes back even to [those] cultures

which preceded the Shang in northeast China. Shang culture, like all

great cultures, was eclectic, fertilized by influences from many

quarters. But these influences and techniques, when they were

accepted, met the same fate which has overtaken every people, every

religion, every philosophy which has invaded China. They were taken

up, developed to accord with Chinese conditions, and transmuted into

organic parts of a culture which remained fundamentally and

characteristically Chinese.[2]

This is the comment of H. G. Creel, an American Sinologue who has helped

to explain the archaeological sites of a Chinese civilization

considerably older than any other. Even in its historical beginnings the

civilization of man in China displayed features corresponding to that of

the modern Chinese.

_The Ages before Confucius_

The earliest Chinese state known is the Hsia, which is traditionally

termed a dynasty in the Chinese chronicles and given the dates 2205-1765

B. C. More critical examination of the materials of Chinese tradition,

the excavation of the engraved bones and bronzes from succeeding

periods, and an interpretation of Chinese history with the technique of

modern archaeology have upset the credibility of the records of the

earliest periods. All that is established is the fact that the Hsia was

a state before the Shang. It is unlikely that Hsia exercised any

imperial hegemony over other peoples, since the empire system did not

rise till Chou times.

Of the Shang dynasty (traditionally 1765-1123 B. C.) much more is

known. Thirty years ago most Western scholars thought the Shang

chronicles to be myth, but excavations in northeast China have located a

Shang capital and have unearthed a large body of inscriptions on

bone.[3] The Shang culture must have been highly developed, possessing

an urban life, writing, and a definite system of monarchical government.

The germs of scholastic leadership were present. Power was in the hands

of a single ruler (_wang_, or king), who claimed hegemony for an

undetermined distance beyond the walls of the capital.

In the twelfth century B. C. the Shang dynasty was overthrown by

conquerors from the west, the Chou. The Chou dynasty bridges the gap

between the semihistoric and the definitely historic period of Chinese

antiquity. Under the Chou the chief features of Chinese social and

intellectual existence took on clear form. From the Chou conquest and

their attempts to establish stable government China derived striking

social and political characteristics. One of the astonishing facts about

early Chinese history is the manner in which the Chou rulers utilized

propaganda to make their conquest secure, and in which their propaganda

furnished dynamic concepts of Chinese social thought and development.

The most important of these widely propagandized concepts was that of

the Chinese Empire. The city of Shang had been the center of a dominion

which could not possibly have included more than a fraction of what is

known today as China. The civilized areas along the Yellow River were

probably no larger than Palestine. Most of what is now China was

conquered in succeeding centuries. Even in this small area, it is not

known what relationship existed between the ruler of Shang and other

rulers. The Chou monarchs built up the legend that the Shang rulers had

occupied a position of primacy among the rulers of the civilized world,

and then claimed the position themselves by right of succession through

conquest. There was thus fostered the notion of one ruler, central and

supreme.

Secondly, the Chou themselves taught the doctrine of the right of

revolution. They identified their god with the Shang god instead of

declaring that their god had overwhelmed the other. They asserted that

this one god had been displeased by the profligacy and wickedness of the

Shang and had called upon the Chou to overthrow the Shang rulers. Both

these theories, refined and amplified, became fundamentals of Chinese

political thought in later ages.[4]

The Chou established a system of government which left an imprint on

Chinese politics for three thousand years. In relating their

metropolitan administration to their occupation of the lands of North

and Central China they were less successful. Lacking any other device of

government, they turned to feudalism, and on the quasi-feudal

foundations of the Shang they imposed a fief system. This led first to

the division of China into many small feudal units and later to the

appearance of powerful territorial states. The first of these

periods--that in which feudalism predominated--was known as the Ch'un

Ch'iu, or Spring and Autumn epoch (770-473 B. C.). The second--in

which the states developed--was known as the Chan Kuo, or Warring States

epoch (473-221 B. C.).

The rise of the Chou provided China with her first government on an

imperial scale and with the beginnings of a theory concerning the nature

of imperial government. The increasing disorganization during the Ch'un

Ch'iu and Chan Kuo periods led to the development of the Confucian and

other philosophies, wherein the Chinese, conscious of political

shortcomings, sought the good society.

_The Ideology Called Confucian_

551 B. C. is most commonly given as the year of Confucius' birth.

Confucius (K'ung Ch'iu; also Master K'ung--K'ung Fu-tz[)u], from which

Confucius is derived) was a wandering scholar and would-be official

whose life was spent in the advocacy of political and social reform. He

was important because of his part in establishing the profession of

teaching and for his doctrines upholding good government. Discontented

with the present, he turned to the past--becoming conservative and

aristocratic in outlook. His position in the history of political

thought he owes to the bent which he gave aristocratic conservatism. He

sought the leadership of the _chün-tz[)u]_ (the upright, superior, or

aristocratic man) rather than the domination of laws. He developed an

ethical system secular and practical in its orientation and humane in

its tenets. He emphasized the necessity of the individual's appropriate

self-consciousness in the society, and the need for following _li_

(propriety), the established values. He stressed family loyalty above

all others, and insisted on respect for tradition. After his death in

479 B. C. his ideas were elaborated, clarified, and revised into what

is known as the _Confucian system_.[5]

This system underwent many changes. The Confucian influences came to

prevail in the Han dynasty, in the second and first centuries B. C.,

but lost its official preeminence with the fall of the Han in the third

century. It nevertheless retained a great share of intellectual

leadership. In the Sung period (960-1279) the philosopher Chu Hsi

developed Confucianism into its most recent accepted form. Others joined

him in sharpening and refining Confucianism.

The Sung philosophers evolved a Confucianism which showed the influence

of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. They reinterpreted the classics

by emphasizing works other than those hitherto regarded as preeminent.

With reference to the concept _li_, they developed the notion of a truly

complete order running through both spirit and matter. Metaphysics,

alien to the mind of Confucius himself, became an operative part of

Confucian thought. Through their ethical and psychological studies the

Sung Confucians translated the Confucian rationale into an effective

ideological technique for domination. It is not inconsistent to find

them opposing any action definitely governmental. Furthermore, they

showed themselves to be conservatives in politics, and through their

commentaries on the classics--which were studied in succeeding centuries

along with the texts themselves--imprinted their conservatism upon the

Chinese mind.

The ideology called _Confucian_ is not identical with Confucianism as

the philosophic system proper. In the first place, it is not known how

much of the social doctrines taught by Confucius and his successors was

original and how much mere transmission of preexisting beliefs.

Confucius himself regarded his work as that of a transmitter and not a

creator. Secondly, the whole Chinese culture contributed elements of

strength to the ideology to which the name of Confucius became attached

by Westerners. Thirdly, the system developed in practice to an extent

which Confucius could not have anticipated. The Confucian ideology and

society bear the relation to Confucius which Christendom bears to Jesus

Christ; both founders would scarcely recognize the derivations to which

their teachings have led.

The Confucian ideology came to prevail in China just before the day of

Christ. At the time of Christ, Wang Mang, a usurper and a zealous

Confucian, shook the Han Empire with his experiments. A period of

reaction against Confucianism set in. Taoism and Buddhism provided rival

cults. After the twelfth century, Confucianism rose slowly to power over

men's minds again--although it had never been wholly superseded by other

doctrines, it had long lacked its all-compelling primacy. Not until the

Ming dynasty (1368-1643) did it become the state philosophy of China,

the ideology whereby China lived politically and whereby she was

governed.

Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular

cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role

of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese

culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered

apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely.

Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various

centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are

tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all

ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to

distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative

philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of

Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be

distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which

Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was

interpreted by Aquinas, so was Confucianism by the Sung philosophers.

Aristotelian politics are far removed from the specific problems of

representative or modern authoritarian government; nevertheless they

possess great value and exercise an indeterminable influence upon the

entire West. The analogy holds for China if left in its loosest terms.

Confucianism is far from oblivion. The China which met the Western

impact--"old China" in the eyes of the twentieth century--was in fact

more Confucian than was the West Aristotelian. She was permeated by an

ideology in which Confucius' teachings were the key pattern, though not

one which he had made up in its entirety.

_Government in the Confucian Ideology_

In Confucian China, government was reduced to a minimum. There existed a

set of institutions which in many respects afforded a remarkable

although misleading parallel to the governments of the West. In fact,

the earliest Western visitors to China found no difficulty in applying

their own political language to China. The supreme Chinese leader they

called the _emperor_, despite the inevitable Caesarian connotations of

the term and the fact that it erased the peculiar significance of the

Chinese title. Subordinate areas were called _provinces_. All the way

through, the use of European concepts compelled whole series of

unwarranted parallels. The term _mandarin_ forced its way into Western

tongues, however, since there was no existing term to describe the

members of the curious hierarchy of scholar-bureaucrats occupying a

position of hegemony among the institutions of Chinese society.

Unfortunately for Chinese as well as Westerners, both were so poorly

informed in the beginnings of intercourse that the Chinese could not

secure an adequate picture of Europe, while the Europeans assumed that

the Chinese were more, rather than less, like themselves. The Chinese

society, with a single supreme ritual leader, was termed an _empire_,

and the predominant hierarchy of that society a _government_.

Actually, modern political scientists would have to hesitate before

applying the term _government_ to the hierarchy of old China. In many

respects that hierarchy was more like Europe's medieval universities and

our fraternal societies than the governments of the West. The prestige

accruing to positions in the system was not derived so much from

political power as from the status which the system offered to its

members. An official, although he might value his power, was regarded in

the society at large almost as much for what he was as for the dignity

with which the office invested him. This arose from his peculiar role,

in which his function was to provide a model of propriety in his private

and public life rather than to interfere in the lives of others.

Interference, to be sure, occurred--sharply, Draconically, directed more

against the social group of the offender than against the offender

himself, on the theory that it was the function of the group to keep its

members in line with the common-sense traditions. In such rare cases the

officialdom became a government--government as the institution of men

who seek to control society in the name of all society. Normally the

officialdom was not a government in this sense, as it claimed leadership

rather than control, preached rather than punished, shamed rather than

intimidated the people.

Confucius said, "If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to

be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but

have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought

to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of

shame, and moreover will become good."[6] In a governmental system which

was avowedly Confucian, the officials were discouraged from trying to

formulate rules, for such rules, if specific, could only duplicate the

enactments of custom and, if general, might entangle the official in a

web of words. If the officials were personally and individually

worthless, there would be no hope for good government and the only

remedy would consist in selecting good officials and placing them in

high positions. If the officials were good, their integrity and common

sense would show them the solutions to problems and they would have no

need to solicit advice from some manual of commands. No lifeless paper

and ink could guide a people unless there were upright officials to

study the classics and put the judicious rules found in them into

effect. The only safeguard against bad government was good government by

good men; the only remedy for bad government was the effort of good men.

The Chinese never set up an imaginary machinery and turned themselves

into its cogs. To the simple, common-sense humanity of the Confucians, a

government made up of rigid laws--a system having no reference to the

personality or value of individuals, but embedded in a vast mechanism of

numbers--would have seemed anathema and lunacy.

Government in China was an auxiliary activity, the reserve power of a

hierarchy given to the pursuit of different ends. The officials were

teachers first and magistrates afterward; the emperor was a supreme

model first and a ruler afterward; the people were shamed, and punished

only when they were shameless. Such was the ideal theory upon which the

Chinese built their world society. The facts were rarely as bright as

they might have hoped; the reserve power never disappeared.

The necessity for government did not always proceed from the frailties

of the governed. The Confucian system, although worthy of its great

esteem, was marked by the difficulties which attend all human

organization. Corruption and tyranny appeared, and were not by any means

negligible. In many cases it may be supposed that a system of laws would

have provided redress for individuals treated arbitrarily or unjustly;

but, if one is to judge by experience in the West, even law brings with

it other types of injustice peculiar to itself. In China some of the

most benevolent and effective emperors advocated at times a government

of rules and not of men, in order to check the caprice and the

oppression of officials; yet the role of law in China, in contrast to

the part it has played in the West, remained slight. The West affords

instances of effective political work outside legal systems, while the

Chinese have produced law codes of considerable breadth and

significance. Nevertheless, the power of Chinese government aside from

law is just as clear as the Western development of government within

law.

The old Chinese system was based upon control through ideas, control

exercised through the maintenance of clear notions of right and wrong,

as founded in certain well-established common-sense traditions. The

world of fact and the world of right and wrong were bound together, and

the whole ideology was one of general and all-pervasive order. While the

Western impact was felt cumulatively through the nineteenth century, the

Chinese world of fact went down into the limbo of myth in a few

disestablished generations, and with it went the compulsion which

Confucian common sense had exerted.[7] The consequent development of new

ways of acting, which had nothing to do with traditional control, upset

the entire scheme. When the system of ideological guidance began

breaking down, there was a stampede to get away from it. Men no longer

trusted it, no longer trusted the tameness of their neighbors. A new

wildness, a savagery armed with science, had come with the aliens from

beyond the seas. It was the old hierarchy to which men turned, calling

it _the state_.

As a state, as an all-embracing control institution, the old Chinese

hierarchy was a pseudomorph--it looked like a state but was not really

one. Now it had to develop those characteristics of regularity,

impersonality, and machine effectiveness demanded of a state in the

modern world. It had to restore the virtue of men by telling them how it

was possible to be virtuous in a world in which all things turned and

changed with the days and not with the centuries. It had to gather

together the members of the old Chinese world-community, reorient them

with respect to the new, divided world around them, and fight off the

inroads of outsiders. Above everything else, it had to grow strong, so

that it might institute order, so that it might someday grow weak again.

On the other hand, if a governmental system were set up which tried to

maintain the precarious supremacy that Western states have enjoyed, and

which was subject to uncontrolled fluctuations in the thought of the

people upon whom it rested, the Chinese might lose their character as

Chinese. They might be absorbed into the Western world and become a

group of yellow-skinned traditionless men, living according to the

heritage of white men's laws and doomed to a perpetual inferiority

because these laws were not their own. They might be aliens upon the

earth, with no group to call their own. Such a nightmarish vision may

have come to Sun Yat-sen when he pleaded with all his heart for the

unification and defense of a China still Chinese.

The old system broke and collapsed in 1911-1912. This collapse was

hastened by the fact that the imperial family was incapable of

leadership. A succession of degenerates and children occupied the

throne--the one intelligent emperor was imprisoned by a clique--and a

fanatical old woman held enough power to keep anyone else from using it,

but not enough to lead or to want to lead a revolution from above. When

the old structure caved in, over four hundred million people were

without effective government, and no one really knew how to create it.

_The Replacement of the Confucian Ideology_

Only some of the movements which have occurred in China have had

political significance. With the collapse of the old stable order, the

Chinese fell into great confusion, devoting themselves to a variety of

doctrines and crusades. Some of these movements may be regarded as

subordinate to the day-to-day struggle for military or governmental

power; others, though within the sphere of politics as far as their

interests were concerned, never acquired sufficient importance to

impress themselves upon the general political scene.

The only movements which need be here considered are constituent ones.

It has been noted that the real basis for the stability and operation of

the old Chinese society lay not in the power of an organized body of

law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-interpreters but in the

constitutionalism of common sense, in the deep harmony of agreement

which the Confucian outlook on fact and value had created. Men were

raised tame, and what tamed them was an ideology--a unified, coherent

body of ideas--which related the knowledge of the world to the sphere of

morals, which was applied by the intellectually dominant classes as a

means of control, and which secured for the controlling classes hegemony

over all groups in society.

The moment the old order weakened, it was inevitable that men would try

to find substitutes which met four criteria: (1) a plausibly

satisfactory explanation for the world of fact; (2) a persuasively

related scheme of values (right, wrong; good, bad); (3) use of this

explanation and the value scheme (both together forming an ideology) to

control behavior; (4) authoritative status of the individuals promoting

the ideology, whether or not organized as a group.

It will be recognized that these criteria fit the great religious

movements of mankind; it is equally apparent that they lend themselves

to the promotion of governance. Governing under conditions of

ideological anarchy is at best a precarious effort--a makeshift, a

pitiable building upon sand. The Western world faces today the same

problem that the Chinese face: How are men to agree widely enough to

live together in peace? But the Chinese approached this problem from an

experience of deliberately fostered agreement. Confucianism had the

effectiveness of the great religions and a sophistication and

malleability superior, perhaps, to any of them. As a consequence, the

modern Chinese were keenly aware of the necessity of the last two

criteria. The problem of ideological guidance is only half solved with

the presentation of a new scheme of facts and a new scheme of morals;

propaganda and institutionalization remain.

Complaints are current in the West to the effect that art, science, and

letters are becoming propaganda--that is, that they are being used to

control men, or as attempts to control men. The Chinese of 1912 and

after never had similar scruples. All human effort was propaganda, and

whatever was not, was of only passing interest. There was no alternative

while the Chinese tried to found a new common sense in the discredited

ruins of their old world order. Their natural science had been impeached

by the demonstrable superiority of Western science. Their code of

ethics, whatever its aesthetic appeal, was ineffectual as a way of

conduct among people who had different, more violent notions of right

and wrong. Even the code of personal behavior--the elaborate courtesies,

the leisureliness, the grace of life in old China--was worthless in an

environment which put a high premium upon speed, impersonality,

efficiency. As the Chinese turned to a revision of all aspects of their

mode of life at once, different groups, trying to find some one key

reform which would solve all difficulties, fell into discord. Economic

advance, political reorganization, "realism" in outlook, educational

reform--all these had their adherents. None was allowed, by either

adherents or opponents, to stand simply as a group of separate reform

measures to be considered on their own merits; the drive for a new

ideology made all proposals important for their bent rather than their

content. A simple thing like the desirability of using Latin letters in

mass education immediately took on a vast significance when related to

the _Kulturpolitik_ of the time. The left-wingers once attacked the

missionaries who had first tried to introduce it, on the ground that the

missionaries were seeking to prostitute the Chinese mind and to make the

Chinese betray the past. Later the Communists enthusiastically pushed

the same scheme, stating that the Chinese ideographs were a stronghold

of reactionary thought. The torments of the struggle inevitably caused

the terms of conflict to resolve; gradually several more or less

determinant movements emerged, around which all other reforms tended to

cluster, because of sympathy or logical relationship.

_The Chief Movements in the Rebuilding of China_

Among the movements, Confucianism stands first. Even with its limpness

and decadence, it still represents the greatest single intellectual

force in the country. To the Chinese, this force may not even be

apparent, and they take it as much for granted as the air they breathe.

Nevertheless, the outside observer can see that even though Confucianism

is inert as a movement, its inertia is more important than the pressures

of other causes. Unconsciously, the Chinese accept whole tracts of

Confucian thought. They accept, in other words, the guidance of

Confucian ideology in much the same way that Americans who are not

churchgoers still accept the major premises of Christianity, simply

because their whole environment is charged with it. Just as in the West

a universal and potent Christian revival in politics is not likely but

is nevertheless conceivable, so in China it is not very probable but

quite possible that there will be a successful resurrection of the

orthodox Confucian philosophy. Whether a strict Confucianism could

return without monarchy is doubtful; and Sun Yat-sen's blend of

republicanism and Confucianism is so well established that it may

prevent the successful promotion of uninterpreted Confucianism.

The Taoists and Buddhists are similarly inactive in politics. More

strictly concerned with the supernatural than is Confucianism, they

represent significant tangential forces upon the flow of political

development, but do not express themselves in overt intervention. Among

the leaders of all groups except the Communists there are important

members of both sects. It is not uncommon for any of them, defeated in

war or temporarily eliminated from politics, to turn to a monastery and

study ancient texts, much in the way that an idle American politician

goes to a farm, cultivating his health and his reputation.

Islam is a minor but living force in China. It has long prevailed in the

border territories of the Northwest, and for generations has presented

vital and effective opposition to the Chinese influence. The territory

of the Mohammedans was consequently a hotbed of rebellion and

separatism, until the ghastly religious wars of the past century drowned

autonomous tendencies in an ocean of blood. At the present time the

Islamic movement faces another equal to itself in ferocity and

persuasiveness--Marxism--in Outer Mongolia, across the border in the U.

S. S. R., and in the northwest controlled by the Chinese Red Army. Thus

far Islam has given no promise of power.

Nationalism--the movement launched by Sun Yat-sen, which follows his

doctrines of the _San Min Chu I_[8]--is the official movement of the

National Government of China and of the Nationalist armies under Chiang

K'ai-shek. It is consequently the chief power of positive action in the

whole country. At various times, Sun's followers have been known as

Progressives, Revolutionists, Republicans, and Nationalists--according

to the phase of their program then uppermost.

Opportunism, rationalized by one or another ornamental philosophy, has

been very common in modern China. It has accepted ideological materials

the way they are used in superficial struggles of the West--making

ideals fit the facts and using them for the sake of the facts.

Opportunism has been characterized by the avid acceptance of wholly

implausible doctrines, or by a disingenuous "realism." Proalien and

defeatist movements have been opportunist in practical matters; "strong

man" philosophies have served the causes of individual ambitions.

Ideologically these currents were noteworthy only because they stirred

up the mud, making genuine intellectual clarification all the more

difficult.

Finally, three important movements have come from outside. These are

Christianity, Marxism, and pro-Japanism.

Each sociopolitical movement in China has had economic connections. Some

movements are avowedly bourgeois and capitalist and find their roots in

Western tradition. Others are inspired by the challenge of the land

problem, which is very acute. World production has upset Chinese farm

prices; international trade has ruined many peasant craft industries;

modern armies have imposed unprecedented tax burdens; opium and erosion

ruin large portions of the people and the land. In some cases the chaos

in the countryside can only be stilled by massacre. Despite the presence

of capitalist, proletarian, and agrarian economic movements, it seems

likely that economic questions will be settled by groups which do not

concentrate upon them to the exclusion of all others. Meanwhile, each of

the movements seeking to create a new China will have to provide for

reform or replacement of the economic system, which is decrepit because

of its internal decline and the appearance of economic devices from the

West vastly more effective, but inconsistent with Chinese modes of

existence.

_Confucianism in the Republic_

Confucianism as an official movement has been used to support other

tendencies, to further the opportunist activities of particular cliques,

and to bolster--by disguising--the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It

is incorrect, however, to limit the role of Confucianism in modern China

to these facts. In serving as a foundation for other movements it

possesses unmeasured potentialities.

Confucianism supposes that the truth and the socially desirable are

identical; that both are identical with the Confucian tradition; and

that an elite of scholars is required to propagate truth, clothing it

with the language of tradition and morality. Confucianism is hostile to

the very notion of sovereignty, leaves no room for a system of

permanently separate nations, and is unable to accommodate the Western

idea of an accidental growth in knowledge, dependent upon sporadic

individual initiative. Confucianism is strong in so far as it promotes a

society based upon knowledge, in which individuals can ascend or descend

according to their personal virtue and competence. Such an ideal has a

definite end in the physical universe by working toward a human

immortality of the flesh and the spirit--flesh through the perpetuation

of the family name in the male line, spirit through the transmission of

records and knowledge. Its present-day defects are obvious. The world of

fact in the Confucian ideology does not correspond with the beliefs

accepted as fact by the dominant West. The intellectual insulation

against the outside necessary to ideological control could not be

achieved by any single modern nation without the use of tyranny.

Moreover, Confucian ethics and politics, more than twenty-four centuries

old, can scarcely be expected to conform to the changed minutiae of

human life, dominated by technology. Nevertheless, while the Chinese may

not turn again to the classics for guidance in concrete situations, or

consult ancient authorities for solutions to simple practical problems,

the moral and social doctrines of Confucianism, redefined or modified,

could well play a definite role in the modern world. In China the chief

rivals to Confucianism will be the new heterodox schools of

reinterpreted Confucianism--such as the versions posed by Sun Yat-sen

and Chiang K'ai-shek, or the watery Confucianism of Manchoukuo.

The nonformal unorganized power of Confucianism weighs more heavily. If

Confucianism were to be considered alone on the strength of the

movements featuring the password "Back to Confucius!" it would be so

negligible as to merit no attention. Not the strength of its partisans

but the concessions of its opponents and rivals make Confucianism

important. Confucius can no more be eradicated from modern China than

Plato, Aristotle, and Christ from the background of Western society.

Every Chinese movement, starting with Confucianism as the status quo,

will have to incorporate a large part of the traditional doctrines. It

may well be that in the new breeds of thought the Confucian strain will

prove dominant and most lasting.

Until the breakdown of the Empire, Confucian texts were studied

appreciatively rather than critically. One does not criticize common

sense unless one is anxious for the reputation of a crank. With the

blinding dawn of Western knowledge, Confucianism went into the

wastebasket. Two years in New York were worth a generation of study over

the ancient authorities. From time to time, under the Republic, the

various governments discussed plans for educational reform, or

haphazardly encouraged the dying traditionalist schools; but nothing

could restore the prestige of classicism. Strangely, the greatest

impetus toward classical learning was provided by the challengers of the

classics. Modern Chinese scholarship, using Western methods of critical

study, and armed with new specializations undreamed of by the archaists,

found that the traditional authorities were valuable not only for what

they pretended to be--plain, direct, factual records--but also as source

material for penetrating interpretations.

The Chinese have turned to this task since the opening of the various

scientific agencies of the National Government at Nanking and have

already produced works of importance on their own past. They have pushed

back their scientifically ascertainable history almost a thousand years.

The modern Chinese students, who hated the classics when they were

mouthed by sedate old scholars ignorant of the modern world, now devote

themselves to the classics to criticize them; criticizing them, they

study them; studying them, they love them. The "science of the country"

(Sinology) has recently been added to the curriculum of the modern

schools; it is causing a veritable renaissance. In fact, the Chinese are

constantly becoming more anxious to find precedent for political growth

and development in their own past rather than in the past of the West,

which they could never appreciate as much as do Westerners.

The actual Confucian movements do not warrant attention. Militarists

have sponsored little Confucian coteries, or have paid for the

publication of sumptuous editions of the Confucian classics, with the

expectation of acquiring a reputation for benevolence and intelligence.

Wu P'ei-fu, the most accomplished scholar among the military leaders of

his period, who owed part of his prestige to his scholarship, was

diligent in promoting Confucianism. With his decline (1926) his example

was no longer felt to be worth following; Confucianism as a practical

political expedient passed from the scene. It gave too little sanction

to the raising of local conscript armies, inflation of the currency, and

the doubling of taxes. Its complete silence on such necessities could

not be taken for consent.

In the Japanese-occupied territory in Manchuria, however, an interesting

experiment in Confucianism has been made. The customs and organization

of the last Chinese dynasty have been resurrected, touched up by a few

classical scholars, given a somewhat more orthodox and unrealistic air,

and proclaimed as the constitution of the Great Empire of Manchou

(Manchoukuo). Since the effective government of the country is under

strong Japanese influence, the venture is significant only as a

political narcotic. The laws proclaimed are in Chinese; the officials'

names are Chinese; the miranda of government, whatever the fact, are

consistent with the grand traditions of Chinese history. The Japanese

might have placed a handful of dreaming reactionaries in actual power

and helped the growth of an anachronistic Chinese Empire in the

northeast, but they seem to have spoiled their opportunity of creating a

friendly and subservient state by acting too arbitrarily and making it

impossible for the Confucian experiment to work.

Confucianism in modern China owes its position not so much to its

prospects as to the fact that it has provided a frame of reference,

however obsolescent, for the political struggle. Hence, through the

tumultuous modern period, the Chinese have been strengthened by a

philosophy which emphasized the separateness and stability of each

institution in society, and which did not make them lose all with the

fortunes of a single supreme organization. As a positive political

force, Confucianism has done two things: It has kept the Chinese from

depending too much on political control, and it has provided a rationale

in the contest for power. It accomplished the first by making police a

function of society as a whole, by stressing the appropriateness of

behavior rather than its legality; and it has given the Chinese ethical

values despite their sorry political condition. Confucianism has

rationalized struggle by supplying each individual participant with a

code to apply if he came to power, and by giving him a good pretense for

seeking power. Confucius himself lived in a time when Chinese political

organization was chaotic. He noted the need for righteous men in high

places and pointed out the good which could be done, apart from general

reform, by the furtherance of virtue through scattered efforts.

Confucius supplied the ambitious men of his own time with a reason for

aspiring to power--by making political responsibility a duty for the man

of intelligence. The Confucian scholar was no saint contemplating

eternity; he was a proud, correct, self-righteous, patient individual,

obliged by his training to take public office wherein his talent could

gain wide influence.

In modern China, the seekers of political office have been able to avoid

the appearance of abject venality by professing respectability. Even

though they may have been just as corrupt as the politicians of other

nations, and more efficiently so, they nevertheless had the saving grace

to eschew hard realism and cloak their ambition with a pleasantly

virtuous tradition. A military leader could surround himself with a few

scholars and give his efforts to reach power the air of a mild and

well-mannered crusade. Whenever political strife in China has had no

meaning but vanity and greed it has at least worn the decent cloak of

the Confucian tradition.

NOTES

[1] For a good general introduction to Far Eastern history and politics

see G. Nye Steiger, _A History of the Far East_, Boston, 1936, the most

complete of one-volume works; Harold M. Vinacke, _A History of the Far

East in Modern Times_, New York, 1937, especially good for social,

economic, and governmental developments; René Grousset, _Histoire de

l'Extrême Orient_, Paris, 1929; and Richard Wilhelm, _Ostasien_, Potsdam

and Zurich, 1928, a brilliant short outline. Diplomatic history is dealt

with by H. B. Morse and H. F. MacNair, _Far Eastern International

Relations_, Boston, 1931, the most detailed one-volume work; Paul H.

Clyde, A _History of the Modern and Contemporary Far East_, New York,

1937, the most recent; and Payson J. Treat, _The Far East_, New York,

1935. The most useful one-volume history of China is Kenneth Scott

Latourette, _The Chinese: Their History and Culture_, New York, 1934.

All these works carry bibliographies; those of Steiger and Latourette

are particularly informing.

[2] Herrlee Glessner Creel, _Studies in Early Chinese Culture, First

Series_, p. 254, Baltimore, 1937. Quoted by permission of the author.

[3] H. G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, London, 1936, provides a

brilliant popular account of the earliest known Chinese culture.

[4] Creel, _Studies_, pp. 50 ff. For relevant information the writer is

indebted to Professor H. H. Dubs, Duke University.

[5] On Confucianism and its immediate background see Marcel Granet,

_Chinese Civilization_, New York, 1930; Fung Yu-lan (Derk Bodde,

translator), _A History of Chinese Philosophy: The Period of the

Philosophers_, Peiping, 1937, an authoritative work; Liang Chi-chao, _A

History of Chinese Political Thought_, New York, 1930; and Leonard

Shihlien Hsü, _The Political Philosophy of Confucianism_, New York,

1932, brilliant but open to criticism. For a popular portrait of

Confucius see Carl Crow, _Master Kung_, New York, 1938.

[6] _Confucian Analects_, Book II, Chapter III.

[7] For its loss of political support see below, pp. 34 ff.

[8] See below, pp. 41 ff.

_Chapter_ II

THE RISE OF NATIONALISM

Of the constituent movements of modern China, the most important has

focused on the personality, principles, and following of Sun Yat-sen

(1867-1925). Now known primarily as the Nationalist movement, it has at

various times emphasized different aspects of its program. In its

simplest and most fundamental points, the movement has fallen heir to

early patriotism. It has assumed different names: the Society for the

Regeneration of China (1894-1905), or _Hsing Chung Hui_; the League of

Common Alliance (1905-1912), or _T'ung Mêng Hui_; the Nationalist

Democratic Party or National People's Party (1912-1914), or Kuomintang;

the Chung Hua Kê Ming Tang (1914-1920), or Chinese Revolutionary Party;

and since 1920, again the _Kuomintang_. Kuomintang is the combination of

three Chinese words meaning "country" or "realm," "people," and "party."

The name of the party can be translated in innumerable ways: nationalist

democratic, nationalist popular, national people's party, etc. The

commonest rendering is "Nationalist," but it is to be remembered that

the word "people" figures in the name. Furthermore, the Chinese version

of patriotism has more cosmopolitan and fewer restrictive connotations

than patriotism ever had in the West.

_Nationalism: Patriotic Anti-Manchu Phase_

Even in a world society that knew neither state nor nation the Chinese

felt attached to their homes and their native land, which led them to

repel invaders. They never personified this loyalty or tried to express

it in specific institutions; nor did they admit outsiders to equality

and concede that there was more of the civilized world outside, thus

admitting the existence of nations. Their attitude rested on sentiment

rather than theory. There was no elaborate bolstering of Chinese racial

superiority, for--by and large--all the peoples in China, conquerors or

conquered, seemed racially alike, fused under the pressure of great

social homogeneity.

At the time of the Manchu conquest (about 1644) the Chinese developed a

passionate hatred for the invaders from the northeast. In entrenching

themselves the Manchus committed a fateful blunder which was to bring

momentary strength but ultimate ruin: they enforced racial segregation

in the political, social, and economic sphere. Legend has it that a

Chinese statesman, forced into Manchu service, suggested this plan and

thus laid the cornerstone for the eventual Chinese liberation. The

Manchus prohibited miscegenation; they established Manchu garrisons

throughout the Empire, keeping their troops from work (which might have

led to intermingling with the Chinese) and thus ruining them by sloth. A

fixed quota of Manchus was introduced into the government service,

irrespective of the operation of the examination system. In time the

Chinese scholars submitted willingly enough to the alien rule; two of

the Manchu emperors were the most enlightened patrons which Chinese

letters and arts had had in centuries, and the intellectual opposition

dwindled away to a minimum.

Among the populace there was no such general reconciliation. Deprived

for the first time of scholarly leadership, the common people, peasants

and artisans, organized numerous secret societies. The societies

flourished, coming to supersede the government in whole areas and

marking many decades with insurrection and riot. Scholars fought the

secret societies because of their uncouth rituals, their heterodoxy of

ideas, their opposition to the existing system. The societies answered

by building up political agencies which were able to act on the lower

and more generally understood levels of ideology.

These groups kept patriotism afire. The greatest of their uprisings, the

T'ai-p'ing rebellion of 1849-1865, was put down with the assistance of

the Western Christian states, but it left a permanent mark on Chinese

society. The rebels had shown that it was possible to wrest the greater

part of China from Manchu rule. They were the first to welcome the

invasion of Christianity, adopting a fantastically modified Christian

faith. They awakened the Chinese to the immediate possibility of a war

of liberation against the outsiders who held the throne of the Chinese

world.

The T'ai-p'ing rebellion showed its strength as a patriotic movement. It

was successful in shaking the established ideology with a rival

compounded of the more vulgar parts of the old, combined with

Christianity. And it indicated the weakest point of the

dynasty--governmental inadequacy in dealing with the agrarian problem.

The years of formal stability gave China a much increased population;

the same years were years of political decline which raised the cost of

government. A house-cleaning was in order. The T'ai-p'ing demonstrated

the need for it; the Manchu dynasty refused to yield to the demand.

Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866 or 1867. An uncle of his had been one of

the rebels. At Sun's parental home the countryside had known of the

T'ai-p'ing rebellion; many in his native village had participated in it.

He was as patriotic as any Chinese could be in the far south, where the

Manchu conquest had penetrated least deeply, but his patriotism did not

differ from the patriotism of his neighbors until he came to know life

outside China. From the patriotism of the old Chinese realm to the

nationalism required of China in the new Westernized world--this was a

step to be traversed only by rich personal experience.

Sun took this step as a boy, when he went to Honolulu. He soon was

converted to Christianity, learned English, and became acquainted with

Western life. He was able to see the world in terms of nations, and he

saw that from the Western point of view China was a large but weak

nation. Already committed from childhood to the revolutionary cause, he

was led by his knowledge of the West to change patriotism into

nationalism. When he returned to China, after studying medicine in

Hongkong, he arrived with the notion of transforming the old world

community into an effective modern nation-state.

He did not seem at first to realize how necessary it was to dispose of

the monarchy. For a while he petitioned the authorities, trusting that

immediate reforms might be effected within the existing framework,

pending an ultimate revolution of patriots. His success must be measured

in terms of what he and his few fellow workers learned, rather than of

what they accomplished. His technique of revolution was based upon the

established traditions of Chinese history--the formation of a small

nucleus, the gathering of affiliated groups, the permeation of a

regional bureaucracy when possible, and the launching of terroristic

attacks to shake the apparent stability of the government.

At the beginning of his work he came into contact with the secret

groups. When he started organizing in earnest, the first major

development was the admittance en bloc of a small secret society. In an

unpublished autobiography Sun wrote: "After my graduation I practised

medicine in Canton and Macao as a pretext for spreading my revolutionary

ideas."[1]

_Nationalism: Revolutionary Modernist Phase_

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 was the cause of much disturbance in

China and the first major event to shake the belief of the masses in

their own ideology. Fantastic barbarians with deadly contrivances might

harry the coasts and even allow themselves impertinences with the

dynasty, but the situation became different when a small, inoffensive,

ineffectual neighbor nation took over these same weapons and spoiled the

internal arrangements of the Far Eastern universe. The peripheral

countries could perhaps even demolish the central suzerainty; this was

the _mene-tekel_ of the Empire.

The revolutionary organization of Sun Yat-sen had by now become

definitely modernist, nationalist, and antimonarchical, instead of

merely patriotic and antidynastic. Under the name of _Hsing Chung Hui_

there was established a confederacy of secret societies. After a short

while the member societies were liquidated, and a modern revolutionary

organization emerged, advocating overthrow of the Manchus. The

intellectual elite of this group had no part in the ideological control

which gripped the rest of China, in the form of the traditional

mandarinate. As a new elite, with a new ideology, it broke the monopoly

of leadership, the monopoly of thought. The consequences cannot be

exaggerated. It was symptomatic that Sun's own family became estranged

in part and that many members of the society had to die a civil death

before working in the organization. They left their property to heirs

and changed their names, lest--under the principle of group

responsibility--terrible punishments be visited upon their native

villages and their families. Furthermore, an important bloc of

participants consisted of Chinese from overseas.

The Chinese overseas were for the most part men who had been kidnaped

and sold in the coolie trade or who had stealthily deserted their native

regions for adventure and wealth. With the increased foreign commerce it

was possible for many Chinese to become wealthier outside their own

country than within. But in leaving they left their custom and tradition

and met peoples--especially Europeans and Americans--whose way of life,

though utterly different, was effective in the practical, tangible terms

of wealth and security. Chinese in increasing numbers bettered their

condition outside. They did not amass wealth through family effort, nor

did they broaden their learning through the classics. What they won,

they won themselves; and they learned something for which the Confucian

ideology had no place. When they returned home, they were greeted with

contempt, though also with covert admiration. Those among them who had

gathered knowledge of the West, of modern methods of business, of

European languages, found that in the eyes of the traditional literati

and officials they were lower than the lowest illiterates.

Such men came in great numbers to the revolutionary party. Among

overseas Chinese merchants, workers, and students, there developed a

group--possessing power in the form of money and family

connections--which was determined to overthrow the existing order and

bring China in line with the outside world. Their effort was idealistic,

because the Chinese overseas felt that the economic and cultural

advantages of the West should be secured for their countrymen at home;

it was also realistic, since they were fighting in the only way they

knew for a respectable, honorable return to their homes. They could not

throw their lives away and admit that their ventures and dangers were of

no profit. They felt that they had acquired something, and they wanted

it recognized. It was Sun Yat-sen who showed them how they could do it.

In a sense, this feature of the Nationalist movement might be taken as

the pivot of modern Chinese government and politics. Controlling men

through controlling their minds and through making sure that every

possible leader would lead from within the hierarchy--these devices of

the past had failed. There were now Chinese to whom the Confucian rules

were pleasant and homelike but not the real material of modern life.

These Chinese possessed intellectually trained leaders who had nothing

in common with the dominant elite--who were more interested in building

railroads, improving water supplies, defending China's frontiers, and

modernizing the country than in augmenting the virtue of mankind.

_Nationalism: Republican Phase_

Every year brought the Nationalists increased strength. The Manchu court

yielded a series of constitutional reforms which by their promises

disturbed the minds of those still content with the old order and by

their nonfulfillment raised fresh storms of resentment against the

Manchu rule. The court did not really seek to master the drift in the

thought of the people; it tried to defeat change rather than direct

it.[2] In a few short years before and after 1900 the Dragon Throne

declined from the supreme office of mankind to an obsolete and

picturesque ornament of a government so weak and disorganized as to

render ornament artificial. While the Empire lost prestige, the

Nationalists came to emphasize the republican part of their program more

and more. As Nationalists, they differed little from the generations of

patriots who had fought the alien rulers of China. As republicans, they

were the Chinese vanguard of modernization. Some people accepted

republican ideas as good in themselves; far more thought them better

than the Manchu rule, especially since there was no Chinese pretender in

sight--the heir of the Mings, the last native dynasty, was a pensioner

in Peking. A large number probably thought little about the abstract

issue one way or another but trusted the revolutionary leaders because

they seemed to have a competence consonant with the times.

As the Nationalists advanced, they reorganized their party mechanism,

and formed the T'ung Mêng Hui in 1905. At this time the principles which

were later to become the _San Min Chu I_[3] were given public

formulation. The Nationalists began to feel the necessity of an ideology

with which to replace that of the Confucian monarchy. It had been

possible to leave doubt unsettled so long as they were a small,

conspiratorial group. As soon as they began to secure adherents among

the masses it became necessary to provide their followers with a common

set of ideas. In seeking agreement on fundamentals, they found

disagreements within the party. Sun Yat-sen's role began to change from

conspiracy to statesmanship. The future was to show that even a

statesman was not enough--that a lawgiver, a state founder, was needed.

The T'ung Mêng Hui was one of the most effective revolutionary

organizations which the modern world has seen, so far as achievement of

immediate aims was concerned. In a series of activities which would

rouse a mystery-story addict to startled incredulity, the

revolutionaries tried to awaken the populace by spectacular revolts.

They capitalized on the impotence of a government alien to China, one so

ineffectual that it could not protect the Chinese from the other, newer

aliens who had appeared. They realized that it was hopeless to attack

the monarchy along its entire front, since the old ideological guidance,

although waning, still held the broad masses in inertia. The

revolutionaries accordingly attacked the Empire at its top level, its

most obvious and conspicuous points of strength--the military and

political headquarters of the viceroyalties and other significant

positions. Knowing that they themselves could not monopolize the

government of China, they looked forward to attaining a position of

leadership among the various groups in the Chinese society and to

keeping that leadership through parliamentary methods to be established

under the Republic. Instead of regarding the Empire as a set of

institutions, they considered it the mere decoration of the country.

They had no reason to suppose, nor any way of telling, that in

destroying the old regime they destroyed government and all possibility

of government for a long time to come. They consequently tried to set in

motion a snowball revolution--an initial conspiracy of terror which

would intimidate the Manchus and cause the whole house of cards to

collapse. It was their task only to start the movement, which could be

counted upon to avalanche itself into history.

To the revolutionary group a republican scheme seemed possible. They

felt that in the twentieth century men would disagree but amicably, and

they regarded democracy as a form of government so excellent that its

mere inauguration would guarantee success. Furthermore, republicanism

and democracy were closely associated with nationalism; how could a

nation be free unless it governed itself in the most direct

manner--through the votes of its broad majorities?

In failing to provide a stopping point for the revolution before they

started it, the Nationalists were scarcely guilty of rash action. No

human being could have foretold the consequences of revolt against a

civilization. The revolutionaries were men who had passed through the

transition from the old Confucian ideology to that of the West with

relative ease. They did not realize that what was obvious to them would

be a mystery to the masses and that the political changes contemplated

would rip asunder the very fabric of thought in China. It is evidence of

the simplicity and usefulness of Confucian ideas that--even when

admitted to be challenged by the new environment--they continued to

operate without the sanction of intelligence, and operated well as empty

habits.

With the old patriotic forces behind them, and an untested Utopia ahead,

the Nationalists raced the Manchu Empire into revolution. The story of

the revolution is not complex.[4] In a great part of China the people

awoke to find no government. In the North the imperial officials and

princes clamored for the assistance of a man whom they had once

slighted: Yüan Shih-k'ai, the leader of the modernized armies of the

Empire. He held the fate of China in his hands. But he betrayed the

Empire so that he might betray the Republic; he joined the

revolutionaries and thrust a settlement upon the ruling house. With his

intervention the whole picture of Chinese politics changed. Yüan brought

troops into the play of power, troops dependent upon himself, men no

longer interested in ideas now that the all-compelling force of the old

way of thought was gone.

_Nationalism: Constitutionalist Phase_

The Republic at Nanking enjoyed a brief Utopian existence, with Sun

Yat-sen as its president. The revolutionaries were independent from

October, 1911, to March, 1912, when the Republic became the instrument

of Yüan Shih-k'ai. No substantial power accrued to the legislative.

During their bright heyday of power as a parliamentary party under the

Republic--which they had founded only to give it away to the

military--the Nationalists were known as the _Kuomintang_. At this time

the Chinese name of the party was significantly translated "Democratic

Party." Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionaries had expected that the

Chinese people would accept the new ideology without understanding it

and then would come to understand it very quickly. They could not hope

to replace the old ideology before the revolution, because the presence

of the imperial government made large-scale educational work impossible.

After the establishment of the Republic, however, they found themselves

hamstrung because they had not inculcated republicanism. It was a

vicious circle. The governmental pattern set up at Nanking was replaced

by another to make room for Yüan Shih-k'ai, who proposed a third, in

which he should have more power, in order that he might create a fourth

government, in which he should be emperor.[5] The armies of the

revolutionaries, such as they were, became absorbed in the forces of

Yüan. When, in a few months, the Republic had been won and lost, the

Nationalists realized that the revolution of 1911-1912 was only the

first step in their labors. They experimented with a minor revolution in

1913, and then turned to other measures for securing a return to

constitutional government and the creation of a republic which should be

as firmly rooted in men's minds as the majestic but irretrievable

Confucian order had been. They had won the revolution by creating doubt

and giving it tangible expression; they lost their revolution because

doubt persisted, swallowed everything, leaving China in a turmoil beyond

all systematic thought.

The first years of the nominal Republic, the beginning of the new order

in China, were marked by a feverish pretense of changed forms. The

outlook which superseded the ancient ideology was curious. It was a

mixture of traditionalist acceptance of temporary disorder and

resignation to a period of transformation into an unconceived and

unproclaimed future. This outlook gave life no purpose, but it kept men

from falling into complete anarchy. People were willing to accept

illegal authorities, since local administrators had traditionally

maintained a spotty cloak of public order. Modern Chinese were prepared

to pay lip service to a preposterous parliamentary regime but soon found

that it was comfortable to think in terms such as armies, foreign

interference, and money--thus allowing their thinking to settle in the

large framework of an accepted disorder.

The Nationalists tried to combat this anticonstitutional way of thought.

For six years (1914-1920) they combined conspiratorial techniques with

the role of a legally constituted power fighting for law. They assumed

the name _Chinese Revolutionary Party_ until they discovered that they

could secure no ideological foothold upon which to base the order they

proposed. Some of them went so far as to become anarchists, favoring a

continuance of disorder until the world joined China in collapse. Others

followed an unrealistic legalism; they held to the paper constitution,

to the text of the president's oath of allegiance to the constitution,

to the election laws, thinking that the magic of ink would conjure up a

government. Sun Yat-sen, and the body of his followers with him,

attempted to chart a middle course; in 1917 there was created a "lawful"

administration in the South. With extraordinary good fortune the

Republic might have succeeded, but the war in Europe, the Japanese

interventions, and other adverse circumstances prevented this.

The Nationalists changed the name of their party back to _Kuomintang_

after 1920 but did not discontinue their reformist policies until about

two years later. Sun Yat-sen had spent years in study and propaganda;

eventually his program became an ideology. No sharp line can be drawn

between the two. In some respects the very first programs of the

revolutionaries were ideological, in that they presupposed a change in

man's outlook which would accommodate republican government. On the

other hand, programmatic proposals may be distinguished from ideological

theses by the fact that programs refer to things which should be done

and ideologies to things in which men should believe in order to do

anything at all. A program which is rooted in no ideology is one lacking

context; unless a program refers to some accepted scheme of thought it

is words in a vacuum. Similarly, an ideology without programs to put it

into men's minds, to persuade men to believe in it and give it effect,

is an airy prettiness for philosophers. The Nationalists had stood on

the foundations of Confucian common sense and proposed a republic; they

had destroyed the organization which made that common sense seem real

and had cut the ground from under their own feet. They could not

distinguish values because their critical attitude enveloped all moral

notions or made them isolated points without coherent significance. The

Nationalists themselves fell prey to day-dreaming when they appealed to

worthless paper for their right to govern. The epoch is significant in

the history of the movement in that it taught the Nationalists that men

would not fight unless there was something to fight for and that there

was nothing to fight for until men could find desirable elements

embedded in some larger scheme of life. Politics had to have an end and

an environment; without either it was a series of monologues in the

wilderness, the soliloquies of logicians.

Sun Yat-sen during this time wrote the drafts of monumental treatises

which were to relate the general body of his doctrines to the background

of fact and thought from which they had emerged. He never finished them,

but meanwhile he and his followers realized that if they were to have a

grip over government they must grasp power within the brains of men. The

revolutionary reformists had to supply some better medium of persuasion

than the frivolity of military cynicism or the impudence of shadow

government. They had to abandon legalism and bring forth an ideology

capable of serving as the new foundation for a just and effective system

of government in China. If their original importance was that of an

effective counter-elite springing up in the intellectual borderlands

between the Western and Chinese ideologies, their second period of

significance begins with their realization that a new framework of

thought would have to be set up before any of their programs could be

effectuated.

_The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_

The ideology which the Nationalists were to teach was one which had lain

dormant in the party for more than thirty years. It was the invention of

Sun Yat-sen--his reinterpretation of Confucianism to suit the modern

world. He did not settle down with books before him, pen in hand and

notebooks all about, to formulate a Utopia; nor did he approach the

subject as a historian, seeking scientific causes for the emotions and

loyalties of men. He came to the subject as a political leader,

modifying the given background only so far as was necessary. His

doctrines grew with his personal growth and the development of his

movement. They are scattered among a variety of writings and utterances,

and are contradictory in many points although remarkably consistent as a

whole.

Sun Yat-sen asked himself: What is China? China is a race, he said, a

race which was once great and which held benevolent world leadership in

the world it knew. It has declined because it has fallen upon evil days,

under the rule of outsiders, barbarians, and has failed to develop in

ways which the West discovered. This race should be a nation in the

modern world; a great, powerful, united, effective nation in a world of

nations. It should fight for its right of self-rule and should support

justice in the international community. In order to achieve greatness,

the Chinese will have to turn their nation into an effective state and

add the devices of law to the devices of social control through

ideology. They should rethink their ideology, keeping the old ethical

philosophy and the old social knowledge (the technique of control

through thought, as in Confucianism) but adding Western technics. They

should then strive to make their nation the leader in progress toward

world peace and eventual cosmopolitanism. China should turn to

nationalism for the time--decades or centuries--that remained for the

travail of nations, but the Chinese should never forget the world

society whence they came. This is the first of Sun's three principles,

_nationalism_.

The second principle referred to the problem of leadership and the

organization of government. Obviously, the Chinese could not return to

monarchy in the modern world. In the first place, it would not be

modern; Sun lived at a time when the democratic tide was sweeping to its

high point and when the world triumph of democracy seemed a foregone

conclusion. Secondly, Sun thought it disloyal to China's past for the

Chinese to evade the responsibility of democracy, as it was implicit in

their most ancient traditions and thus an obligation laid upon them by

their first great leaders. Thirdly, he thought that good administration

was to be derived from democracy more readily than from any other

system. Fourthly, because democracy was a modernizing force, it should

be introduced; the people, participating in progress, would themselves

become progressive. Fifthly and most necessarily, democracy was simply

the self-control of a nation. If the nation was to be created and made

free through nationalism it had to become democratic, since there was no

other way for a whole people to express and rule itself. But the Chinese

needed specific devices[6] in order to assure that the old system of

selecting an intellectual leadership would not be compromised or

destroyed by democracy. They should see to it that democracy did not

become mob rule. The Chinese people should become self-indoctrinating

and thus maintain ideological control along with political. But the

Chinese should accommodate the concept of the state in their thinking,

since the concentration of power in Western states made it necessary

that there be in China an equivalent social device for canalizing and

concentrating power, in order to meet Western and Japanese attacks. The

egalitarian features of democracy should be congenial to the democracy

of customs and manners which was indigenous to old China. This was the

second principle, _democracy_.

The third principle was the restatement in modern political terms of the

cardinal economic principles of the past, together with an infusion of

newly invented doctrines. It protected the livelihood of the people, and

may be summed up in a single sentence: No government deserves to exist

unless it assures its people of the maximum of material welfare possible

under prevailing physical conditions. Government was of no use if the

people perished. The state was nothing if its substance was lost.

Political leadership should aim at constant improvement of economic

conditions, spread economic benefits, and make the nation healthy. In

doing so it was not to be bound by any creed of capitalism or communism

but was to experiment and seek the most efficient measures for the

benefit of the whole community. This last principle involved the _life_

of the nation, as nationalism did its _birth_ and democracy its

_freedom_. It was an ethical doctrine rather than a schematic principle,

and cannot be properly translated. It should best be left in the

Chinese, and expressed by two words which mean "people" and

"generation": _min shêng_.

This ideology gave the Nationalists a faith to propagate. It was

designed to achieve the revision of the old Confucian ideology;

experience and the accepted ideology would supply this new skeleton with

flesh. It differed radically from the Marxian doctrine in that it was

traditionalistic and nationalistic; it resembled the Marxian doctrine in

that it sought to create a whole new intellectual civilization before

turning to the question of government.

The new ideology had to make headway against other propagandas, the

partially adequate ways of thought which had grown up since the

establishment of the Republic. It had to restore life to the vast corpse

of Confucianism, and soon after its first general promulgation (1924)

had to fight its temporary ally--communism--for power over Chinese

minds.

_Opportunist Movements and their Anticonstitutional Effects_

The field which the Nationalists invaded to propagate their doctrines

was already occupied. The slow evaporation of the Confucian moral,

intellectual, and social system had given rise to various movements

which, for lack of a better term, may be called _half-ideological_.

These movements made no pretense of presenting a new order sufficient

for Chinese thought and belief, but--in the opinion of those

constituting them--they did afford an adequate frame of reference for

immediate action. Some of the half-ideologies were: (1) military

feudalism, (2) provincial _tuchünism_ (3) China-wide militarism, (4)

bureaucratism, and (5) capitalism. Although none of them succeeded in

indoctrinating broad masses of the population, yet each was effective in

a negative way. Each obstructed the development of any coherent system

of social and political life. Each was anticonstitutional, since it

proposed to constitute a scheme narrowly pragmatic or unattainable in

fact.

The presence of these movements gave China an appearance of considerable

freedom in the earlier years of the Republican era. Diversity of opinion

based upon a fundamental concord in outlook--diversity circumscribed by

one cohesive ideology--may be most wholesome in social and political

life. When diversity penetrates so deep as to include all major aspects

of human existence, it becomes insupportable, a hindrance and not a

stimulant to action. When policy is predetermined by tradition, thought

is easy, action relatively more difficult; when there is discord even on

fundamentals, thought is difficult, action easy. Almost any scheme

mitigating the evils of discord will be assured a hearing; if the world

cannot be rationalized, the individual will be.

Yüan Shih-k'ai inaugurated, in his efforts to control China through

military means, a way of thought which might be characterized as

military feudalism of the twentieth century variety, an order based upon

contract between commander and soldier, upon the payment of wages by the

former and the performance of any task by the latter. This militarism

never flowered in literature, never developed a political theory, never

achieved governmental form. Even Yüan felt its inadequacy as a state

philosophy, and by his attempt to establish a modern monarchy ruined

what chances he might have had for anticipating Mussolini with a Fascist

movement. As it was, the movement of military thought was derived from

the facts rather than propagated to excuse the facts. The militarists

themselves abandoned it whenever they found substitutes.

Nevertheless, the movement for a military ideology was at times the

prevailing mode of thought among the men who held power in China. They

were able to gain perspective on their own behavior by reference to the

old traditions, regarding themselves as upright magistrates in a time of

chaos. For working purposes they could claim from their subordinates and

superiors a vague constitutionalism limited to army circles. Amid the

cowardice, betrayal, and corruption in the military dictatorships,

tendencies occasionally appeared leading toward an effective military

spirit. Certain kinds of betrayal or cruelty were beyond the limits of

good soldiering, but not many.

A more effective explanation for the condition of the armies in China

from 1916 to about 1931 may be found in _tuchünism_. A _tuchün_ was a

military commandant ruling an area ranging from a few districts to a

number of provinces.[7] The imperial regime maintained a military

counterpart to the provincial governor. After the Republican Revolution

provinces tended to become separate and autonomous under military

leaders. The military man, who was prone to apologize for his position

by admitting that he was not developing a permanent establishment, who

held his troops together by a modern feudalism, could also rationalize

his role by presenting himself to his province as a good son, by

stressing the wickedness and strangeness of the soldiers in other

provinces, and by suggesting the thought of federalism. The scheme was

not convincing or edifying, but it could become temporarily popular. A

great part of the news from China is still written in terms of

_tuchünism_--since it is a simple pattern and requires no explanation

involving Chinese peculiarities. Satrapies have become tyrannies in all

ages. At the very best the _tuchünist_ movement could not have served

well as the constituent force of a new China. It would necessarily have

ended in one-man government, almost unthinkable with modern Chinese

conditions; or it would have implied a military federalism which is

scarcely a solution to the problem of unity.

Military cliques at times had China-wide proportions, but despite the

proclamations which were occasionally issued, there was no effective

single movement for a general military regime. Such movements as there

were developed within the framework of the shadow Republic. Moreover,

the shifting alignments of Chinese wars within the nominal organization

of the Republic were so confused as to make almost anything but order

seem possible. Yet many Chinese thought in terms of a "realism"

compounded of slogans and military exigencies.

If movements for military feudalism, provincial _tuchünism_, and (most

nebulous of all) China-wide militarism failed to provide more than an

explanation of immediate fact, there were counterparts in the civilian

administration aspiring to political autonomy for particular cliques.

Ministries tended at times to develop a spirit of independence. Finance

was too close to the military, but the revenue collection services (with

a large European and Japanese personnel) and the postal services behaved

as _imperia in imperio_. The foreign office functioned frequently

without effective superiors. Working without pay a great part of the

time, in a period which offered no near solution for its disastrous

troubles, bureaucrats saw in the increase of bureaucracy a possible

inauguration of order. The ministries did function in a way, despite the

chaos about them. They might have evolved a new bureaucratism to steal

the _tuchüns'_ power. Their spirit was helpful in particular and

damaging in general, since it was bound to sabotage any government which

might come to power. A few years of insecurity may weld a bureaucracy

together more closely than would decades of spoils; this was the case

between 1916 and 1928. Bureaucratism demonstrates the limitations of

opportunist ideology as a foundation for government.

Capitalism flourished wherever economic conditions made it possible;

such economic conditions did not last very long under the jurisdiction

of the military. In treaty ports[8] the Chinese capitalists prospered,

secure under governments which were international in effect, Chinese

only in legal fiction. There Chinese soon amassed enough capital to

compete with economic institutions erected by foreigners, and exercised

an important indirect influence on the growth of Chinese government.

Capitalism helped to thwart a peasant-labor alliance in China, for

although the capitalists were an insignificant minority without

country-wide influence, its form of control was mobile. No army, no

surge of popular resentment, no propaganda, no conspirator can travel as

fast as a telegraphic money order. The ideology of capitalism was

content in China to remain subordinate as long as the political and

legal conditions were favorable to it. Capitalist groups supported any

sort of strong government which might protect property and increase

opportunities for investment.

Among the most pitiful of the movements for the construction of a

general agreement in China were the proalien movements. They were

pitiful because they represented a prostitution of thought by men

conscious of the nature of their action. The Anfu Party flourished in

the first decade after the death of Yüan in 1916; together with its

militarism and its meaningless "realism" it was pro-Japanese. The

present "government" in North China[9] is another such movement.

Manchoukuo bases little of her official ideology on such a dangerous

outlook and prefers to propagate a Confucianist traditionalism in so far

as she propagates anything. Pro-Japanese action may express a discontent

with the competence of the Chinese for self-government, but more

forcefully it relates to theories of Pan-Asianism or Pan-Mongolism.

The opportunist movements--militarism, _tuchünism_, military federalism,

bureaucratic separatism, capitalism, and political puppetry--served to

confuse the basic alternatives. Because they reflected a narrow and

accidental scheme of power rather than long-range transformation, they

possessed a specious realism which obfuscated real issues. They

distracted attention without rewarding it and polarized opinion around

conflicts which were beyond settlement. There is no possibility of

agreement between men who think one another deluded in regard to

fundamentals. Disorder in China was the more violent because of these

different explanations. They delayed the creation of a framework in

which men could find a common reasonableness, an ideology sufficient to

rationalize all interests and to sublimate all frustrations.

_Christianity as a Political Force_

Ever since the establishment of American and British Protestant missions

in the nineteenth century, Christianity has been a conditioning force

for a democratic ideology in Asia.[10] The Protestants were among the

first to make a breach in the stronghold of Confucianism; they secured

international action to assist them. Their role was that of

counter-ideologues whose position was guaranteed by treaty (British

Treaty of Tientsin, 1858; American Treaty of Tientsin, 1858). They

possessed the power, under the legal sanction of the Chinese government,

to preach against the moral foundations upon which that government

rested. A missionary wrote in 1887:

The foremost opposition to the introduction of Christianity comes from

those who esteem themselves the followers of Confucius. They assent to

our views about the "emptiness" of Buddhism, the deceptions of Taoism,

the character of the priesthood, the mud and stone of the images, but

when we gently allude to ancestral idolatry, the worship of heaven and

earth, and the sacrifices of the mandarins, they are offended. Also,

the Confucianists do the thinking for the people; they have the minds,

the books, the schools, and the offices. Without a long residence in

the country it is hard to imagine the influence of a penniless scholar

in his neighbourhood, and the mental control he exercises over the

minds of the peasantry. More than this, the graduates at the

government examinations form a clique or "ring," and their voice is

the unwritten law of China, their authority above that of His

Excellency the Governor. The lamented Carstairs Douglas said at the

Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1877, "Confucianism is the citadel;

take it, and the war is ended."[11]

But for the presence of Christianity, a Chinese counter-elite with

sufficient moral self-assurance and intellectual ability to attack the

traditional institutions of the Empire might not have developed. Sun

Yat-sen was a Christian, although in his case Christianity has been less

of a modernizing force compared with the influence of his actual

experience abroad. Large numbers of the reformist and republican leaders

were Christian, some of them with missionary or Y. M. C. A. connections.

These men were not bound by the moral tenets of Confucianism; those

among them who had mission school educations had little in common with

the long intellectual tradition of the Chinese. For a while Christianity

spelled Westernization and provided an avenue of self-advancement

hitherto unprecedented in China--one outside the archaic scheme of

things.

With the coming of the Republic, Christian ethics appeared to have an

open field. The emphasis which Christianity places upon the value of

individual human life was favorable to the emergence of modern

republican institutions. Even Yüan Shih-k'ai is said to have

acknowledged the influence of Christianity in this respect; he is

reported to have said, in an interview with a leading missionary

educator, "You missionaries are responsible for this revolution. Now you

must see us through."[12] The implication of doctrines of human

brotherhood is obvious, despite the fact that such doctrines--in less

forceful and spiritual form--were a familiar feature of certain Chinese

philosophies.

In its more direct effects Christianity demonstrated a variety of new

points to the Chinese. The intervention of the missionaries was not only

moral; it was scientific, and the early mission leaders brought Western

engineering and industrial methods with them. They published the first

journal in Chinese to give regular accounts of practical mechanics. As

the missions themselves developed, the physical presence of the

Protestant missionaries and of Western ways of life--to which they

adhered in contrast with the Catholics--became strong informational

influences. Later the rise of churches and of Christian establishments

gave the Chinese experience in the Western methods of social and

business organization.

In practical administration the Christian impact has been striking.

American missionaries were influential in developing popular education

in China. They have led the way in public health. They have organized

model orphanages and have assailed infanticide, footbinding, and

concubinage. They have been the public opinion of the Western world,

right on the spot, and have introduced the Chinese to a great many of

the best features of Western life. Finally, the Christians have

embellished and justified Western imperialism in China. The mission

enterprises have been among the most expensive and elaborate

philanthropic agencies ever set up by one state for the benefit of

another. The advance of the West has been saved from seeming unrelieved

imperialism. The West has taken, but it has also returned. Christianity

has been the companion and the antagonist of Western exploitation in the

East; it has suffered and benefited because of this position.

The total contribution of Christianity to Chinese politics cannot be

assessed. The ways of Christian influence are frequently pervasive and

incalculable. In the headquarters of the Chinese Red Army, Chinese

Communist leaders have quietly gone away to pray. The Christians have

breached the Confucian citadel and have weakened the ideological

foundations of government. They have also torn the web of Chinese

popular superstition and afforded a foothold for religion in a truer

sense. There has been no genuine Christian party, no real Christian

army, no government avowedly Christian in policy. Nevertheless, the

first president of the Republic was a Christian, as was the outstanding

founder of the National Government at Nanking, Chiang K'ai-shek. The

Protestant Church counts among its members a large number of the highest

government personnel; no other religion plays as active a part.

Christianity, then, has been an indirect force, not a program or an

immediate political challenge.

_Nationalism: Social-revolutionary Phase_

In 1912 the Nationalists had won their revolution, which was political

in nature, but they found in the ensuing years that mere change in the

form of government would not of itself bring about the needed

regeneration of Chinese society. By 1922 Sun Yat-sen and his followers

possessed a well-defined ideology and a definite new revolutionary

program but they had neither a way of propagating the ideology nor a

method of realizing the program. Sun himself thought in political and

economic rather than agitational terms. He sought loans from abroad and

schemed for power in the turbulent military politics of the time. His

slogan was still that of the Confucians: "Hold office in order to

teach." The Nationalists intended to gain a political rostrum from which

to expound their teachings, since they no longer hoped to rule

effectively without converting the masses to their way of thought. They

had not yet realized that conversion scarcely required governing and

that--given the appropriate technique--they might agitate more

successfully as an opposition than as a government.

The means of systematically winning men's minds--wholesale and

high-speed agitation--did not occur to the Nationalists because the

Bolshevist revolution was the only successful demonstration of such

methods, and Russia was not yet understood. China was just reaching that

phase of revolution which the Communists had already traversed in

Russia. Without the benefit of Russian advice, the Kuomintang might have

become a political sect with long-range plans. Fortunately for their

cause, the Kuomintang leaders were willing to learn and the Russians

willing to teach. Mere physical contact served to inaugurate the

process.

Contact was not afforded by way of the Communist Party of China, a small

and largely academic group which developed after 1920, but through

direct correspondence and negotiation between Sun Yat-sen and Moscow.

Sun had communicated with persons of influence all over the world,

trying to build up interest in the future of a united and powerful

China. He had conceived a plan for the international development of

China which envisaged the extension of Allied war budgets for one year

after the war, and the lending of vast sums for the modernization of

China. He believed that his project would appeal to imperialism and at

the same time would serve to create in China a modern state-socialist

industrialism. China would thereby become a customer for all the

capitalist nations of the world and alleviate the depression which was

bound to follow the war. Correspondence about other projects for

ideological and political reconstruction elicited more replies from

Russia than from anywhere else. Sun was not doctrinaire in the

furtherance of immediate projects. He was willing to accept help from

the Russians, just as he would have accepted help from the imperialist

nations had they been prepared to risk their money. From 1920 onward he

was in touch with the Bolsheviks.

In December, 1922, and January, 1923, the decisive turning point was

reached. Adolf Joffe, the Soviet representative in China, had come to

Shanghai and conferred with Sun Yat-sen. These two found that there were

terms on which they could cooperate. The Communist ideology and that of

the Nationalists coincided in their general opposition to imperialism.

Resistance to the treaties which bound China[13] became more and more

apparent to Sun as a necessity for further revolutionary progress. He

had met polite regret or open ridicule in his solicitation of help for

China from the imperialist powers, and his invitation to Western capital

had not been taken seriously. The Communists seemed to have adequate

idealistic and practical motives for joining the Chinese.

The Communists, moreover, conceded a point which they had not conceded

to any other country up to that time. They willingly assumed a secondary

position, agreed that the communist order of things was not suited to

China, and in effect guaranteed their practical assistance to the

Nationalists without demanding, as the price, the acceptance of Marxism.

Sun and Joffe gave out a joint memorandum which made the issue perfectly

plain. It was to be the constitutional compact between the Nationalists

and the Communists for the period of their collaboration. The most

significant paragraph read:

Dr. Sun Yat-sen holds that the communistic order, or even the Soviet

system, cannot actually be introduced into China because there do not

exist the conditions for the successful establishment of either

communism or Sovietism. This view is entirely shared by Mr. Joffe, who

is further of the opinion that China's paramount and most pressing

problem is to achieve national unification and attain full national

independence; and regarding this great task he has assured Dr. Sun

Yat-sen that China has the warmest sympathy of the Russian people and

can count on the support of Russia.[14]

In the autumn of 1923 Chiang K'ai-shek was sent by Sun to Russia to

study the Soviet military system. This was the first step in the

formation of a non-mercenary Nationalist army. About the same time

Michael Borodin arrived in Canton, where Sun had come to power for the

third time. The ensuing period was marked by an intensive reorganization

of the Nationalist Party and of its technique of revolution, to the end

that it might become a movement depending upon mass conversion, not upon

mass apathy, for power. The military mission was followed by other and

more important grants of aid. The Bolsheviks not only trained Chinese

sent to Russia but also supplied military instructors who reorganized

the Nationalist forces on the spot.[15]

The assistance rendered by the Soviets in the application of tested

propaganda methods to a revolutionary situation resulted in vast

changes. The Russians found that approximately the same devices could be

used in China as in Russia without affecting the fundamentals of

Nationalist philosophy. Integration and regularization of the party

machinery, formulation of immediate programs to bring large groups into

the Nationalist fold, development of large-scale propaganda techniques,

and other improvements designed to enlarge and speed up the Nationalist

advance were effected within the Kuomintang.

Throughout, Sun Yat-sen worked in close collaboration with Borodin. The

details of Nationalist party reforms and of Nationalist participation in

local politics are now part of the history of the modern Far East. These

details, while significant, tend to blur the cardinal change: the

transformation of the Nationalist party from a revolutionary elite with

long-range effectiveness into a mass organization designed for

propaganda and immediate general measures. The Russian Communists made

it possible for the Kuomintang to perform in weeks what had been planned

for the decades, or at least to reach the equivalent of the contemplated

performance.