The Three Stages of Revolution.
Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine of the three stages of revolution attracted a
considerable degree of attention. By the three stages of the revolution he
meant (1) the acquisition of political power by the teachers of the new
ideology (the revolution), (2) the teaching of the new ideology
(tutelage), and (3) the practice of government by the people in accord
with the new ideology (constitutional democracy). Enough of Sun Yat-sen’s
teaching concerning the new ideology has been shown to make clear that
this proposal is merely a logical extension of his doctrine of the three
classes of men.
Western writers who have acquainted themselves with the theory seem, in
some instances, inclined to identify it with the Marxist theory of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, into which the proletarian revolution is
to be divided into three stages—the conquest of political power by the
masses; the dictatorship of the proletariat; and the inauguration (in the
remote future) of the non-governmental class-less society.(269) It
scarcely seems necessary to go so far afield to discover the origin of the
theory. As a matter of record, Sun Yat-sen made his earliest recorded
announcement of this theory in 1905, when he was not at all under the
influence of Marxism, although he was acquainted with it.(270) Finally,
the theory forms so necessary a link between his theory of Kuomintang
control of the revolution, and his equally insistent demand for ultimate
democracy, that it may be regarded as a logically necessary part of his
complete plan. The coincidence between his and the Marxian theories would
consequently appear as a tribute to his acumen; this was the view that the
Communists took when they discovered that Sun Yat-sen was afraid of the
weaknesses of immediate democracy in a country not fit for it.
One might also observe that, once the premise of revolution for a purpose
is accepted, the three stages fit well into the scheme of age-old
traditional political thought advocated by the Confucians. Confucius did
not see the value of revolution, although he condoned it in specific
instances. He did, however, believe in tutelage and looked forward to an
age when the ideology would have so impregnated the minds of men that _ta
t’ung_ (the Confucian Utopia) would be reached, and, presumably,
government would become superfluous. That which Sun sought to achieve by
revolution—the placing of political power in the hands of the ideological
reformers (or, in the case of the Marxist theory, the proletariat,
actually the Communist party, its trustee)—Confucius sought, not by
advocating a general conspiracy of scholars for an oligarchy of the
intellectuals, but the more peaceful method of urging princes to take the
advice of scholars in government, so that the ideology could be
established (by the introduction of “correct names,” _chêng ming_) and
ideological control introduced.
The three stages of revolution may resemble Communist doctrine; they may
have been influenced by Confucian teaching; whatever their origin, they
play an extremely important part in the doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, and in
the politics springing from his principles. If the Kuomintang is the
instrument of the revolution, the three stages are its process. The
clearest exposition of this theory of the three stages is found in _The
Fundamentals of National Reconstruction_, a manifesto which Sun Yat-sen
issued in 1924:
3. The next element of reconstruction is democracy. To enable the
people to be competent in their knowledge of politics, the
government should undertake to train and guide them so that they
may know how to exercise their rights of election, recall,
initiative, and referendum....
5. The order of reconstruction is divided into three periods, viz.
(_a_) Period of Military Operations;
(_b_) Period of Political Tutelage;
(_c_) Period of Constitutional Government.
6. During the period of military operations the entire country
should be subject to military rule. To hasten the unification of
the country, the Government to be controlled by the Kuomintang
should employ military force to conquer all opposition in the
country and propagate the principles of the Party so that the
people may be enlightened.
7. The period of political tutelage in a province should begin and
military rule should cease as soon as order within the province is
completely restored....
He then goes on to describe the method by which tutelage shall be applied,
and when it should end. It should end, Sun declares, in each _hsien_
(district; township) as the people of the _hsien_ become self-governing,
through learning and practice in the democratic techniques. As soon as all
the _hsien_ within a province are self-governing, the provincial
government shall be released to democratic control.
23. When more than one half of the provinces in the country have
reached the constitutional government stage, _i. e._ more than one
half of the provinces have local self-government full established
in all their districts, there shall be a National Congress to
decide on the adoption and promulgation of the Constitution....
(_Signed_) SUN WEN
12th day, 4th month, 13th year of the Republic (April 12,
1924).(271)
Sun Yat-sen was emphatic about the necessity of a period of tutelage. The
dismal farce of the first Republic in 1912, when the inexperience and
apathy of the people, coupled with the venality of the militarists and
politicians, very nearly discredited Chinese democracy, convinced Sun
Yat-sen that effective self-government could be built up only as the
citizens became ready for it. A considerable number of the disputes
concerning the theory of self-government to be employed by the
policy-making groups of the National (Kuomintang-controlled) Government
have centered on the point of criteria for self-government. Even with the
insertion of a transition stage, and with a certain amount of tutelage,
difficulties are being encountered in the application of this theory of
the introduction of constitutional government as soon as the people in a
_hsien_ are prepared for it. Other considerations, military or political,
may make any venture beyond the secure confines of a benevolent Party
despotism dangerous; and the efficacy of tutelage can always be
questioned. The period of tutelage was set for 1930-1935; it is possible,
however, that the three stages cannot be gone through as quickly as
possible, since the Japanese invasions and the world economic depression
exercised a thoroughly disturbing influence throughout the country.
A final point may be made with regard to the three stages of the
revolution as Sun Yat-sen planned them. Always impetuous and optimistic in
revolutionary endeavor, Sun Yat-sen expected that the military conquest
would be rapid, the period of tutelage continue a few years, and
constitutional democracy endure for ages, until in the end _ta t’ung_
should reign upon earth. The transition period was not, as in the theory
of the Confucians and the Marxians, an indefinite period beginning with
the present and leading on down to the age of the near-perfection of
humanity. It was to Sun Yat-sen, in his more concrete plans, an interval
between the anarchy and tyranny of the warlord dictatorships and the
coming of Nationalist democracy. It was not a scheme of government in
itself.
To recapitulate: Sun Yat-sen believed that revolution proceeded or should
proceed by three stages—the (military) revolution proper; the period of
tutelage; and the period of constitutional democracy. His theory resembles
the Communist, although it provides for a dictatorship of the patriotic
elite (Kuomintang) and not of any one class such as the proletariat; it
also resembles the Confucian with respect to the concepts of tutelage and
eventual harmony. Military conquest was to yield swiftly to tutelage;
tutelage was to lead, _hsien_ by _hsien_, into democracy. With the
establishment of democracy in more than one-half of the provinces,
constitutional government was to be inaugurated and the expedient of Party
dictatorship dispensed with.
This theory, announced as early as 1905, Sun did not insist upon when the
first Republic was proclaimed in 1912, with the tragic results which the
history of that unfortunate experiment shows. In the experience derived
from that great enthusiasm, Sun appreciated the necessity of knowledge
before action. He was willing to defer the enjoyment of democracy until
the stability of the democratic idea in the minds of the people was such
that they could be entrusted with the familiar devices of Western
self-government.
What kind of a democratic organization did Sun Yat-sen propose to develop
in China on the basis of his Nationalist and democratic ideology? Having
established the fundamental ideas of national unity, and the national
self-control, and having allowed for the necessity of an instrument of
revolution—the Kuomintang—and a process of revolution—the three stages,
what mechanisms of government did Sun advocate to permit the people of
China to govern themselves in accord with the Three Principles?
The Adjustment of Democracy to China.
It is apparent that, even with tutelage, the democratic techniques of the
West could impair the attainment of democracy in China were they applied
in an unmodified form, and without concession to the ideological and
institutional backgrounds of the Chinese. The Westerner need only
contemplate the political structure of the Roman Republic to realize how
much this modern democracy is the peculiar institution of his race, bred
in his bone and running, sacred and ancient, deep within his mind. The
particular methods of democracy, so peculiarly European, which the
modern—that is, Western or Westernized—world employs, is no less alien to
the imperial anarchy of traditional China than is the Papacy. Sun Yat-sen,
beholding the accomplishments of the West in practical matters, had few
illusions about the excellence of democratic shibboleths, such as
parliamentarism or liberty, and was profoundly concerned with effecting
the self-rule of the Chinese people without leading them into the
labyrinth of a strange and uncongenial political system.
In advocating democracy he did not necessarily advocate the adoption of
strange devices from the West. While believing, as we have seen, in the
necessity of the self-rule of the Chinese race-nation, he by no means
desired to take over the particular parliamentary forms which the West had
developed.(272) He criticised the weakness of Western political and social
science as contrasted with the strength of Western technology: “It would
be a gross error to believe that just as we imitate the material sciences
of the foreigners, so we ought likewise to copy their politics. The
material civilization of the foreigners changes from day to day; we
attempt to imitate it, and we find it difficult to keep step with it. But
there is a vast difference between the progress of foreign politics and
the progress of material civilization; the speed of (the first) is very
slow.”(273) And he said later, in speaking of the democracy of the first
Republic: “China wanted to be in line with foreign countries and to
practice democracy; accordingly she set up her representative government.
But China has not learned anything about the good sides of representative
governments in Europe and in America, and as to the bad sides of these
governments, they have increased tenfold, a hundredfold in China, even to
the point of making swine, filthy and corrupt, out of government
representatives, a thing which has not been witnessed in other countries
since the days of antiquity. This is truly a peculiar phenomenon of
representative government. Hence, China not only failed to learn well
anything from the democratic governments of other countries, but she
learned evil practices from them.”(274) This farce-democracy was as bad as
no government at all. Sun Yat-sen had to reject any suggestion that China
imitate the example of some of the South American nations in borrowing the
American Constitution and proclaiming a “United States of China.” The
problem was not to be solved so easily.
In approaching Sun Yat-sen’s solution the Western student must again
remember two quite important distinctions between the democracy of Sun
Yat-sen and the democracy of the West. Sun Yat-sen’s principle of _min
ch’üan_ was the self-control of the whole people first, and a government
by the mass of individuals making up the people secondarily. The Chinese
social system was well enough organized to permit the question of
democracy to be a question of the nation as a whole, rather than a
question of the reconciliation of particular interests within the nation.
Special interests already found their outlet in the recognized social
patterns—so reminiscent of the institutions envisaged by the pluralists—of
the ancient order. In the second place, China was already a society which
was highly organized socially, although politically in ruins; the
democratic government that Sun Yat-sen planned had infinitely less
governing to do than did Western governments. The new Nationalist
government had to fit into rather than supplant the old order. As a
consequence of these distinctions, one may expect to find much less
emphasis on the exact methods of popular control of the government than
one would in a similar Western plan; and one must anticipate meeting the
ancient devices and offices which the usage of centuries had hallowed and
made true to the Chinese.
One may find that democracy in China is not so radical a novelty as it
might at first thought be esteemed. A figure of speech, which somewhat
anticipates the exposition, may serve to prepare one for some of the
seeming omissions of Sun Yat-sen’s plan for a democracy. The suggestion is
this: that the democracy of Sun Yat-sen is, roughly, a modernization of
the old Imperial system, with the Emperor (as the head of the academic
civil service) removed, and the majority placed in his stead. Neither in
the old system nor in the new were the minorities the object of profound
concern, for, to the Chinese, the notion of a minority (as against the
greater mass of the tradition-following people) is an odd one. The rule of
the Son of Heaven (so far as it was government at all) was to be replaced
by the rule of the whole people (_min_, which is more similar to the
German _Volk_ than the English _people_). The first Sun Yat-sen called
monarchy; the second, democracy.
The old ideology was to yield to the new, but even the new as a review of
it has shown, was not broad enough completely to supplant the old. The
essential continuity of Chinese civilization was not to be broken.
Democracy as a Western institution could be nothing more than a sham, as
the parliaments at Peking had showed; democracy in China had to be not
only democracy, but Chinese as well.
It is not, therefore, extraordinarily strange to find the ancient
institutions of the Empire surviving by the side of the most extreme
methods of popular government. The censorate and the referendum, the
examination system and the recall, all could work together in the
democracy planned by Sun Yat-sen. Even with the idea of popular rule
adopted in the formal Western manner, Sun Yat-sen proposed to continue the
idea of natural and ineradicable class differences between men. The
Chinese democracy was not to be any mere imitation of the West; it was to
be the fundamentally new fusion of Chinese and Western methods, and
offered as the solution for the political readjustment of the Chinese
society in a world no longer safe for it.
The Four Powers.
Sun Yat-sen divided all men into three categories: the geniuses, the
followers, and the unthinking. To reconcile this theory of natural
inequality with democracy, he distinguished between _ch’üan_, the right to
rule as sovereign, and _nêng_, the right to administer as an official. He
furthermore considered the state similar to a machine. How should the
unthinking, who would possess _ch’üan_, the right to rule, be granted that
right without attempting to usurp _nêng_?
This was to be accomplished by two means. The Four Powers were to be given
to the people, in order to assure their possession of _ch’üan_. The Five
Rights were to assure that the government might be protected in its right
to _nêng_, in its right to have only the most competent officials.
Together the Four Powers and the Five Rights implement a scheme of
government so novel that Sun Yat-sen himself believed it to be a definite
contribution to political method. The learned Jesuit translator of the
_San Min Chin I_ does not even term it democracy, but neo-democracy
instead.(275)
The Four Powers represent an almost extreme limit of popular control. Sun
Yat-sen divided the four into two groups: the first two are powers of the
people over the administrators—the power of election and the power of
recall; the second two are powers of the people over the laws—the power of
initiative and the power of referendum. Having secured the government from
undue interference, Sun Yat-sen had no reluctance in giving these powers
to the people. He said: “As for our China, since she had no old democratic
system, she ought to be able to make very good use of this most recent and
excellent invention.”(276)
These four powers are perhaps the most Western element in the whole theory
of Sun. History does not record the technique by which the Chinese chose
Yao to be their Emperor, and even where actions comparable to elections
were performed, it was not by use of the ballot-box or the voting machine,
or drilling on an appointed field. The Chinese way of getting things done
never tended that much to formality. A man who wanted to be a village head
might be quietly chosen head by a cabal of the most influential persons,
or at a meeting of many of the villagers. He might even decide to be head,
and act as head, in the hope that people would pay attention to him and
think that he was head. The Four Powers represent a distinct innovation in
Chinese politics for, apart from a few ridiculous comic-opera performances
under the first Republic, and the spurious plebiscite on the attempted
usurpation of Yüan Shih-k’ai, the voting method has been a technique
unknown in China. It is distinctly Western.
Another distinction may be made with a certain degree of reservation and
hesitancy. It is this: the Chinese, without the elaborate system of
expedient fictions which the West terms juristic law, were and are unable
to conceive of corporate action. A law passed by the Peking parliament was
not passed by the dictator in parliament, or the people in parliament; it
was simply passed by parliament, and was parliament’s responsibility. The
only kind of law that the people could pass would be one upon which they
themselves had voted.
Seen in this light, the Four Powers assume a further significance greater
than the Western political scientist might attribute to them. In America
there is little difference between a law which the people of Oregon pass
in the legislature, and one which they pass in a referendum. To the
Chinese there is all the difference in the world. The one is an act of the
government, and not of the people; the other, the act of the people, and
not of the government. The people may have powers over the government, but
never, by the wildest swing of imagination, can they discover themselves
personified in it. A Chinese democracy is almost a dyarchy of majority and
officialdom, the one revising and checking the other.
Sun Yat-sen did not comment on the frequency with which he expected these
powers to be exercised, nor has the political development of democratic
China gone far enough to afford any test of experience; it is consequently
impossible to state whether these powers were to be, or shall be,
exercised constantly as a matter of course, or whether they shall be
employed by the people only as courses for emergency action, when the
government arouses their displeasure. The latter seems the more probable,
in view of the background of Chinese tradition, and the strong
propensities of the Chinese to avoid getting involved in anything which
does not concern them immediately and personally. This probability is made
the more plausible by the self-corrective devices in the governmental
system, which may seem to imply that an extensive use of the popular
corrective power was not contemplated by Sun Yat-sen.
Sun Yat-sen said:
Now we separate power from capacity and we say _that the people
are the engineers and the government is the machine_. On the one
hand, we want the machinery of the government to be all-powerful,
able to do anything, and on the other hand we want the engineer,
the people, to have great power so as to be able to control that
all-powerful machine.
But what must be the mutual rights of the people and of the
government in order that they might balance? We have just
explained that. On the people’s side there should be the four
rights of _election_, _recall_, _initiative_, and _referendum_. On
the government’s side there must be five powers.... If the four
governing powers of the people control the five administrative
powers of the government, then we shall have _a perfect
political-democratic machine_....(277)
The Five Rights.
Sun Yat-sen implemented his theory of democracy by assigning Four Powers
to the people and Five Rights to the government. This latter doctrine is
one of the most disputed points in his proposal. Some writers see in it
nothing more than a crass conjunction of the theory of Montesquieu and the
practices of the Chinese Imperial system.(278) His followers are disposed
to regard the doctrine of the Five Rights as the product of intrepid
imagination, which succeeded in reconciling the traditional scheme of
Chinese things with the requirements of modern self-government.
Sun made the point that both Chinese and Western governments had in the
past had tripartite governments. He illustrated this by a diagram:(279)
CONSTITUTION OF CHINA
The Examining Power (_Kao Shih ch’üan_)
The Imperial Power (_Chun ch’üan_)
The Legislative Power
The Executive Power
The Judicial Power
The Power to Impeach (_Tan k’ê ch’üan_)
FOREIGN CONSTITUTIONS
The Legislative Power combined with the Power to Impeach
The Executive Power combined with the Examining Power
The Judicial Power
Sun Yat-sen believed that in separating the Five Rights from one another
he would make clear certain differentiations of function which had led to
numberless disputes in the past, and would present to the world a model
government.
Thus far, the Five Rights seem the complement of the Four Powers. The two
sets of controls, of people over the government, and of the government
over the people, assure China that a neo-democratic administration will
have no less continuity and power than did its Imperial predecessor, and
nevertheless be subject to the will of the majority of the four hundred
odd million sovereigns. Contemplated in this manner, the Five Rights are
an amalgamation of the Western theory upon the Chinese, and significant as
a novelty in democratic administrative theory rather than as institutions
altering the fundamental premises and methods of democracy.
If, however, a further step is taken, and the Five Powers are associated
with Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine of the three naturally unequal classes of men,
they assume a somewhat less superficial significance. If the rule of the
people is placed over the administration by the geniuses, the geniuses
must be assured a method of entering the government service. The oligarchy
of the intellectuals is to be reconciled with the dictatorship of the
majority. The old Chinese system of a trained class of scholars, entrance
to which was open on a competitive system to members of almost all classes
of society, had to be preserved in the new China, and at the same time
disciplined and purified of unworthy or unsuitable elements, while
simultaneously subject to the policy-making authority of the majority.
The preservation of a leader class was to be assured by an examination
division in the new democratic government, and its purification and
discipline continued by a supervisory or censoring division. The
administrative setup of the nationalist democracy would appear as follows,
when the present official translations of the Chinese names for the
divisions (_Yuan_) are adopted:
1. The division of the executive (Executive Yuan).
2. The division of the legislative (Legislative Yuan).
3. The division of the judicial (Judicial Yuan).
4. The division of censorship, impeachment and accounting (Control
Yuan).
5. And the division of the examination system (Examination Yuan).
It is an illustration of the further difference between the democracy of
Sun Yat-sen and Western democracy, that each of the divisions, even the
legislative, was to have a single head. The whole government was to be
departmentally, not camerally, organized.
The system of Five Powers emphasizes the implied dyarchy of government and
people in the _San Min Chu I_ by assigning to the government itself
functions which, in the usual course of events, are supposed to be
exercised by the people themselves in Western democracies. The people are
supposed to eliminate unfit officials and decide on the merits and
trustworthiness of incumbents. By the expedient of non-reëlection, the
people are supposed to remove officials, who are incapable or unsuitable
for public office. The two functions have been taken over by the
Examination and Control Yuans, respectively; the Four Powers of the people
are not, in all probability, instruments for continual popular intrigue
and meddling in government, but almost revolutionary implements for
shifting the course or composition of the government.
The Five Rights are instruments for the self-government of the official
class (Examination and Control), and for the government of the people by
the official class (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial). The Four Powers
are the instruments for the government of the official class by the
people. Out of the checks and balances of government and people the
integrity, efficacy, and stability of Sun Yat-sen’s democracy was to be
assured.
The exercise of the Four Rights of the people could, in the theory of Sun
Yat-sen, be used to check the development of an arrogant, inefficient or
irresponsible bureaucracy, in that the people would assist in the
selection of officials and would be able to remove incompetents at any
time. The civil service mechanism of the government would, on the other
hand, resist the too free play of popular caprice. No incompetent person
would be elected to office, since the civil service would extend even to
elective offices. The voters could remove a bad official but they could
not replace him with an untrained person; they would have to select their
candidate from the roster of scholar-officials eligible for the rank of
the office in question. The people were to supervise the operations of the
age-old Chinese civil service, as revivified by the nationalists; they
were to appoint and remove officers, to repeal and enact laws; but in no
case were they to tear down the structure of the civil service and
inaugurate a spoils democracy such as that found in the United States.
This blending of extreme democracy and traditional administrative
hierarchy would result, said Sun Yat-sen, in perfect government.
The democratic nationalist government was to supersede the Empire. In
between there was no central government, since the various military
leaders paid scant respect to the unfortunate clique of diplomats and
officials who carried on the few functions left to the powerless Peking
government.(280) The new government was not, therefore, so much a new
political order to be set up in place of the old as a political order to
be built up out of military chaos. The social system, although shaken and
affected by Western ideas, continued much as usual, and was to be woven
into the new socio-political patterns that Sun Yat-sen projected.
The Nationalist government was to be the nation’s answer to the foreign
aggression. The White Peril, which had flooded Asia, could only be held
back by the dykes of a militant nationalist movement, expressing itself in
a formal state such as the Westerners themselves had developed, and which
fitted them to undertake the conquest of the world. This government was to
be the agent of the whole Chinese people who, casting off the oppression
of the militarists and the imperialists, was to rise again with its
ancient power, formidable and ready to fight if necessary, more ready to
bring about world-coöperation and peace if possible. It was to be a
government made up of a trained officialdom such as ancient China had
possessed for centuries, which had led to the integration of control and
culture (in the narrowest sense of the word), and of a people ruling by
checking that officialdom: an all-powerful state-machine ruled by an
all-powerful people.(281) A state was to appear in the world of states and
enclose the Chinese people, by political power, more effectively than
could the Great Wall.
This aspect of democracy, the self-rule of the Chinese society _vis-à-vis_
the linked despotism of militarists, renegades and imperialists, was,
although the most important facet of democracy, not the whole story. In
order to systematize the loose democracy of old China, in order to lead
all force to the top, where it could be exerted outwards, the democratic
plan had to plan links with the traditional system. The government could
not be democratic if it were not tied to the people. The people could not
govern themselves, as apart from governing the officialdom making up the
National government, unless they had mechanisms with which to do so.
Although the family, the _hui_ and the _hsien_ provided self-government,
this self-government had to be associated with the scheme of nationalist
and national self-government in order to guarantee the latter’s
effectiveness. Beyond or beneath the national democracy of China there was
to be a system of democracy (the politicalization, as it were, of the old
social organs) running through society. What these separate or subordinate
organs were to be, what relations they were to have with the national
government, and what other intermediate institutions were to facilitate
those relations must be studied to gain a complete picture of the
democracy of Sun Yat-sen.
Confederacy Versus Centralism.
One of the most involved questions in the political thought of the Chinese
revolution has been the problem of provincial autonomy. The Chinese
provinces differ considerably more from one another in economic
conditions, language and race than do the American states; it has been
said that one of the causes of the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy was
the encroachment of the Imperial central power, in its last desperate
attempts to modernize itself and cope with the last crisis, upon the old
autonomy of the provinces.(282) Institutionally, the provinces were
relatively independent; this degree of independence was, however,
minimized by the general unimportance of government in Chinese society.
The Chinese, toward each other, feel conscious of family, village and
provincial ties; face to face with the foreigners, they are beginning to
know themselves as Chinese. Until the wave of nationalism swept the
country, provincial rivalry was a live issue; even today, it cannot be
called forgotten.
Sun Yat-sen’s opinions on many points of government remained stable
through his life. The fundamental ideas and ideals seem to have been
expanded, rather than changed, as his theory met the test of his growing
experience and the lessons of the revolution; but even with expansion,
they remain, for the most part, consistent. Sun Yat-sen was steadfast in
his beliefs.
This cannot be said of his and his successors’ opinions on the problem of
province versus nation. There is no one doctrine dealing with the question
of provincial autonomy. There may be a trend, however, which can be
described as a swing from definite emphasis upon the province toward
neglect of that unit of administration. This trend may be illustrated by
several points.
At the time of the first Republic the provinces were treated much as are
states in the United States. The members of the Senate of the Republic
(_Ts’an Yi Yuan_) were to be elected by the Assemblies of the provinces,
and, when representing persons not under the jurisdiction of a provincial
Assembly, by Electoral Colleges. The House of Representatives was to be
elected directly by the people, in the proportion of one member to each
eight hundred thousand of population, with the reservation—again in
propitiation of provincial vanity—that no province should have less than
ten representatives.(283) The first Republic was distinctly federal
although by no means confederate.
Sun Yat-sen did not immediately shift from this position. As late as
1919-1922, when he was preparing his official biography, he spoke
enthusiastically to his biographer of the potentialities of democratic
provincial home rule.(284) He still believed in the importance of the
provinces as units of a future democracy in China.
From the time that Sun went South, and the Kuomintang was reorganized, to
the present, the tendency in the Sun-Kuomintang theory seems to have been
toward minimization of the importance of the provinces in the democracy to
be set up. The Party Declaration of the Kuomintang at its First National
Convention in 1924 in Canton criticised several political viewpoints
prevalent; among these was that of the Confederalists, so called. The
Declaration states, in part: “Undoubtedly regional self-government is in
entire accord with the spirit of democracy and is a great need of our
nation. But a true regional self-government can be realized only when our
national independence is won, for without national freedom, local freedom
is impossible.... Many social, economic and political problems facing the
individual provinces can be solved only by the nation as a whole. So the
success of the peoples’ revolution is a prerequisite to the realization of
provincial autonomy.”(285)
Sun Yat-sen himself stated, a few months earlier, a point of view which
may seem inconsistent with the Party Declaration:
18. The _Hsien_ is the unit of self-government. The province links
up and provides means of co-operation between the Central
Government and the local governments of the districts.(286)
Whatever the occasion for the slight difference of opinion, it has been
the policy of the Kuomintang to emphasize _hsien_ rather than provinces as
units of self-government. The Party itself is quite centralized. The
Resumé of the Kuomintang Third National Congress Resolutions Concerning
Political Matters, adopted March 27, 1929, states unequivocally: “The
traditional policy of attaching greater importance to provincial
government than to _Hsien_ or district government must be corrected or
even reversed.” It adds, “The provincial government, on the other hand,
shall act only as a supervisor of local self-government, standing in
between the _Hsien_ or district government on the one hand, and the
Central Government on the other.”(287)
The province is thus reduced to the lowest possible level. It is not
probable that this tendency was influenced by Marxism, but it certainly
resembled the Marxian idea of a vast confederation of self-governing
communes, acting, by some proletarian metempsychosis, as a highly
centralized instrument of revolution.(288) The doctrine of the
_hsien_-province-nation relationship which places emphasis upon the first
and the last is the authoritative one, and is quite harmonious with the
earlier picture of Imperial China which, apart from the strictly
governmental, was a vast confederacy of largely autonomous communities. In
the picture of the new democratic national government which emerges from
this doctrine, the central government may be regarded as a centralism
versus the provinces, and a super-government in relation to the _hsien_;
that is, while the people govern themselves as groups in the _hsien_, they
will govern themselves as one people in the National Government. The
province will remain as a convenient intermediary between the two.
This is one of the few doctrines of Sun Yat-sen upon which no one
definitive and final pronouncement is to be found and concerning which,
consequently, recourse must be had to the history of the development of
the Sun Yat-sen political philosophy.
The _Hsien_ in a Democracy.
The _hsien_, or district, was one of the most important social
institutions in old China. The lowest official, the _hsien_ Magistrate,
represented the Empire to the people of the _hsien_, while within the
villages or the _hsien_ the people enjoyed a very high degree of autonomy.
The _hsien_ was the meeting point of the political system and the
extra-legal government, generally of a very vaguely organized nature, by
which the Chinese managed their own affairs in accord with tradition. An
estimate of the position of the _hsien_ may be gleaned from the fact that
China has approximately four hundred eighty million inhabitants; apart
from the cities and towns, there are about half a million villages; and
the whole country, with the exception of certain Special Municipalities,
such as Shanghai, is divided into nineteen hundred and forty-three
_hsien_.(289)
The _hsien_, however significant they may be in the social system of
China, both past and present, cannot be described in a work such as this.
It is not inappropriate, however, to reiterate that they form what is
perhaps the most important grouping within China, and that much of Chinese
life is centred in _hsien_ affairs. It is by reason of _hsien_ autonomy
that the Chinese social system has been so elastic as to permit the shocks
of invasion, insurrection, conquest, famine and flood to pass through and
over China without disrupting Chinese social organization.
Sun once quoted the old Chinese proverb about the Lu Shan (mountains): “We
cannot find the real shape of the Lu Shan—for we ourselves are on it.”
From the viewpoint of the Western reader this proverb could be turned
against Sun in his treatment of the _hsien_. He was passionately emphatic
in discussing the importance of the _hsien_ with his foreign friends;(290)
in his writings, addressed to his countrymen, he, as they, simply assumed
the importance of the _hsien_ without troubling to make any cardinal point
of it.
The _hsien_ is in the unit of the most direct self-government of the
people, without the interference of any elaborate set-up from officialdom.
Apart from its age-old importance, it will gain further significance in
the democracy of Sun Yat-sen.
Some of the functions to be assigned to the people in a _hsien_ are
assessment, registration, taxation, and/or purchase of all lands in the
_hsien_; the collection of all unearned increment on lands within the
_hsien_; land profits to be subjected to collection by the _hsien_, and
disbursement for public improvements, charitable work, or other public
service. Add this to the fact that the _hsien_ have been the chief
agencies for police, health, charity, religious activity and the
regulative control of custom—sometimes with the assistance of
persons—through the centuries, and the great importance of the _hsien_ in
the nationalist democracy becomes more clear.
The Family System.
Sun Yat-sen’s democracy differs further from the parliamentary, mechanical
democracy of the West in that it incorporates the family system.(291) Of
course Sun understood the extraordinary part that the family plays in
China—a part more conspicuous, perhaps, than in any other country. He
pointed out that the family required in China much of the loyalty which in
the West is given to the state. “Among the Chinese people the family and
kinship ties are very strong. Not infrequently the people sacrifice their
lives and homes for some affair of kinship; for instance, in Kuangtung,
two clans may fight regardless of life and property. On the other hand,
our people hesitate to sacrifice themselves for a national cause. The
spirit of unity has not extended beyond the family and clan
relationships.”(292)
Speaking of the early Emperors and the revolution, he said: “You see,
gentlemen, the methodology of Yao, like that of ours, was to begin his
moral and political teachings with the family, then the nation-group, then
the world.”(293) How did Sun Yat-sen propose to join the strength of the
family spirit and of nationalism, to the common advantage?
He planned to reorganize the already existing clan organizations in each
district. These organizations have existed from time immemorial for the
purposes of preserving clan unity, commemorating clan ancestry, performing
charitable functions, and acting as a focus—although this last was not an
avowed purpose—for clan defense. The reorganization which Sun proposed
would probably have involved some systematizing of the organization for
the purposes of uniformity and official record, as well as effectiveness.
Once the district headquarters were reorganized, they could be combined
throughout a province into a provincial clan organization. Such
organizations already exist, but they are neither systematic nor general.
After the clan was organized on a provincial basis throughout the
provinces, the various provincial organizations could be gathered together
in a national clan organization.
It is only when one contemplates the strength of the family system in
China that the boldness of this plan becomes apparent. A series of vast
national clan organizations would include practically every Chinese. Not
content with this, Sun proposed inter-clan organizations, certain clans
being more related to one another. A further series of national inter-clan
organizations would draw together the allegiance of numberless
individuals. There was always the possibility that a convention of all the
clans might be called—although Sun was not sanguine about this last.(294)
This methodology, according to Sun Yat-sen, would automatically bring
about nationalism. The Chinese people were already vigorously attached to
their families and clans. A union of all the families and clans would lead
the Chinese to realize that they were one people—one enormous family, as
it were—and cause them to join together as a nation. Since there are only
about four hundred surnames in China, the alliance of the clans was not so
far-fetched a suggestion as it might seem. Some clans have a membership
running into the millions, and clan spirit is so great that, in spite of
the absence of legislation, the Chinese marriage system is still largely
exogamic on this clan basis.
The suggestion of clan organization is relevant to Sun Yat-sen’s
democracy, in that the clan was one of the democratizing influences in old
China. An individual who failed to exert appreciable pressure on the
government, or on some other group, might appeal to his clan for
assistance. The Chinese record of relationships was kept so extensively
that there were few men of wealth or power who did not have their kinsmen
commanding their assistance. The non-political authority of the family
system controlled many things which have been within the scope of the
police power in the West, and the adjustments of society and the
individual were frequently mitigated in their harshness by the entrance of
the clan upon the scene. A stable Chinese democracy with a clan system
would be remarkably like the traditional system. The recourse of political
democracy would have been added, but the familiar methods of political
pressure upwards through the clan to the government might, not
inconceivably, prove the more efficacious.