Government in Republican ChinaLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Government in Republican China
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
China -- Politics and government -- 1912-1949
Another of Sun's programs relates to the question: How can democracy be
reconciled with ideological control? The Chinese had lived in a society
so completely under the rule of common ideas that independent individual
thinking had to be moderate, careful, and orthodox in appearance before
it met with any welcome. The individual was not free to think freely;
but since most did not think freely, sensing no need for it, they were
unconscious of control. A problem larger than that of individual freedom
is raised by the question of ideological control, since the controlled
individual himself transmits control to his neighbors and his
dependents. The ideology must be filtered, as it were, at some point.
Sun believed that democracy would effectuate the filtering, allowing
long-range revision from outside the bureaucracy. He expected that the
bureaucracy of democratic China would rule well but would be subject to
control from a people not completely under its thumb. The ideology was
to be officially fostered, but it was to be subject to the check of the
electorate. The Chinese were still to use orthodoxy as a tool of control
and social pressure as the major instrument of constraint, but they were
not to be allowed to fall into a blind traditionalism which would
isolate them.
The old ideology was to be adjusted and supplemented with Western
science, so that the new would be compounded of three things: old
Chinese social and political experience, old Chinese ethical knowledge,
and modern scientific truth. With respect to Western science, the
Nationalists had to present few startling governmental innovations,
since the need for a knowledge of the physical and technical sciences
was widely recognized in China--not only by the Nationalists. That the
Western technology should serve to build the new China was obvious;
trade schools needed encouragement rather than initiation. As to the old
Chinese social and political experience, the Kuomintang stressed study
of China's past. They attempted to mend the gap between the generation
born in the 1880's and that born in the 1910's by encouraging
concentration on the classical texts, reverently, but critically as
well. Archaeology has heightened interest of the Chinese in their past.
As a consequence, their sense of national value has deepened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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