The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu ILinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu I
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Sun, Yat-sen, 1866-1925. San min zhu yi
If one were to attempt to define the relations of the _min shêng_ ideology
to the various types of Western economic doctrines at present current,
certain misapprehensions may be eliminated at the outset. First:
Capitalism in its Western form was opposed by Sun Yat-sen; _min shêng_ was
to put through the national economic revolution of enrichment through a
deliberately-planned industrialization, but in doing so was to prevent
China from going through all the painful stages which attended the growth
of capitalism in the West. “We want,” said Sun Yat-sen, “a preventive
remedy; a remedy which will thwart the accumulation of large private
capitals and so preserve future society from the great inconvenience of
the inequality between rich and poor.”(187) And yet he looked forward to a
society which would ultimately be communistic, although never in its
strict Marxian sense. “We may say that communism is the ideal of
livelihood, and that the doctrine of livelihood is the practical
application of communism; such is the difference between the doctrine of
Marx and the doctrine of the Kuomintang. In the last analysis, there is no
real difference in the principles of the two; where they differ is in
method.”(188) This is sufficient to show that Sun Yat-sen was not an
orthodox Western apologist for capitalism; as a Chinese, it would have
been hard for him to be one, for the logically consistent capitalist
ideology is one which minimizes all human relationships excepting those
individual-contractual ones based on money bargains. The marketing of
goods and services in such a way as to disturb the traditional forms of
Chinese society would have been repugnant to Sun Yat-sen.
Second: if Sun Yat-sen’s _min shêng_ ideology cannot be associated with
capitalism, it can as little be affiliated with Marxism or the single-tax.
What, then, in relation to Western socio-economic thought, is it? We have
seen that the state it proposed was liberal-protective, and that the
society from which it was derived and to which it was to lead back was one
of extreme laissez-faire, bordering almost on anarchism. These political
features are enough to distinguish it from the Western varieties of
socialism, anarchism and syndicalism, since the ingredients of these
ideologies of the West and that of Sun Yat-sen, while coincident on some
points, cannot be fitted together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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