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
When one considers that to Sun Yat-sen democracy and autonomy are
inextricably associated, the full significance of his stressing
nationalism as a means to democracy appears. The Chinese people could not
rule themselves if they were to be intimidated by the Western powers and
Japan. They could not rule themselves completely if large portions of them
were under alien jurisdiction in the treaty ports. These forms of
political oppression were wounds in the body of Chinese society. Chinese
nationalism, associated with democracy, required that the whole Chinese
people be associated in one race-nation and that this race-nation rule
itself through the mechanism of a democratic state.
Here the code of values imposed by Sun Yat-sen’s thinking in terms of the
old ideology becomes apparent. The development of nationalism in China,
while it threatened no one outside and sought only for the justification
of China’s interests at home, was an accentuation of the existence of the
race-nation. The race-nation, freeing itself (political nationalism) and
ruling itself (democracy), was to become more conscious of itself. Sun
implicitly denied the immediate necessity for a general world-authority;
perhaps he did so because he realized that in the present world, any
supreme authority would be predominantly Western. The Chinese race-nation,
once politically free, had a definite duty to perform on behalf of its
peripheral states and on behalf of the suppressed states of the whole
world. The first demand, however, was for the freedom of China; others
could not be helped by China until China herself was free.
The political application of nationalism envisaged (1) the elimination of
existing foreign political control (imperialism) in China; (2) the
strengthening of the country to such a degree that it would no longer be a
hypo-colony or sub-colony, and would not have to live under the constant
threat of invasion or partition; and (3) the resulting free exercise of
self-rule by the Chinese people, through a nationalist democracy, so
arranged that self-rule of China did not conflict with the equal right of
self-rule of other peoples but, on the contrary, helped them.
The Class War of the Nations.
Now come to a consideration of the second part of the sub-principle of
political nationalism. This is the theory held by Sun concerning the class
war of the nations. It serves to illustrate three points in Sun Yat-sen’s
thought: first, that Sun never permitted a Western theory to disturb the
fundamentals of Chinese ideology as he wished to re-orient it; second,
that Sun frequently took Western political theories which had been
developed in connection with the relations of individuals and applied them
to the relations of nations; and third, that Sun was so much impressed
with the cordiality and friendship proffered him by the Communists that he
sought to coöperate with them so far as his Chinese ideology permitted
him.(255)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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