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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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