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
The theory of Sun Yat-sen in connection with the continuation of the old
system is a significant one. His political doctrines, both ideological and
programmatic, are original and not without great meaning in the
development of an adequate and just state system in modern China. But this
work might have been done, although perhaps not as well, by other leaders.
The significance of Sun in his own lifetime lay in his deliberate
championing of the cause of industrial revolution as the _sine qua non_ of
development in China. In the epoch of the first Republic he relinquished
the Presidency in favor of Yüan Shih-k’ai in order to be able to devote
his whole time to the advancement of the railway program of the Republic.
In the years that he had to spend in exile, he constantly studied and
preached the necessity of modernizing China. Of his slogan, “Modernization
without Westernization!” modernization is the industrial revolution, and
non-Westernization the rest of his programs and ideology. The unity of Sun
Yat-sen’s doctrines is apparent; they are inseparable; but if one part
were to be plucked forth as his greatest contribution to the working
politics of his own time, it might conceivably be his activities and plans
for the industrial revolution.
He spoke feelingly and bitterly of the miserable lives which the vast
majority of his countrymen had to lead, of the expensiveness and
insecurity of their material existences, of the vast, tragic waste of
human effort in the form of man-power in a world where machine-power had
rendered muscular work unnecessary. “This miserable condition among the
Chinese proletariat [he apparently means the whole working class] is due
to the non-development of the country, the crude methods of production,
and the wastefulness of labor. The radical cure for all this is industrial
development by foreign capital and experts for the benefit of the whole
nation.... If foreign capital cannot be gotten, we will have to get at
least their experts and inventors to make for us our own
machinery....”(312) Howsoever the work was to be done, it had to be done.
In bringing China into the modern world, in modernizing her economy, in
assuring the justice of the new economy which was to emerge, Sun found the
key in the physical advancement of China, in the building of vast railway
systems, in creating ports “with future capacity equalling New York
harbor,” in re-making the whole face of Eastern Asia as a better home for
his beloved race-nation.
The Social Revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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