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 restriction of private capital to the point of keeping it harmless,
and thus avoiding the evils which would lead to the class war and a
violent social revolution, was only half the story of capitalism in China
which Sun Yat-sen wanted told in history. The other half was the
advancement of the industrial revolution by the state, which was the only
instrumentality capable of doing this great work. “China cannot be
compared to foreign countries. It is not sufficient (for her) to impose
restrictions upon capital. Foreign countries are rich, while China is
poor.... For that reason China must not only restrict private capital, but
she must also develop the capital of the State.”(324) The restrictions to
be placed upon private capital and upon private land speculation were
negative; the development of state-owned capital and of capital which the
state could trust politically were positive, as was the revenue which
should be gained from the governmental seizure of unearned increment. In
some cases the state would not even have to trouble itself to confiscate
the unearned increment; it could itself develop the land and profit by its
rise in value, applying the funds thus derived to the paying-off of
foreign loans or some socially constructive enterprise.(325)
Ideologically, Sun Yat-sen was opposed to the intra-national class war.
Class war could, nevertheless, be justified in the programs of Sun in two
ways: 1) if it were international class war, of the oppressed against the
oppressing nations; and 2) if it were the class war of the nationalist
Chinese workers against foreign imperialism. In these two cases Sun
Yat-sen thought class-war a good idea. He did not think class war
necessary in contemporary China, and hoped, by means of _min shêng_, to
develop an economy so healthy that the pathological phenomena of the class
struggle would never appear. On the other hand, in justice to Sun, and to
those Marxians who would apologize for him to their fellow-Marxians, there
can be little doubt that Sun Yat-sen would have approved of the class war,
even in China, if he had thought that Chinese capitalism had risen to such
power that it obstructed the way of the Chinese nation to freedom and
economic health. Even in this he might not have set any particular virtue
upon the proletariat as such; the capitalists would be the enemies of the
nation, and it would be the whole nation which would have to dispose of
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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