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 technique adopted in the present work is a relatively simple one. It
is an attempt to start _de novo_ with certain concepts of society and
government. Several simple although novel terms are introduced, to provide
a foundation upon which the procedure may rest. One of these, for
instance, is “ideology,” which in the present work refers to the whole
psychological conditioning of a group of persons.(23) No attempt is made,
at the beginning or at any later phase of the exposition, to distinguish
between the ideology as belief and the ideology as truth. Whether the
Chinese were and are right, or the Westerners, are questions, not for the
student of comparative political science, but for the philosopher and the
psychologist. The interpretation seeks, as far as possible, to transpose
certain parts of the traditional Chinese ideology, as they were, and as
Sun Yat-sen re-shaped them, into one frame of reference provided by the
ideology of twentieth-century America. What the “real truth” is, does not
matter; the Marxians would say that both ideologies were inexact; so might
the Roman Catholics. If the ideology of old China, and the ideology that
Sun wished to see developed in the minds of the Chinese people of the
future, can be made comprehensible in terms of contemporary American
beliefs, of fact or of value, this venture will have been successful.
The Chinese ideology cannot be explained in its own terms; these exist
only in the Chinese language. If Sun Yat-sen’s own arrangement of his
works is inadequate for the Chinese, rearrangement is a task for the
Chinese and not for the Western scholars to perform. The Westerners who
deal with Sun can contribute substantially only if they give what the
Chinese cannot—enough of a reference to their own ideology to permit a
broader scale for the analysis and the appreciation of Sun’s thought.
Their knowledge of their own world of ideas is the special tool which
justifies their intervention in this Chinese field of knowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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