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
Secondly, government needs to administer only for two purposes. The chief
of these is the maintenance of the ideology. Once right views are
established, no individual is entitled to think otherwise. Government must
treat the heterodox as malefactors. Their crime is greater than ordinary
crime, which is a mere violation of right behavior; they pollute right
thought, set in motion the forces of discord, and initiate evils which may
work on and on through the society, even after the evil-thinkers
themselves are dead. To protect the society actively against discord, the
government must encourage the utterance of the accepted truth. The scholar
is thus the highest of all the social classes; it is he who maintains
agreement and order. The government becomes, in maintaining the ideology,
the educational system. The whole political life is education, formal or
informal. Every act of the leader is a precept and an example. The ruler
does not compel virtue by law; he spreads it by his conspicuous example.
The other function of the government in maintaining the ideology lies in
the necessity of dealing with persons not affected by the ideology.
Barbarians are especially formidable, since both heretics and criminals
may be restored to the use of their reason, while barbarians may not, so
long as they remain barbarians. Accordingly, the government is also a
defense system. It is a defense against open and physical disruption from
within—as in the case of insurrectionaries or bandits—and a defense
against forces from without which, as veritable powers of darkness, cannot
be taught and are amenable only to brute force.
In connection with the third point, government itself appears as subject
to _li_. It has no right to do wrong. The truth is apparent to everyone,
and especially to the scholars. In this wise the Chinese governments were
at the mercy of their subjects. No divine right shielded them when public
opinion condemned them; ill-doing governments were twice guilty and
contemptible, because of the great force of their examples. An evil
emperor was not only a criminal; he was a heresiarch, leading many astray,
and corrupting the virtue upon which society rested—virtue being the
maintenance of a true and moral ideology, and conformity to it.
The consequence of these teachings was such that we may say, without
sacrificing truth to paradox, that the aim of Chinese government was
anarchy—not in the sense of disorder, but in the sense of an order so just
and so complete that it needed no governing. The _laissez-faire_ of the
Chinese was not only economic; it was political. The Great Harmony of
Confucius, which was his Utopia, was conceived of as a society where the
excellence of ideology and the thoroughness of conformity to ideology had
brought perfect virtue, perfect happiness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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