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
He states, also, that if the Chinese race is to survive, it must adopt
nationalism. “... if we now want to save China, if we wish to see the
Chinese race survive forever, we must preach Nationalism.”(62) Hitherto
they had been no more conscious of race than were the Europeans of the
middle ages. To be sure, they were barbarians, whose features were
strange; but the Chinese were not conscious of themselves as a racial
unity in competition and conflict with other equal or superior racial
unities. The self-consciousness of the Chinese was a cultural rather than
a racial one, and the juxtaposition that presented itself to the Chinese
mind was between “Ourselves of the Central Realm” and “You the
Outsiders.”(63) Sun Yat-sen became intensely conscious of being a Chinese
by race,(64) and so did many other of his compatriots, by the
extraordinary race-pride of the _White Men_ in China. In common with many
others of his generation, Sun Yat-sen turned to race-consciousness as the
name for Chinese solidarity.
There is nowhere in his works, so far as the writer knows, any attempt to
find a value higher than the necessity of perpetuating the Chinese race.
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese; his followers were Chinese; whatever benefits
they contemplated bestowing upon the world as a whole were incidental to
their work for a powerful and continued China. At various times Sun
Yat-sen and his followers expressed sympathy with the whole world, with
the oppressed of the earth, or with all Asia, but the paramount drive
behind the new movement has been the defense and reconstruction of China,
no longer conceived of as a core-society maintaining the flower of human
civilization, but regarded as a race abruptly plunged into the chaos of
hostile and greedy nations.
Throughout his life, Sun Yat-sen called China a nation. We may suppose
that he never thought that Chinese society need not necessarily be called
a nation, even in the modern world. What he did do, though, was to
conceive of China as a unique type of nation: a race-nation. He stated
that races could be distinguished by a study of physical characteristics,
occupation, language, religion and folkways or customs.(65) Dividing the
world first into the usual old-style five primary races (white, black,
yellow, brown, and red), he divides these races into sub-races in the
narrow sense of the term. The Chinese race, in the narrow sense of the
term, is both a race and a nation. The Anglo-Saxons are divided between
England and America, the Germans between Germany and Austria, the Latins
among the Mediterranean nations, and so forth; but China is at the same
time both the Chinese race and the Chinese nation. If the Chinese wish
their race to perpetuate itself forever, they must adopt and follow the
doctrine of Nationalism.(66) Otherwise China faces the tragedy of being
"despoiled as a nation and extinct as a race."(67)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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