Sun Yat-Sen: People's Democracy and Chinese Democracy
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Lee, Theresa Man Ling. "Sun Yat-sen: People’s Democracy and Chinese Democracy." Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 161–168. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350006195.ch-021>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 14:34 UTC. Copyright © Xavier Márquez and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER TWENTY Sun Yat-sen: People’s Democracy and Chinese Democracy Theresa Man Ling Lee [T]he aims of the Chinese Revolution are different from the aims in foreign revolutions, and the methods we use must also be different. Why, indeed, is China having a revolution? To put the answer directly, the aims of our revolutions are just opposite to the aims of the revolutions of Europe. Europeans rebelled and fought for liberty because they had had too little liberty. But we, because we have had too much liberty without any unity and resisting power, because we have become a sheet of loose sand and so have been invaded by foreign imperialism and oppressed by the economic control and trade wars of the Powers, without being able to resist, must break down individual liberty and become pressed into an unyielding body like a firm rock which is formed by the addition of cement to sand. [. .] I classified mankind into three groups. The first group are those who see and perceive first: they are the people of superior wisdom . , whose insight into the future and whose many achievements make the world advance and give mankind its civilization. The second group includes those who see and 162 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS perceive later: their intelligence and ability are below the standard of the first group; they cannot create or discover but can only follow and imitate, learning from what the first group have already done. The third group are those who do not see or perceive: they have a still lower grade of intelligence and ability and do not understand even though one tries to teach them; they simply act. [. .] The progress of the world depends on these three types, and not one type must be lacking. The nations of the world, as they begin to apply democracy and to reform the government, should give a part to every man – to the man who sees first, to the man who sees later, to the man who does not see. We must realize that political democracy is not given to us by nature; it is created by human effort. We must create democracy and then give it to the people, not wait to give it until people fight for it.1 All three of the passages cited above are taken from a set of lectures on ‘The Principle of Democracy’ delivered at the Canton University in China by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) in 1924. These lectures, along with two other sets – one on ‘The Principle of Nationalism’ and the other on ‘The Principle of Livelihood’ – were subsequently published as a book under the title San Min Chu I (‘The Three Principles of the People’).2 Despite his remarkable stature as the founding father of modern China, straddling the deep-seated political divide between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, Sun’s international reputation is considerably less pronounced. Moreover, he was undoubtedly a man of action and Sun considered himself more a political actor than a thinker. It is therefore not surprising that Sun has yet to be taken seriously as a major thinker in Western scholarship on Chinese philosophy and thought, while Sun studies in both Taiwan and China tend to be more ideological than academic. Nonetheless, as Marie-Claire Bergère, a French historian who wrote the most recent major biography of Sun, said, San Min Chu I is ‘a fundamental work’ of much import as it ‘crystallizes the questions, ambitions, and ideas that fueled the debates of the first quarter of this [twentieth] century’.3 More specifically, as we shall see, Sun’s theory of democracy embodies this crystallization. To appreciate what was at stake for Sun and his contemporaries, one needs to place Sun’s thought in its historical context. This is not a methodological question of choosing the historical approach over the philosophical in the study of political thought. Rather, Sun’s thought and Chinese history are inextricably linked. The political reality of China at the time was what prompted Sun to think of a unique solution to Chinese problems by drawing from both Chinese and Western political ideas, while his place as a SUN YAT-SEN: PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY AND CHINESE DEMOCRACY 163 much revered political leader meant that thought for him must necessarily inspire and orchestrate concrete and goal-oriented action. In Sun’s words, a principle is at once ‘an idea, a faith, and a power’ (3). When Sun delivered these lectures on the ‘principles’ of nationalism, democracy and livelihood in 1924, China had been a republic for thirteen years, following the abolition of the imperial state during the Revolution of 1911. Yet the nascent republic was plagued by an aborted attempt to restore monarchy early on and power struggle among political factions from the very start while the country splintered under the rule of warlords (former imperial generals). The impact of this protracted political crisis was made worse as Western powers and Japan continued their imperialistic expansion by carving up China into pockets of colonial outposts. Having served the Chinese Republic briefly as its first provisional president, Sun founded the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in 1919 to save China from obliteration. By 1924, Sun was ready to take his plan to yet another stage, which was to form an alliance, known as the United Front, with the newly founded Chinese Communist Party (1921). This strategic alignment, brokered by the Comintern (1919–43), was deemed to be necessary if China were to be reunified as a sovereign state free from internal political strife and external territorial encroachment. But the alliance soon fell apart when Sun died of cancer in 1925. The struggle for power between the two parties that ensued only ended with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by the Communist Party under Mao Zedong while the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan as a government-in-exile of the Chinese Republic. What is remarkable is that despite their ideological differences, both the Communists and the Nationalists claimed that their party was the true bearer of Sun’s vision for a new China. A new China in this context meant a centralized state presiding over a united and sovereign China that is on par with other countries in the world, along with a mandate to serve its people by improving their livelihood. Against this historical background, San Min Chu I is at once an anti- colonial political treatise that affirms nationhood and a blueprint for postcolonial state-building. Democracy as such is the pathway to this new nationhood. Yet Sun noted that ‘the Chinese people’s ideas of political democracy have all come from the West’ because ‘Western civilization . is in every way more advanced than Chinese civilization’ (280–1). In other words, for Sun Chinese nationalism was anti-imperialistic but not necessarily anti-Western.4 Sun, however, withheld giving full credit to the West as the inventor of democracy by reminding his audience that both Confucius and Mencius ‘had already considered the idea of democracy’ as they ‘spoke for people’s rights’, only to be ahead of their time (169–70). Now more than 2,000 years later, the time was finally right because humanity had reached the age of ‘people’s sovereignty’, when the ‘people’, as a ‘unified and organized body of men’, are the bearer of sovereignty, defined as the ‘power and authority extended to the area of the state’ (151–2). 164 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS Why then did the Chinese lag behind their Western counterparts in reaching this critical historical juncture? Sun’s explanation was that the Chinese people were simply not as oppressed as the Europeans, both politically and socially. First, in contrast to European despotism, China’s autocracy was not as ‘severe’ (225). Second, feudalism was long abolished in China with the founding of the first imperial state in 221 BCE. Consequently, there were neither inherited social classes nor an entrenched nobility that stood above the rest of the population (223–5). Accordingly, the Chinese did not have the same intense longing for liberty and equality as the Europeans (209). This was why the aim of democratic revolution in China was different from the ones that took place in Europe, as noted in the first extract at the start of this chapter. Given that the Chinese people had too much freedom, so much so that the Chinese were ‘a sheet of loose sand’, democracy in China was not about enhancing individual freedom. Rather, ‘personal freedom’ had to be sacrificed in order ‘to make the nation free’ (213). In other words, the ‘Principle of Democracy’ works hand in hand with the ‘Principle of Nationalism’ in Sun’s vision. Along with this rejection of personal freedom in the name of nation- building is Sun’s claim that a modern state works more effectively when its citizens are not just individuals stripped of other embedded bonds among them. According to Sun, in the West where ‘the individual is the unit’, the individual expands immediately into the state; between the individual and the state there is no common, firm, social unit’ (114).