Part 7 (1/2)
The Democratic Machine State.
Throughout pre-modern Chinese thought there runs the idea of personal behavior and personal controls. The Chinese could not hypostatize in the manner of the West. Looking at men they saw men and nothing more.
Considering the problems and difficulties which men encountered, they sought solutions in terms of men and the conditioning intimacies of each individual's life. The Confucian Prince was not so much an administrator as a moral leader; his influence, extending itself through imitation on the part of others, was personal and social rather than political.(134) In succeeding ages, the scholars thought of themselves as the leaven of virtue in society. They stressed deportment and sought, only too frequently by means of petty formalities, to impress their own excellence and pre-eminence upon the people. Rarely, if ever, did the scholar-official appeal to formal political law. He was more likely to invoke propriety and proceed to exercise his authority theoretically in accordance with it.
Sun Yat-sen did not feel that further appeal to the intellectual leaders was necessary. In an environment still dominated by the past, an exhortation for the traditional personal aspect of leaders.h.i.+p would probably have appeared as a centuries-old triteness. The far-seeing men, the geniuses that Sun saw in all society, owed their superiority not to artificial inequality but to natural inequality;(135) by their ability they were outstanding. Laws and customs could outrage this natural inequality, or conceal it behind a legal facade of artificial inequality or equally artificial equality. Laws and customs do not change the facts.
The superior man was innately the superior man.
Nevertheless, the geniuses of the Chinese revolution could not rely upon the loose and personal system of influence hitherto trusted. To organize Chinese nationalism, to give it direction as well as force, the power of the people must be run through a machine-the State.
A distinction must be made here. The term ”machine,” applied to government, was itself a neologism introduced from the j.a.panese.(136) Not only was the word but the thing itself was alien to the Chinese, since the same term (_ch'i_) meant machinery, tool, or instrument. The introduction of the view of the state as a machine does not imply that Sun Yat-sen wished to introduce a specific form of Western state-machine into China-as will be later explained (in the pages which concern themselves with the applied political science of Sun Yat-sen).
Sun was careful, moreover, to explain that his a.n.a.logy between industrial machinery and political machinery was merely an a.n.a.logy. He said, ”The machinery of the government is entirely composed of human beings. All its motions are brought about by men and not by material objects. Therefore, there is a very great difference between the machinery of the government and the manufacturing machine ... the machinery of the government is moved by human agency whereas the manufacturing machine is set in motion by material forces.”(137)
Even after allowance has been made for the fact that Sun Yat-sen did not desire to import Western governmental machinery, nor even to stress the machine and state a.n.a.logy too far, it still remains extraordinarily significant that he should have impressed upon his followers the necessity of what may be called a mechanical rather than an organic type of government. The administrative machine of the Ch'ing dynasty, insofar as it was a machine at all, was a chaotic ma.s.s of political authorities melting vaguely into the social system. Sun's desire to have a clear-cut machine of government, while not of supreme importance in his ideological projects, was of great significance in his practical proposal. In his theory the state machine bears the same resemblance to the old government that the Chinese race-nation bears to the now somewhat ambiguous civilized humanity of the Confucians. In both instances he was seeking sharper and more distinct lines of demarcation.
In putting forth his proposals for the reconst.i.tution of the Chinese government he was thinking, in speaking of a state-machine, of the more or less clearly understood juristic states of the West.(138) His concrete proposals dealing with the minutiae of administrative organization, his emphasis on const.i.tution and law, and his interest in the exact allocation of control all testify to his complete acceptance of a sharply delimited state. On the other hand, he was extraordinary for his time in demanding an unusual extent, both qualitative and quant.i.tative, of power for the state which he wished to hammer out on the forges of the nationalist social and political revolution.
In summarizing this description of the instrument with which Sun Yat-sen hoped to organize the intellectual leaders of China so as to implement the force of the revolution, it may be said that it was to be a state-machine, as opposed to a totalitarian state, based upon Western juristic theory in general but organized out of the materials of old Chinese political philosophy and the Imperial experience in government.(139) The state machine was to be built along lines which Sun Yat-sen laid out in some detail. Yet, even with his elaborate plans already prepared, and in the midst of a revolution, he pointed out the difficulty of political experimentation, in the following words:
... the progress of human machinery, as government organizations and the like, has been very slow. What is the reason? It is that once a manufacturing machine has been constructed, it can easily be tested, and after it has been tried out, it can easily be put aside if it is not good, and if it is not perfect, it can easily be perfected. But it is very difficult to try out a human machine and more difficult still to perfect it after it has been tried out. It is impossible to perfect it without bringing about a revolution. The only other way would be to regard it as a useless material machine which can easily be turned into sc.r.a.p iron. But this is not workable.(140)
Democratic-Political Versus Ideological Control.
Sun Yat-sen accepted an organization of society based upon intellectual differences, despite his belief in the justifiability and necessity of formal democracy, and his reconciliation of the two at first contradictory theses in a plan for a machine state to be based upon a distinction between _ch'uan_ and _neng_. It may now be asked, why did Sun Yat-sen, familiar with the old method of ideological control, and himself proposing a new ideology which would not only restore internal harmony but also put China into harmony with the actual political condition of the world, desire to add formal popular control to ideological control?
The answer is not difficult, although it must be based for the most part on inference rather than on direct citation of Sun Yat-sen's own words. In the consideration of the system of ideological control fostered by the Confucians, ideological control presented two distinct aspects: the formation of the ideology by men, and control of men by the ideology. The ideology controlled men; some men sought to control the ideology; the whole ideological control system was based upon the continuous interaction of cause and effect, wherein tradition influenced the men who sought to use the system as a means of mastery, while the same men succeeded in a greater or less degree in directing the development of the ideology.
In the old Chinese world-society the control of the ideology was normally vested in the _literati_ who were either government officials or hoped to become such. The populace, however, acting in conformity with the ideology, could overthrow the government, and, to that extent, consciously control the content and the development of the ideology. Moreover, as the efficacy of an ideology depends upon its greater acceptance, the populace had the last word in control of the ideology both consciously and unconsciously. Politics, however, rarely comes to the last word. In the normal and ordinary conduct of social affairs, the populace was willing to let the _literati_ uphold the cla.s.sics and modify their teachings in accordance with the development of the ideology-in the name of _cheng ming_. The old ideology was so skilfully put together out of traditional elements that are indissociable from the main traits of Chinese culture, together with the revisions made by Confucius and his successors, that it was well-nigh unchallengeable. The whole Confucian method of government was based, as previously stated, on the control of men through the control of their ideas by men-and these latter men, the ideologues, were the scholar administrators of successive dynasties. The identification of the _literati_ and officials, the respect in which learning was held, the general distribution of a leaven of scholars through all the families of the Empire, and the completeness-almost incredible to a Westerner-of traditional orthodoxy, permitted the interpreters of the tradition also to mould and transform it to a considerable degree. As a means of adjusting the mores through the course of centuries, interpretation succeeded in gradually changing popular ideas, where open and revolutionary heterodoxy would have failed.
Now, in modern times, even though men might still remain largely under the control of the ideology (learn to behave rightly instead of being governed), the ideology was necessarily weakened in two ways: by the appearance of men who were recalcitrant to the ideology, and by the emergence of conceptions and ideas which could not find a place in the ideology, and which consequently opened up extra-ideological fields of individual behavior. In other words, _li_ was no longer all-inclusive, either as to men or as to realms of thought. Its control had never, of course, been complete, for in that case all inst.i.tutions of government would have become superfluous in China and would have vanished; but its deficiencies in past ages had never been so great; either with reference to insubordinate individuals or in regard to una.s.similable ideas, as they were in modern times.
Hence the province of government had to be greatly extended. The control of men by the ideology was incomplete wherever the foreign culture had really struck the Chinese-as, for instance, in the case of the newly-developed Chinese proletariat, which could not follow the Confucian precepts in the slums of twentieth-century industry. The family system, the village, and the guild were to the Chinese proletarians mere shadows of a past; they were faced individually with the problems of a foreign social life suddenly interjected into that of the Chinese. True instances of the interpenetration of opposites, they were Chinese from the still existing old society of China suddenly transposed into an industrial world in which the old ideology was of little relevance. If they were to remain Chinese they had to be brought again into the fold of the Chinese ideology; and, meanwhile, instead of being controlled ideologically, they must be controlled by the sharp, clear action of government possessing a monopoly of the power of coercion. The proletarians were not, indeed, the only group of Chinese over whom the old ideology had lost control. There were the overseas Chinese, the new Chinese finance-capitalists, and others who had adjusted their personal lives to the Western world. These had done so incompletely, and needed the action of government to s.h.i.+eld them not only from themselves and from one another, but from their precarious position in their relations with the Westerners.
Other groups had not completely fallen away from the ideology, but had found major sections of it to be unsuitable to the regulation of their own lives. Virtue could not be found in a family system which was slowly losing its polygynous character and also slowly giving place to a sort of social atomism; the intervention of the machine state was required to serve as a subst.i.tute for ideological regulation until such a time as the new ideology should have developed sufficiently to restore relevance to traditions.
Indeed, throughout all China, there were few people who were not touched to a greater or less degree by the consequences of the collision of the two intellectual worlds, the nationalistic West and the old Chinese world-society. However much Chinese might desire to continue in their traditional modes of behavior, it was impossible for them to live happy and progressive lives by virtue of having memorized the cla.s.sics and paid respect to the precepts of tradition, as had their forefathers. In all cases where the old ideas failed, state and law suddenly acquired a new importance-almost overwhelming to some Chinese-as the establishers of the new order of life. Even etiquette was established by decree, in the days of the parliamentary Republic at Peking; the age-old a.s.surance of Chinese dress and manners was suddenly swept away, and the government found itself forced to decree frock-coats.
Successive governments in the new China had fallen, not because they did too much, but because they did too little. The sphere of state activity had become enormous in contrast to what it had been under more than a score of dynasties, and the state had perforce to intervene in almost every walk of life, and every detail of behavior. Yet this intervention, although imperative, was met by the age-old Chinese contempt for government, by the determined adherence to traditional methods of control in the face of situations to which now they were no longer relevant. It was this paradox, the ever-broadening necessity of state activity in the face of traditional and unrealistic opposition to state activity, which caused a great part of the turmoil in the new China. Officials made concessions to the necessity for state action by drafting elaborate codes on almost every subject, and then, turning about, also made concessions to the traditional non-political habits of their countrymen by failing to enforce the codes which they had just promulgated. The leaders of the Republic, and their followers in the provinces, found themselves with laws which could not possibly be introduced in a nation unaccustomed to law and especially unaccustomed to law dealing with life in a Western way; thus baffled, but perhaps not disappointed, the pseudo-republican government officials were content with developing a shadow state, a shadow body of law, and then ignoring it except as a tool in the vast pandemonium of the tuchunates-where state and law were valued only in so far as they served to aggrandize or enrich military rulers and their hangers-on.
This tragic dilemma led Sun Yat-sen to call for a new kind of state, a state which was to be democratic and yet to lead back to ideological control. The emergency of imperialism and internal impotence made it imperative that the state limit its activities to those provinces of human behavior in which it could actually effectuate its decrees, and that, after having so limited the field of its action, it be well-nigh authoritarian within that field. Yet throughout the whole scheme, Sun Yat-sen's deep faith in the common people required him to demand that the state be democratic in principle and practice.