Sun Yatsen's Doctrine In The Modern World

Chu-yuan Cheng, Hung-Chao Tai, Harold Z Schiffrin, Yu-Long Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000313581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume focuses on Sun Yat-sen's social, political, and economic ideas as seen in his major work, The Three Principles of the People, which discusses nationalism, democracy, and people's welfare, examining his doctrines as well as a his ideas with other contemporary ideologies.

1
Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Times

Harold Z. Schiffrin

More than sixty years after Sun Yat-sen's death, his memory continues to evoke unparalleled respect and admiration. Regardless of their political affiliation, Chinese patriots identify with his overarching aims—modernization, democracy, social justice, and China's gaining equal status among the great nations of the world. Sun's lifelong, selfless struggle to realize these aims explains his enduring appeal. During his thirty-year political career, Sun had to adjust his strategy and tactics to the momentous events of the times: the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the scramble for foreign concessions, the Boxer Rebellion, the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and emergence as an Asian power, the Russo-Japanese War, Japan's annexation of Korea and pursuit of aggressive imperialism, World War I, the Russian Revolution and the growth of international communism, the Versailles Peace Treaty, and the Washington conference (discussed below). At home, Sun had to contend, in succession, with the Manchu dynasty, Yüan Shih-k'ai, and the warlords. Yet, during these years darkened by national humiliation and mass misery and studded with personal disappointments and betrayals, Sun's confidence in China's future never wavered. Before he died in 1925, he had become the undisputed spokesman for Chinese nationalism. Thus his life story, shining with complete devotion to his country's revival, became an integral chapter in the saga of modern China.

The Formative Years: 1866-1893

Sun (given name, Wen; courtesy name, Ti-hsiang) was born on November 12, 1866, to a poor peasant family in the village of Ts'ui-heng, Hsiang-shan district, in the Pearl River delta of Kwangtung Province.¹ His father, Sun Ta-ch'eng, eked out a meager living in various trades. When Sun was born, the family had little hope of escaping the grinding poverty shared by the millions of peasants who formed the vast majority of China's population. This early, intimate encounter with rural distress was to have a profound influence upon Sun Yat-sen.

His home district, Hsiang-shan, was close to Macao and Canton, the two earliest links between China and the maritime nations of Europe, and to Hong Kong, ceded to Great Britain after the Opium War, which had also led to the opening of treaty-ports on the coast. Given this early exposure to foreign influences, Hsiang-shan produced many missionary disciples and compradors, agents of foreign firms in Hong Kong and the treaty-ports.² It also produced many emigrants who, driven by poverty and land-hunger, hoped to better their fortunes abroad. Few succeeded. But the contact with emigrant communities and Western influences was of lasting consequence in Sun's life and political career.

When he was born, the fortunes of the Manchu Empire had been declining for a half century. Corruption and incompetence in the imperial bureaucratic system, coupled with an unprecedented demographic crisis—the population had passed the 400 million mark in 1850—had provoked uprisings by secret societies, the traditional vehicles for peasant protest. In the meantime, two disastrous wars, the British-induced Opium War (1840-1842) and the Arrow War (1856-1860), capped by the occupation of Peking by Anglo-French invaders, had destroyed China's proud isolation and its myth of superiority. A series of unequal treaties had robbed the nation of its sovereign rights and territory, especially on the northern borders, where Russia remained a constant threat.

Before 1860, Confucian officials, whose main diplomatic experience had been in handling Inner Asian nomads, were slow to perceive the danger posed by the maritime trading nations, led by Great Britain. These officials had not understood the full significance of foreign-imposed treaties that granted those countries extraterritoriality, most-favored-nation status, tariff restrictions, and other rights designed to facilitate the commercial exploitation of China. In the years following the Opium War, the more pressing danger was internal.

The T'aip'ing Rebellion (1850-1864), in which desperate peasants unleashed their fury against the Manchu dynasty, was the most destructive civil war in history. Tens of millions of lives were lost and vast stretches of territory decimated. Blending Judeo-Christian with ancient Chinese themes, the rebels also challenged the ideology and dominance of the Confucian literati, which caused the latter to rally to the banner of the dynasty and help to give it a fifty-year reprieve.

In the year Sun was born, imperial armies had just mopped up the last remnants of T'aip'ing resistance. This took place in his home province of Kwangtung, which had long nurtured a tradition of anti-Manchuism. Reinvigorated by the T'aip'ings, anti-Manchuism became firmly embedded in the consciousness of the young Sun Yat-sen. His mentor was a T'aip'ing veteran who had returned to Ts'ui-heng to teach in the village school. Thus began Sun's lifelong admiration of the T'aip'ing leader, Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, with whom Sun would identify in his earliest expression of political interest.³

However, the immediate post-T'aip'ing period seemed to start auspiciously for the Manchu dynasty. The Confucian leaders who had taken the lead in quelling the rebellion now combined internal administrative renovation with a new, more open-minded attitude toward foreigners and foreign influences. This "self-strengthening" effort, as it was called, concentrated on the military and technological spheres, where its achievements were not entirely insignificant. Furthermore, the establishment in 1861-1862 of new institutions like the Tsungli-yamen, which served the function of a foreign office and dealt with the foreign envoys, who had won the right of residence in Peking; and the T'ung-wen Kuan, the first Chinese government school for the teaching of foreign languages, seemed to indicate that Chinese and Manchu leaders finally understood the need for modernization. Yet this self-strengthening program lacked a concerted national effort toward thoroughgoing institutional reform. What was missing, most importantly of all, was an attempt to mobilize China's human resources fully. Literati elitism largely excluded lower-class participation in the reform program, which in any case was limited in scope and only sporadically implemented. This program proved insufficient to stem the unrelenting pressure of the foreign powers, whose hopes of turning China into an El Dorado for their business interests were not fully satisfied. Nor was it sufficient to make any appreciable change in the lives of the peasant masses.

The fortunes of the Sun family, however, did change, thanks to the hard work and good business sense of the eldest son, Sun Mei, who emigrated to Hawaii in 1871- The entire family benefited from his success in the islands, but none more so than Sun Yat-sen, who joined him in 1879. Supported by his brother, the thirteen-year-old Sun now started receiving the modern education that changed his life. At home, village schooling had given Sun a fragmentary knowledge of the Chinese classics. His real education began in Honolulu and it was thoroughly Western and Christian oriented. The Iolani School, where he was first enrolled as an external student and then as a boarder, was an Anglican elementary school whose teaching staff was mostly British. Sun continued his education at a high school run by American Congregationalists, but after a year, his brother, who objected to his growing attachment to Christianity, sent him home.

Sun's stay in Ts'ui-heng was brief. Four years of modern, Christian education had alienated him from traditional religious beliefs, and he was too self-assertive to hide his feelings. After mutilating a village deity in order to discredit idol worship, he was forced to leave. The same thing had happened to his hero, Hung Hsiu-ch'üan. Courageously, Sun resumed his studies at a Church of England school in Hong Kong and also began studying the Chinese classics with a Chinese Christian missionary. In 1884 he transferred to Government Central School, a well-known secondary school catering to both British and Chinese students.

Already showing an interest in history and political affairs, Sun was deeply impressed by the patriotism of Chinese dockworkers who refused to service a French war vessel that had arrived in Hong Kong after bombarding Foochow. This was during the Sino-French War (1883-1885), which revealed that, despite self-strengthening, China was still too weak to protect its tributary state Annam from the inroads of French imperialism.

Also in 1884 Sun was baptized by Charles Hager, an American Congregationalist minister. To mark the occasion, his Chinese tutor gave Sun a new name, Yat-sen (I-hsien). He also responded to a call from his parents to marry the bride they had chosen for him. She remained in Ts'ui-heng with his parents, and he returned to Hong Kong after desecrating yet another village idol. His studies were interrupted by a summons from his brother in Hawaii. Infuriated by reports of Sun's iconoclastic behavior, Sun Mei threatened to cut off support if Sun did not mend his ways. Sun, however, was determined to follow his own course. U.S. friends raised the money for his return to Hong Kong.

The following year, after debating the choice of a profession, he decided to study medicine. Hager helped him get admitted to the Canton Hospital Medical School, an Anglo-American missionary institution headed by John Kerr, a pioneer in introducing modern medicine into China. Work as an interpreter in the hospital paid for Sun's board and tuition, and a forgiving Sun Mei resumed financial support. Still receiving private tutoring in Chinese, Sun also began voicing anti-Manchu views. Cheng Shih-liang, a fellow-student, belonged to the Triads, an anti-Manchu secret society with lodges in southern China and overseas (hua-ch'iao) communities. He assured Sun that the Triads would help him should he plan an antidynastic uprising.

In 1887 Sun transferred to the newly opened College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong. The five years spent there broadened his knowledge and intensified his desire to contribute to China's progress. A voracious reader throughout his adult life, Sun's interests now included a wide range of subjects: Darwinism, the French Revolution, Chinese geography, and scientific agriculture. Furthermore, the contrast between the relatively efficient and modern administration of Hong Kong and the corruption and backwardness of his native province, which he visited during vacations, convinced him that China had to change. He and his friends spent hours discussing politics and made no secret of their distaste for the Manchu dynasty. Sun's circle was jokingly referred to as the Four Great Bandits, and he himself was called "Hung Hsiu-ch'üan." But he was not yet a confirmed revolutionary.

His immediate concern was to study medicine—which he did with outstanding success. He was a scholarship student, and only he and one other student of the original group of twelve graduated in 1892. Sun had the best grades and won the most prizes. His teachers, including the eminent British physicians, Patrick Manson and James Cantlie, were impressed by his character as well as his academic achievements. Cantlie, in particular, became a close friend and supporter. Another faculty member, Ho Kai (Ho Ch'i), who had qualified in both medicine and law in Britain, deeply influenced Sun's earliest attempts to help modernize China.⁴ Like Sun, Ho at this time was one of the few Chinese who had received a modern, professional education. Like Sun, too, he lacked the proficiency in classical learning needed for admission into the Chinese leadership stratum. Though achieving success in the British colony, Ho was worried about the fate of China and criticized the direction then being taken by the officially sponsored reform movement. In a series of articles he argued that although military strengthening was important, it did not offer the basic solution to China's problems, which were essentially internal. As Ho saw it, foreign aggression was merely the by-product of China's failure to modernize its political, economic, and social institutions. This became one of the most consistent themes in the political endeavors of Sun Yat-sen.

While still in medical school, Sun attempted to call attention to his talents and ideas. In a letter to a Chinese official in 1890, he expressed the "hope of being of some use in the world," and went on to emphasize the need for modern education, the use of science, especially in agriculture, and the alleviation of economic distress.⁵ Though reflecting a keener perception of the concept of modernization than the conventional emphasis upon building defenses to resist foreign invaders, this and other attempts to become involved in official reformism, led to disappointment, as they had for Ho Kai.

Sun's attempt to pursue a modern medical career also met with disappointment. He did not stay in Hong Kong because the local medical council decided that the graduates of the new school were not qualified to practice modern medicine in the colony. In Macao he encountered a similar problem with the Portuguese authorities, and in 1893 Sun moved to Canton, where he combined herbalism with modern medicine. At the same time, he revived his political discussion group and edited the Chinese supplement of a Macao weekly. The following year he gave up his medical practice and made a final attempt to join the official reform effort.

Li Hung-chang, governor-general of the metropolitan province, Chihli, was the nation's leading statesman and a prominent advocate of reform. With the help of a friend who was better versed in the classical style, Sun composed a lengthy petition, which he took with him to Tientsin and deposited in Li's office. This document resembled Sun's earlier writings as well as those of Ho Kai and others, and especially that of Cheng Kuan-ying, a comprador-scholar with whom Sun had had contact. The crux of Sun's message was that the "sources of foreign wealth and power do not altogether lie in solid ships and effective guns" but in better use of human and natural resources and in allowing the free rein of commerce. Significantly, at a time when most Chinese leaders were ignoring the remarkable accomplishments of Japan during the preceding twenty-five years, Sun pointed out that despite having started later than China, Japan had succeeded in reform because that country had approached reform more seriously. Making frequent use of the traditional term, min-sheng (people's welfare), later used to denote his version of socialism, Sun issued a special plea to improve peasant welfare by applying the benefits of modern science to agriculture.⁶

Frankly admitting his inability to write a traditional examination essay, he wrote of his modern scientific training, unique in the China of his times, and his knowledge of Western institutions and customs. He asked to be a protégé of Governor-general Li, and under his auspices to study sericulture and other modern agricultural methods abroad. What Sun sought was entry into Li's entourage, even in a modest capacity, for an eventual rise to a higher position of influence. As it turned out, Li had no opportunity to consider Sun's proposal.

This was in June 1894, and Li's attention was fastened on the brewing crisis in Korea, where Japanese intervention required a Chinese response. The Sino-japanese War, officially declared in August, resulted in a humiliating defeat for China, the most serious blow yet endured after a half century of intermittent conflict with foreign powers. That the defeat was at the hands of a traditionally despised neighbor, a longtime borrower of Chinese culture, made it all the more shocking. It exposed the shallowness and wastefulness of the official reformism, turned China into a debtor nation, and invited a new wave of imperialist aggression that, within a few years, would raise serious doubts as to whether China could remain intact as a sovereign nation. Sun, however, did not wait for the ignominious peace treaty of April 1895, which gave Taiwan, a large indemnity, and unprecedented concessions to Japan. Being ignored by Li closed a chapter in Sun's life, and he decided to do what he had long considered—work for the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty as a prelude to the real modernization of China.

The Revolutionary: First Phase, 1894-1904

Disgusted with gentry reformers, Sun went back to Hawaii and turned to the lower rungs of Chinese society and to the marginal men like himself. This strategy first directed his attention to the hua-ch'iao, an emigrant community he knew well, Hsiang-shan natives formed a large share of the 20,000 hua-ch'iao in the islands...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Times
• 2 An Overview of Sun Yat-sen's Doctrine
• 3 Sun Yat-sen's Doctrine and Traditional Chinese Culture
• 4 The Thought of Sun Yat-sen in Comparative Perspective
• 5 The Doctrine of Nationalism and the Chinese Revolution
• 6 The Approach to Peace and War
• 7 The Doctrine of Democracy arid Human Rights
• 8 China's Modernization and the Doctrine of Democracy
• 9 The Principle of People's Welfare: A Multidimensional Concept
• 10 The Doctrine of People's Welfare: The Taiwan Experiment and Its Implications for the Third World
• 11 Sun Yat-sen's Doctrine and the Future of China
• Chronology
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index