Min Shêng as an Ethical Doctrine.

Reference has been made to the Confucian doctrine of jên, the fellow-feeling of all mankind—each man's consciousness of membership in society. This doctrine was formulated in a society unacquainted with Greek logic, nor did it have the strange European emphasis upon sheer intellectuality which has played its way through Western thought. Not, of course, as profoundly introspective as Christianity, nor appealing so distinctly to the mystical in man's nature, it was nevertheless concerned with man's inner life, as well as with the ethics of his outward behavior. The Confucian was suffused throughout with the idea of virtue; the moral and the physical were inextricably intertwined. Its non-logical content scarcely approached the form of a religion; commentators on the old ideology have not called it religious, despite the prominence of beliefs in the supernatural.201 The religion of the Chinese has been this-worldly,202 but it has not on that account been indifferent to the subjective aspects of the moral life.203

The nationalist ideology was designed as the inheritor of and successor to, the old ideology of China. The doctrine [pg 155] of nationalism narrowed the field of the application of Confucianism from the whole civilized world to the state-ized society of the Chinese race-nation. The doctrine of democracy implemented the old teachings of popular power and intellectual leadership with a political mechanism designed to bring forth the full strength of both. And the doctrine of min shêng was the economic application of the old social ethos.

It is in this last significance, rather than in any of its practical meanings of recovery, development, and reform, that Sun Yat-sen spoke most of it to one of his followers.204 He was concerned with it as a moral force. His work was, among other things, a work of moral transformation of individual motives.205 Min shêng must, in addition to its other meanings be regarded as an attempt to extend the Chinese ideology to economic matters, to lead the Chinese to follow their old ethics. Sun Yat-sen had ample time in his visits to the West to observe the ravages that modern civilization had inflicted upon the older Western [pg 156] moral life, and did not desire that China should also follow the same course. The humanity of the old tradition must be kept by the Chinese in their venture into the elaborate and dangerous economy of modern life; the machine civilization was needed, and was itself desirable,206 but it could not overthrow the humane civilization that preceded it and was to continue on beneath and throughout it.

In this manner a follower of Sun Yat-sen seeks to recall his words: “I should say that min shêng focuses our ethical tradition even more than the other two principles; after a Chinese has become nationalistic and democratic, he will become socialized through the idea of his own personality as an instrument of good for human welfare. In this proud feeling of importance to and for the world, egotism gives way to altruism.... So, I say again that min shêng is an ethical endeavor ... this, the final principle (and yet, the first principle which I discovered, in the bitterness and poverty of my boyhood days), will come imperceptibly into our lives.”207

In a philosophy for intellectuals such attitudes need not, perhaps, be reckoned with; in an ideology for revolution and reconstitution, perhaps they should. Sun Yat-sen conceived of his own work and his ideology not only as political acts but as moral forces; min shêng was at once to invigorate the national economy, to industrialize the material civilization, and to institute distributive justice, and in addition to this, it was to open a new, humane epoch in economic relations. That is why the term, instead of being translated, is left in the Chinese: min shêng.

[pg 157]