The Chinese World-Society of Eastern Asia.

It would be, of course, absurd to pretend to analyze the social system of China in a few paragraphs; and yet [pg 037] it is necessary to the study of Sun Yat-sen that certain characteristics be at least mentioned. Several problems appear which are quite outstanding. What was the social position and function of each individual? How were refractory individuals to be disciplined in accordance with the requirements that the general opinion of society imposed? What were the ultimate ends which the organization of Chinese society was to realize? How were the educational system and the frontier defenses to be maintained? What was to be the position and power of the political organization?

At the outset it is necessary that a working demarcation of the political be established. Accepting, by definition, those coercive controls as political which are operated for the preservation of society as a whole, and are recognized within the society as so doing, we see immediately that the range of the political must have been much less in old China than it has been in the West. Western societies tend, at least in law, to emphasize the relationship between the individual and the society as a whole; free and unassociated individuals tend to become extraordinarily unstable. In the old Chinese society the control of the individual was so much an ideological one, that political control was infinitely narrower than in the West. But, in order to effectuate ideological control, there must be an organization which will permit pressure to be exercised on the individual in such a compelling manner that the exercise of external coercion becomes unnecessary. In a society in which the state has withered away, after an enormous expansion in the subject-matter of its control,40 the totalitarian state is succeeded by the totalitarian [pg 038] tradition, if—and the qualification is an important one—the indoctrination has been so effective that the ideology can maintain itself in the minds of men without the continuing coercive power of the state to uphold it. If the ideology is secure, then control of the individual will devolve upon those persons making up his immediate social environment, who—in view of the uniform and secure notions of right and justice prevailing—can be relied upon to attend to him in a manner which will be approved by the society in general.

In China the groups most conspicuous within the society were the family system, the village and district, and the hui (association; league; society, in the everyday sense of the word).

The family was an intricate structure. A fairly typical instance of family organization within a specific village has been described in the following terms: “The village is occupied by one sib, a uni-lateral kinship group, exogamous, monogamous but polygynous, composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the natural family, the economic-family, the religious-family, and the sib.”41 The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The economic family may have had a natural family as its core, but commonly extended through several degrees of kinship, and may have included from thirty to one hundred persons, who formed a single economic unit, living and consuming collectively. The religious family was an aggregate of economic families, of which it would be very difficult to give any specified number as an average. It [pg 039] was religious in that it provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of ancestors, and maintained an ancestral shrine where the proper genealogical records could be kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern times. The sib corresponded roughly to the clan, found in some Western communities; its rôle was determined by the immediate environment. In some cases—as especially in the south—the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one or more sibs dominated whole communities; in the greater part of China it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite the various local religious families which constituted it.

Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality of the human race; it oriented the individual, not only philosophically, but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant heights of nobility or falling to the degradation of a slavery in which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by outsiders or the menace of his own potential follies. It was largely through the family system, with its religious as well as economic and social foundation, that the Chinese solved the problem of adequate mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole, and gave to that stability a clear and undeniable purpose—the continued generation of the human race through the continuity of a multitude of families, each determined upon survival.

The family was the most obviously significant of the [pg 040] groupings within the society, but it was equalled if not excelled in importance by the village.42

Had the family been the only important social grouping, it might have been impossible for any democracy to develop in China. It so occurred that the family pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the importance of villages in Chinese life negated the too sharp influence of a familistic government. It would have been the most awful heresy, as it is in Japan today, to revolt against and depose an unrighteous father; there was nothing to prevent the deposition or destruction of an evil village elder. In times of concord, the Emperor was the father of the society; at other times, when his rule was less successful, he was a fellow-villager subject to the criticism of the people.

The village was the largest working unit of non-political administration; that is to say, groups within and up to the village were almost completely autonomous and not subject to interference, except in very rare cases, from outside. The village was the smallest unit of the political. The District Magistrate, as the lowest officer in the political-educational system, was in control of a district containing from one to twenty villages, and negotiated, in performing the duties imposed upon him, with the village leaders. The villages acted as self-ruling communes, at times very democratic.43

[pg 041]

Next in importance, among Chinese social groups, after the family and the village was the hui. It was in all probability the last to appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, the association found its justification in the deeply ingrained propensities of the Chinese to coöperate. Paralleling and supplementing the former two, the hui won for itself a definite and unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The kinds of hui may be classified into six categories:44 1) the fraternal societies; 2) insurance groups; 3) economic guilds; 4) religious societies; 5) political societies; and 6) organizations of militia and vigilantes. The hui made up, in their economic form, the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and provided the system of vocational education for persons not destined to literature and administration. Politically, it was the hui—under such names as the Triad and the Lotus—that provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever objectionable social or economic conditions developed.

The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, [pg 042] villages, and hui, comprised a whole “known world.” Its strength was like that of a dinosaur in modern fable; having no one nerve-centre, the world-society could not be destroyed by inroads of barbarians, or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The ideology which has been called Confucian continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation of persons emancipated from the tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government went forward, even though dynasties fell and the whole country was occasionally over-run by conquerors. The absence of any juristically rigid organization permitted the Chinese to maintain a certain minimum of order, even in the absence of an emperor, or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.

The governmental superstructure cemented the whole Chinese world together in a formal manner; it did not create it. The family, the village, and the hui were fit subjects for imperial comment, but there was nothing in their organization to persuade the student that the Emperor—by virtue of some Western-type Kompetenz Kompetenz—could remove his sanction from their existence and thereby annihilate them. There was no precarious legal personality behind the family, the village, and the hui, which could be destroyed by a stroke of law. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland clan of the MacGregor—“the proscribed name”—without liquidating the members of the clan in toto. In China the Emperor beheld a family as a quasi-individual, and when enraged at them was prone to wipe them out with massacre. Only in a very few cases was it possible for him to destroy an organization without destroying the persons composing it; he could, for example, remove the privilege of a scholarship system from a district, prefecture, or province without necessarily disposing of all the scholars involved in the [pg 043] move. The government of China—which, in the normal run of affairs, had no questions of policy, because policy was traditional and inviolable—continued to be an administration dedicated to three main ends—the maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the society as a whole against barbarians (military affairs) and against the adverse forces of nature (public works on the most extensive—and not intensive—scale), and the collection of funds for the fulfillment of the first two ends (revenue). The Emperor was also the titular family head of the Chinese world.

The educational system was identical with the administrative, except in the case of the foreign dynasties. (Under the Manchus, for example, a certain quota of Manchu officials were assigned throughout the government, irrespective of their scholastic rank in contrast to the Chinese.) It was a civil service, an educational structure, and a ritualist organization. Selected from the people at large, scholars could—at least in theory—proceed on the basis of sheer merit to any office in the Empire excepting the Throne. Their advancement was graduated on a very elaborate scale of degrees, which could be attained only by the passing of examinations involving an almost perfect knowledge of the literature of antiquity and the ability to think in harmony with and reproduce that literature. The Chinese scholar-official had to learn to do his own thinking by means of the clichés which he could learn from the classics; he had to make every thought and act of his life conform to the pattern of the ideology. Resourceful men may have found in this a proper fortification for their originality, as soon as they were able to cloak it with the expressions of respect; mediocre persons were helpless beyond the bounds of what they had learned.

The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. [pg 044] It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar class, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded—except in rare instances—on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was assured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government assistance. The educational system also served as the substitute for a nobility. Hereditary class distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.45 In a society [pg 045] which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful nobility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order.

The scholars, once they had passed the examinations, were given either subsistence allowances or posts, according to the rank which they had secured in the tests. (This was, of course, the theory; in actuality bribery and nepotism played rôles varying with the time and the locality.) They made up the administration of the civilized world. They were not only the officials but the literati.

It would be impossible even to enumerate the many posts and types of organization in the administration of imperial China.46 Its most conspicuous features may be enumerated as follows: China consisted of half a million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, each to a large extent autonomous.47 These were divided among, roughly, two thousand hsien, in each of which an over-burdened District Magistrate sought to carry out all the recognized functions of government in so far as they applied to his locality. He did this largely by negotiation with the [pg 046] leaders of the social groups in his bailiwick, the heads of families, the elders of villages, the functionaries of hui. He was supervised by a variety of travelling prefects and superintendents, but the next officer above him who possessed a high degree of independence was the viceroy or governor—whichever type happened to rule the province or group of provinces. Except for their non-hereditability, these last offices were to all intents and purposes satrapies. The enormous extent of the Chinese civilized world, the difficulty of communicating with the capital, the cumbersomeness of the administrative organization, the rivalry and unfriendliness between the inhabitants of various provinces—all these encouraged independence of a high degree. If Chinese society was divided into largely autonomous communes, the Chinese political system was made up of largely autonomous provinces. Everywhere there was elasticity.

At the top of the whole structure stood the Emperor. In the mystical doctrines which Confucianism transmitted from the animism of the feudal ages of China, the Emperor was the intermediary between the forces of nature and mankind. The Son of Heaven became the chief ritualist; in more sophisticated times he was the patron of civilization to the scholars, and the object of supernatural veneration to the uneducated. His function was to provide a constant pattern of propriety. He was to act as chief of the scholars. To the scholars the ideology was recognized as an ideology, albeit the most exact one; to the common people it was an objective reality of thought and value. As the dictates of reason were not subject to change, the power and the functions of the Emperor were delimited; he was not, therefore, responsible to himself alone. He was responsible to reason, which the people could enforce when the Emperor failed. Popular intervention was regarded as de jure in proportion to its effectiveness de facto. The Imperial structure might be called, [pg 047] in Western terms, the constitutionalism of common sense.48 The Dragon Throne did not enjoy the mysterious and awful prestige which surrounds the modern Tenno of Nippon; although sublime in the Confucian theory, it was, even in the theory, at the mercy of its subjects, who were themselves the arbiters of reason. There was no authority higher than reason; and no reason beyond the reason discovered and made manifest in the ages of antiquity.