The National Economic Revolution.

After the pitiable failure of the 1912 Republic, Sun Yat-sen began to place an especially heavy emphasis on the necessity of a national economic revolution which would carry on the achievements of the national political revolution. He placed an even greater stress upon the necessity of min shêng in the revolutionary ideology, and became more and more clearly conscious of the danger imperialism constituted to the Chinese race-nation. He believed that, as the 1912 revolution had been created by the sword, the new economic revolution might be furthered by the pen, and with this in mind he wrote The International Development of China. At the time that he wrote this work, he seems to have been convinced of the fruitlessness of purely military effort, and the superior value of pacific economic organization.299

This organization was to be effected through capital brought in from the outside. As it developed that capital would not come in, that instead of continuing the terrific pace of production which the World War had demanded, the nations returned to comparative laissez faire, and let their economies slump, Sun was persuaded that the whole revolution would have to be carried on by the Chinese themselves, with the possible help of the Communist Russians, and of Japan. He found the reorganized Kuomintang to be the instrument of this last revolution, both politically and democratically, and began to emphasize Chinese resistance to the outside, rather than appeal for help from the barbarian nations.

[pg 241]

It is this last attitude which one finds expressed in the acts of the last years of his life. The national revolution was to be made a reality by being intimately associated with the economic life and development of the country. The plans made for economic development should be pushed as far as possible without waiting for foreign help. The Chinese should use the instrument of the boycott as a sanction with which to give weight to their national policy.300 They had to practise economic nationalism in order to rid themselves of the incubus of imperialism which was sucking the life-blood of their country. In this connection between nationalism and min shêng, the economic aspect of the nationalist program was to be the means, and the national aspect of the min shêng program the consequence. Unless Chinese, both as members of a state and as individuals stirred by national sentiment, were moved to action against Western economic aggression, they might consider themselves already doomed.

How did Sun propose to promote the national economic revolution,301 as distinguished from the industrial revolution and the social revolution? He gave, in the first place, as earlier stated, the economic part of his theories a greater weight than they had hitherto enjoyed, and placed them first in his practical program. Secondly, he tended to associate the national political revolution more and more with the real seat of economic power: the working class. [pg 242] In this introduction of the working class into the labors for the fulfilment of min shêng as a national economic revolution, he was doing two things. He was hoping to bring the standards of Chinese labor up to those of the West, and he was making use of the political power of labor in China as an added instrument of the national economic revolution.

The Chinese nation could and should not continue, as a nation, on a scale of living lower than that of the Western nations. He urged the Chinese workers, as the class most affected, to fight for the economic advancement of themselves and of their nation. “Comrades, the people meeting here are all workers and represent a part of the nation. A great responsibility rests on Chinese labor, and if you are equal to the task, China will become a great nation and you a mighty working class.”302 The Chinese workers were performing not only a duty that they owed to themselves—they were also acting patriotically.

In advancing the national economic revolution by advancing themselves, they could not afford to lose sight of the political part of the revolution. “Beyond the economic struggle for the shortening of the working day and the increase of wages, there are before you other much more important questions of a political character. For our political objectives you must follow the three principles and support the revolution.”303 The two parts of the revolution could not be separated from one another.

[pg 243]

Besides the economic part of the national revolution, there was another readjustment of which Sun did not often speak, because it was not an open problem which could be served by immediate political action. This was the problem of the transition of China from an autarchic to a trading economy. The old Chinese world had been self-sustaining, so self-sustaining that the Emperor Tao Kuang wrote to George III of England that he did not desire anything that the barbarians might have, but, out of the mercy and the bounty of his heart, would permit them to come to China in order to purchase the excellent things that the Chinese possessed in such abundance.304 The impact of the West had had serious economic consequences,305 and the Chinese were in the unpleasant position of having their old economic system disrupted without gaining the advantages of a nationally organized economy in return. They had the actual privilege of consuming a greater variety of goods than before, but this was offset by the fact that the presence of these goods threw their domestic markets and old native commercial system out of balance, without offering a correspondingly large potentiality of foreign export. Furthermore, the political position of the Western powers in China was such, as Sun Yat-sen complained, that trade was conducted on a somewhat inequitable basis.

The consequences of a national economic revolution could not but be far-reaching. The political changes in the economic situation demanded by Sun Yat-sen in his program of economic nationalism—the return of tariff autonomy, [pg 244] the retrocession of the occupied concessions, etc.—would have a great positive and immediate effect; but there would be a long system of development, not to be so easily predicted or foreseen, which would inevitably appear as a result of Chinese nationhood. If China were to have a state strong enough to perform the economic functions which Sun wished to have imposed upon it, and were to take her place as one of the great importing and exporting nations of the world, it is obvious that a real economic revolution would have to be gone through.

Here again the liberal-national character of Sun's ideology and programs with respect to relations with the West appears. The Fascist states of the present time exhibit a definite drift from free trade to autarchy. In China the change from an autarchic world-society to a trading nation constituted the reverse. Sun Yat-sen did not leave a large legacy of programs in this connection, but he foresaw the development and was much concerned about it.