The Three Meanings of Min Shêng.

First, min shêng is the doctrine leading the nationalist democracy on its road to a high position among the nations of the earth; only through the material strength to be found in min shêng can the Chinese attain a position by which they can exert the full force of their new-formed state against the invaders and oppressors, and be able to lift up the populace so that democracy will possess some actual operative meaning. Min shêng is “... the center of politics, of economics, of all kinds of historical movements; it is similar to the center of gravity in space.”156 It provides the implementation of nationalism and democracy.

Secondly, min shêng means national enrichment. The problem of China is primarily one of poverty. Sun wanted consideration of the problem of the livelihood of the people to begin with the supreme economic reality in China. What was this reality? “It is the poverty from which we all suffer. The Chinese in general are poor; among them there is no privileged wealthy class, but only a generality of ordinary poor people.”157 However this enrichment was to be brought about, it was imperative.

Thirdly, min shêng, as the doctrine of enrichment, was also the doctrine of economic justice. If the nation was to become economically healthy, it could only do so on the basis of the proper distribution of property among its citizens. Its wealth would not bring about well-being unless it were properly distributed.

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More briefly, min shêng may be said to be the thesis of the indispensability of: 1) a national economic revolution against imperialism and for democracy; 2) an industrial revolution for the enrichment of China; and 3) a prophylactic against social revolution.

The significance of min shêng as the economic implementation of nationalism and democracy is clear enough to require no further discussion. Its significance as a doctrine for the promotion of the industrial revolution is considerable, and worth attention.

Western science was to sow the seed. Min shêng economy was to reap the harvest. By means of the details in Sun Yat-sen's programs which he believed sufficient for the purposes, the modernization of China, which was to be a consequence of Western science in the ideology, was to lead at the same time to the actual physical enrichment of the economic goods and services of the country. The advocacy of industrial development is, of course, a commonplace in the Western world, but in China it was strikingly novel. Sun Yat-sen did not regard industrialism as a necessary evil; he considered it a positive blessing, as the means of increasing the material welfare of the Chinese people.

Time and time again, Sun Yat-sen emphasized the necessity of modernization. His theory of nationalism led him to urge the introduction of Western physical science into the ideology. His theory of democracy was justified in part by the fact that democracy was to be regarded as a modernizing force. Now his principle of min shêng was also to lead to that great end—the modernization of China to a degree to permit the race-nation to regain in the modern world, which encompassed the whole planet, the position it had once had in the smaller world of Eastern Asia.

The wealth of old China had been one of the factors enabling it to resist destruction at the spear-points of its [pg 130] barbarian conquerors. Sun Yat-sen knew this, and knew also that the position of the United States—which had probably the greatest concentration of social and physical wealth and power under one political system that the world had ever known—made that nation impregnable in the modern world. Seeing that wealth was not only a blessing to individuals, but to nations as well, he was anxious that his beloved China should be guarded and assisted by the strength that the ideology of min shêng, once accepted and effectuated, could give it.

Min shêng is more than a vague aspiration for national welfare. The general theory of nationalism and democracy required an additional point to make them effective in the realities of international politics, and min shêng was to supply the hygienic and economic strength that the Chinese race-nation needed for competition and survival; but it was to do more.

Min shêng is at the same time the last step of Chinese resistance and the first of Chinese submission to Western culture. In seeking an economic policy and an ideology which would lead to increased wealth of the nation, the Chinese were preparing to resist the West with its own weapons. Min shêng is a submission in that it is a deliberate declaration of industrial revolution.

It is beside the point to consider the ideological bases of the Western industrial revolution. It was perhaps neither a voluntary nor a deliberate process at all; no man in the first few decades of the nineteenth century could have foretold what the end of a process of mechanization would bring, or was likely to advocate the intentional following of a policy which would transform the orientation and organization of man more thoroughly than had any previous religious, political, and economic transition. The industrial revolution of Euramerica, when viewed from the outside, presents the appearance of a colossal accident, whether for good or for bad, which was but half-perceived [pg 131] by the participants in it. Even today, when the ideology and the institutional outline of the agrarian-handicraft past is fading swiftly away in the new brilliance of Western machine-culture, the new certainty, the new order have not yet appeared. The great transition works its way beyond the knowledge or the intervention of individual men.

This was decidedly not the case in China. Industrialism was something which could be studied from the outside, which could be appraised, and then acclaimed or resisted. Emperor Meiji and his Genro, with a flash of intuition or an intellectual penetration almost unparalleled in the political history of the world, guided Japan into the swift current of mechanical progress; the island empire swept ahead of Asia, abreast of the most powerful states of the world. The Chinese court, under the resolute, but blind, guidance of the Empress Dowager, made a few feeble gestures in favor of modernization, but vigorously opposed any change which might seriously modify the order of Chinese society or the position of the Manchus. In the shadow of the foreign guns, industrialism crept into China, along the coasts and up the banks of the navigable rivers. One might suppose that the Chinese were in a position to choose, deliberately, for or against industrialism. They were not; in China, as in the West, the machine age first appeared largely as an accident.

It is here that the significance of Sun Yat-sen's min shêng becomes apparent. Above all other subsidiary meanings, it is a deliberate declaration of the industrial revolution. Modernism had been an accident; Sun Yat-sen wished to transform it into a program. What would be the ideological consequences of such an attitude?

In the first place, a plan was indicated for almost every type of human behavior. Sun Yat-sen himself drafted a [pg 132] preliminary scheme for a modern manufacturing and communications system.158 The road that China was to take would not be the miserable, halting progress of industrialism, complicated by delays and wars, which the West had known in the painful centuries of readjustment from the medieval to modern civilization; China would not stumble forward, but would deliberately select the swiftest and easiest way to a sound industrialism, and then take it.

Min shêng thus not only provides the Chinese with a way to make their nationalism, their democracy, and their stateification felt in the hour of their ultimate triumph; it gives them something to do to bring about that triumph.

On the basis of the outlines of the ideology and the social system that Sun Yat-sen proposed, viewed from the perspective of the old Confucian world-society, the reader will realize that this declaration of the industrial revolution is the boldest of Sun Yat-sen's acts, and that the meaning of min shêng as a program of complete modernization and reconstruction is superior to other possible meanings it may have, in regard to theoretical national or social revolution. There is nothing remote or philosophical about the significance of min shêng when so viewed; it is a plan to which a Lenin or a Henry Ford might subscribe with equal fervor—although a Tagore would deplore [pg 133] it. It is here that Sun Yat-sen appears as the champion of the West against the traditional technological stagnation of China. Yet just there, at the supreme point of his Westernism, we must remember what he was fighting for: the life of a race-nation and a civilization that was contradictory to the West. The stability of Confucianism could not serve as a cloak for reaction and stagnant thought. For its own good, nay, its own life, Chinese civilization had to modernize (i. e., Westernize economically) in order to compete in a West-ruled world. But what, more specifically, was the socio-economic position of Sun Yat-sen? Was he a Marxian? Was he a liberal? Was he neither?