Western Influences: Henry George, Marxism and Maurice William.

As previously stated there are three parts which may be distinguished in the ideology of the principle of min shêng. Min shêng is, first, the economic aspect of the national revolution—the creation of an active race-nation of China implementing its power by, second, technological revolution. Third, it connotes also the necessity of a social revolution of some kind. Western commentators have been prone to ignore the significance of min shêng in the first two of these meanings, and have concentrated on disputation concerning the third part. The question of the right system of distribution has become so prominent in much Western revolutionary thought that, to many, it sums up the whole moral issue concerning what is good and bad in society.159 They are uninterested in or ignorant [pg 134] of the great importance that the first two aspects of min shêng possess for the Chinese mind. The third part, the application of min shêng to the problems that are in the West the cause of social revolution, and to the possible application of social revolution to China, is important, but is by no means the complete picture.

In attempting to state the definitive position of Sun Yat-sen on this question several points must be kept in mind. The first is that Sun Yat-sen, born a Chinese of the nineteenth century, had the intellectual orientation of a member of the world-society, and an accepter of the Confucian ideology. Enough has been shown of the background of his theories to demonstrate their harmony with and relevance to society which had endured in China for centuries before the coming of the West. The second point to be remembered is that Westerners are prone to overlook this background and see only the Western influences which they are in such a good position to detect. Sun Yat-sen's mind grew and changed. His preferences in [pg 135] Western beliefs changed frequently. A few Westerners, seeing only this, are apt to call Sun unstable and devoid of reason.160

It would, indeed, be strange to find any Western political or ideological leader who thought in precisely the same terms after the world war and the Russian revolution as before. Sun Yat-sen was, like many other receptive-minded leaders, sensitive to the new doctrines of Wilson and Lenin as they were shouted through the world. He was, perhaps, less affected by them than Western leaders, because his ideology was so largely rooted in the ideology of old China.

Apart from the winds of doctrine that blew through the world during Sun's life-period, and the generally known Western influences to which he was exposed,161 there were three writers whose influence has been supposed to have been critical in the development of his thinking. These three were Henry George, Karl Marx, and Maurice William of New York. A much greater amount of material is needed for a detailed study of the influences of various individual theories on Sun Yat-sen than for a general exposition of his political doctrines as a whole. At the present [pg 136] time scarcely enough has been written to permit any really authoritative description of the relations between the ideology of Sun Yat-sen and the thought of these three men. It is possible, nevertheless, to trace certain general outlines which may serve to clarify the possible influence that was exercised on Sun, and to correct some current misapprehensions as to the nature and extent of that influence.

Sun Yat-sen's opposition to the “unearned increment” shows the influence of the thought of Henry George. Sun proposed an ingenious scheme for the government confiscation of unearned increment in an economy which would nevertheless permit private ownership of land. (Incidentally, he terms this, in his second lecture on min shêng, “communism,” which indicates a use of the word different, in this respect at least, from the conventional Western use.)162 The land problem was of course a very old one in China, although accentuated in the disorders resulting from the impact of the West. There can be little question that Sun's particular method of solving the problem was influenced by the idea of unearned increment.

He knew of Henry George in 1897, the year the latter died,163 and advocated redistribution of the land in the party oath, the platform, and the slogans of the Tung Meng Hui of 1905.164 Since, even at the time of the Canton-Moscow Entente, his land policy never approached the Marxist-Leninist program of nationalization or collectivization of land, but remained one of redistribution [pg 137] and confiscation of unearned increment, it is safe to say that Sun kept the theory of George in mind, although he by no means followed George to the latter's ultimate conclusions.165 It may thus be inferred that the influence of Henry George upon the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen was slight, but permanent. An idea was borrowed; the scheme of things was not.

Sun Yat-sen encountered Marxism for the first recorded time in London in 1897, when he met a group of Russian revolutionaries and also read in the subject. The fact that Sun was exposed to Marxism proves little except that he had had the opportunity of taking up Marxism and did not do so.166 Again, the Tung Meng Hui manifesto of 1905 may have been influenced by Marxism. It was not, however, until the development of his Three Principles that the question of Marxian influence was raised. Sun Yat-sen made his first speech on the Principles in Brussels in the spring of 1905.167 By 1907 the three principles had taken on a clear form: nationalism, democracy, and min shêng, which the Chinese of that time seem to have translated socialism when referring to it in Western languages.168

The most careful Marxian critic of Sun Yat-sen, writing of the principle of min shêng and its two main planks, land reform and state capitalism, says: “This very vague program, which does not refer to class interests nor to the class struggle as the means of breaking privileged class interests, was objectively not socialism at all, but something [pg 138] else altogether: Lenin coined the formula, ‘subjective socialism,’ for it.”169 He adds, later: “Hence Sun's socialism meant, on the lips of the Chinese bourgeoisie, nothing but a sort of declaration for a ‘social’ economic policy, that is, a policy friendly to the masses.”170 T'ang Liang-li declares that the third principle at this time adopted “a frankly socialistic attitude,”171 but implies elsewhere that its inadequacy was seen by a Chinese Marxist, Chu Chih-hsin.172 This evidence, as far as it goes, shows that Sun Yat-sen had had the opportunity to become acquainted with Marxism, and that even on the occasion of the first formulation of the principle of min shêng he used none of its tenets. The revolutionary critic, T'ang Liang-li, who, a devoted and brilliant Nationalist in action, writes with a sort of European left-liberal orientation, suggests that the Third Principle grew with the growth of capitalist industrialism in China.173 This is true: economic maladjustment would emphasize the need for ideological reconstruction with reference to the economy. There is no need to resort to Marxian analysis.

That the third principle meant something to Sun Yat-sen is shown by the fact that when Sung Chiao-jen, who a few years later was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs of the revolution, suggested in the period of the first provisional Republic at Nanking that the Third Principle had better be omitted altogether, Sun was enraged, [pg 139] and declared that if min shêng were to be given up, the whole revolution might as well be abandoned.174

Since min shêng, in its third significance, that of the development of a socially just distributive system, was not Marxian nor yet unimportant, it may be contrasted once again with the communist doctrines, and then studied for its actual content. In contrasting it with Marxism, it might be of value to observe, first, the criticism that the Marxians levy against it, and second, the distinctions that nationalist and European critics make between min shêng and communism.

Dr. Karl Wittfogel, the German Marxist whose work on Sun Yat-sen is the most satisfactory of its kind, points out the apparent contradictions in the San Min Chu I: on the one hand, statements which are not only objectively but subjectively friendly to capitalism (on the excellence of the Ford plant; on the necessity for the coöperation of capital and labor)—on the other, the unmerciful condemnation of capitalism; on the one hand, the declaration that there is no capitalism in China—on the other, that capitalism must be destroyed as it appears; on the right, the statement that communism and min shêng are opposed—on the left, that the communist doctrines are a subsidiary part of the ideology of min shêng.175 How, asks Wittfogel, does this all fit together? He answers by pointing out the significance of Sun's theses when considered in relation to the dialectical-materialist interpretation of recent Far Eastern history:

His three principles incorporate

in their development the objective change in the socio-economic situation of China,

in their contradictions the real contradictions of the Chinese revolution,

in their latest tendencies the transposition of the social center of gravity of the revolution, which sets the classes in action, [pg 140]and whose aim is no longer a bourgeois capitalist one, but proletarian-socialist and peasant agrarian-revolutionary.

Sun Yat-sen is according to this not only the hitherto most powerful representative of the bourgeois-national, anti-imperialist revolutions of awakening Asia; he points at the same time outwards over the bourgeois class limitations of the first step of the Asiatic movement for liberation. To deny this were portentuous, even for the proletarian communist movement of Eastern Asia.176

The modifications which the Marxians have introduced into their programs with respect to the class struggle in colonial countries do not imply a corresponding modification of their ideology. The determinism adopted from Hegel, the economic interpretation of history—these and other dogmas are held by the Marxians to be universally valid despite their Western origin.

We have seen what Sun's chief Marxian exegete thinks of him. Now it may be worth while to consider the actual relations of Sun's doctrines with some of those in Marxism. In the first place, Sun Yat-sen, during his stay in Shanghai, 1919-1922 (with interruptions), was very much interested in Communism and friendly to the Russian people, but not at all inclined to adopt its ideology.177

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In reference to specific points of the Communist ideology, Sun Yat-sen was indebted to the Communists for the application of the principle of nationalism, as a means of propaganda, as anti-imperialism, although, as we have seen, it was fundamentally a thesis for the readjustment of the Chinese society from the ideological basis of a world-society over to a national state among national states.178 Second, his habit of taking Western doctrines and applying them to the Chinese nation instead of to Chinese individuals, led him to apply nationalism to the class war of the oppressed nations against the oppressing nations. There was no justification of intra-national class war in the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen.179 In his doctrine of democracy, his application of a class-system based on intellect was a flat denial of the superior significance of the Marxian economic-class ideology, as was his favoring of the development of a five-power liberal government through ch'üan and nêng in place of a dictatorship of the proletariat operating through soviets. Finally, in relation to min shêng, his use of the Confucian philosophy—the interpretation of history through jên—was a contradiction of the materialist interpretation of history by the Marxians. It also contradicted the class struggle; the loyalty of the Chinese to the race-nation was to be the supreme loyalty; it was to develop from the ta chia, the great family of all Chinese; and class lines within it could not transcend its significance. Furthermore, purely as a matter of economic development, Sun Yat-sen regarded [pg 142] the class struggle as pathological in society. He said, “Out of his studies of the social question, Marx gained no other advantage than a knowledge of the diseases of social evolution; he failed to see the principle of social evolution. Hence we can say that Marx was a pathologist rather than a physiologist of society.”180 Finally, he did not accept the Marxian theory of surplus value or of the inevitable collapse of capitalism. He even spoke of capitalism and socialism as “two economic forces of human civilization” which might “work side by side in future civilization.”181

All in all, it may safely be said that Sun Yat-sen's ideology, as an adjustment of the old Chinese ideology to the modern world, was not inspired by the Marxist; that through the greater part of his life, he was acquainted with Marxism, and did not avail himself of the opportunities he had for adopting it, but consistently rejected it; and that while the Communists were of great use to him in the formulation and implementation of his program, they affected his ideology, either generally or with reference to min shêng, imperceptibly if at all.

This conclusion is of significance in the estimation of the influence of Maurice William upon the thought of Sun Yat-sen. It is, briefly, the thesis of Dr. William that it was his own book which saved China from Bolshevism by making an anti-Marxian out of Sun after he had fallen prey to the Bolshevist philosophy. Dr. William writes of the lectures on Nationalism and Democracy; “In these lectures Dr. Sun makes clear that his position is strongly pro-Russian and pro-Marxian, that he endorses the class struggle, repudiates Western democracy, and advocates China's coöperation with Bolshevist Russia against capitalist [pg 143] nations.”182 Dr. William then goes on to show, quite convincingly, that Sun Yat-sen, with very slight acknowledgments, quoted William's The Social Interpretation of History almost verbatim for paragraph after paragraph in the lectures on min shêng.

It would be unjust and untruthful to deny the great value that William's book had for Sun Yat-sen, who did quote it and use its arguments.183 On the other hand, it is a manifest absurdity to assume that Sun Yat-sen, having once been a communist, suddenly reversed his position after reading one book by an American of whom he knew nothing. Even Dr. William writes with a tone of mild surprise when he speaks of the terrific volte-face which he thinks Sun Yat-sen performed.

There are two necessary comments to be made on the question of the influence of Maurice William. In the first place, Sun Yat-sen had never swerved from the interpretation of history by jên, which may be interpreted as the humane or social interpretation of history. Enough of the old Chinese ideology has been outlined above to make clear what this outlook was.184 Sun Yat-sen, in short, never having been a Marxian, was not converted to the social interpretation of history as put forth by Dr. William. He found in the latter's book, perhaps more clearly than in any other Western work an analysis of society that coincided with his own, which he had developed from the old Chinese philosophy and morality as rendered by Confucius. Consequently he said of William's rejection of the materialistic interpretation of history, “That sounds perfectly reasonable ... the greatest discovery of the American scholar fits in perfectly with the (third) [pg 144] principle of our Party.”185 The accomplishment of Maurice William, therefore, was a great one, but one which has been misunderstood. He formulated a doctrine of social evolution which tallied perfectly with Chinese ideology, and did this without being informed on Chinese thought. He did not change the main currents of Sun's thought, which were consistent through the years. He did present Sun with several telling supplementary arguments in Western economic terms, by means of which he could reconcile his interpretation of social history not only with Confucian jên but also with modern Western economics.

The other point to be considered in relation to Maurice William is a matter of dates. The thesis of Maurice William, that Sun Yat-sen, after having turned Marxian or near-Marxian, was returned to democratic liberal thought by William's book, is based on contrast of the first twelve lectures in the San Min Chu I and the last four on min shêng. Dr. William believes that Sun read his book in the meantime and changed his mind. A Chinese commentator points out that Sun Yat-sen referred to The Social Interpretation of History in a speech on January 21, 1924; his first lecture on the San Min Chu I was given January 24, 1924.186 Hence, in the twelve lectures that Dr. William interprets as Marxian, Sun Yat-sen was speaking from a background which included not only Marxism, but The Social Interpretation of History, as well.

Only on the third part does the influence of the Western thinkers appear unmistakably. Henry George gave Sun Yat-sen the idea of the unearned increment, but Sun Yat-sen, instead of accepting the whole body of doctrine that George put forth, simply kept this one idea, and built a novel land-policy of his own on it. Marxism may have influenced the verbal tone of Sun Yat-sen's lectures, but it did not affect his ideology, although it shows a definite [pg 145] imprint upon his programs. Maurice William gave Sun Yat-sen a set of arguments in modern economic terms which he attached to his ideological thesis of the jên interpretation of history, which he based upon Confucianism. There is no evidence to show that at any time in his life Sun Yat-sen abandoned his Chinese ideological orientation and fell under the sway of any Western thinker. The strong consistency in the ideology of Sun Yat-sen is a consistency rooted in the old Chinese ideology. On minor points of doctrine he showed the influence of the West; this influence cannot be considered solely by itself. The present discussion of Western influences may, by its length, imply a disproportionate emphasis of Western thought in the political doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, but in a work written primarily for Westerners, this may be found excusable.