Chapter XII: Introduction (1)

The origins of Chinese society may reach half a million years into the past. Anthropologists have suggested that Sinanthropus Pekinensis, among the earliest forms of man, resembles the modern Chinese more closely than he does any other modern race. In what specific period the earliest ancestors of the Chinese came to China is not known. It is certain, however, that about 1500 B. C. there existed a well-developed civilized society in the Yellow River valley, and that this same society has lived on--modified by the centuries, but in unbroken continuity--down into the present. China has outlasted Crete, Tyre, Greece, and Rome. The Aztec empire, which arose in Mexico when China was already ancient, has become only a memory, while China is still vital. How is it that China's institutions survive, while those of other nations did not? How real are Chinese institutions today? What, precisely, is the Republic of China?

_Duality or Confluence?_

The phrase _Republican China_ indicates an era rather than a system. The preceding ages of China have been known by the names of great dynasties. T'ang China (620-906 A. D.) overawed and instructed all eastern Asia. Sung China (A. D. 960-1279) flourished, civilian and tolerant, in a world marked by bigotry and arms. Well into the past century the West remained distant and vague. Republican China struggles in the presence of the modern world and subject to its superior force; her very name is a capitulation to the twentieth century. The problems of the Republican era are not merely the problems of republican government; they involve the broad question of the meeting and interpenetration of civilizations. How are the Chinese, schooled for thousands of years in the effective operation of their own political system, to adapt themselves fast enough to the Western scheme? What happens when they must and yet cannot effectuate such adaptation? These are not queries to be answered simply in the routine terms of Western politics.

For the past three thousand years and more the eastern end of the European-Asiatic land mass has formed a world to itself. Most of this time it was larger, richer, and more civilized than the European world. Down to the nineteenth century of the Christian era the Chinese had no reason to suppose that theirs was not the most advanced and powerful of civilized societies. They looked upon the Far East as the all-inclusive universe of civilization; to them, their way of life was the common-sense way. The Europeans did likewise, with reference to their own sphere. When the European realm expanded so as to include the whole planet, when Western civilization began to dominate the earth, and the Christian family of nations became the world-wide international system, the Chinese were forced to concede that the Far East could not be kept to itself. They have found it indispensable to respond, as individuals and as a people, to the new environment closing in on them. Doing so has necessitated the reexamination and restatement of nearly all basic values of Chinese life.

Since the nineteenth century the Chinese have been faced with the alternative of adhering to their own traditions or accepting those of the West. Institutions and practices which are so well established that they seem to rest on sheer common sense in each of the competing civilizations have been placed in juxtaposition. As a result, the Chinese now know two kinds of common sense to justify a course of action. The ensuing difficulty at times goes deeper; for they may be said to have even two kinds of sanity. In old China a man who wanted no sons seemed a patent lunatic; in the Western world he might be perfectly sane. A modern Chinese faces thousands of such choices.

_The Peculiarities of Old China_

Obviously, government in Republican China cannot be understood without analysis of the foundations upon which it is built. Such an analysis requires an inquiry, however cursory, into the peculiarities of old China and those of contemporary China. Some of the difficulties of modern China arise from the very adequacy of the old system. Had the Chinese of the past been less satisfied with their society, they might have become more accustomed to change and transience.

China from the first millennium B. C. occupied the central position in the Far East. No other country in that part of the earth was so powerful or so civilized. India, despite important contributions to Chinese religious thought, was too far away to impinge greatly upon the Chinese. Japan was heavily indebted to the Chinese, and encouraged the Chinese in viewing themselves as the most civilized of peoples. This had important consequences. As China was unified most of the time, and as there was no other polity to compare with the Chinese, their political system took on the appearance of a universal empire. The neighboring states paid formal tribute, and the Chinese were unprepared to meet another people who might claim political equality as an organized state. Even today, in the attitudes of the Chinese and Japanese toward one another, there are strong traces of this traditional point of view and indications that the Japanese would like to restore a closed Far Eastern order with themselves in supremacy.

Since old China was rarely confronted with international problems, the Chinese were not aware of their realm as a nation-state. There was no sharp territorial limit to the Chinese polity, and no requirement that within certain boundaries one authority be defined as supreme. The Chinese were able to make their adjustments in the interplay of social and political controls with less frequent resort to theory than the Westerners. Nor was the Chinese ruler ever so firmly entrenched as to eliminate the chance of being overthrown or to preclude the existence of other--pluralistic--independent social controls. The power of government was indeed limited. It maintained the peace of the Chinese world, directed education, supported the social proprieties, and was ornamental rather than efficient for the greater part of its activities.

The Chinese lived primarily under the dominance of nonpolitical agencies. These were the family (comparable to the Western clan), the village and district, and the _hui_ (association, guild, society--in the narrowest sense of the term). The family was intimately bound up with the Chinese religious system, which stressed the continuity of each individual in the flesh. A personal immortality was to be secured with greatest certainty through the survival of one's own blood. The village was the main economic unit, and the union of villages into districts (_hsien_) provided an administrative division of importance: below the _hsien_ level, common interests were fostered by community home rule; above it, by the government. This meant that elders, clans in council, village bosses, and other nongovernmental agencies carried on police work, all local public construction, and most of the activities which are regarded in the modern West as falling under the jurisdiction of the state. The _hui_ was able to supplement the family and the village; in guild form, it provided the chief framework of commercial and industrial organization.

If the government was weak and limited, and social control ensured primarily by nongovernmental agencies, how did the Chinese achieve so great a political stability? Why did their polity not break up into a wilderness of tiny social groups, each jealous and particularistic, like medieval Europe? The answer is to be found in the psychological controls which the Chinese established. They devised a system of indoctrination unequaled by that of any other people.

The Chinese sought to guide men through the guidance of their ideas: government by education, or government by propaganda. For this purpose scholarship and administration were closely allied. The government was made up of scholars, who thereby occupied the position of greatest prestige in the society; the scholars were trained to serve as government officials. Few officials were not scholars; few scholars pursued a nonpolitical course. This led to a profound uniformity of thought, and was in accord with the dictates of the Confucian tradition.[1]

From the earliest times Chinese thought was social and political in emphasis, rather than metaphysical and scientific. For thousands of years scholars studied problems of society, government, and ethics. They appealed to tradition, and interpreted it. They organized the primitive religion of the Chinese into a sophisticated social philosophy, and over the centuries their work took effect. Chinese of different racial backgrounds, using different spoken languages and unable to communicate with one another by writing, living under different climatic and economic conditions, came to show a startling uniformity of behavior. Custom and common sense were woven into a solid pattern by the scholars and accepted by the masses. Everything in human life bore some relation to everything else, and the life of man was related to the world of nature. There was no sharp distinction between natural science and social philosophy.

The educational integration of government, mores, and physical existence created a system of control which has exceeded all others in lasting power. The group in command was the scholastic bureaucracy, but membership in it was not hereditary. Scholar-officials were recruited by civil service examinations, and to this degree the society was a democratic one. Every child in the society had the theoretical opportunity of becoming prime minister. Furthermore, the power exercised by the scholar-officials was different in its nature from that of legal rulers in the West. Government was preventive rather than remedial. Constitutionality was not confined to legal matters; in a broader sense it extended to all subjects. The scholars were as much subject to established tradition as the humblest Chinese, and everyone knew the tradition. The scholars excelled only in knowing it more thoroughly.

It may be stated as a truism that under any government the actual scope of its intervention is confined to a certain category of affairs, bounded on the one hand by matters which are so trivial or so unexplored that they are left to the citizen's free choice and on the other by subjects in which there is such general agreement as to make political action unnecessary. This latter sphere might be called ideological compliance--control of men brought about by the inculcation of broad uniform patterns of belief and behavior. If men are induced to agree upon a traditionally fixed mode of behavior, they will unite in persecuting dissenters and will not be conscious of the tyranny of ideological doctrine. But if they think in many different ways, they will be able to gain security only by promises of mutual noninterference. Liberty--as absence of governmental restraint--may thus result either from a complete concord, in which every man is free to do as he wishes since all men wish to do basically the same, or from a specific guarantee of each individual's freedom to follow his own interest or caprice within a defined limit. The old system of China was a free society in so far as dissent calling for government interference was relatively negligible, and at the same time a society rigidly controlled with respect to the uniformity of individual behavior.

This tradition was pragmatic and realistic. The Chinese ideological controls operated successfully because they corresponded reasonably well with the actualities of social and economic existence. With the coming of the West, the old Chinese system was affected in two ways: First, the amorphous Chinese society was threatened by the strong, effectively organized states of the West. Secondly, the competitive accomplishments of Western civilization destroyed, in large part, the assumption of universality upon which much Chinese tradition depended, and thereby impaired the power of the scholar-officials. The twentieth century brought China a new freedom, unaccustomed and unsought. The old system was threatened with ruin, and modern China faced the problem: replacement or reconstitution? Or, more dangerously: chaos or political extinction?

_The Peculiarities of Modern China_

The lifetime of one man can span the gap between old China and new. There are men living in Peking today who can remember when the Forbidden City (the palace-city of the emperors) was sacred and inviolate, and when the mandarinate ruled in accordance with immemorial usage. These may regard all Western science as a confusion, a wild torrent of exotic words, which answers no problems, gives human life no aim and no dignity, and is bound to return to the alien dust whence it came. Opposing them are younger Chinese who hate the dead hand of the past and look forward to a Westernized, scientific, industrial China which will differ from Europe and America only in being even more modern than they.

Most Chinese fall into neither of these groups. Many of them, however, have a definite conception of the West and of the benefits which Western civilization has to bestow. They also realize the threat which it contains for those who do not master it. Yet they have been nurtured in the serene humanity of ancient custom and hold to it with the effortlessness of habit long transmitted. Out of this dual standard there spring daily problems of ethics and conduct, of private life and public policy. Administrative organization versus family loyalty and nepotism, promptness versus leisureliness, discipline versus courtesy: these and many others are omnipresent antitheses.

Anachronism is China's second self. There is no set scheme of things. Modern Western civilization has not been adopted so fully as to make the traditional habits seem outmoded, nor has the past survived to an extent as to make everything modern appear ridiculous. The notion of world government, for example, is gone from China, and the notion of multi-national government not yet clear. The relation of the individual to society and of the parts of society to the whole are not yet reformulated; this affects such matters as criminal law, political organization, and economic development. Virtually every adaptation in China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think after the fashion of the West--scientifically and logically--or are they to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner?

It is thus patent that the new Chinese world which is appearing must grow out of the background of the past and the necessities of the present. It cannot readily be planned because there are not enough formulas common to the old Far Eastern and the new Western worlds. New China must be a blending, from use, from habit, from new skills imposed upon old. Out of the dangers and misfortunes of the years since 1912 the Chinese have developed a small body of political methods which is temporarily workable. But the greater part of their social and governmental thought and custom has yet to go through the process of reevaluation by practice. Chinese political development has perforce to be emergent and not planned.

According to either time scheme, that of her long past or of the modern world, modern China is anachronistic. The transformation of the Chinese world of the past to the China of the future involves the creation of a whole set of transitional institutions designed to lead from one to the other. Contemporary Chinese institutions are neither those of the past nor those of the future; they are a peculiar scheme of more recent origin and bound to be replaced. Old China is gone. Modern China is novel and unstable; in time it too will yield to a China of which prophecy affords but few glimpses.

_The World Significance of Chinese Government_

If government in Republican China is an extemporized and doomed system, rooted in no past, committed to no future, why should it be scrutinized at all? A number of reasons for examining Chinese government suggest themselves. Some of these are of sufficient significance to merit statement, so as to suggest facts and issues worthy of special notice. If certain points of key importance are kept in mind, they may serve as references whereby the relative ranking of any specific topic may be ascertained.

First, the mere geographic extent of China is such as to make her government necessary to a picture of contemporary governments. At least every fifth human being now living is a Chinese.

Second, in international relations China has been of great passive importance. The wars between Western and Far Eastern nations have all been fought over the so-called Chinese question. The partition of China and the open door in China have been issues of international concern. Since 1931 the Chinese have been active participants in the struggle for the control of China, and the nature of their government determines in large part the effectiveness of their resistance. China is a vast market, and an even vaster reserve of man power--for troops or for industrial labor.

Third, the pathology of government deserves attention. Chronic social disorder may provide a great variety of political facts wherewith to gauge the nature of political power. Well-governed societies do not supply similar material because they rarely need to probe political fundamentals.

Fourth, old China offers a challenging demonstration of secular, civilian, pacific world government. The Chinese commonwealth of the past was supernational; it seemed to the Chinese like unified civilized humanity. Among the conflicting currents of present world politics, there are some which drift toward world unity; old China may present significant analogies to the international institutions of today.

Fifth, the universal features of government may be more fruitfully scrutinized in a novel cultural and social setting. China presents a background radically different from the Western one, and affords a unique test whereby Western political patterns and those of world-wide significance may be distinguished from one another.

Sixth, the question of method in political science may meet qualifications after being applied to Chinese political thought. The Chinese did not seek that illusory precision which has been one of the chief goals of Western thought ever since logical procedure was established by the Greeks. The Western man in the street, however, depends very little on mathematics or logic in his everyday thinking. Indirectly, the effect of inductive and deductive method has been revolutionary, but their importance in routine operation or unspecialized thought is open to question--especially in view of the findings of modern psychology. It may well be that Chinese thought can assist in the interpretation of everyday experience in the West, precisely because it is not too specialized or scientific.

Seventh, the Chinese may contribute in a practical way to political knowledge and leadership throughout the world. These contributions may be anticipated by a consideration of past and present Chinese government.

Eighth, the Chinese have lived in a peculiar historical environment, consideration of which may broaden our outlook. Most Western "world histories"--with few exceptions such as H. G. Wells's brilliant _Outline_--are histories of the West Asiatic and European worlds, with only perfunctory references to China.

The relative novelty of Chinese materials to Western research explains in great part the neglect accorded them in the Western social sciences. With the narrowing of the world by modern means of transport and communication the situation is changing. The science of Sinology (systematic study of China through Chinese texts) has won its place among the archaeological disciplines. Sinologists have made available to Westerners a great deal of material, but its value depends in large part upon the degree to which it is incorporated into the generally accessible and usable body of knowledge.

_The Main Factors in Modern Chinese Government_

In the consideration of modern Chinese government a somewhat novel approach to government is called for: one which distinguishes different elements and levels of control and makes plain their interrelation. The narrow consideration of the formal structure would be puzzling and discouraging, since the various governments of modern China have been the ornaments rather than the engines of political power. An attempt to explain modern China in terms of constitutional legal development alone would lead to exasperation or frustration; the ideological and institutional context which might convey meaning would be lost.

How can government be studied when politics are antecedent to government? If the rulers make and unmake the form of government almost at will, where is the real source of their power? If armies can dissolve overnight and be reassembled under different banners on the morrow, military power may seem tenuous and dependent on other factors. What are these? If property is insecure and the standards of wealth subject to variation, how can economic power be treated as an ultimate determinant? How do men wield authority of any sort, while they create or destroy the machinery of authority?

For centuries China had been held together by a close-knit system dependent upon tradition. This tradition, the ideology called _Confucian_, was the device whereby the scholar-officials of the old imperial bureaucracy controlled society. Government itself was subordinate to the moral and social leadership of the intellectuals, who relegated the economic and military professions to the less honored categories of society. The whole fabric of Chinese life was made up of interlocking patterns; the West, by destroying a part, tore the whole asunder. Modern China faces more than political problems; a totalitarian revolution has engulfed it. China has been proceeding not from partial control to complete control, as are Italy,[2] Germany,[3] and the Soviets,[4] but from complete control to something not far from universal license--freedom all-pervading, unwanted, and terrifying. The problem of modern Chinese government is the problem of re-creating government out of its raw materials: land, people, doctrine, force, and law.

In this problem certain factors stand forth as preeminent: ideological movements, military and economic factors, governments.

First, the movements. These supplant the ancient tradition and the old hierarchy of scholars. In the place of one settled authority over all subjects, there suddenly appeared thousands of little authorities. Anarchism, dress reform, Christianity, feminism, nationalism, pro-Japanism, communism, atheism, capitalism--discordant and partially contradictory, these all compete for the authority or a part of the authority once held by the old system. China undergoes intellectual, moral, educational, political, economic, military, scientific, and industrial revolutions all at once, and all for the same reason--the passing of the old unified order. Imagine the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, the Gold Rush of '49, the World War, and the Russian Revolution all happening in the same country in the same generation! This is a common-place comparison, frequently made. Movements determined the loyalty of troops, the title to property, the form of government. Power inhered in them, since they determined the conditions under which men would seek and wield power. A great part of the control of China has been exerted directly, by means of the movements themselves.

Second, the armies took the power which goes with military force, simply because theirs was military force. They did not have to seek power. It accrued to them, out of the disorder of society. Along with military power went economic power as the most tangible and negotiable. Guns and property seem very realistic indices of power, as long as the troops are loyal and the property safe from confiscation or devaluation.

Third, the governments. Between ideological movements, which sought to rebuild the ideas and habits of men, and armies wielding a brief but nearly unrestricted authority, government played its tertiary role. It was at times of ludicrous unimportance, and on some occasions possessed power in its own right. It leaped to a sharply improved position after 1928, but never possessed the generality of assent or the monopoly of force to the degree common in the West.

_The Approach_

Government may mean the control (or attempted control) of society by men professing to act in the name of all society. In this sense it includes propagandists and educators who seek to reconstitute society, leaders of movements, soldiers, economic leaders of all classes, and government leaders (so far as they use government establishments as an actual means of control). Viewed thus, the political processes of modern China are manifold and significant. Here is power stripped naked, power without ornament, power resting squarely upon the brains or guns of men. Men rise and fall in the contest for power; they rise and fall absolutely, not in a fictitious scheme which establishes a fictitious order of constitutional offices sometimes providing asylum for popular leaders in eclipse.

Government may also mean the structure and function of that formally organized group in society which claims to act upon the mandate of legal sovereignty. When the concept of sovereignty itself is vague, confused, or absent, government by title may be merely one among several factors of power. Government in China is broader than the governments of China; the two should be distinguished from one another.

In outlining government in Republican China, the present analysis follows the broader construction of the word _government_. The governments proper are accordingly discussed in the last part, the first two being devoted to the ideological movements and to the military and economic factors. For the purpose of defining the three sets of controls as clearly as possible, each is treated separately. This has necessitated a corresponding arrangement of the historical data, though in each part presented from a different point of view. But it is highly desirable that the long-range Chinese chronology be kept in mind. To this end a table of Chinese dynasties has been provided.[5] As a result of separate analysis the movements, the armies, and the governments may appear in bolder relief than would otherwise be possible, and the role of government in the broadest sense may be made clearer, not only for China but for the West as well.

NOTES

[1] For a description of this system see below, pp. 18 ff.

[2] _Cf._ H. Arthur Sterner, _Government in Fascist Italy_, New York and London, 1938.

[3] _Cf._ Fritz Morstein Marx, _Government in the Third Reich_, 2d ed., New York and London, 1937.

[4] _Cf._ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, _Soviet Communism_, 2d ed., New York, 1937.

[5] See below, p. 197.

FIRST PART

MOVEMENTS

_Chapter_ I

CONFUCIANISM

The continuity of Chinese civilization depends not alone upon its political virtues, but upon its working effectiveness in all relevant spheres of human activity. In emphasizing certain aspects of old China, it is impossible to trace the entire broad evolution.[1] In fact, the emergence of those devices which, along with government in the narrow sense, guided China in her long past dates back to prehistory. Throughout the ages, however, Chinese life has preserved its identity.

Chinese culture is unique in its continuity. Its most striking
characteristic is a capacity for change without disruption. It would
appear that that characteristic goes back even to [those] cultures
which preceded the Shang in northeast China. Shang culture, like all
great cultures, was eclectic, fertilized by influences from many
quarters. But these influences and techniques, when they were
accepted, met the same fate which has overtaken every people, every
religion, every philosophy which has invaded China. They were taken
up, developed to accord with Chinese conditions, and transmuted into
organic parts of a culture which remained fundamentally and
characteristically Chinese.[2]

This is the comment of H. G. Creel, an American Sinologue who has helped to explain the archaeological sites of a Chinese civilization considerably older than any other. Even in its historical beginnings the civilization of man in China displayed features corresponding to that of the modern Chinese.

_The Ages before Confucius_

The earliest Chinese state known is the Hsia, which is traditionally termed a dynasty in the Chinese chronicles and given the dates 2205-1765 B. C. More critical examination of the materials of Chinese tradition, the excavation of the engraved bones and bronzes from succeeding periods, and an interpretation of Chinese history with the technique of modern archaeology have upset the credibility of the records of the earliest periods. All that is established is the fact that the Hsia was a state before the Shang. It is unlikely that Hsia exercised any imperial hegemony over other peoples, since the empire system did not rise till Chou times.

Of the Shang dynasty (traditionally 1765-1123 B. C.) much more is known. Thirty years ago most Western scholars thought the Shang chronicles to be myth, but excavations in northeast China have located a Shang capital and have unearthed a large body of inscriptions on bone.[3] The Shang culture must have been highly developed, possessing an urban life, writing, and a definite system of monarchical government. The germs of scholastic leadership were present. Power was in the hands of a single ruler (_wang_, or king), who claimed hegemony for an undetermined distance beyond the walls of the capital.

In the twelfth century B. C. the Shang dynasty was overthrown by conquerors from the west, the Chou. The Chou dynasty bridges the gap between the semihistoric and the definitely historic period of Chinese antiquity. Under the Chou the chief features of Chinese social and intellectual existence took on clear form. From the Chou conquest and their attempts to establish stable government China derived striking social and political characteristics. One of the astonishing facts about early Chinese history is the manner in which the Chou rulers utilized propaganda to make their conquest secure, and in which their propaganda furnished dynamic concepts of Chinese social thought and development.

The most important of these widely propagandized concepts was that of the Chinese Empire. The city of Shang had been the center of a dominion which could not possibly have included more than a fraction of what is known today as China. The civilized areas along the Yellow River were probably no larger than Palestine. Most of what is now China was conquered in succeeding centuries. Even in this small area, it is not known what relationship existed between the ruler of Shang and other rulers. The Chou monarchs built up the legend that the Shang rulers had occupied a position of primacy among the rulers of the civilized world, and then claimed the position themselves by right of succession through conquest. There was thus fostered the notion of one ruler, central and supreme.

Secondly, the Chou themselves taught the doctrine of the right of revolution. They identified their god with the Shang god instead of declaring that their god had overwhelmed the other. They asserted that this one god had been displeased by the profligacy and wickedness of the Shang and had called upon the Chou to overthrow the Shang rulers. Both these theories, refined and amplified, became fundamentals of Chinese political thought in later ages.[4]

The Chou established a system of government which left an imprint on Chinese politics for three thousand years. In relating their metropolitan administration to their occupation of the lands of North and Central China they were less successful. Lacking any other device of government, they turned to feudalism, and on the quasi-feudal foundations of the Shang they imposed a fief system. This led first to the division of China into many small feudal units and later to the appearance of powerful territorial states. The first of these periods--that in which feudalism predominated--was known as the Ch'un Ch'iu, or Spring and Autumn epoch (770-473 B. C.). The second--in which the states developed--was known as the Chan Kuo, or Warring States epoch (473-221 B. C.).

The rise of the Chou provided China with her first government on an imperial scale and with the beginnings of a theory concerning the nature of imperial government. The increasing disorganization during the Ch'un Ch'iu and Chan Kuo periods led to the development of the Confucian and other philosophies, wherein the Chinese, conscious of political shortcomings, sought the good society.

_The Ideology Called Confucian_

551 B. C. is most commonly given as the year of Confucius' birth. Confucius (K'ung Ch'iu; also Master K'ung--K'ung Fu-tz[)u], from which Confucius is derived) was a wandering scholar and would-be official whose life was spent in the advocacy of political and social reform. He was important because of his part in establishing the profession of teaching and for his doctrines upholding good government. Discontented with the present, he turned to the past--becoming conservative and aristocratic in outlook. His position in the history of political thought he owes to the bent which he gave aristocratic conservatism. He sought the leadership of the _chün-tz[)u]_ (the upright, superior, or aristocratic man) rather than the domination of laws. He developed an ethical system secular and practical in its orientation and humane in its tenets. He emphasized the necessity of the individual's appropriate self-consciousness in the society, and the need for following _li_ (propriety), the established values. He stressed family loyalty above all others, and insisted on respect for tradition. After his death in 479 B. C. his ideas were elaborated, clarified, and revised into what is known as the _Confucian system_.[5]

This system underwent many changes. The Confucian influences came to prevail in the Han dynasty, in the second and first centuries B. C., but lost its official preeminence with the fall of the Han in the third century. It nevertheless retained a great share of intellectual leadership. In the Sung period (960-1279) the philosopher Chu Hsi developed Confucianism into its most recent accepted form. Others joined him in sharpening and refining Confucianism.

The Sung philosophers evolved a Confucianism which showed the influence of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. They reinterpreted the classics by emphasizing works other than those hitherto regarded as preeminent. With reference to the concept _li_, they developed the notion of a truly complete order running through both spirit and matter. Metaphysics, alien to the mind of Confucius himself, became an operative part of Confucian thought. Through their ethical and psychological studies the Sung Confucians translated the Confucian rationale into an effective ideological technique for domination. It is not inconsistent to find them opposing any action definitely governmental. Furthermore, they showed themselves to be conservatives in politics, and through their commentaries on the classics--which were studied in succeeding centuries along with the texts themselves--imprinted their conservatism upon the Chinese mind.

The ideology called _Confucian_ is not identical with Confucianism as the philosophic system proper. In the first place, it is not known how much of the social doctrines taught by Confucius and his successors was original and how much mere transmission of preexisting beliefs. Confucius himself regarded his work as that of a transmitter and not a creator. Secondly, the whole Chinese culture contributed elements of strength to the ideology to which the name of Confucius became attached by Westerners. Thirdly, the system developed in practice to an extent which Confucius could not have anticipated. The Confucian ideology and society bear the relation to Confucius which Christendom bears to Jesus Christ; both founders would scarcely recognize the derivations to which their teachings have led.

The Confucian ideology came to prevail in China just before the day of Christ. At the time of Christ, Wang Mang, a usurper and a zealous Confucian, shook the Han Empire with his experiments. A period of reaction against Confucianism set in. Taoism and Buddhism provided rival cults. After the twelfth century, Confucianism rose slowly to power over men's minds again--although it had never been wholly superseded by other doctrines, it had long lacked its all-compelling primacy. Not until the Ming dynasty (1368-1643) did it become the state philosophy of China, the ideology whereby China lived politically and whereby she was governed.

Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely. Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was interpreted by Aquinas, so was Confucianism by the Sung philosophers. Aristotelian politics are far removed from the specific problems of representative or modern authoritarian government; nevertheless they possess great value and exercise an indeterminable influence upon the entire West. The analogy holds for China if left in its loosest terms. Confucianism is far from oblivion. The China which met the Western impact--"old China" in the eyes of the twentieth century--was in fact more Confucian than was the West Aristotelian. She was permeated by an ideology in which Confucius' teachings were the key pattern, though not one which he had made up in its entirety.

_Government in the Confucian Ideology_

In Confucian China, government was reduced to a minimum. There existed a set of institutions which in many respects afforded a remarkable although misleading parallel to the governments of the West. In fact, the earliest Western visitors to China found no difficulty in applying their own political language to China. The supreme Chinese leader they called the _emperor_, despite the inevitable Caesarian connotations of the term and the fact that it erased the peculiar significance of the Chinese title. Subordinate areas were called _provinces_. All the way through, the use of European concepts compelled whole series of unwarranted parallels. The term _mandarin_ forced its way into Western tongues, however, since there was no existing term to describe the members of the curious hierarchy of scholar-bureaucrats occupying a position of hegemony among the institutions of Chinese society. Unfortunately for Chinese as well as Westerners, both were so poorly informed in the beginnings of intercourse that the Chinese could not secure an adequate picture of Europe, while the Europeans assumed that the Chinese were more, rather than less, like themselves. The Chinese society, with a single supreme ritual leader, was termed an _empire_, and the predominant hierarchy of that society a _government_.

Actually, modern political scientists would have to hesitate before applying the term _government_ to the hierarchy of old China. In many respects that hierarchy was more like Europe's medieval universities and our fraternal societies than the governments of the West. The prestige accruing to positions in the system was not derived so much from political power as from the status which the system offered to its members. An official, although he might value his power, was regarded in the society at large almost as much for what he was as for the dignity with which the office invested him. This arose from his peculiar role, in which his function was to provide a model of propriety in his private and public life rather than to interfere in the lives of others. Interference, to be sure, occurred--sharply, Draconically, directed more against the social group of the offender than against the offender himself, on the theory that it was the function of the group to keep its members in line with the common-sense traditions. In such rare cases the officialdom became a government--government as the institution of men who seek to control society in the name of all society. Normally the officialdom was not a government in this sense, as it claimed leadership rather than control, preached rather than punished, shamed rather than intimidated the people.

Confucius said, "If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good."[6] In a governmental system which was avowedly Confucian, the officials were discouraged from trying to formulate rules, for such rules, if specific, could only duplicate the enactments of custom and, if general, might entangle the official in a web of words. If the officials were personally and individually worthless, there would be no hope for good government and the only remedy would consist in selecting good officials and placing them in high positions. If the officials were good, their integrity and common sense would show them the solutions to problems and they would have no need to solicit advice from some manual of commands. No lifeless paper and ink could guide a people unless there were upright officials to study the classics and put the judicious rules found in them into effect. The only safeguard against bad government was good government by good men; the only remedy for bad government was the effort of good men. The Chinese never set up an imaginary machinery and turned themselves into its cogs. To the simple, common-sense humanity of the Confucians, a government made up of rigid laws--a system having no reference to the personality or value of individuals, but embedded in a vast mechanism of numbers--would have seemed anathema and lunacy.

Government in China was an auxiliary activity, the reserve power of a hierarchy given to the pursuit of different ends. The officials were teachers first and magistrates afterward; the emperor was a supreme model first and a ruler afterward; the people were shamed, and punished only when they were shameless. Such was the ideal theory upon which the Chinese built their world society. The facts were rarely as bright as they might have hoped; the reserve power never disappeared.

The necessity for government did not always proceed from the frailties of the governed. The Confucian system, although worthy of its great esteem, was marked by the difficulties which attend all human organization. Corruption and tyranny appeared, and were not by any means negligible. In many cases it may be supposed that a system of laws would have provided redress for individuals treated arbitrarily or unjustly; but, if one is to judge by experience in the West, even law brings with it other types of injustice peculiar to itself. In China some of the most benevolent and effective emperors advocated at times a government of rules and not of men, in order to check the caprice and the oppression of officials; yet the role of law in China, in contrast to the part it has played in the West, remained slight. The West affords instances of effective political work outside legal systems, while the Chinese have produced law codes of considerable breadth and significance. Nevertheless, the power of Chinese government aside from law is just as clear as the Western development of government within law.

The old Chinese system was based upon control through ideas, control exercised through the maintenance of clear notions of right and wrong, as founded in certain well-established common-sense traditions. The world of fact and the world of right and wrong were bound together, and the whole ideology was one of general and all-pervasive order. While the Western impact was felt cumulatively through the nineteenth century, the Chinese world of fact went down into the limbo of myth in a few disestablished generations, and with it went the compulsion which Confucian common sense had exerted.[7] The consequent development of new ways of acting, which had nothing to do with traditional control, upset the entire scheme. When the system of ideological guidance began breaking down, there was a stampede to get away from it. Men no longer trusted it, no longer trusted the tameness of their neighbors. A new wildness, a savagery armed with science, had come with the aliens from beyond the seas. It was the old hierarchy to which men turned, calling it _the state_.

As a state, as an all-embracing control institution, the old Chinese hierarchy was a pseudomorph--it looked like a state but was not really one. Now it had to develop those characteristics of regularity, impersonality, and machine effectiveness demanded of a state in the modern world. It had to restore the virtue of men by telling them how it was possible to be virtuous in a world in which all things turned and changed with the days and not with the centuries. It had to gather together the members of the old Chinese world-community, reorient them with respect to the new, divided world around them, and fight off the inroads of outsiders. Above everything else, it had to grow strong, so that it might institute order, so that it might someday grow weak again. On the other hand, if a governmental system were set up which tried to maintain the precarious supremacy that Western states have enjoyed, and which was subject to uncontrolled fluctuations in the thought of the people upon whom it rested, the Chinese might lose their character as Chinese. They might be absorbed into the Western world and become a group of yellow-skinned traditionless men, living according to the heritage of white men's laws and doomed to a perpetual inferiority because these laws were not their own. They might be aliens upon the earth, with no group to call their own. Such a nightmarish vision may have come to Sun Yat-sen when he pleaded with all his heart for the unification and defense of a China still Chinese.

The old system broke and collapsed in 1911-1912. This collapse was hastened by the fact that the imperial family was incapable of leadership. A succession of degenerates and children occupied the throne--the one intelligent emperor was imprisoned by a clique--and a fanatical old woman held enough power to keep anyone else from using it, but not enough to lead or to want to lead a revolution from above. When the old structure caved in, over four hundred million people were without effective government, and no one really knew how to create it.

_The Replacement of the Confucian Ideology_

Only some of the movements which have occurred in China have had political significance. With the collapse of the old stable order, the Chinese fell into great confusion, devoting themselves to a variety of doctrines and crusades. Some of these movements may be regarded as subordinate to the day-to-day struggle for military or governmental power; others, though within the sphere of politics as far as their interests were concerned, never acquired sufficient importance to impress themselves upon the general political scene.

The only movements which need be here considered are constituent ones. It has been noted that the real basis for the stability and operation of the old Chinese society lay not in the power of an organized body of law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-interpreters but in the constitutionalism of common sense, in the deep harmony of agreement which the Confucian outlook on fact and value had created. Men were raised tame, and what tamed them was an ideology--a unified, coherent body of ideas--which related the knowledge of the world to the sphere of morals, which was applied by the intellectually dominant classes as a means of control, and which secured for the controlling classes hegemony over all groups in society.

The moment the old order weakened, it was inevitable that men would try to find substitutes which met four criteria: (1) a plausibly satisfactory explanation for the world of fact; (2) a persuasively related scheme of values (right, wrong; good, bad); (3) use of this explanation and the value scheme (both together forming an ideology) to control behavior; (4) authoritative status of the individuals promoting the ideology, whether or not organized as a group.

It will be recognized that these criteria fit the great religious movements of mankind; it is equally apparent that they lend themselves to the promotion of governance. Governing under conditions of ideological anarchy is at best a precarious effort--a makeshift, a pitiable building upon sand. The Western world faces today the same problem that the Chinese face: How are men to agree widely enough to live together in peace? But the Chinese approached this problem from an experience of deliberately fostered agreement. Confucianism had the effectiveness of the great religions and a sophistication and malleability superior, perhaps, to any of them. As a consequence, the modern Chinese were keenly aware of the necessity of the last two criteria. The problem of ideological guidance is only half solved with the presentation of a new scheme of facts and a new scheme of morals; propaganda and institutionalization remain.

Complaints are current in the West to the effect that art, science, and letters are becoming propaganda--that is, that they are being used to control men, or as attempts to control men. The Chinese of 1912 and after never had similar scruples. All human effort was propaganda, and whatever was not, was of only passing interest. There was no alternative while the Chinese tried to found a new common sense in the discredited ruins of their old world order. Their natural science had been impeached by the demonstrable superiority of Western science. Their code of ethics, whatever its aesthetic appeal, was ineffectual as a way of conduct among people who had different, more violent notions of right and wrong. Even the code of personal behavior--the elaborate courtesies, the leisureliness, the grace of life in old China--was worthless in an environment which put a high premium upon speed, impersonality, efficiency. As the Chinese turned to a revision of all aspects of their mode of life at once, different groups, trying to find some one key reform which would solve all difficulties, fell into discord. Economic advance, political reorganization, "realism" in outlook, educational reform--all these had their adherents. None was allowed, by either adherents or opponents, to stand simply as a group of separate reform measures to be considered on their own merits; the drive for a new ideology made all proposals important for their bent rather than their content. A simple thing like the desirability of using Latin letters in mass education immediately took on a vast significance when related to the _Kulturpolitik_ of the time. The left-wingers once attacked the missionaries who had first tried to introduce it, on the ground that the missionaries were seeking to prostitute the Chinese mind and to make the Chinese betray the past. Later the Communists enthusiastically pushed the same scheme, stating that the Chinese ideographs were a stronghold of reactionary thought. The torments of the struggle inevitably caused the terms of conflict to resolve; gradually several more or less determinant movements emerged, around which all other reforms tended to cluster, because of sympathy or logical relationship.

_The Chief Movements in the Rebuilding of China_

Among the movements, Confucianism stands first. Even with its limpness and decadence, it still represents the greatest single intellectual force in the country. To the Chinese, this force may not even be apparent, and they take it as much for granted as the air they breathe. Nevertheless, the outside observer can see that even though Confucianism is inert as a movement, its inertia is more important than the pressures of other causes. Unconsciously, the Chinese accept whole tracts of Confucian thought. They accept, in other words, the guidance of Confucian ideology in much the same way that Americans who are not churchgoers still accept the major premises of Christianity, simply because their whole environment is charged with it. Just as in the West a universal and potent Christian revival in politics is not likely but is nevertheless conceivable, so in China it is not very probable but quite possible that there will be a successful resurrection of the orthodox Confucian philosophy. Whether a strict Confucianism could return without monarchy is doubtful; and Sun Yat-sen's blend of republicanism and Confucianism is so well established that it may prevent the successful promotion of uninterpreted Confucianism.

The Taoists and Buddhists are similarly inactive in politics. More strictly concerned with the supernatural than is Confucianism, they represent significant tangential forces upon the flow of political development, but do not express themselves in overt intervention. Among the leaders of all groups except the Communists there are important members of both sects. It is not uncommon for any of them, defeated in war or temporarily eliminated from politics, to turn to a monastery and study ancient texts, much in the way that an idle American politician goes to a farm, cultivating his health and his reputation.

Islam is a minor but living force in China. It has long prevailed in the border territories of the Northwest, and for generations has presented vital and effective opposition to the Chinese influence. The territory of the Mohammedans was consequently a hotbed of rebellion and separatism, until the ghastly religious wars of the past century drowned autonomous tendencies in an ocean of blood. At the present time the Islamic movement faces another equal to itself in ferocity and persuasiveness--Marxism--in Outer Mongolia, across the border in the U. S. S. R., and in the northwest controlled by the Chinese Red Army. Thus far Islam has given no promise of power.

Nationalism--the movement launched by Sun Yat-sen, which follows his doctrines of the _San Min Chu I_[8]--is the official movement of the National Government of China and of the Nationalist armies under Chiang K'ai-shek. It is consequently the chief power of positive action in the whole country. At various times, Sun's followers have been known as Progressives, Revolutionists, Republicans, and Nationalists--according to the phase of their program then uppermost.

Opportunism, rationalized by one or another ornamental philosophy, has been very common in modern China. It has accepted ideological materials the way they are used in superficial struggles of the West--making ideals fit the facts and using them for the sake of the facts. Opportunism has been characterized by the avid acceptance of wholly implausible doctrines, or by a disingenuous "realism." Proalien and defeatist movements have been opportunist in practical matters; "strong man" philosophies have served the causes of individual ambitions. Ideologically these currents were noteworthy only because they stirred up the mud, making genuine intellectual clarification all the more difficult.

Finally, three important movements have come from outside. These are Christianity, Marxism, and pro-Japanism.