Government in Republican China. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
could not monopolize the government of China, they looked forward to attaining a position of leadership among the various groups in the Chinese society and to keeping that leadership through parliamentary methods to be established under the Republic. Instead of regarding the Empire as a set of institutions, they considered it the mere decoration of the country. They had no reason to suppose, nor any way of telling, that in destroying the old regime they destroyed government and all possibility of government for a long time to come. They consequently tried to set in motion a snowball revolution—an initial conspiracy of terror which would intimidate the Manchus and cause the whole house of cards to collapse. It was their task only to start the movement, which could be counted upon to avalanche itself into history.
To the revolutionary group a republican scheme seemed possible. They felt that in the twentieth century men would disagree but amicably, and they regarded democracy as a form of government so excellent that its mere inauguration would guarantee success. Furthermore, republicanism and democracy were closely associated with nationalism; how could a nation be free unless it governed itself in the most direct manner—through the votes of its broad majorities?
In failing to provide a stopping point for the revolution before they started it, the Nationalists were scarcely guilty of rash action. No human being could have foretold the consequences of revolt against a civilization. The revolutionaries were men who had passed through the transition from the old Confucian ideology to that of the West with relative ease. They did not realize that what was obvious to them would be a mystery to the masses and that the political changes contemplated would rip asunder the very fabric of thought in China. It is evidence of the simplicity and usefulness of Confucian ideas that—even when admitted to be challenged by the new environment—they continued to operate without the sanction of intelligence, and operated well as empty habits.
With the old patriotic forces behind them, and an untested Utopia ahead, the Nationalists raced the Manchu Empire into revolution. The story of the revolution is not complex.4 In a great part of China the people awoke to find no government. In the North the imperial officials and princes clamored for the assistance of a man whom they had once slighted: Yüan Shih-k'ai, the leader of the modernized armies of the Empire. He held the fate of China in his hands. But he betrayed the Empire so that he might betray the Republic; he joined the revolutionaries and thrust a settlement upon the ruling house. With his intervention the whole picture of Chinese politics changed. Yüan brought troops into the play of power, troops dependent upon himself, men no longer interested in ideas now that the all-compelling force of the old way of thought was gone.
Nationalism: Constitutionalist Phase
The Republic at Nanking enjoyed a brief Utopian existence, with Sun Yat-sen as its president. The revolutionaries were independent from October, 1911, to March, 1912, when the Republic became the instrument of Yüan Shih-k'ai. No substantial power accrued to the legislative.
During their bright heyday of power as a parliamentary party under the Republic—which they had founded only to give it away to the military—the Nationalists were known as the Kuomintang. At this time the Chinese name of the party was significantly translated "Democratic Party." Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionaries had expected that the Chinese people would accept the new ideology without understanding it and then would come to understand it very quickly. They could not hope to replace the old ideology before the revolution, because the presence of the imperial government made large-scale educational work impossible. After the establishment of the Republic, however, they found themselves hamstrung because they had not inculcated republicanism. It was a vicious circle. The governmental pattern set up at Nanking was replaced by another to make room for Yüan Shih-k'ai, who proposed a third, in which he should have more power, in order that he might create a fourth government, in which he should be emperor.5 The armies of the revolutionaries, such as they were, became absorbed in the forces of Yüan. When, in a few months, the Republic had been won and lost, the Nationalists realized that the revolution of 1911–1912 was only the first step in their labors. They experimented with a minor revolution in 1913, and then turned to other measures for securing a return to constitutional government and the creation of a republic which should be as firmly rooted in men's minds as the majestic but irretrievable Confucian order had been. They had won the revolution by creating doubt and giving it tangible expression; they lost their revolution because doubt persisted, swallowed everything, leaving China in a turmoil beyond all systematic thought.
The first years of the nominal Republic, the beginning of the new order in China, were marked by a feverish pretense of changed forms. The outlook which superseded the ancient ideology was curious. It was a mixture of traditionalist acceptance of temporary disorder and resignation to a period of transformation into an unconceived and unproclaimed future. This outlook gave life no purpose, but it kept men from falling into complete anarchy. People were willing to accept illegal authorities, since local administrators had traditionally maintained a spotty cloak of public order. Modern Chinese were prepared to pay lip service to a preposterous parliamentary regime but soon found that it was comfortable to think in terms such as armies, foreign interference, and money—thus allowing their thinking to settle in the large framework of an accepted disorder.
The Nationalists tried to combat this anticonstitutional way of thought. For six years (1914–1920) they combined conspiratorial techniques with the role of a legally constituted power fighting for law. They assumed the name Chinese Revolutionary Party until they discovered that they could secure no ideological foothold upon which to base the order they proposed. Some of them went so far as to become anarchists, favoring a continuance of disorder until the world joined China in collapse. Others followed an unrealistic legalism; they held to the paper constitution, to the text of the president's oath of allegiance to the constitution, to the election laws, thinking that the magic of ink would conjure up a government. Sun Yat-sen, and the body of his followers with him, attempted to chart a middle course; in 1917 there was created a "lawful" administration in the South. With extraordinary good fortune the Republic might have succeeded, but the war in Europe, the Japanese interventions, and other adverse circumstances prevented this.
The Nationalists changed the name of their party back to Kuomintang after 1920 but did not discontinue their reformist policies until about two years later. Sun Yat-sen had spent years in study and propaganda; eventually his program became an ideology. No sharp line can be drawn between the two. In some respects the very first programs of the revolutionaries were ideological, in that they presupposed a change in man's outlook which would accommodate republican government. On the other hand, programmatic proposals may be distinguished from ideological theses by the fact that programs refer to things which should be done and ideologies to things in which men should believe in order to do anything at all. A program which is rooted in no ideology is one lacking context; unless a program refers to some accepted scheme of thought it is words in a vacuum. Similarly, an ideology without programs to put it into men's minds, to persuade men to believe in it and give it effect, is an airy prettiness for philosophers. The Nationalists had stood on the foundations of Confucian common sense and proposed a republic; they had destroyed the organization which made that common sense seem real and had cut the ground from under their own feet. They could not distinguish values because their critical attitude enveloped all moral notions or made them isolated points without coherent significance. The Nationalists themselves fell prey to day-dreaming when they appealed to worthless paper for their right to govern. The epoch is significant in the history of the movement in that it taught the Nationalists that men would not fight unless there was something to fight for and that there was nothing to fight for until men could find desirable elements embedded in some larger scheme of life. Politics had to have an end and an environment; without either it was a series of monologues in the wilderness, the soliloquies of logicians.
Sun Yat-sen during this time wrote the drafts of monumental treatises which were to relate the general body of his doctrines to the background of fact and thought from which they had emerged. He never finished them, but meanwhile he and his followers realized that if they were to have a grip over government they must grasp power within the brains of men. The revolutionary reformists had to supply some better medium of persuasion than the frivolity of military cynicism