FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[1]The China Information Committee,News Release, April 1, 1940.[2]The same, April 8, 1940. Minor changes in punctuation have been introduced.[3]The same, May 6, 1940.[4]Research Staff of the Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations,Agrarian China, Selected Source Materials from Chinese Authors, Shanghai, 1938. A more Leftist and even gloomier view is taken by Chen Han-seng,Landlord and Peasant in China, New York, 1936, and the same author'sIndustrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, A Study of the Livelihood of Chinese Tobacco Cultivators, Shanghai, 1939. Two general surveys of the Chinese economy are Condliffe, J. B.,China Today: Economic, Boston, 1932, and Tawney, R. H.,Land and Labour in China, New York, 1932. A significant hypothesis of the relations of economics, government, and culture in China is found in Lattimore, Owen,Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, Ch. III, esp. p. 39ff.; this rests in part upon Wittfogel, Karl August,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Leipzig, 1931, the leading Marxian exposition of the subject.[5]Publicity release of Indusco, Inc., The American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, New York, January 1940 [1941]. This agency, exceedingly active in publicizing China's cooperative progress, has released a great deal of up-to-date information on the movement. The Western literature on the C.I.C. has appeared mostly in popular sources, to whichThe Bulletin of Far Eastern Bibliographyissued by the Committees on Far Eastern Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D. C., serves as a useful guide. The writings of Edgar Snow are of special value and vividness in treating this topic: articles inAsia, various dates; "China's Blitzbuilder, Rewi Alley,"The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 213, no. 32 (February 8, 1941); and his recentThe Battle for Asia, New York, 1941, which appeared as this work was completed and sent to press. A convenient handbook is the anonymousThe People Strike Back! or The Story of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, Shanghai, (1939?).[6]"The Movement in Action,"New Defense, A Journal of the 30,000 Industrial Cooperatives Movement in China(Chungking) Vol. I, no. 1 (April 1939), p. 5.[7]The China Information Committee,News Release, July 15, 1940. The article and tables have been somewhat abridged. The cooperatives spread so rapidly that figures are often obsolete before they are tabulated.[8]"Model Constitution for Chinese Cooperative Societies, Revised July 7th, 1940," The China Information Committee,News Release, July 15, 1940.[9]Nevertheless, the rural cooperative movement must be counted in as having made some beginnings, despite the obstacles it has faced. More than seventy thousand credit and marketing cooperatives were in service last year. (The same, April 22, 1940.)[10]Wu Yi-fang and Price, Frank W., editors; New York, 1940.

[1]The China Information Committee,News Release, April 1, 1940.

[2]The same, April 8, 1940. Minor changes in punctuation have been introduced.

[3]The same, May 6, 1940.

[4]Research Staff of the Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations,Agrarian China, Selected Source Materials from Chinese Authors, Shanghai, 1938. A more Leftist and even gloomier view is taken by Chen Han-seng,Landlord and Peasant in China, New York, 1936, and the same author'sIndustrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, A Study of the Livelihood of Chinese Tobacco Cultivators, Shanghai, 1939. Two general surveys of the Chinese economy are Condliffe, J. B.,China Today: Economic, Boston, 1932, and Tawney, R. H.,Land and Labour in China, New York, 1932. A significant hypothesis of the relations of economics, government, and culture in China is found in Lattimore, Owen,Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, Ch. III, esp. p. 39ff.; this rests in part upon Wittfogel, Karl August,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Leipzig, 1931, the leading Marxian exposition of the subject.

[5]Publicity release of Indusco, Inc., The American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, New York, January 1940 [1941]. This agency, exceedingly active in publicizing China's cooperative progress, has released a great deal of up-to-date information on the movement. The Western literature on the C.I.C. has appeared mostly in popular sources, to whichThe Bulletin of Far Eastern Bibliographyissued by the Committees on Far Eastern Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D. C., serves as a useful guide. The writings of Edgar Snow are of special value and vividness in treating this topic: articles inAsia, various dates; "China's Blitzbuilder, Rewi Alley,"The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 213, no. 32 (February 8, 1941); and his recentThe Battle for Asia, New York, 1941, which appeared as this work was completed and sent to press. A convenient handbook is the anonymousThe People Strike Back! or The Story of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, Shanghai, (1939?).

[6]"The Movement in Action,"New Defense, A Journal of the 30,000 Industrial Cooperatives Movement in China(Chungking) Vol. I, no. 1 (April 1939), p. 5.

[7]The China Information Committee,News Release, July 15, 1940. The article and tables have been somewhat abridged. The cooperatives spread so rapidly that figures are often obsolete before they are tabulated.

[8]"Model Constitution for Chinese Cooperative Societies, Revised July 7th, 1940," The China Information Committee,News Release, July 15, 1940.

[9]Nevertheless, the rural cooperative movement must be counted in as having made some beginnings, despite the obstacles it has faced. More than seventy thousand credit and marketing cooperatives were in service last year. (The same, April 22, 1940.)

[10]Wu Yi-fang and Price, Frank W., editors; New York, 1940.

Dr. Sun Yat-senDr. Sun Yat-sen

The two highest offices in the Kuomintang areTsung-li(Leader) andTsung-ts'ai(Chief). These are occupied by Sun Yat-sen as Leader and Chiang K'ai-shek as Chief. Sun Yat-sen, though he died on March 12, 1925, holds the higher office in perpetuity. So vast is his legacy to modern China that it exceeds full enumeration: founder of the effective revolutionary movement and Party, first practical republican, political organizer of the modern and overseas Chinese, first President of the Republic, and therefore officially acknowledged State Founder, a drafter of the national plan of modernization, author of the accepted ideology (San Min Chu I), initiator of the Nationalist-Communist entente and of the consequent Great Revolution, promulgator of the Outline of National Reconstruction, and posthumous patron of the National Government. Keenly and devotedly an advocate of democracy, Sun Yat-sen established by practical example the principle of charismatic leadership. He most certainly left a mantle. This is now, after years of struggle, draped about the shoulders of Chiang K'ai-shek, although Wang Ch'ing-wei retains a few threads torn from the hem.

Sun Yat-sen was a leader in the sense that the great religious and philosophical figures have been leaders. He is not to be compared to Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or Hitler, but to Confucius, Gautama Buddha, or Mohammed. Like the spiritual leaders he blended profound humility and complete assurance.He knew that he was the savior of China, and knew it long before anyone else did. He did not rely on rising to power within a party, as did Lenin, or within a state, as did Hitler. He created his own Party and his own state. Had he not succeeded, he would have been labelled a maniac; so would most of the other major figures of human history, had they failed. His success, whatever its future fortune, is already so immense that it makes his sense of leadership seem modest. And within the limits of success, he was very modest; throughout life Sun remained more open-minded, ready to consult, deferential to the opinions of others, and more willing to yield power for the sake of harmony than the majority of his compeers. This duality has troubled some of his biographers. As late as 1939 an anonymous Englishman published an attack on Sun, which, missing the history of six decades, failed to note that Sun had lived, had succeeded, and had died objectively justified in his conception of himself.

Sun's example, unconsciously at variance with his teachings, has left a strong Caesarian strain in practical Chinese politics. Without Sun Yat-sen in the background, it is altogether impossible to understand the role played by Chiang, or to resolve the contradiction between a state pledged to democracy and a leader over-loaded with power. No group in China, except the officials of Manchoukuo, disavows Sun Yat-sen: the Japanophiles, the Nationalists, and the Communists all claim to execute his will.

Sun Yat-sen was born in Kwangtung Province, near the Portuguese city of Macao. Although he was uncertain of the date, the National Government has found it to be November 12, 1866. Both his provincial and class background had effect on his later life. The Cantonese are among the most turbulent of Chinese,living at the southern edge of China and speaking a dialect far different from the majority of the country. Active, rebellious, enterprising, the Cantonese were disposed to change. Sun's use of their tongue and knowledge of their customs gave him an audience which both suffered and profited by its distinctness. Sun's family was certainly not of the gentry class, and yet not so utterly poor that it lacked all profitable connections. Otherwise his potentialities might have been thwarted by ruinous poverty, disease, or early death.

In adolescence, Sun felt the stings and urges of resentment driving him to reform and revolution. He had kin who were involved in the T'aip'ing Rebellion (1850-65), the vast peasant uprising which, under Christian collectivist leadership by the Messianic Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, swept North to the Yangtze and drowned in a sea of blood less than two years before Sun's birth. He thus had direct knowledge not merely of Chinese revolt against the alien Manchu empire, but he knew of the revolutionary technique of a religious leader. The effect of this presumptive knowledge has never been explored; it would explain a great deal in Sun's career—much of the sharp enthusiasm, the use of ecstatic slogans, the emphasis on will, his demands for faith in himself—if one could know that he followed the instance of a Chinese Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, not that of a Chinese Mazzini or Marx. The other important feature about his early life was Western education.[1]

Western training gave him a channel upward which the Confucian system had denied a hundred generations of his predecessors. Patriots, rebels, reformers—these have been sown by temperament and fortune across the centuries of Chinese social existence, but such potential heroes have been ploughed out or crippled by the language and the examinations. No man could command power—save in its transient forms: banditry, conspiracy, commerce—without mastering the Confucian canon. Once the intricate scholarship of the past gripped him, the complex, beautiful, archaic language of the mandarinate stopped up his mouth for plain utterance. He was isolated from the people. Sun escaped this by the use of the English language and the command of Western science. He was par excellence the great counter-ideologue, whose self-confidence and command of men rested upon foundations beyond the ken of his adversaries. Judge Linebarger wrote, on the basis of what Sun told him:

Like a soldier who after long study and practice has at length mastered the manual of arms so as to have complete confidence in his weapons, Sun now began to feel at last a confidence in his ability to show others the path of his new wisdom, for, while thus enjoying a steady advance under English tutelage in the ways of the foreigner, he was by no means neglecting his study of Chinese politics, even in the pressure of college work. He knew now that he would have to lead out in the Great Reform. At Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton he had college intimates, and these he sought out as often as his college course would permit.[2]

Sun lived with his elder brother in Honolulu on two occasions, and finally, after a period of discontent and rising turbulence at home, went to study medicine in Hong Kong. He was the outstanding student in the school because of his already fluent command of the English language,[3]and was graduated as one of the very first Chinese physicians to be trained in Western medicine. Through their very nature, medical studies impart to the student a sense of responsibility for others, and also incline them toward the expert's indifference to lay opinion. Throughout his life Sun never lost confidence in the powers of his own reason, or in the belief that, although difficult, it was both necessary and possible to know the form and nature of social no less than of biological processes, and to prescribe remedies for an ill civilization as well as for a sick man.

With traditional patriotism, a Cantonese background, the memory of poverty, foreign training, and contact with overseas China, Sun was already a marked man in his twenties. By 1895 he was important enough for the Imperial Chinese Legation in London to kidnap him, preparing to charter a ship to return him to China, where the torturers of the Board of Punishments waited. In acause célèbre, Sun was released; from then on he had an international reputation.

His technique of revolution was little affected by the growing proletarian parties of Europe. He adhered to traditional Chinese methods, working through theconsolidation of pre-existent secret societies, the recruitment of terrorists, the launching of insurrection after insurrection in the hope that one of them would catch the waiting tinder and blaze across China. In Japan, in America, and in Europe, he travelled, gathering funds, carrying on vigorous polemics against his fellow-exiles, the monarchist reformers. His followers were organized under a variety of names, of which Kuomintang is the last and best-known. By 1911 the revolution broke out, flared sporadically across the central and southern provinces, then lapsed into negotiations between the Republicans and the Empire. Sun Yat-sen, in America when the clash was precipitated, returned home to be elected Provisional President of the Chinese Republic, on January 1, 1912. But his revolution had begun to pass into other hands. Opportunists, no rare breed in China, leapt aboard the bandwagon, minimizing the role of the Nationalists and grasping for the materials of power: offices, guns and money, slogans. The new-born Republic was taken over by the formidable Yüan Shih-k'ai and converted into a pyramid of military dictatorships; with Yüan's death the nation fell intotuchünismand foreign meddling.

The years following were the saddest in Sun's life. He headed miscellaneous governments in Canton, lived for a while in Shanghai, and died at a fruitless unification conference in Peking. In his last years, obsessed by his clear realization of the evils which beset his country, he was even derided. He saw the vast economic maladjustments which would follow the World War, and wrote a work,The International Development of China[4]which in its grandeur anticipated the Five-Year and Four-Year Plans; his idea was to finance a spectacular modernization of China through public works by a scheme of international loans. Not only would the imports of capital goods have benefited the Westernpowers, but the development of a prosperous China would have provided the expansion necessary to support an imperialist capitalism. His argument was that international capitalism needed a market; China, one fourth of humanity, provided a market; international guarantees and supervision would make modernization possible; and modernization, while building state-socialism and the material basis of prosperity in China, would have enriched capitalism throughout the world. There is no evidence that anyone save his followers and friends took his plan seriously.

The next step, in 1922, was a turning from capitalist democracies, which had disappointed him, to a Russia which professed a new justice in the world. Sun negotiated with emissaries of the Third International, accepting Red help on the clear understanding that Communism was recognized, by him and by the Communists, as unsuited to China—a proposition which history calls into question. Only in his last stay in Canton did he escape the ten-year pattern of frustration which had been broken only by his happy second marriage, to Soong Ching-ling. (The author, then a small boy, remembers Sun in Shanghai as a man of gentle kindness and rueful gaiety; Sun was never too busy to speak to him, nor to remember little presents; and in the midst of revolution Sun found time to write a note of encouragement and good cheer.) With the new allies, Sun, a dying man, went South, founded the lineal predecessors of the Chungking government, called his comrades to him, and discovered an effective military helper—his first after Huang Hsing, dead in the years of Yüan. This military aide was Chiang K'ai-shek.

Just before his death Sun made sixteen lectures, out of a scheduled program of eighteen. He did not write them, but they were transcribed and roughly edited. In other years he had drafted monumental politicaltreatises; when the manuscripts were lost he did not reconstruct them. The lectures, improvised, filled with minor inaccuracies, incomplete arguments, and appeals to immediate opinion, rank nevertheless among works of political genius. They are sharp, stirring, pointed, hopeful, concrete. They define China's position in the world, and the goals of the Chinese revolution. They adumbrate the reinforced democracy which was to come and now fights for existence. And they prescribe an economic philosophy humane beyond the dogma of the Russo-German dialecticians and far more self-conscious than the obstinate torpor of Coolidge's capitalism. Sun's lectures are today the foundation of the Chinese state philosophy, taught in all curricula, required in all examinations. As theSan Min Chu I, they form an ideology with more legal adherents than Marxism and National Socialism and Fascism combined. For democrats, wherever they may be, this is a matter of importance, bearing directly on the confused uncanalized struggles of our time. China possesses a doctrine which indefeasibly associates her independence, her democracy, and her prosperity.

It would be a mistake to consider these lectures and Sun's lesser writings the only source of Sun Yat-sen's dogma. Since the government is in the hands of the Kuomintang, and Kuomintang seniority depends largely on closeness of association with Sun Yat-sen, Sun's personal, casual, unconsidered influence on his friends forms a vital background to state policy. Sun's American biographer wrote,

Some criticize theSan Min Chu I, because it seems to them severe and lofty. To this I reply that there are things other than what is written in theSan Min Chu I. The English and other nations have their laws, written and unwritten. So too do we, the partisans of Sun Yat-sen, have our laws, written and unwritten. And this unwritten law is to us the dearer, is closer to our hearts, and is more moving as the goal of our activity, than even the writtencommentaries. This unwritten law is for us, who, sitting at his feet, received his teaching, the highest of all laws of truth and fidelity, the law ofbona fides.[5]

The continuing power of Sun Yat-sen is shown by the prestige and power of his kin. Sun Yat-sen had two families. Early in life, before his medical studies had ended, he was married to a woman of his own class who was devoted, family-loving, characteristically Chinese, untouched by the West, and undisposed to revolution. She bore him three children; the son, Dr. Sun K'ê, was reared largely in the United States and has been an important figure in Chinese politics ever since his return to China from Columbia University. Successively Mayor of Canton, Chairman of Kwangtung Province, Minister of Communications, of Finance, and of Railways, President of the Executive and of the LegislativeYüan, he has served with distinction. A practical and moderate man, he has always advocated a moderate, constitutional application of his father's dogma, has espoused full democratic government, stood for Party abdication, and worked for national unity. One of his sisters died young and the other married a gentleman who was later Chinese Minister to Brazil. Mrs. Sun Yat-sen, Sun K'ê's mother, lived to a ripe old age in Macao. Charitable, pious, humane, she was an enthusiastic Christian convert and a terror to sluggard officials in that European outpost of vice. She took no part in politics.

Sun Yat-sen's second family was acquired when he married Miss Soong Ching-ling. After his defeat by Yüan Shih-k'ai and the frustration of the first Republic, Sun Yat-sen felt very much in need of a companion to hearten him, help his work, and share his troubles. He had been on very close terms with C. J. Soong, aChristian business man, and had asked Mr. Soong's eldest daughter, Ai-ling, to act as his secretary. When Miss Ai-ling Soong left, her sister succeeded her. Sun fell genuinely and deeply in love with the beautiful, vivacious, American-educated girl who understood his work and desired to share his troubles. In all his life, it is likely that Sun met no one more devoted to himself, more understanding of what he sought from life and from his work for China, than Ching-ling Soong. They were married on October 15, 1915, in Japan, Sun Yat-sen having provided for separation from his first wife. The younger wife has since become world-famous as Mme. Sun Yat-sen.

Ching-ling and Ai-ling Soong had a third sister,[6]May-ling, who married Chiang K'ai-shek after Ai-ling had married H. H. K'ung. (Hence Chiang K'ai-shek's closest family connection with Sun Yat-sen consists in being brother-in-law to the second wife.) The three Soong sisters thus married the two outstanding leaders and another who stood just below. The Soong brothers were less successful, although one, T. V. Soong, has been a leading fiscal reformer and financial expert.

The beauty, American education, polished cosmopolitan manners, and sense of publicity of the three sisters have made them sensational news figures. Their eldest brother's success has added distinction to this family. The inescapable consequence has been a great deal of speculation about the "Soong dynasty"; but the surprising feature of the Soongs is not their fame and power through marriage, plus ability, but their slight cohesion as a Chinese family. They have stood together only at times of highest crisis, and not always then. Mme. Sun Yat-sen has continued along the Leftisttangent which her husband followed just before he died. For years she was the only Leftist in China who did not fear death or a more painful fate. She kept her ideals; from the homes of her family she wrote scathing denunciations of the blood-soaked tyranny of her brother-in-law, her sisters, her stepson, and her brother. Mme. K'ung appears to have worked most steadfastly in the interest of the entire family, although rivalry between her brother and her husband has been a matter of general report. Mme. Chiang K'ai-shek, the youngest of the three sisters, has been a loyal wife first of all, and has contributed enormously to the Generalissimo's international prestige. No other modern leader possesses an able publicity adviser, capable and apt, so near to himself. The family relationships of Sun Yat-sen thus display themselves in his son, constitutional and moderate, who is inclined to favor Mme. Sun, with Sun's sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law following their respective political courses with their own families—all on cordial political terms, but scarcely a monolithic family bloc.

In addition to his doctrine, his Party, his followers, and his family, Sun Yat-sen has bequeathed his name. As Chung Shan, he fills the void in Chinese polity left by the Emperor. Every Monday morning his will is read, throughout every government office in the land. His picture is seen everywhere. His sayings and slogans have become the shibboleths of revolution, union, and reconstruction. The reverence paid to him is a form of secular worship, focussed upon a magnificent mausoleum near the cenotaphs of the Ming Emperors on Purple Mountain, Nanking. All virtues and most knowledge are attributed to him; inescapably, some hard-headed people react against the cult. Dead, he is to the Chinese what the King is to the British, or the assembled forefathers to the Americans, or—save partial eclipse by Stalin—Lenin is to the Soviet Union. Perpetualleader of the Kuomintang, Sun has in death more power than life vouchsafed him. In a world wild with alarm and hungry for leadership, his sense of providential mission and of terrible political urgency no longer seems shrill or vain. His is the greatest of posthumous satisfactions: vindication by history.

Out of the broad body of doctrine embodied in the public and private utterances of Sun Yat-sen, one single integrating philosophy stands forth, which entitles him to rank as a major political thinker. This is theSan Min Chu I, which may be translated "three principles of the people," "three principles of government for the benefit of the people," "three principles concerning people" and so forth, or may—most accurately—be represented by the neologism, "tridemism."[7]It consists of an affirmation of a body of theory and a scheme of programs to be applied generally to human experience, and particularly to the modern problems of China.

The prime problem faced by Sun Yat-sen was displacement of the Confucian ideology, long refreshed and perpetuated by the mandarinate. (The scholastic bureaucracy rested on the difficulty and character of the language, which removed writing from speaking and, lacking what Westerners commonly consider grammar, depended upon exact, appropriate choice of terms.) Confucius, anticipating semantic controversialists by many centuries, established a doctrine of meaning which made politics the by-product of correct speech and thought, to be performed by conspicuous, informed, and majestic persons. When ideas and ideals were clear,moral standards firm and visible, and demeanor correct—as determined by archaic natural standards—the realm would prosper. Education was stressed as a means to public service. In succeeding centuries Confucians first monopolized education, establishing the Confucian classics as formal Chinese canons, and then monopolized the bureaucracy. Providing for elementary circulation of an academic elite, although economically based on land-ownership, they gave China a modified sort of representative government, which operated by the all-encompassing constitutionalism of common sense itself, and rested ultimately on the lack of an alternative to common sense. The Confucians were intellectually indifferent to natural science and economically unfriendly to technological change; China, unsurpassed for political sophistication and deliberate social order, was immobilized by an ancient success. Ideological control led to veneration of the scholar, even veneration of writing. Emperors, officials, people—all were captive to accomplishment, and so completely indoctrinated that they presumably enjoyed a very high conscious freedom. Rigid social and mental uniformity spelled political laxity; the state became atrophied and vestigial.

Social rigidity made China only very slowly progressive in mechanical terms. Political laxity made the country weak in the face of invasion, exploitation, and possible partition. Intellectual traditionalism shut off stimuli available from the outside. Confucius had said, "If terms be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."[8]Sun Yat-sen, Confucian in spirit though not in form, turned to the dynamics of ideological rather than legal control. To stir the immenselethargy of China, he substituted science for archaism; a Party elite for the scholastic system, propaganda to replace doctrinal education, and agitation to supersede incantation and reverence.

He struck at ideas first: "We cannot say in general that ideas, as ideas, are either good or bad. We must judge whether, when put into practice, they prove useful or not. If they are of practical use to us, they are good; if they are impractical, they are bad. If they are useful to the world, they are good; if they are not useful to the world, they are not good."[9]This pragmatic utilitarianism was to be the philosophical foundation of his revolution. TheSan Min Chu Itherewith remained alien to Marxism, which is dependent upon the occult mysteries of a topsy-turvy Hegelianism; Sun's thought is kin to the working philosophy of America, a pragmatism tinctured by idealist vestiges.

The first political principle he developed wasNationalism(min ts'u). The theoretical basis for this was a racialism which, scientifically no more tenable than National Socialist Aryanism, is clear in common practice. Very few Chinese have trouble in identifying another Chinese. Sun Yat-sen pointed out that although the European peoples were divided, China was to him both a race and a nation. He thereby established for his followers a foundation for nationality more credible than any mere appeal to state allegiance. Treason against one's government is taken lightly in China: witness the Japanophiles. Treason to the Chinese race is a far more serious matter. In order to preserve the Chinese race-nation, Sun Yat-sen called for ideological reconstruction from three elements: ancient Chinese morality, traditional Chinese social knowledge (e.g., bureaucratic techniques; arbitration instead of adjudication), and Western physical science. He urged a return to cosmopolitanism through nationalism. Bybecoming strong—instead of extinct under alien colonial rule—the Chinese state could lead the world back to the old pacific cosmopolitanism of Eastern Asia.

Programmatically, Sun subsumed under hismin t'sutheory, the necessity of a patriotic elite, formed into the party of his followers, which was to unify China and to cultivate a genuine state-allegiance instead of the veneration of a concretely paramount Emperor or other leader. He also advocated that China maintain independence, make independence a reality in which the entire race-nation should share by fostering actual autonomy (hence, democracy), and by fighting defensively against economic exploitation by the imperialist powers.

The second principle presented wasDemocracy(min ch'üan). He pointed out that old China was democratic in allowing considerable social mobility, and much equality within the framework of that mobility, and that popular government was a reality in local affairs, while popular supremacy (corresponding to Western theories of popular sovereignty) followed from the universally admitted Chinese right of rebellion. He justified democracy on the grounds that it was commanded by China's antique sages, was necessarily consequent upon nationalism, was decreed by theZeitgeist, was necessary to good administration, and was a modernizing force. But he modified his democracy by a distinction betweench'üan(power) andnêng(ability), keeping government and people perpetually dual, and making the problem of democratic personnel one of popular choice plus the control of popular choice. The programs of democracy involved the revolution of three stages, the five-yüangovernment, and emphasis on thehsien.[10]

The third principle is based on Sun Yat-sen's own philosophy of history.Min shêng, frequentlytranslated "the principle of the people's livelihood," rested upon Sun Yat-sen's belief that history is not based exclusively on materialism and that it cannot be analyzed merely in terms of the ownership of the means of production. He insisted that history was based on the fundamental fact that man hasjên—humane self-awareness; human fellow-sympathy; consciousness of being located in society, together with orientation by values social, not individually or materially established; benevolence.Min shêngis accordingly an ethical doctrine first, and an economic one afterward. It is the basis of history (min-shêng wei li-shih-ti chung-hsin). It presupposes, for China: (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. Although showing the influence of Karl Marx, Henry George, and the modern American, Maurice William,[11]the doctrine remained Chinese in spirit, pragmatically collectivist in application. Under the programs ofmin shêngSun included the bold projects for which he had sought all his life, desiring the independent, socially just prosperity of his country.

These doctrines form the constitutional foundation of government action, as well as being the Party credo of the Kuomintang. Whoever proposes policy in China must first square it with theSan Min Chu I. In this the Generalissimo has combined adroitness with profound sincerity.

Despite a small shelf of biographies, Chiang K'ai-shek remains a personality above and behind the news,not in it. His former teacher and present publicity adviser, Hollington Tong, has written an authorized life, clear, detailed, and well expurgated. The celebrated Sven Hedin published a study of Chiang; virtues, but not specific personality stood forth. An able American newspaperman had recourse to his files, and some Chinese admirers sketched an incredibly soft, lovely picture: the background was clarified, but not Chiang. Two world-famous reporters, trained to epitomize a life or a nation in a double column or sharp review, failed to grasp Chiang. He eludes everyone.

Part of the trouble comes from the fact that he possesses virtues which, once lauded, are now suspected of being mythical, wheresoever they occur. Frederick the Great, George Washington, Julius Caesar in his careerist years—authentic in history, as contemporaries these leaders would strike the moderns as characters inflated or incredible. Sincerity has become consistency with one's source of income; persons who fail to fit into the accepted moral and intellectual types of Western industrialist society are labelled fakes. One is a gentleman-liberal, an intellectual-liberal, a capitalist, a picturesquenative, a war-lord sinister, obscene, cruel, and criminal—one fits such a type, and if one doesn't, one does not exist. Yet Chiang exists, and is thereby suspect to a host of commentators. Sun Yat-sen as First President was an acceptable news figure; as Saint of the Great Revolution he became vulnerable. When Chiang seems neither a general nor a reactionary, he bewilders many Westerners.

Within China, Chiang is more readily grasped. In any other age, he would be the founder of a new dynasty. The establishers of Imperial houses have, as a group, combined intense vigor with a flair for the disreputably picturesque, in turn qualified by the highly respectable associates they sought out after success. Several have been bandits; one was an unfrocked Buddhist priest.For vigor and a timely libertarianism, they compare favorably with the Claudian line. Today the Dragon Throne is irrecoverably remote; the Manchoukuoan Emperor Kang Tê lacks elementary plausibility. Chiang is far too wise, far too modern in his own motivations, to wish or dare dream of Empire. Upon him has descended grace of a new kind, the charismatic halo of Sun Yat-sen. His reputation can be carved in the most enduring of materials: indefeasible history. With a son who is a Bolshevik, a little Eurasian grandchild, and an adopted son of no high merit, Chiang does not face the problem of power-bequeathal. He has power now; it matters little where power goes after his death; the value to him lies in immediate use.

Assuming even an abnormal egocentrism, Chiang—at the apex of state—is above ambition; he has no welfare but that of the state. In fact, Chiang is a man of almost naively insistent morality. Even Westerners act on the stage of today with posterity as an audience; Chinese, state-building, moral, Chiang moves under the glare of his perpetual reputation. As in the case of Sun, his sense of leadership would be maniacal if not grounded on fact; but what assumption would not? A peanut-vendor who thinks he is the King of Egypt is crazy; Farouk is not therefore crazy because King of Egypt. If Chiang were not the leader of China, he would be mad; but he, and he alone, is leader. His humility begins with the assumption of his power.

Twenty-one years the junior of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang was born in 1888 in Chekiang province.[12]His familywas of a class intermediate between the truly eminent landlord-official or merchant families, and the farmers. They had been farmers, but also minor gentry, and had been connected with the salt-revenue system. His grandfather attained considerable renown as a scholar, but Chiang's own father died when Chiang was eight years of age. The child had few special advantages. His family background is one which is of common occurrence among political leaders; his widowed mother, mastering and managing for the family, inculcated a sharp morality, an unrelenting frugality, and a persistent drive of industriousness in her children. To such a person, who rises from poverty and hardship by his own efforts, the failure of others to do likewise becomes a personal problem. By his own case he has proved that opportunities are there. He is impatient with the poor, the stupid, or the shiftless; instead of re-arranging society to give them a chance, he expects them to improve themselves to meet existing realities. Chiang has not explicitly stated all these points; many of them are qualified by the fact that thestatus quoin modern China is thestatus quoof perpetual revolution.

Leftist commentators, dubbing Chiang a combined product of landlordism, compradore class, and criminal gangs, explain him through a mystagogic economic determinism. Actually, Western impress on Chiang is of a more special nature: Western religion, and Western warfare. The ideals which animate him, and determine—so far as these are visible—his own sense of values, are concepts and attitudes extraneous to the Chinese scene. Deduct the threaded recurrency of religion, and the sense of technique from military training, andChiang could be paired with many other modern Chinese leaders—soldiers of turmoil, administrators of thead interim, complacent leaders of hypothetical groups. He and Sun stand out because each had a Western technique so thoroughly mastered that it gave him a clear competence over other men: Sun, the physician; Chiang, the strategist. Each also had a Western moral drive which turned hungrily to the past and justified itself in Chinese antiquity: Sun, the all-around Christian, who professed and denied the churches alternately throughout life, and Chiang, the Bible-quoting Methodist, both cite the Confucian canons; both esteem the Chinese ethics; both discern the forcefulness of Western spirituality.

Leadership, plus technical power, plus alien moral reinforcement, spells preeminence. The Confucians have gone; the serene mandarins are dead. Methodist soldiers, Baptist bankers—such Chinese control China. Marxism, which by combining jargon and act of faith, is both religion and erudition, unites these ideocratic forces; Wang Ming can feel that he is a scientist analyzing society with peculiar objectivity, and he can feel morally gratified at the same time. Chiang and the Nationalist leaders keep such sustenance dual.

The special religious background came to him through his mother. Women have traditionally turned to Buddhism for piety in China, and Mrs. Chiang was one of the exceptional characters who combined intense hard work with great piety. The children grew with the infinite looming over them; every misstep meant thousands upon thousands of years of hopeless, damnable rebirth. Buddhism can match the Christian, "It is a fearefull thing to fall into the hands of the living God ...,"[13]with the even more fearful doom of life in a world which does not want to live. Buddhism,socially, goes about in circles; the Mahayana sect provides a qualified kind of salvation, but not the salvation which a determined man can wring bloody-handed out of circumstance itself. The discipline, the austerity, were ready; Christianity, when it came to him, fell on plowed and waiting ground. The other instinct of ascendancy was cultivated by his education: professionalism. His life falls into three stages after childhood: education; wasted years; and the mastery and use of power.

Chiang went to the Imperial Military Academy at Paotingfu. Aloof and ambitious, he was so successful that within a year he was sent to the Shinbo Gokyo (Preparatory Military Academy) in Tokyo; he remained in Japan four years. The Japanese under whom he studied retained no special impression of him, except that he eagerly accepted discipline. As a part of his study, he served with the 13th Field Artillery (Takada) Regiment of the Imperial Army. Chiang therewith acquired not merely military knowledge, but a working insight into Japanese language, mentality, and strength.

His military studies were terminated by the outbreak of the Republican Revolution in 1911. Chiang returned to Shanghai, and began a vigorous military career under the local military commander, pro-Sun in politics. Chiang himself had come into contact with the Republican-Nationalist group while in Japan. There was already no question of where his loyalties lay. He made rapid progress, and saw something of fighting. He took part in the abortive Second Revolution, of 1913, which was the military attempt by Sun Yat-sen and his first military coadjutant, Huang Hsing, to check Yüan Shih-k'ai and to save the newborn Republic by force. In this time, while the enthusiasm of his military studies had not yet worn off, Chiang wrote prodigiously. No Westerner has, so far as the presentauthor knows, taken the trouble to go through Chiang's writings in order to study him. Chinese commentators praise them as full of military acumen, a sense of the novel and important forces in Chinese society, and a vigorous moralism—modern-military in form, but archaic in language—which animated Chiang's youthful desire to improve the world with good, technically apt gunfire. He was at this time twenty-three or twenty-four.

Between this early career and the later years of Chiang's life—the years in which his star rode incessantly ascendant—there is a gap of several years, 1913 to 1918. In this time Chiang lived a life primarily civilian, although he remained under the patronage of his first military leader, General Chen Ch'i-mei, murdered in 1915. Chiang went on a military intelligence trip for the Sun Yat-sen group, travelling through Manchuria in 1915. He opposed Yüan's moves, and stayed in close contact with the patriotic organization. Yet, the total picture of his life in these years lacks the connecting linkage which binds his childhood, his school days, and his mature career. His activity, while considerable, was diffuse.

He went down to Canton in 1918, and fought under the command of Sun Yat-sen, with the inferior troops and hopeless expeditions which the Leader, politically adept but strategically inexpert, kept throwing against the confusion of thetuchünwars, with the result that the war-lords, counting him as another element in their balance of power, did not even set up a united front against him. Chiang, a Central Chinese, was unsympathetic to the intense provincialism of the Cantonese, and was hopelessly tactless in criticizing old-type soldiers upon whom Sun then relied. Disillusioned but still loyal, he went back to Shanghai and wrote letters of advice to his friends in the South, including Dr. Sun. Throughout this time he was simply one more amongthe dozens of bright young military men who were, in the existing crudity of warfare, unneeded in China. (Chu Tê, Chiang's present colleague and rival who heads the Soviet Chinese military system, was at this time besotted in Yünnan—a petty war-lord of landlord family, trapped hopeless on his little island of power amidst ruin.)

The period in the Shanghai years was filled in with business activity. Chiang was acquainted with some of the most influential merchants of the city, among them the crippled Chang Ching-chiang, a Paris merchant whose personal wealth was an informal treasury of Sun's movement. Chiang entered brokerage, and is supposed to have made a great deal of money. He became acquainted with the modernized, Westernized young Chinese of the metropolis, and left many friends behind him among the Chinese business men and industrialists.

Speculative or unfriendly writers asseverate that Chiang joined the Green Gang, an association which combined the features of a protection racket and a benevolent society. (Such a society, common in China during periods of disturbance, is the archetype of the American-Chinese Tong [tang] in its more violent phases.) If so, membership gave Chiang the key to an underworld as well organized as François Villon's Paris, wherein beggars, thieves, pickpockets, kidnappers, labor contractors, burial societies, and legitimate associations merged under the extra-legal government of a Masonic-like hierarchy. (The author is acquainted with a Chinese League of Nations official who joined the Gang as a necessary implement of social research, and was afforded genuine courtesy in preparing a report, general but accurate as to prevailing conditions, through the assistance of his fellow-members.)

Chiang's marriage, which had been made Chinese-fashion in his late boyhood, had given him posterity—ason, now the pro-Communist, Soviet-trained Major-General Chiang Ching-kuo—but little companionship. His wife and son remained most of the time at his native home, whence he returned to see them and his mother, at Fenghua in Chekiang. Social contacts, acquaintance with capitalism, looseness of family connections, spasmodic work for the Revolution, and some military work—this, combined with the making and the losing of a fortune, fill the early maturity of Chiang.

He appeared upon the national and the world scene by his selection in 1923 to go to Moscow under the terms of the Nationalist-Soviet understanding, there to receive military training. He had definitely cast in his lot with Sun Yat-sen, making soldiery his vocation, and the selection implied that Sun began to see in him a military aide, to replace Huang Hsing of the first revolution. Chiang spent four months in the Soviet Union. The Communists, whom he was to fight six years later, showed him their combination of political and military warfare applied in Trotsky's Red Army. Chiang, already the beneficiary of Japanese training, had found Japanese military science dependent upon the framework of a stable constitutional system. In China his earlier training had been superior to its environment and did not have the practical utility of five years' banditry. Chiang, professional by spirit, restless under the drive of conscience and ambition, now found in Moscow the intermediate steps between modern warfare and government-building. He found that an army, from being the tool of pre-existing order, could become the spearhead of an accompanying order. Returning to China via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, he met General Galens (Vassili Bluecher), later his chief Soviet military aide at Canton.

In Canton, the first military creation on Soviet models was the Whampoa (Huangpu) Academy. Decreed by Sun Yat-sen, who made Chiang chief, the Academy hadSoviet advisers, eager to instill revolutionary and civil-war techniques. Chiang began the development of a modern army, and the real accretion of his own power. Even before he commanded full armies, Chiang used his cadets to good purpose in actual combat.

From this point on, Chiang's career becomes a part of the military history of the revolution. In his earlier years of power, Chiang emerged to leadership by cooperating with various intra-Kuomintang groups. He stood with the Left and utilized the Communists, although he managed to provoke, suppress, and appease the Communists in a way which no one else managed. He led the victorious Northern Expedition in 1925-27, carrying his forces on the crest of the Great Revolution. He was little known, but seen to be ambitious, zealous, incalculable, and a political strategist of ruthless genius. He soon found himself one of the triumvirate of Sun Yat-sen's successors: Hu Han-min, the Right Kuomintang leader, editor of Sun's works; Chiang; and Wang Ch'ing-wei, the Left Kuomintang leader.

At Shanghai, in 1927, Chiang's troops turned suddenly against the Communists and Left groups, quenching the uprising which had taken the city under his flag. This coup was undertaken because Chiang felt that the Communists were outrunning their promises. The Soviet advisers, who had come to help the Nationalists, had professed their concern for China's national struggle, and for the desirability of a fight against imperialism. They had not told Sun himself that he was a mere precursor to the proletarian revolution, nor informed the Nationalists that they were being given the privilege of fighting a war to advance the historical necessity of Nationalist extinction, as the next step in China's dialectic progression. Trotsky talked openly in Moscow about overthrowing the Chinese revolutionaries, and hijacking the Chinese revolution with the Chinese Communists, while Stalin believedin appeasing the Nationalists longer before discarding them. Of this Chiang was fully aware, and he struck at the sources of Communist power, labor and peasant unions, using a ruthlessness comparable to theirs. He went further, establishing the National Government (in the five-power form) at Nanking, and leaving the Left Kuomintang uneasily in the company of the Communists at Hankow. When the Communists proceeded to debate the question of monopolizing the remnants, even the Left-Kuomintang had had enough. They suppressed the Communists, and dissolved, coming down river to Nanking and joining the new government, while Chiang stepped technically out of the picture to ease the healing of the schism. Chiang's legitimacy in the leadership of the Kuomintang and the Sun Yat-sen revolution is shown by the fact that within two years he had an overwhelming majority of the veteran Kuomintang leaders at his capital.

In the ensuing years Chiang dedicated himself to three tasks: the development of the National Government, the stabilization of his own power, and the modernization of the country, both moral and mechanical. In 1927 he had married Miss May-ling Soong, and brought himself into alliance with the influential Soong family. The success of his efforts is attested by the continued functioning of a National Government at Chungking, the resistance and unification of China, which Chiang has come to symbolize, and the stalemate of Japan. These things would have appeared in some form, even without Chiang, but they would probably not exist with their present clarity and strength. The ten years of armament, modernization, and Japan-appeasement built an area into a nation, changing one more government into an elementary national state.

The Generalissimo has changed in appearance and manner considerably in the past ten years; these changesseem to have immediate bearing on his political role. In 1931 he was unmistakably the first soldier of China—brusque, forthright, sharp-voiced, and dismayingly lacking in the devious but pleasantk'ê-ch'i(ceremonial politeness) which is carried to professional heights by Chinese officials. Even then he was a masterful and clear-willed sort of man, who upset political precedents by a directness which would have been naive were it not so obviously both self-conscious and sincere. He possessed a keen awareness of his own historical importance, and a consistent responsibility before history—which still animates him—was the result. When coupled with the regular exercise of authority, this trait may have the consequence of moderating arbitrariness and minimizing opportunism.

With Chiang's self-possession there went an impatience with opposing views, a carelessness of means in the face of ends, and a fanatical insistence on loyalty. He now seems little older in body, despite the injury to his back during the Sian episode, but the years have left a very clear impress on his moral character. To the sharp discipline and authority of the soldier he has added the characteristics of a teacher—reserved kindliness, a daily preoccupation with moral questions, an inclination to harangue his followers on the general meaning of their problems. Ten years ago it was very difficult to find out what Chiang really believed and wanted; his ambition and patriotism were both patent, but beyond them there was little detail to be filled in. He is beginning to have the relationship of, let us say, Lenin to Marx in his treatment of theSan Min Chu Iof Sun Yat-sen, and is beginning to stand forth as an interesting political theorist in his own right. He gives every indication of maturing in office, and of rising in stature in proportion to the responsibilities which are thrust upon him.

Among both official and unofficial circles in Chungking there is a widespread and apparently well-founded belief that the two critical points of China's resistance and continued national independence rest more on Chiang's life, activity, and support than on any other single man or institution. These points are, of course, the domestic armistice and the promotion of resistance and reconstruction. The enormous strains which collaboration imposes on Nationalists and Communists are borne by Chiang. The finesse necessary to keep regions, classes, and groups in line, would probably not be available if the Generalissimo were dead. It is a tribute to his associates and followers of all parties that they work with him and with each other, but at the same time it is the supreme accomplishment of Chiang to have developed so that he can personify unity.

A question which the writer put to almost everyone he met in Western China was, "What do you think of Chiang? And what do you think Chiang thinks of himself?" The answers varied in tone and detail, but showed an interesting unanimity in major stress. One of the National Salvationist leaders,[14]bitter about Chiang's high-handed repression of Left-liberal movements in pre-war years, replied "Impossible!" to the question, "From your point of view, could General Chiang become an outright dictator?" But this leader explained that Chiang differed from President George Washington in that the latter's own conception of his role was in close harmony with public expectation and governmental necessity, whereas Chiang—believing in democracy as a part of his loyalty to his leader, Dr. Sun, and to theSan Min Chu I—found himself unready to trust democratic processes in really vital issues.

The critic continued by adding that the difference between Sun and Chiang was to be found in the fact that the former, whatever his impatience, let the Plenary Session of the C.E.C. of the Kuomintang reach its decisions through discussion, whereas Chiang tried to help the committee decide by lecturing at it. He concluded thus: if there were no political group other than the Kuomintang, Chiang might become a dictator in fact while remaining a democratic leader in name. The presence of other parties and groups makes this difficult, if not impossible. For example, the Kuomintang might try to apply the new constitution in such a way as to prevent its being an additional step on the road to democracy; but the other groups, including the Communists, could thwart this move by refusing to take part in any of the constitutional ceremonies, and thereupon [in the traditional Chinese fashion] discredit the whole thing. These opinions are of special interest when one considers that they stem from a group which is still suffering from a very careful police supervision and a state of non-recognition and semi-repression.

Another interesting interpretation of Generalissimo Chiang's role is found among the Communists. One of the Chinese Communist leaders[15]had the question put to him, "On what long-range basis of practical politics can you people and the Generalissimo cooperate? After all, you must be consolidating power which can be used against him and he power which can be turned against you?" He replied that if Chiang made terms with the Japanese, or if he failed to resist, the Communists would need to have nothing to do with him, nor he with them, since he would be ruined in any case. On the other hand, if the war came to a successful end, Chiang would be the supreme hero of modern China; the Communists could not turn againsthim; and Chiang knew this well enough to know that if he defeated Japan he had won China. The commentator did not explore other obvious possibilities, such as a long stalemate in the Japanese war, or a shift in Soviet policies, but what he said indicates the present reality of the common interests between the Communists and the Generalissimo.

From these and other comments, the visitor to China soon learns that although Chiang is the Chief (Tsung-ts'ai) of the Kuomintang, his power rests as much on broad national support as it does on Party power. It is significant that although Chiang still has two groups of semi-secret protective police, one Party and the other Army, he has far less occasion to use them than he did five years ago. There is an inadequacy of due process, of course, which would strike the lay American as critically unsatisfactory, but the smoothness, evenness, and relative frankness of government is far greater than at any other time in modern China.

Democracy is obtaining some real beginnings, not because of a sudden lurch in political necessity, nor because of the charm of a theory, but because the firm ground of a common opinion is knitting the country together and affording the limits indispensable to the functioning of democratic techniques; this common opinion, the universal popularity of the war, is based on the resistance-and-reconstruction policy. The same patriotic surge which supports the war supports Chiang, as the hero and chief technician of the war.

The political changes which translated Chiang from the status of a Party leader and a new kind of militarist into a real national leader are mirrored in his writings. His published political works now run to a considerable number of volumes, representing collections of his speeches and essays.[16]It would, perhaps, be interestingto note the main trends of his political philosophy, since it serves as the firm ground of his policy. It is possible that no other leader in the world, except Stalin, has satisfied himself so thoroughly with the connection between his own epistemological and ethical presuppositions and his working conclusions in terms of action as has Chiang.

First and foremost, Chiang accepts theSan Min Chu Iof Sun Yat-sen, deviating from the letter of these doctrines by no single brush-stroke. In his spirit of interpretation, he follows in general the Rightist exegeses, as represented by the works of Hu Han-min and T'ai Ch'i-t'ao, although he has developed his own conclusions in great part from his first-hand memory of Dr. Sun, and from his own experience. (Needless to say, he is worlds apart from the interpretations given by such Leftists as the Communists, the Third Party, or Mme. Sun, or such ultra-Rightists as the Japanophiles.)

Secondly, he has found the pragmatic elements of Sun's philosophy highly palatable. Apart from his public life, he has always made a fetish of action, and has stood for getting something done. His orthodox but modified Sunyatsenism and his practicality can best be shown by excerpts from a recent essay of his which states his position.[17]One notes the stress on practicality,the Christian influence in the matter of love, and the opinions of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy:

In order to make a scientific study of any subject it is best to use the analytical, deductive and inductive methods. By applying this principle to the study of theSan Min Chu I, I have made a chart showing its system and working procedure.... In order to realize his ideas, Sun invented the most complete and the most practical political principles, theSan Min Chu I. At the present there are mainly three schools of political thought, namely, Democracy so-called, Communism, and Fascism. None of them is perfect. For instance, take Communism. It attaches enough importance to the economic side of life and resembles the Principle of Livelihood, but it ignores the ideas embodied in the Principles of Nationalism and Democracy. Furthermore, it considers the economic interests of only one class of people, and not of all. The Fascist school stresses only those ideas as embodied in the Principle of Nationalism and ignores the other two principles. Besides, it ignores the interests and welfare of other nationalities. So-called Democracy is too much involved with capitalism and can hardly solve the problems ofmin shêng. The Three Principles of Sun are different from these in that they originate from the idea thatthe world belongs to the public. His aim is to bring about the real equality of the people without any distinction of classes, religion, and occupations. After this is realized in China, it is expected that the equality of all nationalities in the whole world can be brought about by means of the spirit of mutual help and sincere cooperation.Of all the common human feelings, the sentiment of nationality is the most worthy one. The Principle of Nationalism is based on this point. Laws specifically define the popular responsibilities and privileges which underlie the Principle of Democracy. And lastly, in Livelihood, each man's reasoning power is used to advantage in working out the most rational way of distribution, whereby people will be put in an equitable position economically. Thus it can be seen that the Three Principles are very adaptable to China as well as to any other nation.As I outline above, Sun, starting with the Principle ofpeople's livelihoodand embodying the idea thatthe world belongs to the public, established theSan Min Chu I. But just having a Principle won't do; a motive power is needed to fulfill it. That power is revolution....Revolution is not an easy thing. It needs a very strong driving force to carry it out. What are the driving forces in the case of the Chinese revolution? They are wisdom, love, and courage. I wish to point out specially that the second factor is the most important. "Love" means, among other things: Save your country, even at the cost of your life!Let us define more fully the meanings of these three words. Wisdom means, how to understand Love. It also means: first, wide reading; second, care in your inquiries; third, careful thinking; fourth, the power of distinguishing right and wrong. By Love is meant loyalty, filial piety, faithfulness, and peace. Courage means the determination to do what is right. Besides, what is the most important is the need for persistence, without which nothing can be accomplished.When you have the virtues of Wisdom, Love and Courage and the persistence required, the next move is to start and work. Sun told us that it is hard to know and easy to do. If you study theSan Min Chu Icarefully and yet don't do what is required of you, it is not because you can't do it, but because you won't do it. If you just won't do it, you are not a faithful disciple of theSan Min Chu I.When you are to start the revolutionary work, you must have a Party, because in a Party all the revolutionary forces can be consolidated and all the revolutionary activities can be planned and directed....

Of all the common human feelings, the sentiment of nationality is the most worthy one. The Principle of Nationalism is based on this point. Laws specifically define the popular responsibilities and privileges which underlie the Principle of Democracy. And lastly, in Livelihood, each man's reasoning power is used to advantage in working out the most rational way of distribution, whereby people will be put in an equitable position economically. Thus it can be seen that the Three Principles are very adaptable to China as well as to any other nation.

As I outline above, Sun, starting with the Principle ofpeople's livelihoodand embodying the idea thatthe world belongs to the public, established theSan Min Chu I. But just having a Principle won't do; a motive power is needed to fulfill it. That power is revolution....

Revolution is not an easy thing. It needs a very strong driving force to carry it out. What are the driving forces in the case of the Chinese revolution? They are wisdom, love, and courage. I wish to point out specially that the second factor is the most important. "Love" means, among other things: Save your country, even at the cost of your life!

Let us define more fully the meanings of these three words. Wisdom means, how to understand Love. It also means: first, wide reading; second, care in your inquiries; third, careful thinking; fourth, the power of distinguishing right and wrong. By Love is meant loyalty, filial piety, faithfulness, and peace. Courage means the determination to do what is right. Besides, what is the most important is the need for persistence, without which nothing can be accomplished.

When you have the virtues of Wisdom, Love and Courage and the persistence required, the next move is to start and work. Sun told us that it is hard to know and easy to do. If you study theSan Min Chu Icarefully and yet don't do what is required of you, it is not because you can't do it, but because you won't do it. If you just won't do it, you are not a faithful disciple of theSan Min Chu I.

When you are to start the revolutionary work, you must have a Party, because in a Party all the revolutionary forces can be consolidated and all the revolutionary activities can be planned and directed....

The character of Chiang as a political leader which emerges from his military training, his successful marriage and even more successful jockeying for power, his maturity under the influence of that power, and his somewhat crude but austere recognition of responsibility, is quite different from the portraits drawn by the coastal diehards or by Leftists. To the former he is just another Asiatic swashbuckler who conceals murder and extortion behind orotund banality; to the latter he is a sort of Franco, supinely cooperative with Anglo-American imperialism because of hiscompradore-class mentality, who faces a last chance of dialectical salvation if he yields to the Chinese Communists in their version of democracy and promotes upper-class liquidation in war time. It is likely that he will break the limits of either attempt to define him, and will—if the war succeeds—play a distinctly Chinese part in the construction of a China which, by reason of the speed of technological progress coupled with the rising extent of governmental economics, will break through the ruinous Right-Left pattern of Western politics. Chiang probably has enough awareness of Chinese history to realize that as the founder of an enduring democratic system his prestige would exceed that obtainable by any process of dictatorship. If he becomes a dictator, he will have successors; but as first President of a real democracy, he would be eternally unique, and asde factofounder of a great power, a world figure for this century. Against his desire to let democracy grow beneath his military aegis, his conservatism of habit and his anxiety to get things done right continue to militate; but there is thirteen years' evidence to show that he has tried very hard to work within the limits of the constitutional system of the National Government, has avoided arbitrariness as much as he thought possible, and has at worst behaved like a Salazar, Atatürk, or Pilsudski.

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