Sun Yat-sen’s Theory of the State

• In Event: Comparative Political Theory: Northeast Asia

Abstract

Attracted to western revolutions, and driven by his own, unstoppable ambition, Sun Yat-sen became the prime mover of the 1911 overthrow of the Manchu Empire — China’s last dynasty — and the launch of the Chinese Republic. The date of the overthrow remains epochal in Taiwan: 10 October 1911 is considered the beginning of time on their formal calendar. But in its immediate context, the revolution threw China into an emergency of legitimacy: a unified Chinese state suddenly ceased to exist. The Chinese Republic failed almost as soon as it was founded in 1912. Political chaos ensued until 1916, throughout Yuan Shikai’s violent attempt to restore the dynasty, and continued after his death as various military warlords, eager for imperial power, vied for regional control.
In response to the emergency, Sun Yat-sen delivered sixteen lectures, titled the Three Principles of the People, developing a new theory of political authority and legitimacy that reflects on the failures of Chinese representative government in 1912. While the Three Principles are usually ignored in the West for having offered an unphilosophical and merely pragmatic justification for democratic governance, I argue that such neglect misunderstands Sun’s consistent linguistic focus on the "people’s sovereignty" (min quan) rather than "democracy" (min zhu).
Focusing on Sun’s first two series of lectures, I demonstrate his serious concern with founding a lasting, and morally justified, Chinese alternative to Western representative government that sought to overcome the corrupting force of the "right of the stronger" (qiang quan) within imperial Chinese rule. Sun’s solution, to distinguish between "sovereignty" (quan), held by the people, and "ability" (neng), possessed by a ministerial government, echoes Rousseau’s famous distinction between "sovereignty" and "government" in the Social Contract. Far beyond the scope of Rousseau’s Geneva, however, the Three Principles propose such a radical political system for a country of over four hundred million people.
Sun died in 1925, before he could see the state he envisioned to its fruition, yet the influence of his thought can be seen in the political systems of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, in different manifestations, to this day. While recent challenges to the accepted liberal-democratic world order have led to a renewed interest in historical understandings of popular sovereignty in the West, Sun, and the modern exemplar of his thought, Taiwan, have yet to enter that discussion. As the relationship between the West and China becomes increasingly fraught, a reconsideration of Sun’s impassioned attempt to combine elements of Eastern and Western political theory is much needed.

Author

• Leland Stange