Democracy is on trial in Asia and not without reason. Democratic hopes burgeoned with the World War II defeat of Japan. The United States emerged as the new Rome of 1945, strong enough to keep the peace single-handed. The American superpower was prepared to help Asians achieve not only independence but government of the people, by the people and for the people. It looked as though democracy might spring into Asian existence full blown and without the evolutionary pains through which earlier democratic states had to pass.
Communism turned out to be the big obstacle. Anti-democratic Maoists took advantage of Chinese war weariness and U.S. preoccupation with Europe to move into possession of the mainland. North Korean and then Chinese Communists attacked the emerging democratic Republic in South Korea. Wherever the seeds of liberty began to sprout, the Communists appeared with a spray can filled with defoliant.
Burma experimented with democracy only to fall into the hands of a military socialism which stifled economic as well as political freedoms. Thailand was nearly taken over by leftists. When the Communists failed in South Korea, they made their pitch to grab South Vietnam as well as the North.
Within the last half of 1972, martial law has been declared by President Marcos in the Philippines and President Park in South Korea for reasons which they adjudge to include the national self-determination of the Filipino and Korean peoples. They have not acted lightly. Both feel threatened not only by the Communists but also, by the declining interest of the United States in defending free Asia against aggression. President Marcos plans extensive reforms for the Philippines. President Park is submitting to the South Korean people a new constitution which would eliminate direct election of the chief executive and reduce the power of the legislature.
Both Presidents Marcos and Park believe the best interests of their peoples will be advanced by actions taken under temporary authoritarian rule. This may well be so, but this is not to say that the cause of democracy has been advanced thereby. President Marcos said the Philippines probably has had too much democracy. President Park complained about the obstructionism of the National Assembly and of his political opposition. A number of political scientists in both Occident and Orient have wondered whether democracy is suited to the nations and peoples of the Far East.
Whatever may be happening to democracy elsewhere in Asia, the democratic concepts laid down by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the Founding Father of the Republic of China, early in the 20th century are as strong as ever. This can be seen in the observance of Dr. Sun's 106th birthday on November 12 and will be evident again in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December and early next year. Many obstacles had to be overcome in order to provide fresh blood for the National Assembly, the Legislative Yuan and the Control Yuan, which collectively constitute the Republic of China's parliament. The effort has been successful, however, in keeping with the Principle of Democracy laid down by Dr. Sun in his San Min Chu I (Three Principles of the People).
Dr. Sun began his guidance of China in the theory and ways of democracy by observing that the rule of the many had succeeded autocracy and theocracy in recent times. He asked whether such a political evolution served mankind and answered in this way: "When the masses were unenlightened and depended upon sacred kings and virtuous sages to lead them, autocracy was of considerable value. Before autocracies arose, holy men founded religion upon the way of the gods in order to conserve social values; at that time theocracy rendered a large service. But now autocracy and theocracy are things of the past and we have come to the age of democracy, the age of people's power. Is there any just reason why we should oppose autocracy and insist upon democracy? Yes, because with the rapid advance of civilization people are growing in intelligence and development of a new consciousness of self, just as we, who as children wanted our parents to support us, cannot depend upon them further but must be independent when we grow up to man hood and seek our own living."
Dr. Sun concluded that the intelligence and ability of China made the sovereignty of the people far more suitable than autocracy. He recalled that Confucius and Mencius had spoken for the people's rights. Confucius said, "When the Great Doctrine prevails, all under heaven will work for the common good." And Mencius said, "Most precious are the people; next come the land and grain; and last, the princes." Mencius also remarked, "Heaven sees as the people see; Heaven hears as the people hear." Mencius saw that kings were not absolutely necessary and would not last forever, Dr. Sun said. "Sa he called those who brought happiness to the people holy monarchs, but those who were cruel and unprincipled he called individualists whom all should oppose. Thus China more than two millenniums ago had already considered the idea of democracy, but at that time she could not put it into operation. Democracy was then what foreigners call a Utopia, an ideal which could not be immediately realized."
Dr. Sun recalled that he and his fellow revolutionists had decided that "if we wanted China to be strong and our revolution to be effective, we must espouse the cause of democracy. Those Chinese who opposed democracy used to ask what strength there was in our Revolutionary Party to be able to overthrow the Manchu emperor. But in 1911 he fell with one push, another victim of the world tide. This world tendency has flowed from theocracy on to autocracy and from autocracy now on to democracy, and there is no way to stem the current ... The present age of democracy is a sequence of the democratic ideas in the Greek and Roman age and, while it has been only one hundred and fifty years since the beginnings of democracy, its future will be growing brighter day by day."
The Founding Father asked who would be king when China had a real democracy. The people would be king, he answered. "This will prevent everybody from struggling for power and will reduce the war evil in China. The history of China shows that every change of dynasty has meant war. A peaceful period has always been followed by disorder, disorder over the rivalry for kingship. Foreign countries have had wars over religion and wars over freedom, but China in her thousands of years has had but one kind of war, the war for the throne. In order to avert further civil war, we, as soon as we launched our revolution, proclaimed that we wanted a republic and not kings."
Sun Yat-sen took note of the difference between "liberty" and "democracy." Europeans and Americans risked their lives for liberty, he said, because they had little of it. Autocratic rulers had usurped all freedoms. Chinese, on the other hand, had enjoyed a large measure of liberty from ancient times. He pointed out that foreigners called China "a sheet of loose sand" and went on to attribute this to excessive individual liberty. The emperors cared only for the throne and the grain tax. Once the tax was paid, the people could live and die as they wished.
"The aims of our revolution," Dr. Sun said, "are different from the aims in foreign revolutions, and the methods we use must be different. Why, indeed, is China having a revolution? To put the answer directly, the aims of our revolution are just opposite to the aims of the revolutions of Europe. Europeans rebelled and fought for liberty because they had too little liberty. But we, because we have had too much liberty without any unity and so have been invaded by' foreign imperialism and oppressed by the economic control and trade wars of the Powers, without being able to resist, must break down individual liberty and become pressed together into an unyielding body like the firm rock which is formed by the addition of cement to sand."
As a scientist, Dr. Sun rejected the revolutionary philosophy of Europe and America that liberty was bestowed on man by nature. There is no principle of natural human equality, he said. "Nature originally did not make man equal," he continued, "but when autocracy developed among mankind, the despotic kings and princes pushed human differences to an extreme, and the result was an inequality far worse than Nature's inequality. The inequality created by kings and princes was an artificial inequality... The specially privileged classes became excessively cruel and iniquitous, while the oppressed people, unable to contain themselves, finally broke into rebellion and warred upon inequality. The original aim in the revolutions had been the destruction of man-made inequalities; when that was completed, men thought their revolution would be over. But the men who occupied the high stations of emperor and king all assumed a divine appointment as a shield of their office; they said that they had received their special position from God and that the people who opposed them would be opposing God. The ignorant masses, who did not study to see whether there was any truth or not in these words, followed on blindly and fought for more privileges for their kings. They even opposed the intelligent people who talked about equality and liberty. So the scholars who were supporting revolution had to invent the theory of nature-bestowed rights of equality and liberty in order to overthrow the despotism of kings." Their original purpose was to break down artificial, man-made inequalities. But in everything, certainly, 'action is easy, understanding difficult;' the masses of Europe at that time believed that emperors and kings were divinely sent and had special 'divine rights,' and large numbers of ignorant folk sup ported them. No matter what methods or how much energy the small group of intelligent and educated people used, they could not overthrow the monarchs.
"Finally, when the belief that man is born free and equal and that the struggle for freedom and equality is the duty of everybody had permeated the masses, the emperors and kings of Europe fell automatically. But after their downfall, the people began to believe firmly in the theory of natural equality and kept on working day after day to make ail men equal. They did not know that such a thing is impossible. Only recently, in the light of science, have people begun to realize that there is no principle of natural equality."
The Revolutionary Party of China advocated a struggle not for liberty and equality, but for the Three Principles of the People, Dr. Sun said. These are Nationalism, Democracy and the People's Livelihood (Social Welfare). Without democracy, he said, liberty and equality would have been mere empty rhetoric. "In our revolution, we must not talk only about getting equality; we must hold up the people's rights. Unless democracy is fully developed, the equality which we fight for will be only temporary and will soon disappear. But although our revolution does not make equality its slogan, still we do include equality in the Sovereignty of the People. When equality is a good thing we will apply it; when it is an evil, we will do away with it. Only thus can we make democracy develop and use equality to advantage."
Learned in the science of the West, Dr. Sun did not maintain that China could slavishly imitate the Occident in espousing democracy. "For thousands of years," he said, "Chinese social sentiments, customs and habits have differed widely from those of Western society. Hence methods of social control in China are different from those used in the West, and we should not merely copy the West as we copy the use of their machinery ... In ways of controlling physical objects and forces we should learn from the West, but in ways of controlling men, we should not learn only from the West... The West has its society; we have our society, and the sentiments and customs of the two are not the same. Only as we adapt ourselves, according to our own social conditions, to modern world tendencies, can we hope to reform our society and to advance our nation. If we pay no attention to our own social conditions and try simply to follow world tendencies, our nation will decline and our people will be in peril. If we want China to progress and our race to be safe, we must put democracy into effect ourselves and do some radical thinking upon the best way to realize its ideals."
The Founding Father pointed out that the people of modern democratic nations fear an all-powerful democratic state which they cannot check. At the same time, they desire an all-powerful government subject to the will of the people and working for the people's welfare. Chinese history shows the lasting hope of the people that they might have a government which served the people. Such service was historically exemplified in the sage-emperors. With the coming of Western democratic ideas, the Chinese people began to regard the ancient emperors as tyrants, although they ruled well. "This shows," Dr. Sun said, "that the rise of democracy has developed an attitude of opposition to government among the people; no matter how good the government is, they are not content with it. If we let this attitude of mind continue without any attempt to change it, it will be exceedingly difficult for government to make any progress."
Dr. Sun concluded that a distinction between sovereignty and ability would provide a way out of this difficulty. He classified mankind into three groups. "The first group are those who seek and perceive first; they are the people of superior wisdom who take one look at a thing and see numerous principles involved, who hear one word and immediately perform great deeds, whose insight into the future and whose many achievements make the world advance and give mankind its civilization. These men of vision and foresight are the creators, the discoverers of mankind. The second group includes those who see and perceive later: their intelligence and ability are below the standard of the first group; they cannot create or discover but can only follow and imitate, learning from what the first group have already done. The third group are those who do not see or perceive; they have a still lower grade of intelligence arid ability and do not understand even though one tries to teach them; they simply act. In the language of political movements, the first group are the discoverers; the second group, the promoters; the third group, the operators. Progress in everything depends upon action, so the responsibility for the world's progress rests upon the third group."
"The nations of the world, as they begin to apply democracy and to reform the government, should give a part to every man-to the man who sees first, to the man who sees later, to the man who does not see. We must realize that political democracy is not given to us by nature; it is created by human effort. We must create democracy and then give it to the people, not wait to give until the people fight for it."
A new way to achieve democracy requires a change in attitude toward government, Dr. Sun said. "The hostility of Western peoples towards their governments is due to their failure to separate sovereignty from ability, and consequently they have not yet cleared up the difficulties of democracy. Let us not, as we pursue democracy, copy the West; let us make a clear distinction between sovereignty and ability. Although the democratic ideas came to us from Europe and America, yet the administration of democracy has not been successfully worked out there. We know a way now to make use of democracy and we know how to change the attitude of people toward government, yet the majority of the people are without vision. We who have a prevision must lead them and guide them into the right way if we want to escape the confusions of Western democracy and not follow in the tracks of the West. Western scholars today have only gotten to the point of realizing that the attitude of the people towards government is wrong and ought to be changed, but they do not yet see how to change it. I have now discovered the way—we must distinguish between sovereignty and ability. The foundation of the government of a nation must be built upon the rights of the people, but the administration of government must be intrusted to experts. We must not look upon these experts as stately and grand presidents and ministers, but simply as our chauffeurs, as guards at the gate, as cooks, physicians, carpenters or tailors. It does not matter what sort of workmen the people consider them. As long as they have this general attitude towards them, the state can be governed and the nation can go forward."
Sun Yat-sen said Europe and the United States had not reached ultimate solutions in their study of the problems of democracy. "Consequently the people are in daily conflict with their governments. The force of democracy is new, but the machinery of democracy is old. If we want to solve the difficulties of democracy we must build another machinery, a new machinery, upon the principle that sovereignty and ability are different things. The people must have sovereignty, the machinery must have ability and power. Modern efficient and powerful machinery is operated by men who can start and stop it at will. The West has made the most complete inventions in the field of machinery but very imperfect discoveries in the field of government. If we want to make a complete change in government, we have no model to follow but must discover a new way for ourselves. "
"While we are advocating democracy for the reconstruction of our republic, let us have a thoroughgoing new democracy and a thoroughgoing new republic. If we should not wholly follow the advanced states of the West, we should think out a new and better procedure for ourselves. Are we capable of doing this? For thousands of years, China has been an independent country. In our former political development, we never borrowed materials from other countries. China had one of the earliest civilizations in the world and never needed to copy wholly from others. Only in recent times has Western culture advanced beyond ours, and the passion for this new civilization has stimulated our revolution. Now that the revolution is a reality, we naturally desire to see China excel the West and build up the newest and most progressive state in the world. We certainly possess the qualifications necessary to reach this ideal, but we must not merely imitate the democratic systems of the West. These systems have become old-style machinery."
The new machinery, Dr. Sun concluded, would have to separate the organization of the state from the administration of democracy. This would require division of the machinery of government. How to distinguish the principle of sovereignty from ability and power? The Founding Father said that the meaning of government would have to be consulted. "Government or politics is a concern of all the people," he said, "and its centralizing force is political sovereignty. Political sovereignty, then, means popular sovereignty, and the government which centralizes the forces controlling the life of the people is called government power or government authority."
Dr. Sun reasoned that there were two forces in politics: the political power of the people and the administrative power of the government. Control had to be separated from the functioning of government itself. The West, he said, had built steamships with high-powered machinery but not states with high-powered, strong governments. This was because they feared they could not control high-powered government as they could high-powered machinery. To build a high-powered government in place of an old weak one was extremely difficult, Dr. Sun said. He compared China with the United States, and said that in terms of natural resources, China was the superior but that the two countries could not be mentioned in the same breath. "The reason is that the Chinese have the necessary qualifications but want human effort," he said. "We have never had a real good government. But if we add human effort to our natural qualifications, build up a complete, strong government which will display great power and move the whole nation, then China can immediately begin to advance in line with the United States."
Sun Yat-sen said China need not be afraid that government would become too strong and get out of control. This was because political power would be given into the hands of the people, who would have a full degree of sovereignty and direct control over the affairs of state. Political power would be identical with popular sovereignty. The other power of government would be placed entirely in the hands of government organs which would be strong enough to manage the nation's business. "We must have a complete and powerful government organ, and at the same time have a compact method of popular sovereignty to exercise control over the government organ," he said. "Western governments lack this compact and effective control, so they are not yet making much progress. Let us not follow in their tracks. Let the people in thinking about government distinguish between sovereignty and power. Let the great political force of the state be divided; first let there be the power of the government and then the power of the people. Such a division will make the government the machinery and the people the engineer. The attitude of the people towards their government will then be like the attitude of the engineer towards his machinery."
How to apply democracy? Dr. Sun pointed to the suffrage, the only universal method, and concluded that this was not enough. He added the power of recall, with which the people could pull back the machinery of government. To provide popular control over law, he recommended the initiative to supply new statutes and the referendum to get rid of old ones which had become encumbrances. These four powers would enable the people to control government.
For the operation of government, Dr. Sun recommended the exercise of five powers rather than the traditional three. The five he identified as executive, legislative, judicial, civil service examination and censoring or control. "With these nine powers in operation and preserving a balance, the problem of democracy will truly be solved and the government will have a definite course to follow," he said.
Dr. Sun pointed out that the two added powers of government came from old China. "China long ago had the independent systems of civil service examinations and censorship and they were very effective," he said. "The imperial censors or historiographers of the Manchu dynasty and the official advisers of the T'ang dynasty made a fine censoring system. The power of censorship includes the power to impeach, which other governments have but which is placed in the legislative body and is not a separate governmental power. The selection of real talent and ability through examinations has been characteristic of China for thousands of years ... In Chinese political history, the three governmental powers—judicial, legislative and executive—were vested in the emperor. The other powers of civil service examination and censorship were separate from the throne."
Dr. Sun observed that each of the four popular powers and the five governmental powers had its own focus and function, requiring that they be separated and not confused. "From the standpoint of function," he said, "the governmental powers are mechanical powers. In order to make this large machinery, which can develop tremendous horsepower, function most effectively, we must make it work in five directions. The popular powers of the people, we may say, are four controls which the people manipulate in order to make the machinery move and stop. The government works for the people and its five powers are five forms of work or five directions of work. The people control the government and their four powers are four methods of control. Only as the government is given such power and the opportunity to work in these different directions can it manifest great dignity and authority and become an all-powerful government. Only as the people are given great power and the various checks upon the government will they not be afraid of the government becoming all-powerful and uncontrollable. The people can then at any time command the government to move or to stop. The prestige of the government will grow and the power of the people will increase. With such an administrative power on the part of the government and such political power on the part of the people, we will be able to realize the ideal of the American scholar—an all-powerful government seeking the welfare of the people-and to blaze the way for the building of a new world."
The Republic of China has yet to live up the goals Sun Yat-sen set for it, yet to perfect the democracy for which he laid down the guidelines. These objectives have not been abandoned, however. People and government have not lost confidence in the ideals of the Founding Father. Whatever the future of democracy in Asia, it will always have one strong citadel while the free Chinese people remain faithful to the Three Principles of the People and Dr. Sun Yat-sen's belief that government must be the servant of those it governs.