I

In these days when China is being regarded as a partner and ally fighting on the side of the democracies, it is natural that political scientists and students of comparative government should ask some such questions: Is China a democracy? Has Chinese republicanism or Chinese democracy any historical basis?

There have been different answers to such questions. Some say that there is not an iota of democracy in China. Others want us to believe that the only hope for Chinese democracy is found in the Communist-controlled districts of Northern Shensi, and that a Communist triumph will make China democratic.

. . . My paper purports to describe a few historical factors which have made China inevitably the first country in Asia to abolish the monarchy once and for all and seriously to work out a democratic form of government; and which, in my opinion, furnish the solid foundation on which a democratic China can be successfully built up. These historical factors have been at work for tens of centuries and have given to the Chinese people the tradition and the preparation for the development of modern democratic institutions.

Of these historical foundations I shall mention only three: first, a thoroughly democratized social structure; secondly, 2,000 years of an objective Page 81 →and competitive system of examinations for civil service; and thirdly, the historic institution of the government creating its own “opposition” and censorial control.

You will notice I have singled out only the institutional foundations and have not included the theoretical or philosophical basis for a democratic China. I believe that the best way of showing the influence of a philosophical tradition is through the historic institutions which are both the product and the embodiment of those intellectual forces.

But before taking up these historical institutions, I would like to say a word about a few powerful philosophical ideas which have had a great influence in molding the social and political development of the Chinese people. The first of these is the Confucianist conception of human nature as essentially good. In a rhymed primer which was written in the Sung Dynasty, and was still used in all village schools during my childhood, the opening lines read:

These ideas which go back to Confucius, and particularly to Mencius, have been the basis of Chinese education and have inculcated into the people the sense of human equality. Confucius laid down the philosophy in four words: “Yu chiao wu lei” (With education there is no class). This conception of the essential goodness of human nature and of the infinite possibility of education is the most important philosophical idea which has produced an almost classless society in China. Centuries before China came into contact with the democratic ideas of Western countries, Chinese children in all village schools were humming such popular rhymes as the following:

That is a popular paraphrase of the Confucian doctrine that with education there is no class.

Page 82 →The second important democratic doctrine is the scriptural justification of rebellion against tyrannical government. The story is told of Confucius who passed by the foot of Mount Taishan and heard a woman crying plaintively. He asked her what was the cause of her deep sorrow. She said, “My father was carried away by a tiger; recently my husband was killed by a tiger and now my son was devoured by a tiger.” “Why don’t you run away from this place infested by such ferocious tigers?” And the woman said, “There is no tyrannical government here.” Confucius thereupon turned to his disciples and said, “Remember this! Tyrannical government is more oppressive than ferocious tigers!”

Mencius in particular was the most out-spoken advocate of the right of rebellion against tyrannical government. He said, “When a ruler treats his subject like grass and dirt, then the subject should treat him as a bandit and an enemy.” And he characterized some of the historical rebellions, not as revolts of subjects against rulers, but as justified revolutions against despots whose misrule had alienated them from the people. This doctrine of justifiable rebellion against tyranny and misrule was easily and naturally revived with the coming of revolutionary and democratic ideas from the Western world.

The third important political doctrine is that the subordinate has a sacred duty to criticize and oppose the wrong-doing of his superior. A little classic, the Book of Filial Piety, has this saying of Confucius: “If an Emperor has seven out-spoken ministers [chêng ch’ên: literally, “ministers who fight or oppose him”], he could not lose his empire in spite of his misdeeds. If a feudal lord has five out-spoken ministers, he could not lose his state in spite of his misdeeds. If a minister has three out-spoken servants, he could not lose his family fortune in spite of his misdeeds. . . . Therefore, in the face of a wrong or unrighteousness it is the duty of the son to oppose his father and it is the duty of the servant to oppose his sovereign.”

This idea of encouraging out-spoken advice and even opposition from one’s subordinates has been a most important political tradition which has made possible the development, not only of the institution of the government’s own censors, but also of the hundreds of great personalities who made history by fighting fearlessly against the misdeeds of despotic rulers and powerful ministers.

It is from these basic seeds of Chinese political thinking that there have been developed social and political institutions which have played, and will continue to play, an important role in shaping the political development of my people.

Page 83 →II

China was unified for the first time in 221 B.C. The First Empire, founded on military conquest of the contending states, did not last more than a dozen years, and was overthrown by a revolution of the people. The Second Empire, the Empire of Han, lasted 400 years (202 B.C.–219 A.D.).

Even before the first unification under the First Empire, the numerous small states which flourished at the time of Confucius were gradually being absorbed and consolidated into seven great powers. The old feudal society was rapidly disappearing in an age of conquest, migration of races, and political concentration. Practically all the seven states of the fourth and third centuries B.C. had highly centralized government and administration. That tendency of centralized political control was made uniform under the First Empire, which divided the whole country into 36 administrative districts or provinces governed by officials appointed by the central government.

During the 400 years of the Han Empire, this tendency of political consolidation was continued and perfected. In their first reaction against the despotic consolidation of power under the First Empire, the founders of the Han Dynasty created new feudal states and gave them to the princes of the blood of the new royal family. But the statesmen of the second century B.C. soon realized the mistake of this political anachronism which had led to armed revolts by some of these powerful princes against the central government. In order to avoid an abrupt departure of policy, the political wisdom of these statesmen devised a peaceful method for abolishing the new feudalism. This new procedure consisted of abolishing the law of primogeniture and of dividing the hereditary fief equally among the sons of a deceased or banished prince. After a few generations of equal division of feudal estates among the male heirs, all the newly created principalities were reduced to political nonentity and were peacefully subject to the civil administration of the governors and prefects appointed by the central imperial government. Feudalism has never been revived during the last twenty-one centuries.

This tradition of equal division of hereditary property among the sons of a family was adopted by all classes of people and has worked for the equalization of wealth and landed property. Primogeniture seemed to have been swept overboard with the disappearance of ancient feudal society, and this new procedure came to be recognized as just and equitable. Because of this, no great estate could stand three generations of successive equal division among the sons. The result has been the total absence of large holdings of Page 84 →land by wealthy and powerful families for any great length of time. This economic equalization has tended greatly to bring about a social structure in which there are practically no class divisions and not even any enduring differences between the rich and the poor.

The founders of the Han Empire came from the lowly strata of society, including butchers, sellers of dog meat, undertakers, peddlers, and farmers. Many of their women were of poor and lowly origin. This was the first and probably the greatest dynasty and empire founded by the people. That fact alone was an important asset in the democratic tradition of China. The 400 years of political and social development under the Han Empire practically shaped and conditioned the main lines of historical evolution of Chinese national life and institutions throughout the later ages.

In addition to the institution of equal division of hereditary estates, the Han statesmen were responsible for initiating as early as the second century B.C. the system of selecting men for public office from among those persons either recommended by public opinion of the localities for their special achievements, or chosen through a competitive examination on their knowledge of the classical literature of ancient China. Throughout the Empire men of poverty and lowly origin often arose to highest positions of honor and power. One of the greatest generals, who fought the Huns and drove them far beyond the Great Wall and the desert, arose from slavery. And hundreds of cabinet ministers came from families of destitution.

The earlier statesmen of the Empire consciously practiced the policy of laissez-faire and strict economy in order to allow the people to recuperate from the devastations of the terrible wars of the third century and to grow accustomed to the peace and order of a unified Empire. It was a conscious effort to put into practice the political philosophy of wu-wei (non-activity) taught by the school of philosophic Taoism. Under this laissez-faire policy commerce and industry flourished and the Empire prospered. There grew up a class of wealthy merchants and “capitalists” who lived in comfort and luxury.

The new political leaders after 140 B.C. were largely Confucianist scholars who were trained on books that exalted a static and essentially agricultural society and who viewed with suspicion and disapproval the rising commercial class, whom they considered as social parasites that toiled not nor spun but lived on the sweat and blood of the toilers. There were several serious attempts to limit the amount of land owned by any single individual and to undertake governmental action for the amelioration of the conditions of Page 85 →the poor. These reform movements culminated in the socialistic policies of Wang Mang, who, in the first years of the Christian era, acquired political power and proclaimed himself Emperor of the New Dynasty, which lasted 16 years (8–23 A.D.). Wang Mang nationalized all land, emancipated all slaves, and instituted government regulations and monopolies of salt, wine, coinage, credit, mining and natural resources. He was the first “New Dealer.”

Wang Mang’s many socialistic reforms were swept away and he was killed in the revolution which overthrew his dynasty and restored the Han regime. But anti-mercantile, agrarian, and equalitarian thought had become a part of orthodox social and political thinking of Chinese intelligentsia and accounts for the low position which the merchant occupies in the social scale. The conventional ranking of the professions (not classes) into the scholar, the farmer, the artisan, and the merchant is a product of this anti-mercantile tradition.

All these factors—the abolishing of primogeniture, the custom of equal division of inherited property among the sons, the recognition of the justice of people arising to power from lowliness, the selection of men for office-holding by means of competitive examination, the conscious curbing of the men of wealth—all these factors continued to influence the social structure of China, making it more and more democratic. There was no aristocracy as a class except that of learning, and learning was always accessible to all who had the intelligence and the will to acquire it. The social structure was so thoroughly democratized and the process of leveling had gone so far that when the Manchu Dynasty was overthrown in the Revolution of 1911–1912, no one could think of a Chinese family sufficiently prominent to be qualified as a possible candidate for the throne left vacant by the downfall of an alien dynasty. Some thought of the family of Confucius; but it happened that at the time the direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and the inheritor of the ducal title reserved to the Kung family, was a little child hardly one year old. So he was passed over, and even the so-called “constitutional monarchists” had to agree with the republican revolutionaries that the monarchy must be abolished and that a republic was the only thing feasible.

III

All important schools of Chinese thought of the classical period agreed that government should be in the hands of the wisest and best-informed people. They were unconsciously undermining the feudal society by this advocacy Page 86 →of government by those best qualified to govern. With the passing away of feudalism, and especially with the establishment of a unified empire founded and governed by people who arose from the masses, there was felt a great need for securing men of knowledge and wisdom for the ordering of the state.

The founder of the Han Dynasty, who was an unlettered political genius, once rebuked a scholar in these words: “I conquered the Empire on horseback; what use have I for your classical books?” The scholar retorted: “Sire, it is true you have conquered the Empire on horseback; but can you govern it on horseback?” The early years of the Second Empire witnessed the gradual rise of the scholarly class who tamed the conquerors on horseback and helped them to write the laws and institutes, to work out the details of administration, to remedy the grotesque mistakes of the uncouth rulers, and to pacify and stabilize the Empire.

The task of empire-building was truly tremendous. The Han Empire in its great days was almost as large as the China of today. Without modern means of transportation and communication, the work of administering such a vast empire from a central government at Chang-an, maintaining unity and peace for 400 years, and thereby setting up a permanent framework of a unified national life for 2,000 years, was the greatest achievement of the political genius of the Chinese people.

The civil service system originated in the realization of the need for men who knew the language of the classical literature of ancient China. The Empire was composed of vast areas which spoke different dialects, and the only common medium of empire communication was the classical language, which had been at one time a living dialect of fairly wide currency in eastern and northern China, but had become dead by the time of the Second Empire. The first step was to establish a government university with separate faculties or “doctoral colleges,” each specializing in one of the ancient classics. But the revival of learning through university education took time and the Empire needed men for government offices. About the year 120 B.C., the Prime Minister, Kung-Sun Hung, in a memorial to the throne, said that the edicts and the laws which were written in elegant classical style were often not understood even by the petty officers whose duty it was to explain and interpret them to the people. Therefore, he recommended that examinations be held for the selection of men who could read and understand the classical language and literature and that those who had shown the best knowledge should have the first preference in appointments to offices requiringPage 87 → the use of the written language. His recommendation was adopted and marked the beginning of the civil service examination system.

Throughout the 400 years of the Han Empire, however, there was not worked out any systematized procedure for the selection of men for public offices. Broadly speaking, there were three methods in use. In the first place, there were the examinations, which had not yet commanded much respect and were apparently limited to clerical and secretarial offices. Secondly, there was the university, which in the second century A.D. was said to have 30,000 students and was becoming a political power much feared by the politicians. The university education naturally gave the youths a fairly reliable chance of civic advancement. Thirdly, from time to time the government would ask the provincial authorities to recommend men of various kinds of attainment. Men were recommended for their “filial piety and purity of character” (hsiao lien), for “marked talent” (mou ts’ai), for “specially distinguished attainments” (tso i), etc. Such recommendations were often, but not regularly, requested by the central government, and those persons thus recommended were usually given offices.

Ts’ao Ts’ao (d. 219 A.D.), one of the greatest statesmen of the age, worked out a system of classifying men into nine grades according to their ability, knowledge, experience, and character. When his son became Emperor in 220 A.D., this system of nine-grade classification was officially adopted for the selection of men for government service. Under this system, the government appointed a special official for each administrative area, who was called “Chung Cheng” (the Impartial Judge) and whose duty it was to list all possible candidates for office and all men of good family, and, on the basis of public opinion and personal knowledge, grade them into nine grades according to their deserts. These gradings, which were to be revised periodically, were to serve as the basis for appointment of these men to offices in the local, provincial, or central government.

This system, known in history as that of “Nine-grade Impartial Judgment,” naturally involved much subjective opinion, family influence, and political pressure. It was humanly impossible to find an objective standard for the nine degrees of grading. After being tried out for fully four centuries, it was finally abolished under the Sui Dynasty, which re-unified the country in 589, after a long period of division, and instituted the Government Examination for civil service in 606.

From the beginning of the seventh century to the beginning of the twentieth century, for 1,300 years, the main system of selection of men for office Page 88 →was by open and competitive examination. Roughly speaking, this system has undergone three stages of evolution. The first period, approximately from 600 to 1070, was the age of purely literary and poetic examination. There were other subjects, such as history, law, the Confucian classics and others, in which examinations were regularly held. But somehow the purely literary examinations came to be the only highly prized and universally coveted channel of entrance into public life. The best minds of the country were attracted to this class of examinations. The winners of the highest honors in these poetic and literary examinations became idolized by the whole country and especially by the women; and the successful candidates in these literary examinations usually attained the heights of governmental power more rapidly than those who took the other more prosaic examinations. In the eyes of the nation only these literary and poetic examinations commanded the interest and the admiration of the people, and the other examinations seemed not to count at all.

The reasons for this peculiar pre-eminence of the literary and poetic examinations are not far to seek. While the other examinations required book knowledge and memory work, this class of ching shih (advanced scholars) was expected to offer creative poetic composition. The difficult themes assigned and the strict rules prescribed only made the successful winners shine more glamorously. And it is not true that poets are always born and not made. Fashion and training can always make a poet of some sort out of a man of native intelligence. Besides, these original compositions required wide reading, wealth of knowledge, and independence of judgment. For these reasons the ching shih came practically to monopolize the civil service for almost four centuries, and great statesmen and empire builders came out of a system which, though fair, seemed completely devoid of practical training.

The second period of the civil service system may be called an age of transition. The purely literary examination had been severely criticized on the ground of its failure to encourage the youths of the nation to prepare themselves in the practical and useful knowledge of morals and government. In the year 1071, the reformer-statesman Wang An-shih succeeded in persuading his Emperor to adopt and proclaim a new system of examinations, in which the poetic compositions were entirely abolished and the scholars were required to specialize in one of the major classics as well as to master the minor classics. Under the new system the scholars were also asked to write an essay on some historic subject and to answer in detail three questions of current and practical importance. This new system was naturally severely Page 89 →attacked by the sponsors of the old poetic examinations. For 200 years the government wavered between the two policies. The prose classical examination was several times discarded and again re-established. Finally the government compromised by offering a dual system placing the poetic composition and the prose classical exposition as two alternate systems for the candidates to choose.

Then came the third period during which the prose classical examination finally became the only legitimate form of civil service examination. The Mongol conquest of North China, and later of the whole of China, had brought about much interruption and dislocation of Chinese political life, including the abolition of the civil service examination system for many decades. When the civil service examinations were revived in 1314, the classical scholars had their way in triumphantly working out an examination system entirely centering around the Confucian classics. In order to make it more attractive to the creative minds, a special form of prose composition was gradually evolved which, though not rhymed, was highly rhythmic, often running in balanced sentences, and so rich in cadence that it could be often sing-songed aloud. All candidates were also required to write a poem on an assigned theme as a supplement to every examination paper. These new developments seemed to have satisfied both the desire for original poetic expression and the more utilitarian demand for a mastery of the Confucian classics, which were supposed to be the foundation of the moral and political life of the Chinese nation. So this new examination system lasted from 1314 to 1905 with comparatively few radical changes in the general scheme.

In a broad sense, therefore, the statesmen of China have seriously attempted to work out and put into practice a system of civil service examination open to all people, irrespective of family, wealth, religion, or race. The subject-matter of the examinations, whether it be original poetic composition or rhythmic prose exposition of the classics, has been severely and probably justly criticized, as useless literary gymnastics. But the main idea behind these examinations is a desire to work out some objective and impartial standard for the selection of men for public offices. The sincerity of that desire was attested throughout history by the development and improvement of the safe-guards against favoritism and fraud in the examinations. One of the safe-guards was the method of sealing the name of the examinee so that no name should appear on the examination paper. Another safe-guard was to have every examination paper copied by the government copyists and to Page 90 →submit to the examiners only the copy and not the original, so that the examiner could not recognize the hand-writing of his own students, friends, or relatives. These techniques were invented about the year 1000 and have been in use in all the later centuries. Fraud in the examinations was punished by the heaviest penalties.

IV

Indeed, the system was so objective and fair that scholars who repeatedly failed to pass the examinations rarely complained of the injustice of the system itself but often comforted themselves with the proverb, “In the examination hall literary merit does not always count,” meaning that luck may be against you. As the subject-matter was always taken from the few classics and in later centuries always from the “Four Books” for the lower examinations, it was possible for the poorest family to give a talented child the necessary education, which cost practically nothing in books or in tuition. In the popular theatres, one often sees well-known plays portraying a poor young man or a poor son-in-law of a beggar-chief successfully taking high honors in the examinations. It was a just system which enabled the sons of the poorest and lowliest families to rise through a regular process of competition to the highest positions of honor and power in the Empire.

Throughout the centuries of training under this system, there has grown up a deep-rooted tradition in the minds of the Chinese people that government should be in the hands of those who are best fitted to govern; and that officers and officials of the state are not born of any special class but should be selected through some system of competitive examination open to all who are prepared to take it.

V

The office of the Imperial Censor, or literally the “Imperial Historian,” probably derived its extraordinary censorial authority from the very ancient days when the historian was a religious priest and represented the will of the gods. At the time of Confucius stories were told of historians who defied despotic rulers and powerful prime ministers in insisting upon telling and recording the truth as they saw it. They preferred death to changing their recordings. Page 91 →Confucius himself tried to write a kind of history where every word would imply a moral judgment of approval or disapproval, so that rulers and leaders of states might be encouraged to do good and refrain from evil-doing by their natural regard for the judgment of posterity.

In later ages the historians rarely kept up this rigoristic tradition of truth-telling, but there grew up a new tradition of out-spoken advice and admonition on the part of the Imperial Censors. The duty of out-spoken interrogation and censure of the misdeeds of all government officials from the highest to the lowest was not confined to the Imperial Censors alone or to any particular censorial office. It was in fact a right and a moral duty of all officials of rank to speak freely and frankly to the Imperial Government on all matters concerning the misery and suffering of the people, or astrological signs or warnings pointing to bad government in any particular direction, or policies which should be promoted or abolished. In short, Chinese moral and political tradition required of every government official this sacred duty of serving as the out-spoken adviser of his sovereign.

All political thinking of ancient China taught the importance of out-spoken censure as the only means for the ruler to know his own faults, the disastrous policies of his government, and the grievances of the people. An ancient statesman of the eighth century B.C. is recorded to have said: “To stop the voice of the people is more dangerous than to dam the flow of a river. The wise manager of the river deepens its basin and facilitates its flow. The wise ruler of men encourages them to speak up freely.” Free expression and out-spoken opposition are, therefore, safety-valves through which the complaints, protests, and grievances of the people are expressed and heard. They are also mirrors in which the rulers can see their own shortcomings. It is, therefore, the duty of the ruler to tolerate all forms of out-spoken advice and opposition, however offensive they may be.

Throughout the long history of China, there are numberless cases of statesmen who incurred the displeasure of their rulers by courageously opposing what they considered as ruinous policies of the government. Not a few of these out-spoken advisers were put to death or subjected to bodily torture. But, in general, even the most notorious despots usually had an almost religious regard for the tradition which exalted tolerance of frank censure as one of the highest virtues of the ruler. With the exception of the few dark periods of the Ming Dynasty, most of the dynasties treated the out-spoken censors with tolerance and leniency. Some of the great rulers, such as the second Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, were famous for their eagerness to Page 92 →seek frank advice from their ministers. The intimate memorials to the throne by such famous statesmen as Wei Cheng of the seventh century and Lu Chih of the eighth century read like heart-to-heart advice of one faithful friend to another. They cover all kinds of topics from private conduct to military campaigns of great importance. Such works have been an inspiration to statesmen throughout the ages.

Even in those periods when out-spoken censors were punished brutally by the despotic rulers, those martyrs in the cause of free political criticism were usually vindicated, sometimes after a few years and sometimes after one or two generations. In such cases the vindication came in the form of conferring posthumous honors on the martyred censors, some of whom were given seats in the Temple of Confucius. The policies they had sponsored were now adopted and the persons against whom they had fought were now disgraced. As a philosopher of the seventeenth century put it: “There are only two things that are supreme in this world: one is reason, the other, authority. Of the two, reason is the more supreme. For in the history of the struggle of the righteous statesmen against the powerful prime ministers and eunuchs, reason always triumphed over authority in the end.” This best expresses the spirit of the Chinese censors: they represented the Chinese historic struggle for liberty.

In a sense, the censorial system may be called the Chinese counterpart for a parliament. Indeed, the censors were called “The Officials Who Speak” (yen kwan), which is an etymological reminder of the modern democratic parliaments. The Censorial Office, or Tribunal, was not a law-making organ but undertook almost every other political and semi-judicial function of a modern parliament, including interrogation, impeachment of government officials, passing on the accounts of the governmental departments, and receiving complaints and grievances of the people. Tradition gave it the right “to speak out even on hearsay.” There was naturally the danger of malicious libel and political attack without sufficient evidence. But the main idea was to encourage free speech and to initiate investigation in cases where evidence could not be easily obtained without the effort of special investigators.

VI

As I have pointed out, the right and duty to advise the government were not confined to the censors alone. All central and provincial officials above a certainPage 93 → rank had the right and the duty to petition the throne on all matters affecting the policy of the government or the interest of the people. In the light of history, much of the advice offered was ridiculous, and many of the issues bitterly fought were trivial. But this tradition of encouragement to out-spoken opposition has, on the whole, played an important and beneficial part in the molding of Chinese political life. It has not only trained the nation to regard out-spoken and fighting officials as national heroes and protectors of the interests of the people, but it has also taught the people to think that government needs censorial check and control and that outspoken opposition to the misdeeds of government officials and even of emperors and empresses is a necessary part of a political constitution.

These three historical factors—a democratized and classless social structure, a traditional belief in the selection of office-holders through an objective competitive examination, and a long history of encouragement of out-spoken censorial control of the government—these are the heritages of my people from the political development throughout the long centuries. They are the historical factors which alone can explain the Chinese Revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy, the establishment of a republican form of government, and the constitutional development of the last 30 years and of the years to come.

The best evidence of the great importance of these historical heritages is the fact that Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the Father of the Chinese Revolution and of the Republic, deliberately adopted the power of examination for civil service and the power of censorial control of the government as two of the five divisions of governmental power, the other three being the traditional executive, legislative, and judicial powers. In these three decades of revolutionary wars and foreign invasion, China has not yet worked out a permanent constitution. But it is safe to predict that the future constitution of China will be a workable democratic constitution made possible by these historical factors without which no importation or imitation of foreign political institutions can function and take root.