Fostering the People's Livelihood: Chinese Political Thought between Empire and Nation

6 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA FOSTERING THE PEOPLE'S LIVELIHOOD: CHINESE POLITICAL THOUGHT BETWEEN EMPIRE AND NATION MARGHERIT A ZANASI, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN Students of modem Chinese history are often faced with the discrepancy between Chinese and Western perceptions of Sun Vat-sen (f~~1l1J, styled f~1:f=lW, 18661925 ). Both in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), historians, and the public at large, consider Sun the father of the modem Chinese nation (~x:, guofu) and still regard his writings-especially the Three People's Principle's (~ ~.±~, sanmin zhuyi): Nationalism (~1i~±~, minzu zhuyi), People's Rights (~fl±~, minquan zhuyi), and People's Livelihood (~ j::±~, minsheng zhuyi)-important for the ideological development of modem Chines~ politics. Western historians, on the other hand, generally tend to downplay Sun's role in the 1911 revolution (the revolution that led to the demise of the Qing Dynasty and of the imperial system as a whole) and in the establishment of the country's first republic. They mostly regard the Three Principles as "fuzzy" at best (Pusey 1982, 356). Even one of the most supportive among the recent biographers of Sun, the French historian Marie-Claire Bergere, describes the Principles as "at times strange," a "hybrid hodgepodge," but above all "incoherent "(Bergere 1998, 353-354). As a result of this process of historical deconstruction , Western historians have generally concluded that the continued prominence of Sun Yat-sen's memory is the result of the Nationalist Party's (~~ Ii, Guomindang or GMD, the political party established by Sun after the fall of the empire) conscious mythologizing. Western scholars stress how the Party promoted a narrative of Sun as father of the new Chinese nation in the effort to bolster the legitimacy of its leadership over China's "national" destiny (Fitzgerald 1996). The significance of Sun Vat-sen in modem Chinese history, however, goes beyond Nationalist mythologizing. In part, it springs from Sun's ability to formulate new political tropes that broke with the late-Qing imperial discourse and set the foundation for a "national" mode of political thinking. It was especially in the Three People's Principles that Sun translated into effective new political language the main intellectual trends that swept China in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. If we refrain from approaching the Principles from a Western-centered and presentist perspective-which inevitably makes them appear awkward vis-a-vis Western political discourses with which we are more readily familiar-and, instead, take into consideration their intellectual backdrop and Sun's political goals, we discover that the Principles estab-© Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 30, NO.1 (November 2004): 6-38. 2004 FOSTERING THE PEOPLE'S LIVELIHOOD 7 lished new conceptual categories for imagining China's national political life and for discussing such crucial issues as "people" and "poverty" outside of the parameters of the imperial discourse. In fact, GMD mythologizing damaged Sun's posthumous image in at least one major way. While it boosted Sun's image to a position he had never really reached before his death in 1925, it also initiated a vulgarization of Sun's thought, by transforming it into predictable propaganda. In other words, the GMD ossified the Principles into meaningless slogans that obliterated their importance in the transformation of Chinese political thought from imperial (specifically late-Qing) to "national." The development of the Principles illustrates, however, that this transformation was neither simple nor clear-cut. Even for thinkers like Sun Vat-sen, who aimed at overthrowing the imperial system and its ideological foundations, conceptual categories constructed by the imperial political discourse continued to exercise considerable influence. Sun's development of the Principle of People's Livelihood and the appropriation of this Principle by GMD leaders after Sun's death offer a most glaring example. In his early writings, Sun used this tropegenerally paired in imperial political rhetoric with state finance in the ubiquitous expression "state finance and people's livelihood (~*t ~~, guo}i minsheng)as an unquestioned conceptual category and without divesting it of most of the implications that it had carried in imperial political discourse. It was only in 1924, after it was used for years in the context...