This was decidedly not the case in China. Industrialism was something which could be studied from the outside, which could be appraised, and then acclaimed or resisted. Emperor Meiji and his Genro, with a flash of intuition or an intellectual penetration almost unparalleled in the political history of the world, guided Japan into the swift current of mechanical progress; the island empire swept ahead of Asia, abreast of the most powerful states of the world. The Chinese court, under the resolute, but blind, guidance of the Empress Dowager, made a few feeble gestures in favor of modernization, but vigorously opposed any change which might seriously modify the order of Chinese society or the position of the Manchus. In the shadow of the foreign guns, industrialism crept into China, along the coasts and up the banks of the navigable rivers. One might suppose that the Chinese were in a position to choose, deliberately, for or against industrialism. They were not; in China, as in the West, the machine age first appeared largely as an accident.
It is here that the significance of Sun Yat-sen’s _min shêng_ becomes apparent. Above all other subsidiary meanings, it is a deliberate declaration of the industrial revolution. Modernism had been an accident; Sun Yat-sen wished to transform it into a program. What would be the ideological consequences of such an attitude?
In the first place, a plan was indicated for almost every type of human behavior. Sun Yat-sen himself drafted a preliminary scheme for a modern manufacturing and communications system.(158) The road that China was to take would not be the miserable, halting progress of industrialism, complicated by delays and wars, which the West had known in the painful centuries of readjustment from the medieval to modern civilization; China would not stumble forward, but would deliberately select the swiftest and easiest way to a sound industrialism, and then take it.
_Min shêng_ thus not only provides the Chinese with a way to make their nationalism, their democracy, and their stateification felt in the hour of their ultimate triumph; it gives them something to do to bring about that triumph.
On the basis of the outlines of the ideology and the social system that Sun Yat-sen proposed, viewed from the perspective of the old Confucian world-society, the reader will realize that this declaration of the industrial revolution is the boldest of Sun Yat-sen’s acts, and that the meaning of _min shêng_ as a program of complete modernization and reconstruction is superior to other possible meanings it may have, in regard to theoretical national or social revolution. There is nothing remote or philosophical about the significance of _min shêng_ when so viewed; it is a plan to which a Lenin or a Henry Ford might subscribe with equal fervor—although a Tagore would deplore it. It is here that Sun Yat-sen appears as the champion of the West against the traditional technological stagnation of China. Yet just there, at the supreme point of his Westernism, we must remember what he was fighting for: the life of a race-nation and a civilization that was contradictory to the West. The stability of Confucianism could not serve as a cloak for reaction and stagnant thought. For its own good, nay, its own life, Chinese civilization had to modernize (i. e., Westernize economically) in order to compete in a West-ruled world. But what, more specifically, was the socio-economic position of Sun Yat-sen? Was he a Marxian? Was he a liberal? Was he neither?