Sun became a uniquely unifying figure among China’s revolutionary movements. He founded the republican Kuomintang (KMT), which rapidly came to dominance in the chaotic period after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The KMT united with the Communist Party in 1922, but with warlords fighting for territory, and a series of new emperors, it proved impossible to establish a central government. The KMT crushed a communist-led uprising in Shanghai in 1926, after which the two groups separated. Communist victory in the 1949 revolution forced the KMT into exile in Taiwan.
In recent years, communist China has increasingly come to embrace Sun’s legacy, citing him as an inspiration behind its move to a market-led economy.
The vast peasantry of China were promised land to work under Sun’s Three Principles of the People. Economic progress would come from a fair distribution of land, he believed.
SUN YAT-SEN
Sun Yat-Sen was born in the village of Cuihen in southern China. He moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, aged 13 to continue his education. There, he learned English and read widely. After further study in Hong Kong, Sun converted to Christianity. He became a doctor, but later abandoned his medical practice to concentrate full-time on his revolutionary activity.
Sun became a campaigner for the renewal of China as a modern state. Following a series of failed revolts, he was forced into exile. But in October 1911, a military uprising at Wuchang spread across southern China. Sun Yat-Sen was elected president of the “Provisional Republic” but stepped down in a deal with pro-Qing dynasty forces in the north. In 1912, Sun helped to establish the Kuomintang to continue the fight for a unified republic as the country descended into civil war.
Key works
1922 The International Development of China
1927 San Min Chu I: Three Principles of the People
See also: Ito Hirobumi • José Martí • Emiliano Zapata • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk • Mao Zedong
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Liberalism
FOCUS
Society
BEFORE
1705 Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville writes The Fable of the Bees, demonstrating collective institutions arising from individual behaviour.
1884 The final volume of Marx’s Capital is published, though it is unfinished.
AFTER
1937 American sociologist Talcott Parsons publishes The Structure of Social Action, introducing Weber’s work to a new international audience.
1976 Capitalism and Social Theory by British sociologist Anthony Giddens criticizes Weber’s sociology, arguing instead for the primacy of structures in social action.
Capitalism’s rise in the 19th century prompted new ways to think about the world. Relations between people were transformed, with traditional ways of life torn up. Scientific and technical knowledge appeared to be advancing relentlessly, and society was seen as an object that could be studied and understood. Max Weber provided a new approach to the study of society – in the new discipline of “sociology”. His incomplete work Economy and Society is an attempt to describe the functioning of society, as well as a method by which such study can be taken further. One of Weber’s methods of study was to use abstract notions such as “ideal-types”. Like a caricature of a person, an ideal-type exaggerated key features and reduced the less important ones – but to draw out the underlying truth, rather than to amuse. This approach was key to Weber’s method, and allowed him to understand complex parts of society via a simplified version. The role of the sociologist was to construct and analyse ideal-types based on the observation of reality. This stood in contrast to Karl Marx and earlier writers on social issues, who attempted to deduce the operations of society based on its internal logic, rather than through direct observation.
"For sociological purposes, there is no such thing as a collective personality which ‘acts’."
Max Weber
Collective understandings
Society, Weber argued, could only be understood on the basis of its constituent parts – in the first instance, individuals. These individuals operated collectively in ways that were complex, but could be understood by the sociologist. Individuals possessed a capacity to act, and their actions would be informed by their view of the world. These views would emerge as collective understandings. Religion and political systems such as capitalism are examples of these understandings. Weber, in his earlier work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, claimed that it was the new “spirit” of individualist Protestantism that paved the way for capital accumulation and the creation of a market society. Economy and Society develops this idea, distinguishing between types of religious belief, and analysing the ways in which individuals may perform social action using a wide variety of belief structures.
Fire ants live in a complex community where the individual’s role is key to the success of the nest. In a similar way, Weber saw the actions of individuals as part of a larger human society.
Restraints to action
Once society’s collective structures are in place, Weber notes, they may act not as enablers, expanding human freedom, but as constraints. This is why Weber speaks of people as “cogs” in a “machine”. The structures people create also restrain their actions, producing further results: Protestants were instructed to work, but also to avoid consuming, and their savings created capitalism.
MAX WEBER
Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, and initially studied law at the University of Heidelberg. Working in a time before the discipline of sociology existed, Weber’s work covered legal theory, history, and economics. He eventually became an economics professor at Freiburg University. Politically engaged from early in his career, Weber made his name as a thinker in social policy, writing on Polish immigration in the 1890s and joining one of Germany’s movements for social reform, the Evangelical Social Congress. After WWI, he co-founded the liberal German Democratic Party.
A tempestuous relationship with his father ended on his father’s death in 1897. Weber had a nervous breakdown, and never fully recovered. He was unable to hold a permanent teaching post again, and suffered from insomnia and bouts of depression.
Key works
1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1922 Economy and Society
1927 General Economic History
See also: Mikhail Bakunin • Karl Marx • Georges Sorel • Beatrice Webb
INTRODUCTION
The first half of the 20th century saw the erosion of the old imperial powers and the establishment of new republics. The result was widespread political instability, especially in Europe, which led to the two world wars that dominated the period. In the process of replacing the old European order, a wave of extreme nationalist, authoritarian parties emerged, and in Russia the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 paved the way for a totalitarian communist dictatorship. Meanwhile, the Great Depression of the early 1930s prompted a move to increased economic and social liberalism in the United States.
By the end of the 1930s, political thinking among the major powers was polarized between the ideologies of fascism, communism, and the social democracy of liberal, free-market capitalism.
World revolutions
The revolutions that sparked this shake-up in political thought did not begin in Europe. In 1910, a decade-long armed struggle known as the Mexican Revolution began, on the fall of the old regime of Porfirio Díaz. In China, the ruling Qing dynasty was overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and replaced with a republic founded by Sun Yat-Sen the following year. But the most influential revolutionary events of the period took place in Russia. Political unrest had led to an unsuccessful revolution in 1905, which was rekindled in 1917 and led to the violent overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II by the Bolsheviks. The optimism many felt at the end of World War I was short-lived. The formation of the League of Nations, with its hope of ensuring an enduring peace, did little to stem the rising tensions in Europe. Punitive war reparations and post-war econo
mic collapse were a major factor in fostering the appeal of extremist movements.
Dictatorship and resistance
Out of small extremist parties in Italy and Germany arose the Fascist party of Benito Mussolini and the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler. In Spain, in reaction to the formation of a second Spanish Republic, nationalists fought for power under Francisco Franco. And in Russia after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin became increasingly autocratic, eliminating opponents and establishing the Soviet Union as an industrial and military power.
While totalitarian regimes grew in strength on continental Europe, Britain faced the break-up of its empire. Independence movements in the colonies threatened British rule, especially in India, with the campaign of non-violent civil disobedience led by Mahatma Gandhi, but also in Africa, where activists such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya were mobilizing resistance.
Entering the fray
In the United States, the massive crash on the New York stock market in 1929 ended the boom years of the 1920s and ushered in the Great Depression. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, which brought a new liberalism to American politics. The United States was keen to remain neutral in Europe’s unstable affairs, but Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies led to the migration of intellectuals from Europe to America, in particular from the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School. These migrants brought a fresh thinking that challenged some of Roosevelt’s policies.
It was not only Europe that the United States tried to ignore. Asia was also experiencing political turmoil as Japanase militarism sparked the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. As the war turned against China, Mao Zedong rose to prominence as a communist leader.
Britain, too, was reluctant to become involved in any conflict, despite the threat of fascism. Even with the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, with Germany and the Soviet Union supporting opposite sides, Britain kept its distance. But pressure was growing in Britain and the United States to stop appeasing Hitler’s territorial demands. After war broke out in 1939, the alliance against Germany grew, with the United States joining after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941.
Although Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union collaborated successfully during World War II, once fascism was defeated, the political lines were redrawn. A standoff soon emerged, with the communist East opposed to the capitalist West, and the rest of Europe struggling to find its place in the middle. The scene was set for the Cold War, which would dominate post-war politics.
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Anti-colonial nationalism
FOCUS
Non-violent resistance
BEFORE
5th–6th centuries BCE Jainist teachings stressing non-violence and self-discipline develop in India.
1849 Henry David Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience, defending the morality of conscientious objection to unjust laws.
AFTER
1963 In his “I have a dream” speech in Washington DC, civil rights leader Martin Luther King outlines his vision of black and white people living together in peace.
2011 Peaceful protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square lead to the overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
In the worldwide empires that European powers built from the 16th century onwards, it was the example of the imperialists themselves that ultimately gave rise to the nationalist movements that sprang up in opposition to colonial rule. Witnessing the colonizers’ strong sense of national identity, based on European ideas about nations and the importance of sovereignty within geographical borders, eventually ignited a desire for nationhood and self-determination in the colonized peoples. However, the lack of economic or military strength led many anti-colonial movements to develop distinctly non-European modes of resistance.
A spiritual weapon
In India, the fight for independence from the UK in the first half of the 20th century was characterized by the political and moral philosophy of its spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi, more commonly known by the honorific title “Mahatma”, meaning “Great Soul”. Although he believed in a strong democratic state, Gandhi held that such a state could never be won, forged, or held by any form of violence. His ethic of radical non-violent resistance and civil disobedience, which he named satyagraha (“adherence to truth”), focussed a lens of morality and conscience on the tide of anti-colonial nationalism that was transforming the political landscape of the 20th century. He described this method as a “purely spiritual weapon”.
Gandhi believed that the universe was governed by a Supreme Principle, which he called satya (“Truth”). For him, this was another name for God, the one God of Love that he believed to be the basis of all the great world religions. Since all human beings were emanations of this divine Being, Gandhi believed that love was the only true principle of relations between humans. Love meant care and respect for others and selfless, lifelong devotion to the cause of “wiping away every tear from every eye”. This enjoined ahimsa, or the rule of harmlessness, on Gandhi’s adherents. Although a Hindu himself, Gandhi drew on many different religious traditions as he developed his moral philosophy, including Jainism and the pacifist Christian teachings of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, both of which stressed the importance of not causing hurt to any living creature.
Political ends
Gandhi’s ideology was an attempt to work out the rule of love in every area of life. However, he believed that the endurance of suffering, or “turning the other cheek” to abusive treatment at the hands of an individual or a state, as opposed to violent resistance or reprisal, was a means to a political end as well as a spiritual one. This willing sacrifice of the self would operate as a law of truth on human nature to secure the reformation and cooperation of an opponent. It would act as an example to wider society – political friend and foe alike. Home rule for India would be, for Gandhi, the inevitable outcome of a mass revolution of behaviour based on a rich brew of peaceful transcendental principles.
South African activist
Gandhi’s first experience of opposing British rule came not in India, but in South Africa. After training as a barrister in London, he worked for 21 years in South Africa – then another British colony – defending the civil rights of migrant Indians. It was during these years that he developed his sense of “Indianness”, which he saw as bridging every divide of race, religion, and caste, and which underpinned his later vision of a united Indian nation. In South Africa, he witnessed first-hand the social injustice, racial violence, and punitive government exploitation of colonial rule. His response was to develop his pacifist ideals into a practical form of opposition. He proved his gift for leadership in 1906 when he led thousands of poor Indian settlers in a campaign of disobedience against repressive new laws requiring them to register with the state. After seven years of struggle and violent repression, the South African leader, Jan Christiaan Smuts, negotiated a compromise with the protestors, demonstrating the power of non-violent resistance. It might take time, but it would win out in the end, shaming opponents into doing the right thing.
In the years that followed, Gandhi had considerable success in promoting his idea that non-violent resistance was the most effective resistance. He returned to India in 1915 with an international reputation as an Indian nationalist, and soon rose to a position of prominence in the Indian National Congress, the political movement for Indian nationalism. Gandhi advocated the boycott of British-made goods, especially textiles, encouraging all Indians to spin and wear khadi, or homespun cloth, in order to reduce dependence on foreign industry and strengthen their own economy. He saw such boycotts as a logical extension of peaceful non-cooperation and urged people to refuse to use British schools and law courts, to resign from government employment, and to eschew British titles and honours. Amid increasing excitement and publicity, he learned to distinguish himself as an astute political showman, understanding the power of the media to influence public opinion.
Gandhi w
as influenced by Jainism, a religion whose central principle is to avoid harming living things. Jain monks wear masks so that they do not inadvertently breathe in insects.
Public defiance
In 1930, with the British government refusing to respond to Gandhi’s congressional resolution calling for Indian dominion status, full independence was unilaterally declared by the Indian National Congress. Soon after, Gandhi launched a new satyagraha against the British tax on salt, calling on thousands to join him on the long march to the sea. As the world watched, Gandhi picked up a handful of the salt that lay in great white sheets along the beach, and was promptly arrested. Gandhi was imprisoned, but his act of defiance had publicly demonstrated the unjust nature of British rule in India to commentators around the world. This carefully orchestrated act of non-violent disobedience began to shake the hold of the British empire on India. Reports of Gandhi’s campaigns and imprisonment appeared in newspapers all over the world. German physicist Albert Einstein said of him: “He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilized world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time, with its overestimation of brutal violent forces.”
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