V. I.

Lenin

The article by Sun Yat-sen, provisional President of the
Chinese Republic, which we take from the Brussels socialist newspaper,
Le Peuple , is of exceptional interest to us Russians.

It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. And Sun Yat-sen is
a most interesting “onlooker”, for he appears to be wholly uninformed
about Russia despite his European education. And now, quite independently
of Russia, of Russian experience and Russian literature, this enlightened
spokesman of militant and victorious Chinese democracy, which has won a
republic, poses purely Russian questions. A progressive Chinese democrat,
he argues exactly like a Russian. His similarity to a Russian Narodnik is
so great that it goes as far as a complete identity of fundamental ideas
and of many individual expressions.

The onlooker sees most of the game. The platform of the great Chinese
democracy—for that is what Sun Yat-sen’s article represents—impels us,
and provides us with a convenient occasion, to examine anew, in the light
of recent world events, the relation between democracy and Narodism in
modern bourgeois revolutions in Asia. This is one of the most serious
questions confronting Russia in the revolutionary epoch which began in
1905. And it confronts not only Russia, but the whole of Asia, as will be
seen from the platform of the provisional President of the Chinese Re
public, particularly when this platform is compared with the revolutionary
developments in Russia, Turkey, Persia and China. In very many and very
essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is
more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries.

Beginning with its distant and lone, forerunner, the nobleman Herzen
and continuing right up to its mass representatives, the members, of the
Peasant Union of 1905 and the Trudovik deputies to the first three Dumas of
1906–12, Russian bourgeois democracy has had a Narodnik
colouring. Bourgeois democracy in China, as we now see, has the same
Narodnik colouring. Let us now consider, with Sun Yat-sen as an example,
the “social significance.” of the ideas generated by the deep-going
revolutionary movement of the hundreds of millions who are finally being
drawn into the stream of world capitalist civilisation.

Every line of Sun Yat-sen’s platform breathes a spirit of militant and
sincere democracy. It reveals a thorough understanding of the inadequacy of
a “racial” revolution. There is not a trace in it of indifference to
political issues, or even of underestimation of political liberty, or of
the idea that Chinese “social reform”, Chinese constitutional reforms,
etc., could be compatible with Chinese autocracy. It stands for complete
democracy and the demand for a republic. It squarely poses the question of
the condition of the masses, of the mass struggle. It expresses warm
sympathy for the toiling and exploited people, faith in their strength and
in the justice of their cause.

Before us is the truly great ideology of a truly great people capable
not only of lamenting its age-long slavery and dreaming of liberty and
equality, but of fighting the age-long oppressors of China.

One is naturally inclined to compare the provisional President of the
Republic in benighted, inert, Asiatic China with the presidents of various
republics in Europe and America, in countries of advanced culture. The
presidents in those republics are all businessmen, agents or
puppets of a bourgeoisie rotten to the core and besmirched from head to
foot with mud and blood—not the blood of padishahs and emperors, but the
blood of striking workers shot down in the name of progress and
civilisation. In those countries the presidents represent the bourgeoisie,
which long ago renounced all the ideals of its youth, has thoroughly
prostituted itself, sold itself body and soul to the millionaires and multimillionaires, to the feudal lords turned bourgeois, etc.

In China, the Asiatic provisional President of the Re public is a
revolutionary democrat, endowed with the nobility and heroism of a class
that is rising, not declining, a class that does not dread the future, but
believes in it and fights for it selflessly, a class that does not cling to
maintenance and restoration of the past in order to safeguard its
privileges, but hates the past and knows how to cast off its dead and
stifling decay.

Does that mean, then, that the materialist West has hopelessly decayed
and that light shines only from the mystic, religious East? No, quite the
opposite. It means that the East has definitely taken the Western path,
that new hundreds of millions of people will from now on share in
the struggle for the ideals which the West has already worked out for
itself. What has decayed is the Western bourgeoisie, which is already
confronted by its grave-digger, the proletariat. But in Asia there is
still a bourgeoisie capable of championing sincere, militant,
consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of France’s great men of the
Enlightenment and great leaders of the close of the eighteenth century.

The chief representative, or the chief social bulwark, of this Asian
bourgeoisie that is still capable of supporting a historically progressive
cause, is the peasant. And side by side with him there already exists a
liberal bourgeoisie whose leaders, men like Y\"uan Shih-kai, are above all
capable of treachery: yesterday they feared the emperor, and cringed before
him; then they betrayed him when they saw the strength, and sensed the
victory, of the revolutionary democracy; and tomorrow they will betray the
democrats to make a deal with some old or new “constitutional” emperor.

The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would
be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is
rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which
is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen’s platform.

But the Chinese Narodnik combines this ideology of militant democracy,
firstly, with socialist dreams, with hopes of China avoiding the capitalist
path, of preventing capitalism, and, secondly, with a plan for, and
advocacy of, radical agrarian reform. It is these two last ideological and political trends that
constitute the element which forms Narodism —Narodism in the
specific sense of that term, i.e., as distinct from democracy, as a
supplement to democracy.

What is the origin and significance of these trends? Had it not been
for the immense spiritual and revolutionary upsurge of the masses, the
Chinese democracy would have been unable to overthrow the old order and
establish the republic. Such an upsurge presupposes and evokes the most
sincere sympathy for the condition of the working masses, and the bitterest
hatred for their oppressors and exploiters. And in Europe and
America—from which the progressive Chinese, all the Chinese who
have experienced this upsurge, have borrowed their ideas of
liberation—emancipation from the bourgeoisie, i.e., socialism,
is the immediate task. This is bound to arouse sympathy for socialism among
Chinese democrats, and is the source of their subjective
socialism.

They are subjectively socialists because they are opposed to oppression
and exploitation of the masses. But the objective conditions of
China, a backward, agricultural, semi-feudal country numbering nearly 500
million people, place on the order of the day only one specific,
historically distinctive form of this oppression and exploitation, namely,
feudalism. Feudalism was based on the predominance of agriculture and
natural economy. The source of the feudal exploitation of the Chinese
peasant was his attachment to the land in some form. The political
exponents of this exploitation were the feudal lords, all together and
individually, with the emperor as the head of the whole system.

But it appears that out of the subjectively socialist ideas and
programmes of the Chinese democrat there emerges in fact a programme for
“changing all the juridical foundations” of “immovable property”
alone , a programme for the abolition of feudal exploitation alone.

That is the essence of Sun Yat-sen’s Narodism, of his progressive, militant, revolutionary programme for bourgeois-democratic
agrarian reform, and of his quasi-socialist theory.

From the point of view of doctrine, this theory is that of a
petty-bourgeois “socialist” reactionary. For the idea that capitalism can
be “prevented” in China and that a “social revolution” there will be
made easier by the country’s backwardness, and so on, is altogether reactionary. And Sun Yat-sen himself, with
inimitable, one might say virginal, naïveté, smashes his
reactionary Narodnik. theory by admitting what reality forces him to admit,
namely that “China is on the eve of a gigantic industrial [i.e.,
capitalist] development”, that in China “trade [i.e., capitalism] will
develop to an enormous extent”, that “in fifty years we shall have many
Shanghais”, i.e., huge centres of capitalist wealth and proletarian need
and poverty.

But the question arises: does Sun Yat-sen, on the basis of his
reactionary economic theory, uphold an actually reactionary agrarian
programme? That is the crux of the matter, its most interesting point, and
one on which curtailed and emasculated liberal quasi-Marxism is
often at a loss.

The fact of the matter is that he does not. The dialectics of the
social relations in China reveals itself precisely in the fact that, while
sincerely sympathising with socialism in Europe, the Chinese democrats have
transformed it into a reactionary theory, and on the basis of this
reactionary theory of “preventing” capitalism are championing a
purely capitalist , a maximum capitalist, agrarian programme!

Indeed, what does the “economic revolution”, of which Sun Yat-sen
talks so pompously and obscurely at the beginning of his article, amount
to?

It amounts to the transfer of rent to the state, i.e., land
nationalisation, by some sort of single tax along Henry George lines. There
is absolutely nothing else that is real in the “economic
revolution” proposed and advocated by Sun Yat-sen.

The difference between the value of land in some remote peasant area
and in Shanghai is the difference in the rate of rent. The value of land is
capitalised rent. To make the “enhanced value” of land the “property of
the people” means transferring the rent, i.e., land ownership, to the
state, or, in other words, nationalising the land.

Is such a reform possible within the framework of capitalism? It is not
only possible but it represents the purest, most consistent, and ideally
perfect capitalism. Marx point ed this out in The Poverty of Philosophy , he proved it in detail in Volume III of Capital ,
and developed it with particular clarity in his controversy with Rodbertus in Theories of Surplus Value .

Land nationalisation makes it possible to abolish absolute rent,
leaving only differential rent. According to Marx’s theory, land
nationalisation means a maximum elimination of medieval monopolies and
medieval relations in agriculture, maximum freedom in buying and selling
land, and maximum facilities for agriculture to adapt itself to the
market. The irony of history is that Narodism, under the guise of
“combating capitalism” in agriculture, champions an agrarian programme
that, if fully carried out, would mean the most rapid development
of capitalism in agriculture.

What economic necessity is behind the spread of the most progressive
bourgeois-democratic agrarian programmes in one of the most backward
peasant countries of Asia? It is the necessity of destroying feudalism in
all its forms and manifestations.

The more China lagged behind Europe and Japan, the more it was
threatened with fragmentation and national disintegration. It could be
“renovated” only by the heroism of the revolutionary masses, a heroism
capable of creating a Chinese republic in the sphere of politics, and of
ensuring, through land nationalisation, the most rapid capitalist progress
in the sphere of agriculture.

Whether and to what extent this will succeed is another question. In
their bourgeois revolutions, various countries achieved various degrees of
political and agrarian democracy, and in the most diverse combinations. The
decisive factors will be the international situation and the alignment of
the social forces in China. The emperor will certainly try to unite the
feudal lords, the bureaucracy and the clergy in an attempt at
restoration. Yuan Shih-kai, who represents a bourgeoisie that has only just
changed from liberal-monarchist to liberal-republican (for how long?), will
pursue a policy of manoeuvring between monarchy and revolution. The
revolutionary bourgeois democracy, represented by Sun Yat-sen, is correct
in seeking ways and means of “renovating” China through maximum
development of the initiative, determination and boldness of the peasant
masses in the matter of political and agrarian reforms.

Lastly, the Chinese proletariat will increase as the number of
Shanghais increases. It will probably form some kind of Chinese
Social-Democratic labour party. which, while criticising the
petty-bourgeois utopias and reactionary views of Sun Yat-sen, will
certainly take care to single out, defend and develop the
revolutionary-democratic core of his political and agrarian programme.