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Concordia Theological Monthly

Publication Date

8-1-1930

Document Type

Article

Keywords

chinese government, china, nanking, hankow, communist, kuomintang, suffrage

Submission Type

Bible Study; Lecture; Sermon Prep

Abstract

The Republic of China has not, as may often be supposed from its name, a republican form of government, with taxation and representation carefully apportioned, popular suffrage, general elections of president, legislators, etc., and other features which we associate with our republican form of government. The nation is at present living in the so-called "period of political tutelage," during which, in accordance with the will of the founder, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the government shall be entirely in the hands of the National People’s Party, or Kuomintang. During this period there is to be no popular government, but the people, as yet unfit for suffrage, are by the inculcation of Dr. Sun's "Three Principles of the People" (Nationalism, Democracy, and Livelihood) to be educated toward popular government. That the people of China, an enormous number of them illiterate, are really unprepared for popular suffrage is an undoubted fact; but with regard to the proportion in which the paternal and the educational functions of the tutor are combined in the Kuomintang’s tutelage there is much room for difference of opinion. The educational element would seem to come short of its due unless education and propaganda are regarded as identical. The effort is to standardize and unify the thinking of the people rather than to supply them with a basis for the formation of independent political judgment. If the reader can imagine ono of the great political parties of our country furnished with a set of fully elaborated and comprehensive principles, ruling the country along one-party lines, forming its policies without reference to popular opinion, self-perpetuating without reference to popular suffrage, and controlling popular education even to the exclusion of parochial schools, one may form some conception of what the ideal state of things in China during the ''period of political tutelage" is supposed to be according to Kuomintang "ideology." That, as a matter of fact, conditions are not exactly thus will be pointed out later. It is, however, clear that where such ideals are cherished and worked out so far as practicable by those in power, the form of government is by no means a democracy, but a bureaucracy.

Disciplines

History of Christianity

Submission Cost

Free

Submission Audience

Laity; Ministers; Scholars

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