《獨立評論》中民主與獨裁的論戰（1933-1937）

Abstract

This thesis attempts to deal with the debate on democracy and dictatorship in the Independent Critique in the contexts of the conflicts between democracy and dictatorship in China in 1930’s. Research background and problematic is mentioned and the past second-hand literature is reviewed in the first chapter. In the second chapter, I focus on the debate on the problem of state-building. While Jiang Tingfu described China as the Hobbesian state of nature in which people are against with each other, Hu Shih thought that a stable political society had been formed in China for a long time. Jiang Tingfu held that the best way to unify the country is through a charismatic leader whose legitimacy is based on people’s loyalty and through its military despotism which is able to destroy the warlords. On the contrary, Hu Shih argued that as a result of China’s lack of consolidation and unification which is the precondition of modern nation-state, it is through the parliamentary institution that the state could transform people’s local identity into the identity of the nation. To speak further, for Hu Shih, people’s participation in public affairs helps to build up national identity and to extend the boundary of their imagined community from the local community to the state. In the third chapter, the emphasis is put on the efficacy of the government. The debate on the efficacy of the government arose from the discussion on whether the system of political tutelage had to be reformed according to the present situation. While the absolutists took the state security as the ends of a government, the democrats regards the democracy itself as the basic principle of the operation of a government. For the absolutists, the ideal government is to promote the advancement of the state. However, democrats held that the strong and powerful government should be built up under the principle of democracy. They reflected Sun Yat-sen’s theory of political tutelage and at the same time urged Kuomintang to keep their promise of practicing democratic republics as soon as possible. People’s roles in political arena are investigated in the fourth chapter. The absolutists preferred the expert politics, emphasizing that expert are well qualified to protect public interests of the political community because of their specialty and objectivity. By contrast, the democrats believed that only the representatives who are elected through democratic procedures could take public interests into account and base their political actions on the public interests. On the one hand, they stressed the functions of civic education which is derived from democratic practice. On the other hand, they held that people’s participation in public affairs could not only supervise the operation of bureaucracy but also link people’s feeling with their country and create their unified identity with the country. In the last chapter, I will indicate the academic implication of the debate between the two camps in the context of Chinese political thought.