Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) presented the Three Principles of the People (in Chinese, sanmin zhuyi) in 1924 as the primary guiding philosophy for China's nationalist revolution. The principles consisted of nationalism (minzu zhuyi), democracy (minquan zhuyi), and the livelihood of the people (minsheng zhuyi). For many years the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, or Kuomintang) vigorously promoted the Three Principles as the only legitimate revolutionary philosophy for China.
Throughout his career Sun consistently sought to strengthen the Chinese nation. Nationalism formed the core of his philosophy and tied the other principles together. Sun blamed China's weaknesses on a lack of patriotism among the masses, which allowed the imperialist powers to exploit the nation. Thus, fostering popular nationalism was the revolution's most important goal. Democracy, the second principle, provided the method for achieving national unity through a political awakening of the masses. Sun called for a five-power system of government, with executive, legislative, and judicial branches, supplemented by two Chinese institutions to oversee civil service examinations and to censure governmental wrongdoing. The people would eventually have the power to elect representatives to the national government, but because the masses still lacked national awareness, Sun prescribed an indefinite period of “political tutelage” led by the Nationalist Party. As the people became more politically responsible, the powers of the electorate would gradually increase. In practice, the Nationalist Party used the notion of political tutelage to justify a dictatorship, which began to allow multiparty elections on Taiwan only in the late 1980s.
The third principle, the livelihood of the people, addressed Chinese poverty. Influenced by Confucian ideals of harmony and the writings of Henry George and Maurice William, Sun believed that the cooperative pursuit of a gradually higher standard of living—not a class struggle, as Karl Marx had asserted—was the driving force of historical evolution. For Sun the true goal of revolution was not to encourage class conflict but to improve people's lives through peaceful means. Primarily, this meant using the government's resources to control key industries and improve the nation's economy. Meanwhile, Sun recognized the social problem of China's high tenancy rates. But he spurned violent land redistribution and instead advocated using tax policies to achieve modest social leveling while economic modernization raised living standards for everyone.
Sun first mentioned the Three Principles in 1905, but it was late in his career when he expressed them as a single philosophy. Originally proposed in a series of speeches that attempted to appease competing factions in the Nationalist Party, the principles sometimes seem contradictory and eclectic rather than cohesive. Many Western observers thus denigrated the principles as philosophy. Yet during the period of Nationalist rule in China from 1927to1949, they were elevated to the status of a dogma. Officials used them to justify government policies, children memorized them in schools, and Nationalist theorists emphasized Sun's insightfulness and originality. In Taiwan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Three Principles are still revered as the foundation for the island's modern democracy. Both the Nationalist Party on Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland still claim to represent the legacy of Sun Yat-sen.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. © 2008
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