Three principles of the people
Sun Yat sen's three principles
While the warlords were fighting amongst themselves and doing battle to control Beijing, opposition to them was building.
Next time, I will discuss the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. But first, let’s have a look at Sun Yatsen and his KMT again, as well as his three principles. The Communists will at multiple times, form a united front with the KMT. It’s important to understand what interests and ideas they shared and how they differed.
As mentioned a few episodes ago, Sun Yatsen had been the first president of the Republic of China and first Chairman of the KMT political party before his successor Yuan Shikai banned the KMT. Sun helped form a new government in Guangzhou in southern China and was named Generalissimo or Commander-in-Chief until he was pushed aside in 1919. He led government there again from 1921 to 1922, before being pushed aside again by southern warlords.
When Sun was not in power anywhere, he spent time thinking, reading, and writing. He refined his views on the People’s Three Principles. These core ideas were to be an inspiration not only to the KMT, but also a reason for collaboration between the KMT party and the new Communist Party of China.
Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People have been important both in mainland China and in Taiwan. Both the KMT Nationalists and the Communists valued them in China’s national development. Sun first mentioned them in 1905, and his last book published in 1924, a year before his death, was called the Three Principles of the People.
What are the three principles of the people?
The first principle is nationalism. Sun wanted the Chinese to govern themselves. He viewed Han Chinese as the dominant group in China (since they make up more than 90% of the population) and therefore should govern. Prior to the successful 1911 Revolution, Sun opposed the Qing Dynasty since it was a Manchu elite that had asserted control over all of China.
To his credit, Sun also supported the legal equality of the races within China. He recognized that there were Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu and Muslim minorities inside China. The Republic of China guaranteed legal equality for all these so called Five Races of China.
After the 1911 Revolution, once the Manchu emperor had abdicated, Sun’s nationalism principle evolved. The battle for Han leadership had been won. Now, this national principle became increasingly anti-imperialist. China needed to be freed from the imperial powers that were taking its ports, living in concessions under their own laws, all on territory that should be Chinese. In its negative expression, the Chinese nation needed to defend itself to prevent its extinction under foreign domination. In its positive form, China needed to re-assert itself to govern all its territory, free of foreign control.
Sun invented the term hypocolony to describe China in the early 20th century. It was not a colony of one country, he said, but of all the imperial powers.
To put this in concrete terms, Sun wanted all the foreign concessions to be abolished and those lands returned to Chinese control. That basically did happen by the end of the Second World War, under his successor Chiang Kai-shek. The only exceptions were Hong Kong and Macau, which were returned to China in the late 1990s. The Soviet Union also occupied parts of Manchuria from Japan at the end of the Second World War from 1945 to 1950 and only returned them to China after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed. So, Sun’s first national principle has now been realized.
The second of Sun’s three principles was democracy, or the rights of the people. Sun was one of China’s earliest proponents of democracy and a republic. When others were pushing for a constitutional monarchy, he retorted that a modern China should not import an outdated locomotive. It should have the newest model. Sun achieved that goal in 1912, once the imperial dynasty abdicated and a Chinese republic was founded. But then it was disrespected by its leaders, like Yuan Shikai, who outlawed the most popular political party and closed Parliament. So, Sun refined the rights of the people further. He distinguished between the histories of Europe and of China. In Europe, the monarchs had been overwhelming in their control of their people’s religion, social practices and economic activities. In contrast, the Chinese Emperor’s control of people’s lives had been weaker. It had not really descended to the village level. So, what China needed, Sun said, was not more individual liberty, but national liberty. China needed to be liberated and he opposed disintegration of the country into a federation. He stood for a unified, national state with the liberty to decide its own path.
He believed the people had the power to dismiss those who governed, like the shareholders of a company could fire its management.
Sun reflected on the three divisions of government in the United States, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial systems and added two more that had precedent in Chinese history. The Examination and the Control systems would complete a five branch government system. The Examination System to manage the civil service and the Control system to audit and impeach government officials when appropriate. This government system proposed by Sun was implemented by his successor in mainland China and is in effect in Taiwan today. It is a legacy of Sun Yat-sen’s ideas for democracy in practice.
Sun imagined that China would need a transition period before it could be a full democracy. There would be a military or revolutionary period, when the old regime and counterrevolutionaries would be defeated. Then a political tutelage period during which education of the people would be key. Finally, a constitutional period. When Sun first articulated it, he expected that the first two periods would require three years each, before passing to real democracy within 6 years. Sun dismissed the need for a monarchy or dictatorship in China. He said if a horse or ox could be trained, why couldn’t the Chinese people learn and become citizens?
In reality, the transition to democracy took longer. Around 1987, martial law ended in the Republic of China, which had relocated to Taiwan. Since then, elections have led to peaceful transitions of power between the two main political parties there.
Whether you believe that the People’s Republic of China is a democracy depends on your views of communism and to what extend you believe it expresses the will of the people.
Sun Yat-sen’s third principle was the Livelihood of the People. When Sun first articulated it around 1905, he was taken by the ideas of the American writer Henry George who had been very popular in the late 19th century. Henry George had influenced US politics in the Progressive Era, when anti-trust legislation and other laws limiting the power of monopoly capitalism were enacted.
In particular, Sun liked Henry George’s ideas for the distribution and taxation of land. George’s idea was that people should be rewarded for their effort and work, but that the general increase in value of land over time from other factors should belong to the state. Since China was about to modernize and industrialize, Sun didn’t want existing landowners to idly profit just because their land increased in value. Instead, the state would, which would allow it to reinvest the funds in public projects. Sun’s proposal was for a form of state socialism that still allowed for the private ownership and development of property. People would still profit from their own effort. Sun wanted to avoid the creation of great disparities of wealth and therefore to avoid any need for class warfare. He wanted to learn from those countries that had already modernized and industrialized to avoid their mistakes.
Sun noted that progressive reforms in the previous decades in Europe and America had contradicted Karl Marx’s predictions. Working hours had gone down and not up. Workers wages, education and rights had increased, not decreased. Prices for goods had decreased not increased. All of this was different than Marx had expected.
Sun believed the goal should be harmony and not conflict between capitalists and workers. This thinking reflects some of the authors that Sun had been reading, like Maurice William, an American socialist who had rejected Marxism. William pointed to Henry Ford’s automobile business. It had increased its employees’ wages dramatically, brought down the prices of its Model T Fords so that ordinary people could afford a car and was hugely successful as a corporation.
Sun, in his speeches, said many things. China’s problem was not that it had rich and poor, but that all Chinese were poor, he explained. He wanted increased production and an increase in the nation’s wealth. But Sun also believed that it was unfair that landowners were gaining from the increased value of their land and the peasants were working hard and having to pay a 50% share of their crop.
Sun’s explanation of the People’s Livelihood was influenced by his negotiations with the Soviet Union for support for his northern expedition shortly before his death. So, Sun also said that this principle could be called socialist or communist. That gave lots of room for future disagreement on what Sun actually meant. Sun died in 1925 and those that survived him used his words as support for their own political agendas. Leftists interpreted Sun’s teachings one way, while Rightists described it another way.
It should be noted that when Sun did receive support from the Soviet Union and when he agreed to cooperate with the new Chinese Communist Party, it was after Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union. That was a loosening of the original strict rules against commerce and small businesses. At that time in the early 1920s, the USSR was experimenting and allowing private food production, markets and shopkeeping in order to overcome the shortages the new communist state had experienced. At that moment, the USSR economic policy was at its most permissive in its entire history prior to Gorbachev. That helped Sun find common ground with this willing ally to the north of China.
So, those Three Principles are key KMT ideology, as articulated by Sun Yat sen, the original chairman and leader of the party.
