The Economic Background of Min Shêng.

What was the nature of the background which decided Sun Yat-sen to draw an economic program into the total of his nationalist ideology for the regeneration of China through a nationalist revolution? Was Sun Yat-sen dissatisfied [pg 126] with the economic order of the old society? Was he interested in a reconstitution of the economic system for the sake of defense against Western powers?

He was unquestionably dissatisfied with the economic order of things in the old society, but it was a dissatisfaction with what the old order had failed to achieve rather than a feeling of the injustice of the Chinese distributive system. He was bitter against a taxation system which worked out unevenly,146 and against the extortions of the internal-transit revenue officials under the Empire.147 He was deeply impressed by his first encounter with Western mechanical achievement—the S. S. Grannoch, which took him from Kwangtung to Honolulu.148 But he had served in the shop of his brother as a young boy,149 and knew the small farm life of South China intimately. On the basis of this first-hand knowledge, and his many years of association with the working people of China, he was not likely to attack the old economic system for its injustice so much as for its inadequacy.150

That there were injustices in the old system of Chinese economy, no one can deny, but these injustices were scarcely sufficient to provoke, of themselves alone, the complete alteration of economic outlook that Sun Yat-sen proposed. Chinese capitalism had not reached the state of industrial capitalism until after its contact with the West; at the most it was a primitive sort of usury-capitalism practised by the three economically dominant groups of old China—landholders, officials, and merchant-usurers.151 The disturbances which hurt the economic condition [pg 127] of the country, and thereby led to greater disturbances, had involved China in a vicious cycle of decline which could scarcely be blamed on any one feature or any one group in the old economy. The essential fault lay with the condition of the country as a whole, directly affected by the economic consequences of Western trade and partial industrialization.152

Sun Yat-sen's positive dissatisfaction with the economy of his time arose from the position which he felt China had in the modern business world. He believed that, by virtue of the economic oppression of the Chinese by the Western powers, China had been degraded to the position of the lowest nation on earth—that the Chinese were even more unfortunate than “slaves without a country,” such as the Koreans and the Annamites.153 The particular forms of this oppression, and Sun Yat-sen's plans for meeting it, may be more aptly described in the consideration of his program of economic national regeneration.154 The Chinese nation occupied the ignominious position of a sub-colony or—as Sun himself termed it—“a hypo-colony”; “Our people are realizing that to be a semi-colony is a national disgrace; but our case is worse than that; our country is in the position of a sub-colony (since it is the colony of all the Great Powers and not merely subject to one of them), a position which is inferior to an ordinary colony such as Korea and Annam.”155

[pg 128]

What, then, were the positive implications of the principle of min shêng in the nationalist ideology?