The most careful Marxian critic of Sun Yat-sen, writing of the principle of min shêng and its two main planks, land reform and state capitalism, says: “This very vague program, which does not refer to class interests nor to the class struggle as the means of breaking privileged class interests, was objectively not socialism at all, but something [pg 138] else altogether: Lenin coined the formula, ‘subjective socialism,’ for it.”[169] He adds, later: “Hence Sun's socialism meant, on the lips of the Chinese bourgeoisie, nothing but a sort of declaration for a ‘social’ economic policy, that is, a policy friendly to the masses.”[170] T'ang Liang-li declares that the third principle at this time adopted “a frankly socialistic attitude,”[171] but implies elsewhere that its inadequacy was seen by a Chinese Marxist, Chu Chih-hsin.[172] This evidence, as far as it goes, shows that Sun Yat-sen had had the opportunity to become acquainted with Marxism, and that even on the occasion of the first formulation of the principle of min shêng he used none of its tenets. The revolutionary critic, T'ang Liang-li, who, a devoted and brilliant Nationalist in action, writes with a sort of European left-liberal orientation, suggests that the Third Principle grew with the growth of capitalist industrialism in China.[173] This is true: economic maladjustment would emphasize the need for ideological reconstruction with reference to the economy. There is no need to resort to Marxian analysis.
That the third principle meant something to Sun Yat-sen is shown by the fact that when Sung Chiao-jen, who a few years later was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs of the revolution, suggested in the period of the first provisional Republic at Nanking that the Third Principle had better be omitted altogether, Sun was enraged, [pg 139] and declared that if min shêng were to be given up, the whole revolution might as well be abandoned.[174]
Since min shêng, in its third significance, that of the development of a socially just distributive system, was not Marxian nor yet unimportant, it may be contrasted once again with the communist doctrines, and then studied for its actual content. In contrasting it with Marxism, it might be of value to observe, first, the criticism that the Marxians levy against it, and second, the distinctions that nationalist and European critics make between min shêng and communism.
Dr. Karl Wittfogel, the German Marxist whose work on Sun Yat-sen is the most satisfactory of its kind, points out the apparent contradictions in the San Min Chu I: on the one hand, statements which are not only objectively but subjectively friendly to capitalism (on the excellence of the Ford plant; on the necessity for the coöperation of capital and labor)—on the other, the unmerciful condemnation of capitalism; on the one hand, the declaration that there is no capitalism in China—on the other, that capitalism must be destroyed as it appears; on the right, the statement that communism and min shêng are opposed—on the left, that the communist doctrines are a subsidiary part of the ideology of min shêng.[175] How, asks Wittfogel, does this all fit together? He answers by pointing out the significance of Sun's theses when considered in relation to the dialectical-materialist interpretation of recent Far Eastern history:
His three principles incorporate
in their development the objective change in the socio-economic situation of China,
in their contradictions the real contradictions of the Chinese revolution,
in their latest tendencies the transposition of the social center of gravity of the revolution, which sets the classes in action, [pg 140]and whose aim is no longer a bourgeois capitalist one, but proletarian-socialist and peasant agrarian-revolutionary.
Sun Yat-sen is according to this not only the hitherto most powerful representative of the bourgeois-national, anti-imperialist revolutions of awakening Asia; he points at the same time outwards over the bourgeois class limitations of the first step of the Asiatic movement for liberation. To deny this were portentuous, even for the proletarian communist movement of Eastern Asia.[176]
The modifications which the Marxians have introduced into their programs with respect to the class struggle in colonial countries do not imply a corresponding modification of their ideology. The determinism adopted from Hegel, the economic interpretation of history—these and other dogmas are held by the Marxians to be universally valid despite their Western origin.