1. The Kuomintang was to be the instrument of the revolution. Re-formed under the influence of the Communist advisers, it had become a powerful weapon of agitation. It was, as will be seen in the discussion of the plans for democracy, to become a governing system as well. Its primary purpose was to carry out the advancement of nationalism by the elimination of the tuchuns and other anti-national groups in China, and by an application of the three principles, one by one, of the nationalist program.
2. The Kuomintang should foster the ideology of nationalism and arouse the Chinese people to the precarious position of their country. In order to make nationalism politically effective, state allegiance had to supplant the old personal allegiance to the Dragon Throne, or the personal allegiance to the neo-feudal militarists.
3. Nationalism should be exerted economically, to develop the country in accord with the ideology of min shêng and to clear away imperialist economic oppression which interfered with both nationalism and min shêng.
4. Nationalism had to be exerted politically, for two ends: Chinese democracy, and Chinese autonomy, which Sun often spoke of as one. This had to be done by active political [pg 207]resistance to aggression and by the advancement of a China state-ized and democratic.
5. Nationalism had also to be exercised politically, in another manner: in the class war of the nations. China should fight the racial and economic oppression of the ruling white powers, in common with the other oppressed nations and the one benevolent white nation (Soviet Russia).
6. Nationalism had to reinforce itself through its racial kinships. China had to help her fellow Asiatic nations, in a pan-Asia movement, and restore justice to Asia and to the world.
This recapitulation serves to show the curious developments of Sun Yat-sen's nationalist program. Originally based upon his ideology, then influenced by the race-orientation of a good deal of his political thought, and finally reconciled to the programmatic necessities of his Communist allies, it is surprising not in its diversity but in its homogeneity under the circumstances. This mixture of elements, which appears much more distinctly in Sun's own words than it does in a rephrasing, led some Western students who dealt with Sun to believe that his mind was a cauldron filled with a political witch-brew. If it is remembered that the points discussed were programmatic points, which changed with the various political developments encountered by Sun and his followers, and not the fundamental premises of his thought and action (which remained surprisingly constant, as far as one can judge, throughout his life), the inner consistency of Sun Yat-sen will appear. These plans could not have endured under any circumstances, since they were set in a particular time. The ideology may.
In turning from the nationalist to the democratic plans of Sun Yat-sen, we encounter a distinct change in the type of material. Orderly and precise instead of chaotic and near-contradictory, the democratic plans of Sun Yat-sen [pg 208] present a detailed scheme of government based squarely on his democratic ideology, and make no concessions to the politics of the moment. Here his nationalism finds its clearest expression. The respective autonomies of the individual, the clan, the hsien and the nation are accounted for; the nature of the democratic nationalist state becomes clear. Programmatically, it is the clearest, and, perhaps, the soundest, part of Sun's work.