His Political Testament cites the Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction), the Chien Kuo Ta Kang (The Outline of National Reconstruction), the San Min Chu I (The Triple Demism, also translated as The Three Principles of the People), and the Manifesto issued by the first national congress of the Party.[5] These four items differ quite sharply from one another in form. No one of them can be relied upon to give the whole of Sun's doctrines.
The Chien Kuo Fang Lo (The Program of National Reconstruction) is in reality three works, only remotely related to one another. The first item in the trilogy is the Sun Wên Hsüeh Shê (The Philosophy of Sun Wên); it is a series of familiar essays on the Chinese way of thought.[6] The second is the Min Ch'üan Ts'u Pu, The Primer of Democracy, which is little more than a text on parliamentary law.[7] The third is the Shih Yeh Chi Hua, known in English as The International Development [pg 005]of China, which Sun wrote in both English and Chinese.[8] These three works, under the alternate titles of “The Program of Psychological Reconstruction,” “The Program of Social Reconstruction,” and “The Program of Material Reconstruction” form The Program of National Reconstruction.
The Chien Kuo Ta Kang, The Outline of National Reconstruction, is an outline of twenty-five points, giving the necessary steps towards the national reconstruction in their most concise form.[9]
The San Min Chu I is Sun's most important work. It comprises sixteen lectures setting forth his socio-political theories and his programs. The title most commonly used in Western versions is The Three Principles of the People.[10]
The last document mentioned in Sun Yat-sen's will was the Manifesto of the first national congress of the Kuomintang. This was not written by himself, but was drafted by Wang Ch'ing-wei, one of his closest followers, and embodies essentially the same ideas as do the other three items, even though Borodin—the emissary of the Third International—had been consulted in its preparation.[11]
Sun undoubtedly regretted leaving such a heterogeneous and ill-assembled group of works as his literary bequest. [pg 006] Throughout the latter years of his life he was studying political science in the hope that he might be able to complete a great treatise which he had projected, an analysis and statement of the programs of the Chinese nationalists. One attempt toward actualization of this work was frustrated when Sun's manuscripts and a great part of his library were burned in the attack launched against him by Ch'en Ch'iung-ming in 1922. His apology for the makeshift volume on the San Min Chu I is pathetic: “As I had neither time to prepare nor books to use as references, I could do nothing else in these lectures but improvise after I ascended the platform. Thus I have omitted and forgotten many things which were in my original manuscript. Although before having them printed, I revised them, added (passages) and eliminated (others), yet, those lectures are far from coming up to my original manuscripts, either in the subject matter itself, or in the concatenations of the discussion, or in the facts adduced as proofs.”[12] Sun was in all probability a more assiduous and widely read student of political science than any other world leader of his day except Wilson; he studied innumerable treatises on government, and was surprisingly familiar with the general background of Western politics, in theory and practice. He was aware of the shabby appearance that these undigested occasional pieces would present when put forth as the bible of a new China, and earnestly enjoined his followers to carry on his labors and bring them to fruition.[13]
The various works included in the Chien Kuo Fang Lo, while satisfactory for the purposes Sun had in mind when he wrote them, are not enough to outline the fundamentals both of political theory and a governmental plan. The familiar essays have an important bearing on the formation of the ideology of a new China; the primer [pg 007] of democracy, less; the industrial plan is one of those magnificent dreams which, in the turn of a decade, may inspire an equally great reality. The outline and the manifesto are no more suited to the rôle of classics; they are decalogues rather than bibles.[14] There remains the San Min Chu I.
The San Min Chu I is a collection of sixteen lectures delivered in Canton in 1924. There were to have been eighteen, but Sun was unable to give the last two. Legend has it that Borodin persuaded Sun to give the series.[15] Whatever the cause of their being offered, they attracted immediate attention. Interest in Sun and in his ideas was at a fever heat; his friends turned to the printed lectures for guidance; his enemies, for statements which could be turned against him. Both friends and enemies found what they wanted. To the friends, the San Min Chu I presented a fairly complete outline of Sun's political and social thought in such a form that it could be preserved and broadcast readily. There was danger, before the book appeared, that the intrinsic unity in Sun's thinking would be lost sight of by posterity, that his ideas would appear as a disconnected jumble of brilliant inspirations. The sixteen lectures incorporated a great part of the doctrines which he had been preaching for more than a generation. To the enemies of Sun, the work was welcome. They pointed out the numerous simplifications and inconsistencies, the frequent contradictions in matters of detail, the then outrageous denunciations of the economic and political system predominant in the Far East. They ridiculed Sun because he was Chinese, and because he was not Chinese enough, and backed up their criticisms with passages from the book.[16]
When Sun gave the lectures, he was a sick man. He carried an ivory-headed sword cane with him on the platform; occasionally, holding it behind him and locking his arms through it, he would press it against his back to relieve the intolerable pain.[17] The business awaiting him after each lecture was vitally important; the revolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. The lectures are the lectures of a sick man, given to a popular audience in the uproar of revolution, without adequate preparation, improvised in large part, and offered as one side of a crucial and bitterly disputed question. The secretaries who took down the lectures may not have succeeded in following them completely; Sun had no leisure to do more than skim through the book before releasing it to the press.
These improvised lectures have had to serve as the fundamental document of Nationalist China. Sun Yat-sen died without writing the treatise he had planned. The materials he left behind were a challenge to scholars and to his followers. Many persons set to work interpreting them, each with a conscious or unconscious end in view. A German Marxian showed Sun to be a forerunner of bolshevism; an American liberal showed Sun to be a bulwark against bolshevism. A Chinese classicist demonstrated Sun's reverence for the past; a Jesuit father explained much by Sun's modern and Christian background. His works have been translated into Western [pg 009] languages without notes; the improvised lectures, torn from their context of a revolutionary crisis, have served poorly to explain the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and his long range political, social, and economic plans.