The first step in reconstruction is to promote the economic well-being of the people by providing for their four necessities of life, namely, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. For this purpose, the Government will, with the people's co-operation, develop agriculture to give the people an adequate food supply, promote textile industries to solve their clothing problem, institute gigantic housing schemes to provide for them decent living quarters, and build roads and canals so that they may have convenient means of travel.
Next is the promotion of democracy....
The third step is the development of nationalism....[298]
The plans for realizing min shêng were to be the most necessary and the most difficult. In the change from a world-society to a race-nation, the Chinese had their own social solidarity and the experience of the Western nations to guide them. There was little in the development of a nation that had not already been tried elsewhere. The only real obstacles were the ignorance of the people, in relation to the new social environment in which their whole society was involved, and the possibility of opposition from the politically oppressing powers.
In the development of democracy the Chinese could rely in part upon the experience of the West. The Kuomintang could observe the machinery of democratic states in regular operation abroad. Although the new democracy of the five powers and the four rights was differed from the democratic methods of the West, still, as in mechanics, certain fundamental rules of political organization in its technical details could be relied upon. The Chinese people had a democratic background in the autonomy of the various extra-political units.
In min shêng neither the experience of the West nor the old Chinese background would be of much value. More than the other two principles and programs, min shêng sought to alter the constitution and nature of Chinese society. Yet in min shêng the Chinese were to be [pg 240] guided only negatively by Western experience. Into their society, passing through a great economic upheaval, they must introduce, by a trial-and-error method, the requirements for economic unity, efficiency, and justice.
The National Economic Revolution.
After the pitiable failure of the 1912 Republic, Sun Yat-sen began to place an especially heavy emphasis on the necessity of a national economic revolution which would carry on the achievements of the national political revolution. He placed an even greater stress upon the necessity of min shêng in the revolutionary ideology, and became more and more clearly conscious of the danger imperialism constituted to the Chinese race-nation. He believed that, as the 1912 revolution had been created by the sword, the new economic revolution might be furthered by the pen, and with this in mind he wrote The International Development of China. At the time that he wrote this work, he seems to have been convinced of the fruitlessness of purely military effort, and the superior value of pacific economic organization.[299]
This organization was to be effected through capital brought in from the outside. As it developed that capital would not come in, that instead of continuing the terrific pace of production which the World War had demanded, the nations returned to comparative laissez faire, and let their economies slump, Sun was persuaded that the whole revolution would have to be carried on by the Chinese themselves, with the possible help of the Communist Russians, and of Japan. He found the reorganized Kuomintang to be the instrument of this last revolution, both politically and democratically, and began to emphasize Chinese resistance to the outside, rather than appeal for help from the barbarian nations.