The Three Principles of the People (Chinese: 三民主義; pinyin: Sānmín Zhǔyì) refer to a nationalist, republican, anti-imperialist political ideology developed by Sun Yat-sen which consist of nationalism (民族主義), democracy (民權主義), and people's welfare (民生主義). The Principles were influenced by a broad set of influences, including Georgism, Marxism, and Chinese utopianism. Under Kuomintang rule, Sun's thought achieved canonical status as part of an overall cult of personality. Aided by fellow members of his Tongmenghui, Sun first set forth the Principles in 1905, notably in a polemic published by the newly-founded party newspaper Minbao; later editions featured articles on the theme by Sun's associates. From January to August 1924, Sun delivered a series of weekly lectures on the Principles, which were later collected and published under the title The Three Principles of the People. After Sun's death in 1925, the Kuomintang united China under its banner and established Sun's principles, as codified in the 1924 lectures and interpreted by party leader Chiang Kai-shek, were made the official ideology of the state. Under Communist rule, both Sun and his Principles were comparatively minimized, until Deng's era of reform, during which they were used to justify his Four Modernizations.
History
Origins In 1894, Sun Yat-sen founded the radically anti-Qing Revive China Society. After the failure of its 1895 uprising, Sun entered a years-long exile, part of which he spent in England. Apart from a brief and well-publicized detention in the Chinese Legation, the time was a period of profound intellectual study and formation, to which he later dated the conception of his nascent Principles. After another uprising in 1900, Sun was forced to compete for diaspora support with the reformist leaders Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, thus spending much of 1903-1905 visiting to overseas Chinese communities across the world, including San Francisco in 1904. The Revive China Society member Liu Cheng-yu would later claim in his memoirs that, while both in San Francisco, he and Sun had a conversation which inspired the latter to incorporate the principle of people's livelihood into his nascent platform. Around the same time, his rhetoric also evolved to reflect the more radical anti-Manchuism of the newly forming radical student movements, whom he courted throughout the period. In a European visit in 1905, Sun made significant progress in winning them to his side: additionally, in a speech in Brussels, Sun set forth for the first time the ideas behind his Principles. In October 1905, Sun, Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren, and other radical figures formed the Tongmenghui in Tokyo. In the party's manifesto, and in an article written by Sun for the first edition of the party paper (Minbao), the Three Principles of the People ( whose party manifesto set forth the Three Principles of the People as a feature of its program. In the first edition of the party newspaper Minbao, Sun wrote an article explaining what those Principles meant: subsequently, younger collaborators, like Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei, Feng Ziyou, fleshed out the Principles into an ideology. In December 1906, the Hong Kong newspaper Republic Daily carried an advertisement for Minbao. Later, Feng Ziyou claimed that, while editing a Hong Kong Tongmenghui paper, he ran an advertisement for Minbao, in which he shortened the phrase "promoting nationalism, democracy, and people's welfare" (提倡民族主義民權主義民生主義) to the term “Three Principles of the People” (三民主義).
In Minbao
From 1905 to 1907, Sun Yat-sen and (to a much greater degree) collaborators like Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and Song Jiaoren wrote a number of articles in Minbao on the Three Principles, in order to provide definition to them as an ideology and assist in the struggle against the Tongmenghui's reformist foes, including Liang Qichao. Among the themes of the articles was anti-Manchuism, which featured in the rhetoric of Minbao as the basis of Chinese nationalism. Wang Jingwei, for instance, argued in his article A Nation of Citizens that China's Han majority was destined to assimilate with the Manchu due to the latter's stark racial incompatibility. Constitutionalism, therefore, was merely a ploy to strengthen Manchu power over Han provincial officials: the Manchus could no more address the revolutionaries' concerns than "that the horse will sprout horns". The Minbao polemicists also assailed Liang Qichao on the matter of democracy. Liang believed that China's national interests demanded the unity of its population under the existing dynasty, which should be transformed into an enlightened autocracy (開明專制, kaiming zhuanzhi). He argued that China was unready for a republic, and that in any case founding a republic meant revolution, and therefore chaos. In response, Sun and his allies argued that republicanism was the most modern, and thus best, form of government in existence. Moreover, republican ideals, he claimed, were rooted in Chinese culture. As for people's livelihood, Liang claimed that social revolution was both unnecessary and potentially harmful: what China really needed was a program of capitalist industrial benefit. In response, Zhu Zhixin claimed that the Tongmenghui's form of socialism did not demand the expropriation of private property or the dictatorship of the proletariat: what the Tongmenghui wanted was a "state socialism" whose main target consisted only of monopolies. In another article, Feng Ziyou claimed that social revolution was necessary if China wanted to avoid the massive inequality and exploitation reigning in the West.
Sun's 1924 lectures
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