Three Principles of the People

zh-cn:三民主义 zh-tw:三民主義

The Republic of China's national anthem is also by the same name.

The Three Principles of the People (三民主義 ; Pinyin: Sān M�n Zhǔy� ; Wade-Giles: San-min Chu-i), also translated as Three People's Principles, or collectively Sanmin Doctrine, is a political philosophy developed by Sun Yat-sen as part of a program to make China a free, prosperous, and powerful nation. Its legacy of implementation is most apparent in the governmental organization of the Republic of China, which currently administers Taiwan, Penghu, Quemoy, and Matsu Islands.

Table of contents

1 Enumeration of the principles
2 Influences, canon, and legacy
3 See also

Enumeration of the principles

The Principle of M�nz� (Min�-tsu�, 民族主義 "The People's Relation/Connection"): Nationalism. By this, Sun meant freedom from imperialist domination.
The Principle of M�nqu�n (Min�-ch'uan�, 民權主義 "The People's Power"): Democracy. To Sun, it represented a Western constitutional government. First, he divided political life of his ideal for China into two 'powers':
- The power of politics (zhèngquán): This is the power of the people to express their political wishes, similar to a parliament in other countries, and is represented by the National Assembly.
- The power of governance (zhìquán): This is the power of administration. Here he expanded the European-American constitutional theory of a three-branch government and a system of checks and balances by incorporating traditional Chinese administrative tradition to create a government of five branches (each of which is called a yuàn or 'court'). The Legislative Yuan, the Executive Yuan, and the Judicial Yuan came from Montesquieuanan thought; the Control Yuan and the Examination Yuan came from Chinese tradition. (Note that the Legislative Yuan was first intended as a branch of governance, not strictly equivalent to a national parliament.)
The Principle of M�nshēng (Min�-sheng�, 民生主義 "The People's Welfare/Livelihood"): Socialism. Sun understood as an industrial economy and equality of land holdings for the Chinese peasant farmers. Here he was influenced by the American thinker Henry George (see Georgism); the Land Value Tax in Taiwan is a legacy thereof. He divided livelihood into four areas: food, clothing, housing, and transportation; and planned out how an ideal (Chinese) government can take care of these for its people.

Influences, canon, and legacy

The ideology is heavily influenced by Sun's experiences in the United States and contains elements of the American progressive movement and the thought championed by Abraham Lincoln.

The most definite (canonical) exposition of these principles was a book compiled from notes of speeches Sun gave near Guangzhou (taken by a colleague in consultation with Sun), and therefore is open to interpretation by various parties and interest groups (see below) and may not have been as fully explicated as Sun might have wished. Indeed, in the Confucian scholarly tradition of annotation and explication, Chiang Kai-shek supplied an annex to The Principle of M�nshēng, covering two additional areas of livelihood: education and leisure.

The Three People's Principles was claimed as the basis for the ideologies of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek, of the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong, and of the Japanese collaborationist government under Wang Jingwei. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China largely agreed on the meaning of nationalism but differed sharply on the meaning of democracy and people's welfare, which the former saw in Western social democratic terms and the latter interpreted in Marxist and Communist terms. The Japanese collaborationist governments interpreted nationalism less in terms of anti-imperialism and more in terms of cooperating with Japan to advance pan-Asian interests.

There were several higher-education institutes (university departments/faculties and graduate institutess) in Taiwan that used to devote themselves to the 'research and development' of the Three Principles; in this aspect, they are similar to those dedicated to one single political theory each, such as those for Juche (Kimilsungism) and for Maoism, elsewhere in the world. Since the late 1990s, these institutes have re-oriented themselves so that other political theories are also admitted as worthy of consideration. In addition to this institutional phenomenon, many streets and businesses in Taiwan are named "Sanmin" or for one of the three principles.