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The Economic Background of China's Nationalist Movement52

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert T. Pollard
Robert T. Pollard
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

The events of the past five years in China furnish abundant evidence of the economic background of politics. Hostility between British Hongkong and Chinese Canton may be said to date from the Hongkong seamen's strike of 1922, and it will be remembered that the Shanghai disturbance of 1925, with the resulting popular disorders in other parts of the country, arose out of a series of strikes in Japanese-owned cotton mills of the city. Moreover, the spectacular progress of the Nationalist movement during the past two years is due in no small degree to the widespread economic unrest produced by chronic civil war, interrupted communications within the country, depreciated currencies, unfavorable conditions in the factories, and steadily mounting price levels.

The third of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's “Three Principles of the People,” on which the Nationalist movement as a whole rests, is concerned with economic conditions. The first of the three principles is Ming Zoh, meaning a race or a people, and it is used in connection with the right of a people to exist on a footing of equality with other races or peoples. The prestige enjoyed by Soviet Russia in Kuomintang circles is directly traceable to the willingness of Russia to recognize this principle of Ming Zoh, thereby dealing with the Chinese as the Russians' racial and national equals.

Type
Foreign Governments and Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , November 1927 , pp. 853 - 857
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1927

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References

53 Dr. Sun's views are set forth in considerable detail in his “San Ming Chu I,” or “Three Principles of the People.” So far as the writer knows, the book has not been translated into English. It covers about five hundred pages and contains occasional addresses rather than a consistent body of doctrine. A translation of Dr. Sun's short “Main Outline for the Reconstruction of the National Government,” dealing very briefly with the major principles of the Nationalist movement, is to be found in the North China Herald (Shanghai) for January 22, 1927, p. 126Google Scholar.

54 There has been a marked recent tendency, due to labor union pressure, to limit the number of working hours to twelve, or even ten. During the past six months even the cry for an eight-hour day has been raised.

55 The figures are fairly, but not strictly, accurate. The monthly report does not always distinguish new strikes occurring in a particular month from those carried over from the previous month. An attempt has been made to eliminate this error. The number of working days lost during October, 1926, is not given.

56 In the Shanghai provisional court (the successor to the mixed court) during March, the murderer of a forewoman in a Chinese mill confessed that a member of the general labor union had paid him $10 to commit the crime, and that he was to get $10 more on returning the borrowed pistol. He got, instead, a life sentence.

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