The Economic Background of China's Nationalist Movement52

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.