That the third principle meant something to Sun Yat-sen is shown by the fact that when Sung Chiao-jen, who a few years later was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs of the revolution, suggested in the period of the first provisional Republic at Nanking that the Third Principle had better be omitted altogether, Sun was enraged, and declared that if _min shêng_ were to be given up, the whole revolution might as well be abandoned.(174)
Since _min shêng_, in its third significance, that of the development of a socially just distributive system, was not Marxian nor yet unimportant, it may be contrasted once again with the communist doctrines, and then studied for its actual content. In contrasting it with Marxism, it might be of value to observe, first, the criticism that the Marxians levy against it, and second, the distinctions that nationalist and European critics make between _min shêng_ and communism.
Dr. Karl Wittfogel, the German Marxist whose work on Sun Yat-sen is the most satisfactory of its kind, points out the apparent contradictions in the _San Min Chu I_: on the one hand, statements which are not only objectively but subjectively friendly to capitalism (on the excellence of the Ford plant; on the necessity for the coöperation of capital and labor)—on the other, the unmerciful condemnation of capitalism; on the one hand, the declaration that there is no capitalism in China—on the other, that capitalism must be destroyed as it appears; on the right, the statement that communism and _min shêng_ are opposed—on the left, that the communist doctrines are a subsidiary part of the ideology of _min shêng_.(175) How, asks Wittfogel, does this all fit together? He answers by pointing out the significance of Sun’s theses when considered in relation to the dialectical-materialist interpretation of recent Far Eastern history:
in their _development_ the objective change in the socio-economic situation of China, in their _contradictions_ the real contradictions of the Chinese revolution, in their _latest tendencies_ the transposition of the social center of gravity of the revolution, which sets the classes in action, and whose aim is no longer a bourgeois capitalist one, but proletarian-socialist and peasant agrarian-revolutionary.