No-one’s ever asked me about my values. If they did, I’d say I generally hold with the 3 Principles of the People. Back when Old China was becoming New China, but before the communists won, there was a fella by the name of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. He was a working-class1 Chinese guy who’d gone to highschool in Hawaii, and he’d gotten interested in modern ways of doing things. The all-encompassing conservatism of Imperial China pissed him off, because the government’s unwillingness to make changes stopped them from fighting corruption or adopting new technology. When he went to med school in Hong Kong, he met up with some like-minded dudes and got into underground politics. This journey would take him to some wild places, like fighting in several wars, getting kidnapped by Imperial agents in London, and eventually becoming the provisional President of China. He died of liver cancer before he could achieve his goal of a successful, unified China, but both Taiwan and the PRC continue to honor him as one of China’s preeminent thinkers. All his ideas about society stemmed from 3 basic points, the things he thought a society needed if anyone was gonna call it successful:
- National Rights
- The China of Dr. Sun’s time was internally divided and at the mercy of foreign powers. Powerful countries like Russia, Japan, and Britain controlled many of China’s key cities and railroads, dictating ridiculously lopsided trade deals at the point of some very big guns. Inside China, the northern Manchu people excluded other ethnic groups from high government positions, because the Imperial dynasty descended from Manchu conquerors.
- Dr. Sun believed China needed to be free from colonial powers, and that the ethnic groups of China needed to unite to create a sovereign Chinese state. He promoted a concept called “Five Races Under One Union,” which recognized the distinctiveness of the five main ethnic groups of China: Han,2 Manchu, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans, but cast them as partners working together as part of a single Chinese nation.
- His ideas weren’t perfect. The five races are an extreme oversimplification of China’s ethnicies, especially because it says all Chinese Muslims are the same race. He also believed the other ethnic groups would gradually assimilate into Han culture, and that this was inherently good.
- Democratic Rights
- If the government makes decisions that effect people, people need to have some control of that. The will of the people should steer the government’s actions.
- He specifically thought people should have the right to: elect leaders, remove leaders from office with a recall vote, make a petition and have the government actually discuss it if it has enough signatures,3 and vote directly on issues through a referendum.
- Livelihood Rights
- A successful country will take steps to ensure a certain quality of life for people living there.
- Among other things, people need clothing, food, healthcare, and mobility
- Sun Yat-Sen wanted to finance programs through a tax based on the value of the land people owned, not on sales or income or things you built on the land.4 He thought this was the fairest form of tax, because it took more from the rich, but it didn’t discourage trade.
I think all of these are good values to think about in relation to modern America.
- National Rights
- National consciousness is big magic. When groups of people form national consciousness from their shared history, language, and ways of life, it fundamentally changes reality. The idea of the nation was a key factor in breaking the European monarchies, because if a state was a manifestation of a national group, than it had an existence beyond being the domain of a specific royal bloodline. Ordinary people were as much a part of the national glory as the king, and maybe what the king did wasn’t necessarily good for the nation.
- Honoring nationality means honoring everyone else’s nationality too. People have a right to their culture, their language, and their shared identity. Don’t try to erase a nation.
- America, like China, is a state containing many national groups, but the current system of government is one created by a conquering foreign nation, like the Manchus’s Chinese Empire. Like the Manchus, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have lived in this state for so long they’re not really “foreign” and other groups have adopted their customs. WASPS aren’t still unambiguously in charge of the USA, but there’s a certain power that comes from being the ones who got to decide how everything was going to be in the beginning.
- My nation is the Rust Belt.
- Democratic Rights
- America could use some extra democracy. Abolition of the electoral college and counting votes directly would make our system a more accurate reflection of what Americans want.
- For those of us who say ending the electoral college would give certain states outsize power to decide elections: that’s already the case. Most states vote solidly Republican or Democrat, so most presidential candidates only campaign in swing states like Michigan or Pennsylvania, where they might actually have an effect on outcomes.
- EU-style Citizen’s Initiatives would be good. Petitions in the US have no teeth. All we got here is Change.org petitions, and they seldom amount to much.
- Livelihood Rights
- Government, business, and the rest of society exist to make the quality of our lives higher. If government and business are making the quality of people’s lives worse for the sake of government and business, the arrangement is backwards.
- People need healthcare, housing, etc. Automation has reduced the value of human labor, so it’s gotten harder to get this stuff by working a job and getting paid. Either through government or another institution, we need to make sure we have these things.
- We could replace some US taxes with a land value tax. It’d encourage people to use space more efficiently.
The way I see it, the 3 Principles aren’t political principles, they’re things politics should work to achieve. They’re not the “how we can make society better” they’re the “why would anyone want to try?” We need that. As I write this, we’re 29 days into a government shutdown. The system is non-functional, and I think life’s gotten so convoluted we’ve forgotten what a functional system is. That’s why I think the 3 Principles of the People matter: they’re benchmarks for a just society in a time when people have forgotten justice.