“Previous to the Republican Revolution of 1911, the principle of nationality was known as the principle of racial struggle, and was in effect little more than _a primitive tribalism rationalized to serve as a weapon_ in the struggle against the Manchu oppressors. It was the corner-stone of revolutionary theory, and by emphasizing the racial distinction between the ruling and the oppressed classes, succeeded in uniting the entire Chinese people against the Manchu dynasty.” (Italics mine.) In speaking of _min ts’u_ as a primitive tribalism which had been rationalized as a weapon, Dr. T’ang might lead some of his readers to infer that Sun Yat-sen did not believe what he taught, and that—as a master-stroke of practical politics—he had devised an ideological weapon which, regardless of its truthfulness, would serve him in his struggles. But, it may be asked, what was Sun Yat-sen struggling for, if not the union and preservation of the Chinese people? 57 See sections, below, on the programs of nationalism. 58 d’Elia translation, p. 131. Sun Yat-sen said: “Formerly China too entertained the ambition of becoming mistress of the whole world and of rising above all other countries; so she (too) advocated cosmopolitanism.... When the Manchus entered the Great Wall, they were very few; they numbered 100,000 men. How were those 100,000 men able to subject hundreds of millions of others? Because the majority of Chinese at that time favored cosmopolitanism and said nothing about nationalism.” 59 d’Elia translation, pp. 126 ff. 60 It seems to the present writer that, whatever criteria are selected for the determination of the nationhood of a given society, _uniqueness_ certainly is _not_ one of the qualities attributed to a “nation.” It is not appropriate for the author to venture upon any extended search for a “true nation”; he might observe, however, that in his own use—in contrast to Sun Yat-sen’s—he employs the term in a consciously relative sense, contrasting it with the old Chinese cosmopolitan society, which thought itself unique except for certain imitations of itself on the part of half-civilized barbarians. A “nation” must signify, among other things, for the purposes of this work, a society calling itself such and recognizing the existence of other societies of more or less the same nature. Sun Yat-sen, on the other hand, regarded a nation as a group of persons as real as a family group, and consistently spoke of the Chinese nation as having existed throughout the ages—even in those times when the Chinese themselves regarded their own society as the civilized world, and did so with some show of exactness, if their own viewpoint is taken into account.