_Min shêng_, accordingly, meant primarily the survival of the race-nation, as nationalism was its awakening, and democracy its self-control. No one of these could be effective without the two others. In the fundamentals of Sun Yat-sen’s ideology, the necessity for survival and prosperity is superlative and self-evident. All other features of the doctrine are, as it were, optional. The first two principles definitely required a third that would give them a body of persons upon which to operate; they did not necessarily require that the third principle advance any specific doctrine. If this be the case, it is evident that the question of the content of _min shêng_, while important, is secondary to the first premises of the _San Min Chu I_. The need for a third principle—one of popular subsistence—in the ideology is vital; the _San Min Chu I_ would be crippled without it. The Economic Background of _Min Shêng_. What was the nature of the background which decided Sun Yat-sen to draw an economic program into the total of his nationalist ideology for the regeneration of China through a nationalist revolution? Was Sun Yat-sen dissatisfied with the economic order of the old society? Was he interested in a reconstitution of the economic system for the sake of defense against Western powers? He was unquestionably dissatisfied with the economic order of things in the old society, but it was a dissatisfaction with what the old order had failed to achieve rather than a feeling of the injustice of the Chinese distributive system. He was bitter against a taxation system which worked out unevenly,(146) and against the extortions of the internal-transit revenue officials under the Empire.(147) He was deeply impressed by his first encounter with Western mechanical achievement—the S. S. _Grannoch_, which took him from Kwangtung to Honolulu.(148) But he had served in the shop of his brother as a young boy,(149) and knew the small farm life of South China intimately. On the basis of this first-hand knowledge, and his many years of association with the working people of China, he was not likely to attack the old economic system for its injustice so much as for its inadequacy.(150)