That there were injustices in the old system of Chinese economy, no one can deny, but these injustices were scarcely sufficient to provoke, of themselves alone, the complete alteration of economic outlook that Sun Yat-sen proposed. Chinese capitalism had not reached the state of industrial capitalism until after its contact with the West; at the most it was a primitive sort of usury-capitalism practised by the three economically dominant groups of old China—landholders, officials, and merchant-usurers.(151) The disturbances which hurt the economic condition of the country, and thereby led to greater disturbances, had involved China in a vicious cycle of decline which could scarcely be blamed on any one feature or any one group in the old economy. The essential fault lay with the condition of the country as a whole, directly affected by the economic consequences of Western trade and partial industrialization.(152) Sun Yat-sen’s positive dissatisfaction with the economy of his time arose from the position which he felt China had in the modern business world. He believed that, by virtue of the economic oppression of the Chinese by the Western powers, China had been degraded to the position of the lowest nation on earth—that the Chinese were even more unfortunate than “slaves without a country,” such as the Koreans and the Annamites.(153) The particular forms of this oppression, and Sun Yat-sen’s plans for meeting it, may be more aptly described in the consideration of his program of economic national regeneration.(154) The Chinese nation occupied the ignominious position of a sub-colony or—as Sun himself termed it—“a hypo-colony”; “Our people are realizing that to be a semi-colony is a national disgrace; but our case is worse than that; our country is in the position of a sub-colony (since it is the colony of all the Great Powers and not merely subject to one of them), a position which is inferior to an ordinary colony such as Korea and Annam.”(155) What, then, were the positive implications of the principle of _min shêng_ in the nationalist ideology? The Three Meanings of _Min Shêng_. First, _min shêng_ is the doctrine leading the nationalist democracy on its road to a high position among the nations of the earth; only through the material strength to be found in _min shêng_ can the Chinese attain a position by which they can exert the full force of their new-formed state against the invaders and oppressors, and be able to lift up the populace so that democracy will possess some actual operative meaning. _Min shêng_ is “... the center of politics, of economics, of all kinds of historical movements; it is similar to the center of gravity in space.”(156) It provides the implementation of nationalism and democracy.