Sun Yat-sen’s opposition to the “unearned increment” shows the influence of the thought of Henry George. Sun proposed an ingenious scheme for the government confiscation of unearned increment in an economy which would nevertheless permit private ownership of land. (Incidentally, he terms this, in his second lecture on _min shêng_, “communism,” which indicates a use of the word different, in this respect at least, from the conventional Western use.)(162) The land problem was of course a very old one in China, although accentuated in the disorders resulting from the impact of the West. There can be little question that Sun’s particular method of solving the problem was influenced by the idea of unearned increment. He knew of Henry George in 1897, the year the latter died,(163) and advocated redistribution of the land in the party oath, the platform, and the slogans of the _Tung Meng Hui_ of 1905.(164) Since, even at the time of the Canton-Moscow Entente, his land policy never approached the Marxist-Leninist program of nationalization or collectivization of land, but remained one of redistribution and confiscation of unearned increment, it is safe to say that Sun kept the theory of George in mind, although he by no means followed George to the latter’s ultimate conclusions.(165) It may thus be inferred that the influence of Henry George upon the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen was slight, but permanent. An idea was borrowed; the scheme of things was not. Sun Yat-sen encountered Marxism for the first recorded time in London in 1897, when he met a group of Russian revolutionaries and also read in the subject. The fact that Sun was exposed to Marxism proves little except that he had had the opportunity of taking up Marxism and did not do so.(166) Again, the _Tung Meng Hui_ manifesto of 1905 may have been influenced by Marxism. It was not, however, until the development of his _Three Principles_ that the question of Marxian influence was raised. Sun Yat-sen made his first speech on the _Principles_ in Brussels in the spring of 1905.(167) By 1907 the three principles had taken on a clear form: nationalism, democracy, and _min shêng_, which the Chinese of that time seem to have translated _socialism_ when referring to it in Western languages.(168)