The most careful Marxian critic of Sun Yat-sen, writing of the principle of _min shêng_ and its two main planks, land reform and state capitalism, says: “This very vague program, which does not refer to class interests nor to the class struggle as the means of breaking privileged class interests, was objectively not socialism at all, but something else altogether: Lenin coined the formula, ‘subjective socialism,’ for it.”(169) He adds, later: “Hence Sun’s socialism meant, on the lips of the Chinese bourgeoisie, nothing but a sort of declaration for a ‘social’ economic policy, that is, a policy friendly to the masses.”(170) T’ang Liang-li declares that the third principle at this time adopted “a frankly socialistic attitude,”(171) but implies elsewhere that its inadequacy was seen by a Chinese Marxist, Chu Chih-hsin.(172) This evidence, as far as it goes, shows that Sun Yat-sen had had the opportunity to become acquainted with Marxism, and that even on the occasion of the first formulation of the principle of _min shêng_ he used none of its tenets. The revolutionary critic, T’ang Liang-li, who, a devoted and brilliant Nationalist in action, writes with a sort of European left-liberal orientation, suggests that the Third Principle grew with the growth of capitalist industrialism in China.(173) This is true: economic maladjustment would emphasize the need for ideological reconstruction with reference to the economy. There is no need to resort to Marxian analysis. That the third principle meant something to Sun Yat-sen is shown by the fact that when Sung Chiao-jen, who a few years later was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs of the revolution, suggested in the period of the first provisional Republic at Nanking that the Third Principle had better be omitted altogether, Sun was enraged, and declared that if _min shêng_ were to be given up, the whole revolution might as well be abandoned.(174) Since _min shêng_, in its third significance, that of the development of a socially just distributive system, was not Marxian nor yet unimportant, it may be contrasted once again with the communist doctrines, and then studied for its actual content. In contrasting it with Marxism, it might be of value to observe, first, the criticism that the Marxians levy against it, and second, the distinctions that nationalist and European critics make between _min shêng_ and communism.