The nationalist ideology was designed as the inheritor of and successor to, the old ideology of China. The doctrine of nationalism narrowed the field of the application of Confucianism from the whole civilized world to the state-ized society of the Chinese race-nation. The doctrine of democracy implemented the old teachings of popular power and intellectual leadership with a political mechanism designed to bring forth the full strength of both. And the doctrine of _min shêng_ was the economic application of the old social ethos.
It is in this last significance, rather than in any of its practical meanings of recovery, development, and reform, that Sun Yat-sen spoke most of it to one of his followers.(204) He was concerned with it as a moral force. His work was, among other things, a work of moral transformation of individual motives.(205) _Min shêng_ must, in addition to its other meanings be regarded as an attempt to extend the Chinese ideology to economic matters, to lead the Chinese to follow their old ethics. Sun Yat-sen had ample time in his visits to the West to observe the ravages that modern civilization had inflicted upon the older Western moral life, and did not desire that China should also follow the same course. The humanity of the old tradition must be kept by the Chinese in their venture into the elaborate and dangerous economy of modern life; the machine civilization was needed, and was itself desirable,(206) but it could not overthrow the humane civilization that preceded it and was to continue on beneath and throughout it.
In this manner a follower of Sun Yat-sen seeks to recall his words: “I should say that _min shêng_ focuses our ethical tradition even more than the other two principles; after a Chinese has become nationalistic and democratic, he will become socialized through the idea of his own personality as an instrument of good for human welfare. In this proud feeling of importance to and for the world, egotism gives way to altruism.... So, I say again that _min shêng_ is an ethical endeavor ... this, the final principle (and yet, the first principle which I discovered, in the bitterness and poverty of my boyhood days), will come imperceptibly into our lives.”(207)