These improvised lectures have had to serve as the fundamental document of Nationalist China. Sun Yat-sen died without writing the treatise he had planned. The materials he left behind were a challenge to scholars and to his followers. Many persons set to work interpreting them, each with a conscious or unconscious end in view. A German Marxian showed Sun to be a forerunner of bolshevism; an American liberal showed Sun to be a bulwark against bolshevism. A Chinese classicist demonstrated Sun’s reverence for the past; a Jesuit father explained much by Sun’s modern and Christian background. His works have been translated into Western languages without notes; the improvised lectures, torn from their context of a revolutionary crisis, have served poorly to explain the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and his long range political, social, and economic plans.
Followers of Sun who knew him personally, or were members of that circle in which his ideas and opinions were well known, have found the _San Min Chu I_ and other literary remains helpful; they have been able to turn to the documents to refresh their memories of Sun on some particular point, or to experience the encouraging force of his faith and enthusiasm again. They need not be reminded of the main tenets of his thought, or of the fundamental values upon which he based his life and his political activities. His sense of leadership, which strangers have at times thought fantastic, is one which they admire in him, since they, too, have felt the power of his personality and have experienced that leadership in the course of their own lives. His voice is ringing in their consciences; they feel no need of a guide to his mind. At the present day many members of Sun’s own family, and a considerable number of his veteran disciples are still living; the control of the National Government is in their hands. They are people who need no commentary on Sun Yat-sen; to them, he died only yesterday.
Others, who met Sun only casually, or who could know him only through his writings, have a quite different impression of his thought. They perforce assume that he thought as he wrote, and fail to realize that virtually all his writings and speeches were occasional pieces, improvisations designed as propaganda. One of the most respected American authorities on China says that in the _San Min Chu I_ “... there is a combination of sound social analysis, keen comment on comparative political science, and bombast, journalistic inaccuracy, jejune philosophizing and sophomoric economics.”(18) This view is one which can scarcely be attacked, if one considers only the printed lectures, and overlooks the other utterances and the personality of Sun. To apply this, or any similar estimate (and there are many of them), to all of Sun Yat-sen’s thought would be woefully inaccurate. It is not the critic’s fault that Sun never found time to write a sober, definitive political treatise expressing his ideas; it is, nevertheless, the critic’s responsibility to weigh the value of the _San Min Chu I_, and consider the importance which Sun himself attached to it, before judging Sun’s whole philosophy by a hastily-composed and poorly written book.