Sun Yatsen (1866–1925) was a revolutionary activist, theoretician, and leader of the GMD. His Three Principles of the People, from which these lectures are excerpted, was his theoretical manifesto. Sun’s formulations were extremely influential, as the many discussions, pro and con, in subsequent essays in this collection will confirm. The three principles are: nationalism [minzu zhuyi], people’s power [minquan zhuyi], and people’s livelihood [minsheng zhuyi]. Our concern here is with the second of these. Sun’s understanding of quan, which in most other essays we have translated as “rights,” as “power,” is a central element of his thought that helps to explain his lack of interest in promoting further freedom for individual Chinese, as discussed below. “Minquan” is one of the most changeable and contested terms in all of Chinese rights discourse, though, and some of his subsequent supporters understand it to mean something much closer to “people’s rights” than “people’s power,” even if they still differentiate it from human rights. For more discussion of this term, see the General Introduction.
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