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The Impact of the Three Principles of the People on China and Taiwan

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“We shall establish a united Chinese Republic in order that all the peoples—Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Tartars and Chinese—should constitute a single powerful nation.… Such a nationalism is possible, and we must pursue it.”- Sun Yat-sen, Three Principles of the People. Countless nationalists across the world seek for the rights Dr. Sun Yat-sen stated in his Principles. Sun Yat-sen was born in Cuiheng, a small village in Guangzhou Province, during the Qing Dynasty in 1866. At this time, the Qing was slowly declining. The Taiping Rebellion, an unsuccessful, large-scale revolt against the Qing dynasty led by Hong Xiuquan, threatened the survival of the empire, the Confucian system. The ascension of the two-year old Emperor Puyi also made …show more content…

Because of this, Sun stated that a modern and ideal government system must be established. Sun had his new government system divided into two powers: the power of politics and the power of governance. The powers of politics are the rights of the people to express their political wishes. An example of this today is Britain’s Parliament’s House of Commons. Sun declares that the people have four major rights or civil rights, which are: election, recall, initiative, and referendum (ABC-CLIO “Sun Yat-sen”). Election means the right to vote, recall is the right to remove an elected official from power, initiative is the right to petition and referendum is the right to refer measures passed by the legislative branch to the approval or rejection of the electorate. The second power was the power of governance or the power of the officials. Sun proposed the use of a five-branch government system within the power of governance, including the three branch system of the U.S. (Legislative, Judicial and Executive), the use of checks and balances, as well as two other branches: Control Branch (similar to the Censorate Branch) and the Examination Branch (similar to the branch responsible for the Civil Service Exams). The Second Principle of the People was meant to represent a Western style of government (ABC-CLIO “Sun Yat-sen”). The last principle of Sun’s Three Principles of the People is the development of

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