ABSTRACT
Lasting an agonizing near-century, Western imperialism ravaged China, only to be followed by the even more devastating invasion by the troops of Imperial Japan. For nearly a hundred years, Sun Yat-sen maintained, China had been subjected to the "political oppression" of foreign imperialist powers. As a result of defeats in war and the unequal treaties with the imperialist powers, China lost countless pieces of its "national territory". What made China so vulnerable to the imperialists' predation and exploitation was its ineffectual government and its people's dearth of national sentiment- both of which Sun blamed on the Manchus. To regenerate China, Sun conceived a formula that began with the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing dynasty, followed by a program of economic and political modernization. What follows is an effort to reconstruct the developmental nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen, beginning with his view of the world.
