ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong was a poet of genuine distinction and often showed great sensitivity of feeling, but he was heartless towards those who stood in his way. The Boxer movement can now be seen as a product of religious fervour, national bitterness, and starvation. It was essentially a peasant movement and in that sense it belonged to the series of desperate peasant rebellions that had occurred sporadically and always unsuccessfully throughout the history of imperial China. China's industrial lift-off had created a railway boom which provided many provinces with substantial foreign investment. This worried the Qing; they feared that if the provinces were enriched in this way it would lessen Beijing's central control over them. Sun Yatsen drew on his foreign experience to develop his revolutionary policies for China. His programme was based on 'the three principles of the People', which he defined as 'Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism'.
