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Aside from its current significance, the recent report from Taiwan announcing the inauguration of a new urban land tax grogram based upon the teachings of Sun Yat-sen serves to reawaken interest in one of his most controversial doctrines—the min sheng principle. The use of Sun's pʻing-chün ti-chʻüan—“equalization of land rights”—as a specifically urban taxation device raises a question concerning the original scope and purpose of this major aspect of the min sheng program. Taken by itself, “equalization of land rights” has an agrarian land tenure reform connotation, and has often been associated with land redistribution, some of its alternative translations being “equitable redistribution of the land” and more recently “proportionalization of the land.” Yet a study of Sun's prolific expositions of this theme starting with the Tʻung Meng Hui manifesto of 1905 down through the first year of the Republic when he was most actively concerned with the promotion of min sheng fails to substantiate the agrarian reform interpretation. On the contrary, according to the available sources for this period, there are few explicit references to the excesses of rural landlordism and the maldistribution of landholdings which in 1924 finally prompted Sun publicly to declare a “land to the tiller” policy. During this formative period for Kuomintang ideology, Sun's use of “equalization of land rights,” and the Western doctrines from which it was derived, indicate a definite preoccupation with the potential problems of a future capitalist order rather than concern with the aberrations of China's current agrarian structure.

The First World War changed the pattern of international relations in East Asia. What had previously been another arena for the European power struggle became the cockpit for two regional forces, Japanese expansionism and incipient Chinese nationalism. The confrontation between the two, which was to last for a quarter of a century, began as a most unequal contest. Great power rivalry had enabled China to balance off her enemies and to maintain her status as a sovereign entity. But with Europe distracted, China was helpless, and Japan had a unique opportunity to pursue an independent expansionist policy. Instead of cooperating with England and the other powers in order to get a fair share of the China spoils, after 1914 Japan could make her bid for the grand prize, exclusive access to China's resources. Thus the European powers’ pre-occupation with mutual slaughter exposed China to extreme danger, greater than that which she had faced during the heyday of classical imperialism.1But Japan was not alone in welcoming the European retreat. Japan’s opportunity was also Sun Yat-sen's opportunity.

The impact of Henry George's land value taxation theory was nothing less than global in scope, and his epochalProgress and Poverty– first published in 1879 – gained wider fame than any other political or socio-economic treatise emanating from an American pen. While George's doctrine was essentially a product of of his experience in California during the land-grabbing 60's and 70's, the most pervasive influence of the San Francisco sage was not manifested at home, but in Europe, Australasia and other distant places.It is with some aspects of this remarkable diffusion of Georgeism during the latter part of the 19th century that this study is concerned. In particular, we would like to examine the circumstances under which this ideological stimulus was transmitted and received in such divergent settings as England, China and Japan. First we will trace the history of the Georgeist influence in each of these countries and then compare their respective patterns of development.

After a decade in power, the Chinese Communists have had enough time to change the past as well as the present. Voluminous documentary collections, monographs, and general treatises on modern Chinese history have been published. Many of these works are designed to tell how socialism was victorious over evil and oppression, why the Communists deserved to inherit the mantle of heaven. Modern Chinese history is being reconstructed, with one eye always focussed upon those impersonal and inexorable forces of dialectical materialism and economic determinism, while the other is fixed upon the very personal if enormously heroic qualities of Chairman Mao. In the opening stages of a Communist revolution (and perhaps of most revolutions), a cult of personality comes so naturally and serves so many strategi c purposes, it is difficult to avoid, whatever the logic in second generation criticisms.

As Lewis Feuer and others have pointed out, the attraction exerted by Marxism in Asia and its diffusion there “cannot be explained within the framework of the Marxist system”.3 Marx and Engels riveted their attention on Europe and gave only passing attention to Asia and other underdeveloped areas. To be sure, when they did mention Asia, they did not postulate an exact, stage-by-stage recapitulation of the pattern of historical development that they discerned in Europe. Their thinking was too sophisticated for such a crude mechanistic formula. “Only vague hypotheses”, wrote Engels, could be formulated for the sort of stages that the ‘semi-civilized’ countries would have to pass through on the way to socialism.4 But while they did not discount the possibility of different and shorter routes to the Promised Land in, for example, Russia, these conjectures were always predicated upon the prior victory of socialism in the West.