The Theory Of Sun Yat-sen's Legal System Thought

As an outstanding political activist and revolutionist universally revered, Sun Yat-sen is also a great thinker and theorist who conformed to the universal trend and times. And his legal thought plays an important part in the history of Chinese legal system.The present conditions of legal system in latter stage of Qing Dynasty with essentially no fairness or justice which laid the foundation of the development of Sun Yat-sen's legal system thought had a disregard of individual basic right. During the process of traveling in most Euro-American countries, Sun Yat-sen gradually developed admiration for the legal system thought of Western capitalist class. And his legal system thought is based on the studying of advanced western legal system and reference of the thought, namely "freedom, equality and universal fraternity". Traditional legal system is the historical foundation of modern legal system, and the latter is continuity of the former. Additionally, Chinese legal culture acts as an important member in the multicultural legal system with a distinguishing feature. This is the cultural basis of the Sun Yat-sen's thought.Principle of the People's Rights is both the core of Three People's Principles and the basis for Sun Yat-sen to set forth his views of legal system thought. It represents the highest level of modern Chinese civil rights and system of government doctrine. The thought of constitution became the main content of Sun Yat-sen's legal system thought. On the basis of concluding the historical experience of domestic and foreign legal system, he put forward the creative theory of Five Rights Constitution and directed the practice of constructing revolutionary regime. The theoretical leap is his wakening the masses. Being a country of two-thousand-year feudalistic autocracy, China was reduced to semi-colony after enduring western imperialism's fill of slavery. The accomplishment of democratic consciousness is not reached in a flash, and it is only during a considerably long democratic environment that the trauma and backward consciousness brought about by autocracy and imperialism aggression. Consequently, he creatively formulated the project of "army and the government, train the policy and constitutional government" which was called the three-term construction.Certainly, there is also some historical limitation to Sun Yat-sen's legal system thought .He emphasized remarkably the political and economic interests of capitalist class without attaching importance to the force of the workers and farmers Class. He also identified and ensured their interests. These were the largest drawback of his constitutionalism blueprint. He excessively underlined the function of constitution ignoring the social fact that even publish of a good constitution would inevitably be thwarted by feudal force and diehards in the old semi-colony and semi-feudal China. Meanwhile, his theory of "universal government" moved towards national totalitarianism. As a result of the excessive concentration and power of governmental administrative rights, the Five Rights could not reach a balance and it actually became a kind of totalitarianism system which concentrated on administrative rights. And this completely conflicted with the freedom concept of modern nations ruled by law.Nowadays, when we look close at Sun Yat-sen's legal system thought again, we find the historical use for reference it brings to us is many-faceted. For instance, after the victory of the 1911 Revolution,the reason why a multitude of laws were not implemented effectively was that the masses held an attitude of suspecting these capitalistic laws. It tells us the fact that there should be not only external system level but also internal concept level, and the law would become empty creed without the concept level adapted to system level. Sun Yat-sen saw the fact that the law was the product deeply planted on certain social culture which is part of social life. And there exited a huge gap between Chinese and western countries in many aspects such...