Abstract
Most of the previous studies on Sun Yat-sen have been focused on his political thought rather than on his political behaviour. This paper deals with the financial difficulties which the Sun administration was confronted with and the rebellion of the Canton Merchant Corps that broke out in the course of Sun's attempts to accommodate these financial difficulties, the purpose being to shed light on the actual political process which the Sun administrasion was involved in. The so-called Canton Merchant Corps Incident is regarded by most scholars as a manifestation of the anti-revolutionary movement, composed of a coalition of merchants, compradors and the British Imperialists, against Sun's revolutionary government. This Incident, however, is not as simple as it seems. The following factors must be taken into consideration when we search for the cause of the rebellion of the Canton Merchant Corps. 1. The financial difficulties of the Sun administration intensified burdens of taxation to the Merchant class. 2. The warlords employed by the Sun administration in order to maintain the power disrupted the Kwangtung market. 3. The Sun administration destroyed the old feudal commercial customs in order to build a new capitalistic commercial order. 4. Class antagonism between the merchants and the employees was actualized, and the Communist Party in alliance with the Kuomintang advanced the class struggle. 5. The anti-imperialistic movement of the Kuomintang provoked the wrath of the British imperialists. These, in short, can be summarized as follows: the rebellion of the Canton Merchant Corps is the complicated result of two contradictory facets of Sun, namely the revolutionism aiming at the destruction of the status quo represented by the Three People's Principles, and the traditional military strategy which sought to promote military victory by means of employing warlords. The financial difficulties of the Sun administration accentuated the inherent contradiction of the two aforementioned facets of Sun and it was this cont radiction which eventually shaped Sun's inconsistent actions in the Canton Merchant Corps Incident.
