Sun Yat-sen and the nationalist revolution Sun Yat-sen was one of the first Chinese revolutionaries who founded the nationalist movement. This movement was almost entirely Western in its beginnings. Sun Yat-sen had an almost entirely Western education, including secondary school in Hawaii. He initially intended to pursue a military career, but instead decided to attend medical school in Hong Kong. He knew little about Chinese classical studies, considering them useless. He earned respect, it seemed more for his understanding of world trends. Due to his predominantly Western upbringing, including in Hong Kong, his knowledge of China itself was limited. Sun's goals were, at first, ill-suited to both traditional Chinese attitudes and the realities of Chinese life. Due to his knowledge of prevailing Western ways of thought, he believed “that, with the progress of civilization and the progress of science, Western ideas and institutions could be quickly and easily adopted by the Chinese.” (de Barry & Lufrano, 2000, p. 315) However, the gap between China's perceived slow past and Sun's vision for the future was a great despair for the nationalist movement. This was demonstrated in the failure of the 1911 movement which caused Sun to rethink the movement and create the Nationalist Party as an open political party. This nationalist party had many of the same beliefs as its predecessor movement, one major difference being that it began to incorporate Leninist ideas after seeing the success of the Soviet revolution. Sun created the “Three Principles of Peoples” which served as the center of nationalist ideas. These were the principles of nationalism, democracy and the livelihood of the people. Another difference is that Sun's first revolutionary attempt was presented with the opportunity to express government approval. If they vote against the current government, or do not vote, they can be seen as reactionaries and therefore enemies of the state. Mao was not initially the leader of the communist party, he started from the bottom and slowly worked his way up to the top position where he could implement his ideas on a much larger scale than in his home province of Hunan. He held many of the same beliefs as anarchists, but instead of following traditional methods he thought the only way to succeed in the revolution was to use violence. Once the peasants had overthrown the landowners, Mao wanted to implement two major changes, the equalization of land ownership and his democratic dictatorship to allow the peasants to have a voice in the government and to oppress those who are still fighting for the old feudal ways..