Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen was born on November 12, 1866, in Cuiheng, a farming village in Xiangshan county, Guangdong province, not far from the Portuguese colony of Macau ^[1]. His family worked the land, and his father supplemented the household income with tailoring and other odd jobs. The region had long sent its sons abroad, and in 1879, at age twelve, Sun joined his elder brother Sun Mei in Honolulu, where the older sibling had built a successful business as a rancher and merchant ^[2].

In Hawaii, Sun enrolled at Iolani School, an Anglican institution where instruction was in English, and later spent a term at Oahu College ^[1]. The experience reshaped him. He absorbed Western science, Christian teaching, and ideas about constitutional government that had no counterpart in the village schooling of his childhood. His growing interest in Christianity alarmed his brother, who sent him home to Cuiheng in 1883. The return did not go smoothly: Sun and a friend damaged an idol in the village temple, an act of defiance that forced him to leave for Hong Kong ^[2].

Hong Kong gave him a profession. He was baptized a Christian around 1884, married Lu Muzhen in an arranged match the same year, and pursued medical training, first briefly in Guangzhou and then at the newly opened College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong, from which he graduated in 1892 as one of its first two graduates ^[1]. He practiced medicine in Macau and Guangzhou, but the profession never held him. China's defeat and humiliation at foreign hands, and the corruption he saw in Qing administration, pulled him toward politics ^[3].

The turn came in 1894. Sun traveled north and attempted to present a reform memorandum to Li Hongzhang, one of the most powerful officials of the Qing dynasty. He was rebuffed, and the rejection hardened his conviction that the dynasty could not be reformed, only removed ^[3]. Later that year, back in Honolulu, he founded the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui), a small organization pledged to overthrow the Qing and establish a new government ^[1].

His first attempt at revolution, a planned uprising in Guangzhou in 1895, was betrayed before it began. Colleagues were executed, and Sun fled abroad with a price on his head ^[2]. The failure launched sixteen years of exile spent in Japan, the United States, Britain, and Southeast Asia, raising money among overseas Chinese communities and building networks of sympathizers. In October 1896, Qing agents detained him inside the Chinese legation in London, intending to ship him home for execution. His former medical teacher James Cantlie learned of the kidnapping and forced its exposure in the British press, and the government of Lord Salisbury pressed for his release ^[4]. The episode made Sun internationally famous, and his own English-language account, Kidnapped in London, spread his name further ^[4].

Who was Sun Yat-sen by the early 1900s? To Qing officials, a wanted criminal; to growing numbers of Chinese students and merchants abroad, the most visible face of revolution. In 1905 in Tokyo he merged his followers with other radical groups to form the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), which adopted his program and elected him its leader ^[1]. In the alliance's journal Min Bao, he set out the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood, a formulation he would refine for the rest of his life ^[5].

Between 1906 and 1911 the Tongmenghui backed a string of armed uprisings in southern China. All of them failed, often at heavy cost, and Sun spent the period abroad raising funds ^[2]. When revolution finally succeeded, he was far from the action. On October 10, 1911, a mutiny among modernized army units in Wuchang set off a chain reaction of provincial defections from the Qing. Sun read about it in a newspaper while traveling in the United States ^[1].

Rather than rushing home, he went first to Washington, London, and Paris, seeking diplomatic neutrality and trying to block foreign loans to the Qing court ^[3]. He reached Shanghai in late December 1911, and on December 29 delegates from the revolutionary provinces meeting in Nanjing elected him provisional president of the Republic of China. He took office on January 1, 1912 ^[1].

The presidency lasted six weeks. Sun's government had little money and no army capable of defeating the Qing forces commanded by Yuan Shikai, the dominant military figure of northern China. In a negotiated settlement, the child emperor Puyi abdicated in February 1912, and Sun resigned in Yuan's favor, believing the compromise would preserve the republic and avert civil war ^[3]. In August 1912 his followers reorganized the Tongmenghui into a parliamentary party, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), which won the largest bloc in China's first national elections that winter ^[1].

The republic Sun had helped create was quickly hollowed out. In March 1913 the Kuomintang's parliamentary leader Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai, and suspicion fell on Yuan Shikai's circle. Sun backed an armed rising against Yuan that summer, the so-called Second Revolution, which collapsed within weeks and sent him back into exile in Japan ^[3]. Yuan outlawed the Kuomintang, dissolved parliament, and in 1915 attempted to make himself emperor before dying in 1916, leaving China fragmented among regional military commanders ^[1].

Sun spent the following decade trying to build a base in the south from which to reunify the country. He established rival governments in Guangzhou in 1917, 1921, and again in 1923, each dependent on the shifting loyalties of local militarists ^[2]. In 1921 a southern parliament named him extraordinary president, but a year later the Guangdong warlord Chen Jiongming turned against him and shelled his residence, forcing Sun to flee to a gunboat and then to Shanghai ^[3].

Repeated disappointment with Western powers, which declined to support him, pushed Sun toward a new partner. In January 1923 he issued a joint statement with the Soviet envoy Adolf Joffe: the Soviet Union would assist the Kuomintang, while both sides agreed that communism was not suited to China's immediate conditions ^[5]. With Soviet advisers, chief among them Mikhail Borodin, Sun rebuilt the Kuomintang on disciplined Leninist lines, admitted Chinese Communists as individual members in the First United Front, and in 1924 founded the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, with Chiang Kai-shek as commandant, to give the party its own army at last ^[1].

Sun's first marriage, to Lu Muzhen in 1884, was arranged by his family and produced three children: a son, Sun Fo, who later held senior posts in the Nationalist government, and two daughters ^[2]. Long separations were the rule, as Sun's revolutionary work kept him abroad for years at a time while Lu raised the children, for a period in Hawaii under the protection of Sun Mei.

In October 1915, in Tokyo, Sun married Soong Ching-ling, the Wellesley-educated daughter of his friend and financier Charlie Soong. She was twenty-two; he was forty-eight, and his first marriage had not been formally dissolved in a manner his Christian associates recognized, so the union scandalized the Soong family ^[6]. Soong Ching-ling became his secretary, political partner, and after his death one of the most prominent public figures in China, eventually serving as a vice chairman of the People's Republic. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling later married Chiang Kai-shek, tying the two most powerful families of Nationalist China together ^[6].

Sun remained a Christian throughout his life, though he wore the faith lightly in public and framed his politics in secular terms. Friends described a man of modest personal habits who was nonetheless relentless in pursuit of funds and followers, capable of winning over merchants, secret society leaders, students, and foreign sympathizers in the same week ^[2].

In 1924 Sun delivered a celebrated series of lectures in Guangzhou expounding the Three Principles of the People, later published as Sanmin Zhuyi, the fullest statement of his political thought ^[5]. Nationalism now meant freeing China from foreign privilege as well as unifying its peoples; democracy would arrive in stages, passing through military government and political tutelage before full constitutional rule; the people's livelihood called for land reform and state regulation of capital ^[5].

Late that year an opening appeared in the north. After a coup in Beijing, the warlord Feng Yuxiang and other power holders invited Sun to the capital to discuss national reunification. Though already ill, he traveled north via Japan, where he delivered a widely noted speech in Kobe on Pan-Asianism, urging Asian peoples to resist Western domination ^[3]. By the time he reached Beijing in December 1924 his condition had deteriorated sharply. Exploratory surgery at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in January 1925 revealed advanced cancer, long described as liver cancer, though the hospital's records point to gallbladder cancer that had spread to the liver ^[7].

Sun Yat-sen died in Beijing on March 12, 1925, at the age of fifty-eight ^[1]. In his political testament, drafted by Wang Jingwei and signed shortly before his death, he urged his followers to complete the revolution, observing that the revolution was not yet finished. The words became a Nationalist catechism, recited at party gatherings for decades ^[3].

Few modern political figures are claimed by two rival states at once. In Taiwan, where the Republic of China endures, Sun is the official Father of the Nation, his portrait displayed in public buildings and his Three Principles written into the constitution ^[1]. In the People's Republic, he is honored as the forerunner of the revolution, a bridge figure whose cooperation with the Communists in his final years is remembered warmly in official histories ^[3]. His widow's decision to remain on the mainland after 1949 reinforced that claim.

Among the most visited Sun Yat-sen facts is the scale of his mausoleum: after his death his body was eventually interred in 1929 in a vast tomb on Purple Mountain outside Nanjing, reached by a stone stairway of several hundred steps, now among China's major historic sites ^[8]. Universities, parks, roads, and the city of Zhongshan (renamed from Xiangshan in his honor) carry his name across the Chinese-speaking world.

Historians continue to debate Sun Yat-sen achievements against his failures. He never won a battle of consequence, his governments controlled only fragments of territory, and rivals repeatedly outmaneuvered him. Yet his organizing, fundraising, and writing did more than any other single career to make republicanism the default aspiration of modern Chinese politics, and the party and army he assembled in his last years unified much of China within three years of his death ^[2]. Marie-Claire Bergère, his leading Western biographer, portrays him as an improviser and salesman of ideas whose importance lay precisely in his ability to connect overseas Chinese money, foreign models, and domestic discontent ^[2].