Sun Yatsen

(b. Xiangshan, Guangdong Province, 12 Nov. 1866; d. 12 Mar. 1925) Chinese; Revolutionary leader and theoretician, first provisional President of post-Imperial China 1911, Founder and first leader of the Kuomintang Sun Yatsen, who is widely regarded as being the father of modern Chinese nationalism, was originally named Sun Wen, and is known throughout the mandarin-speaking world as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was born in Xiangshan (now called Zhongshan in his honour) in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on 12 November 1866. Xiangshan was fertile ground for a young revolutionary. The extreme poverty of the average peasant contrasted starkly with the ostentatious wealth of the foreigners and Chinese collaborators. Xiangshan had also provided many emigrants to the San Francisco gold rush. Despite constant complaints about the awful conditions on the transport ships (100 out of 500 "passengers" died on one shipment in 1854) and in America, the imperial system refused to intervene, which exacerbated existing anti-imperial sentiments. It also created a hostile overseas-Chinese community in America that Sun was later to able to exploit to support his revolutionary aims.

Xiangshan also provided shelter for many veterans of the Taiping Rebellion, an anti-imperial movement that defeated government forces across southern China and did much to weaken the Qing Dynasty between 1850 and 1864. Indeed, Sun's first teacher was a Taiping veteran, and he developed a lifelong admiration for the rebels, and especially for their leader Hong Xiuquan. Like Hong, Sun also became a Christian, and was educated in a Western Christian tradition, ultimately specializing in Western medicine in Hong Kong. In many ways Sun was remarkably atypically Chinese — he did not even speak particularly good mandarin Chinese, and always felt more at home with other East Asians or the overseas Chinese in America than he did with the Chinese in China. Furthermore, his political ideas owed much more to the French Revolution, Social Darwinism, and the Meiji Reformers in Japan, than they did to traditional Chinese political thought.

Whilst his revolutionary influence was enormous, Sun was not a particularly good revolutionary himself. His two attempts to lead anti-imperial uprisings in southern China in October 1895 and October 1901 were abject failures. After the first occasion, Sun was forced into exile in America and later Britain, where he was kidnapped/arrested by the Chinese legation. When the British government threatened severe diplomatic retribution, Sun was released. His story became international news, and Sun used his new-found fame to promote his political causes. Indeed, Sun's real political strengths lay in organization and mobilization for the revolutionary cause, primarily outside China. He spent years travelling the world trying to raise support (and funds) from the growing number of overseas Chinese, and from supportive foreign groups.

Sun recognized the need to establish as broad a political base as possible, and this in turn meant developing an inclusionary ideological basis for his revolution. This ideology became enshrined in "The Three Principles of the People", which advocated the end of imperial rule and the promotion of nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood (min sheng). The Three Principles remain the ideological basis of the Chinese nationalists (Kuomintang) in Taiwan, but the vagueness of particularly the third principle is shown by the way that the Chinese Communists equate people's livelihood with socialism. While Sun may not be happy that his portrait appears alongside those of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels at official celebrations in Beijing, his ideas and principles were deliberately left open to different interpretations. Thus, for the British establishment, nationalism did not mean removing British influence from Hong Kong, but for radical Chinese and Japanese nationalists it did; for socialists, people's livelihood did indeed mean socialism, but for capitalists with money to support the revolution it meant something else.

In the end, however, nothing may have come from Sun's endeavours had it not been for support from Japan. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese authorities had decided that the best way of increasing their influence over China was to foster the next generation of Chinese leaders. Disillusioned and defeated Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao were joined in Japan by many of the brightest and best from all over China, who had been sent to Japan to learn the new skills of statecraft and military strategy. While in Japan, they came into contact with the works of Western political theories and theorists which they then sent back to their friends in China. It was in this political environment that Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance (tongmenghui) in July 1905 in exile in Japan, committed to both the establishment of a republic, and the removal of Western colonial influence in China.

It was the revolutionary alliance which nominally carried out the revolution in 1911 that overthrew the old imperial order. In reality, the empire had long ceased to function as an effective central government, and the real locus of power had passed to newly strong provincial leaders. What happened in 1911 was the final stage in a decade-long transfer of power from empire to province, and while the revolutionary alliance did help finally topple the empire, Sun Yatsen himself was not involved. However, Sun returned to China where he was elected as the first provisional President of the new republic based in Nanjing, and transformed the old revolutionary alliance into a new political party, the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party.

The Nationalists won the subsequent election, but the fledgling republic was thrown into chaos by Yuan Shikai, a key military leader who was determined to assume control. He declared the elections null and void, and ultimately declared himself the new Emperor, a title and position which few people ever acknowledged. The new system fell into chaos as Sun and the Kuomintang established their own rival provisional government in Guangdong. From 1913 to his death in 1925, Sun spent the remainder of his life fighting ever more divisive and destructive internecine warfare with various fragments of the Kuomintang as China slid into a period of warlordism where might, and not ideas, held sway. The fact that he managed to hold the party together at all says much about his organizational and tactical capabilities. The fact that Sun is still revered on both sides of the Taiwan Straits also bears testament to his significance. However, both China and the Kuomintang were in turmoil when Sun died, and it was left to others to build a new party and a new China after his death.

(1866-1925) The best known early leader of the Chinese nationalist revolution, Sun was born into a poor peasant family in the southern province of Guangdong. At the age of 13 he joined an older brother in Hawaii, where he was educated in Western schools, from which he went to Hong Kong and took a medical degree. Concerned at the decay of China, he formed a small society, The Revive China Society (Xing Zhong Hui), which was reformist and moderate. However, the destruction of the 1898 Reform Movement and the execution of some of its leaders by the Manchu Empress Dowager, led Sun and many other Chinese to turn to revolution. He formed a new group, the Alliance Society (Tongmeng Hui). Support for this spread from the Chinese emigrant communities to the southern secret societies and then to young Chinese intellectuals, notably those studying in Japan. Meanwhile attempted reforms by the Manchus actually reduced Chinese as opposed to Manchu power, so that disaffection spread to the Chinese gentry. In 1911, after ten failed risings organized by Sun and his followers, the eleventh succeeded. The Manchus abdicated and a Republic was proclaimed. Sun was elected provisional president, but was soon succeeded by Yuan Shikai, a much better known and acceptably conservative figure.

With the imperial focus of loyalty gone, China fell to pieces. Sun's task was to reunite the country, and to do so (as he perceived it) by the creation of a nationalist democracy. In 1923, in despair of assistance from the Western powers, he turned to the Soviet Union. He made an alliance with the new Communist Party of China (then minuscule, but backed by Russia), reconstituted his party on Leninist lines, and adopted a radical programme. He died in 1925 with China still fragmented among the warlords, but he had created a new climate of opinion and new political aims and expectations. Both Nationalists and Communists claim his inheritance.

His political ideas and programme were expressed in a series of published lectures called the Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, and livelihood), and in his Plan for National Reconstruction. He was not a systematic philosopher. His ideas were often contradictory. He argued that the Western ideas of liberty and equality were not relevant to Chinese society in its existing state. As China (he believed) had not suffered from extremes of autocracy, liberty was not demanded. China's problem was too much liberty, by which he meant that the Chinese people were free to ignore appeals to national solidarity: ‘on no account must we give more liberty to the individual; let us instead secure liberty for the nation’. He argued similarly that China did not demand equality; she had no aristocracy, few big landlords and few capitalists. In China, he said, there were no rich and poor, only poor and poorer. Yet he professed to be committed to democracy and even proposed the rights of recall, initiative, and referendum. He put forward a programme for the development of democracy, under tutelage, beginning with the village and culminating in the eventual creation of a national parliament.

He deplored Communism as expressing only ‘the pathology of a particular society’, but at the same time insisted that his Principle of Livelihood was ‘practical Communism’, and his plans for the economic reconstruction of China were fairly radical. The profits of expanding urban land values would be invested in state-sponsored industry, while lower rural rents and better security of tenure would prepare the way for the redistribution of land. On Chinese culture, he professed to believe that China's morality was on a higher level than that of the West, but admitted that the Chinese had been ‘less active in matters of performance’ than the foreigners.

Sun's successor Chiang Kai-shek, a traditionalist soldier who encouraged China's Blue Shirt fascists, made no serious attempt to apply Sun's ideology until he was chastened by defeat and confined to Taiwan. There land reform with compensation for the landlords, state control of upstream industry, and inducement planning of private enterprise, combined with a one-party system which while oppressive towards individuals was very responsive to peasant interests, produced an economic miracle—the more miraculous because rapid growth was most unusually accompanied by a rapid diminution of inequalities in income. Sun's ideas seemed vindicated, and this was not lost on the many Chinese of all communities who have always found Sun's modernization of tradition more comfortable than the repudiation of tradition in favour either of communism or Western democracy. Sun's Three Principles have life in them still.

— Jack Gray