Sun Yat Sen - the doctor who founded the modern China

Sun Yat Sen was born to a family of poor farmers in Xiangshan, in the South China province of Guangdong. In 1879 his brother Sun Mei, who had earlier emigrated to Hawaii as a labourer, brought him to Honolulu, where, as a student at a British missionary school for three years and at an American school, Oahu College, for another year, he first came into contact with Western influences. Because his brother objected to his penchant for Christianity, Sun returned to his native village in 1883 and went to study at the Diocesan Home in Hong Kong in the fall; late that year, he was baptized by an American missionary.

In 1884 he transferred to the Government Central School (later known as Queen’s College) and married Lu Muzhen (1867–1952), who was chosen for him by his parents. Out of this marriage a son and two daughters were born. After another trip to Hawaii, he enrolled in the Guangzhou (Canton) Hospital Medical School in 1886. He transferred later to the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong and graduated in 1892.

Sun was born to a family of poor farmers in Xiangshan, in the South China province of Guangdong. In 1879 his brother Sun Mei, who had earlier emigrated to Hawaii as a labourer, brought him to Honolulu, where, as a student at a British missionary school for three years and at an American school, Oahu College, for another year, he first came into contact with Western influences. Because his brother objected to his penchant for Christianity, Sun returned to his native village in 1883 and went to study at the Diocesan Home in Hong Kong in the fall; late that year, he was baptized by an American missionary.

In 1884 he transferred to the Government Central School (later known as Queen’s College) and married Lu Muzhen (1867–1952), who was chosen for him by his parents. Out of this marriage a son and two daughters were born. After another trip to Hawaii, he enrolled in the Guangzhou (Canton) Hospital Medical School in 1886. He transferred later to the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong and graduated in 1892.

Taking advantage of China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the ensuing crisis, Sun went to Hong Kong in 1895 and plotted for an uprising in Guangzhou (Canton), the capital of his native province. When the scheme failed, he began a 16-year exile abroad.

In 1896, under circumstances not entirely clear, Sun was caught and detained for 13 days by the Chinese legation in London. It appears likely that Sun ran into a fellow Cantonese who worked for the legation and was found out and seized while visiting him under an alias. The legation planned to ship Sun back to China, but, before this could be done, Sun had converted a British employee at the legation to his side and got word through to James Cantlie, former dean of Hong Kong College of Medicine. The British Foreign Office intervened, and Sun was released from his captivity. The incident engendered great publicity and gave Sun’s career a powerful boost.

After spending much of the ensuing eight months reading in the British Museum, Sun traveled to Japan by way of Canada. Arriving in August 1897, he was met by Miyazaki Torazō, an adventurer who had heard of the London incident and who was willing to help Sun in his political activities. Miyazaki introduced Sun to many influential Japanese, including the elder statesmen Ōkuma Shigenobu, Soejima Taneomi, and Inukai Tsuyoshi, from some of whom Sun was to receive both political and financial assistance.

During the turmoil of 1900, Sun participated in secret maneuvers involving Sir Henry Blake, the British governor of Hong Kong, and He Kai, an influential Chinese in that colony. Their aim was to persuade Li Hongzhang to declare independence from the Qing. Responding to an invitation by Li’s staff, Sun journeyed to Hong Kong, but, fearing a trap, he did not go ashore. Instead, he was represented by Miyazaki and two other Japanese at the meeting, which proved fruitless.

Previously, Sun had made contact with bandits and secret societies in Guangdong. These forces began a revolt in Huizhou (present-day Huiyang in Guangdong) in October 1900. The campaign, the second of 10 claimed by Sun between 1895 and 1911, lasted 12 days.

The year 1903 marked a significant turning point in Sun’s career; from then on, his following came increasingly from the educated class, the most prestigious and influential group in China. For this decisive change Sun owed much to two factors: the steady decline of the Qing dynasty and the powerful propaganda of Liang Qichao, a reformist who fled to Japan in 1898, founded a Chinese press, and turned it into an instant success. Liang did not actually oppose the Qing regime, but his attacks on Cixi, the empress dowager, who effectively ruled the country, served to undermine the regime and make revolution the only logical choice. As a consequence, Sun’s stock rose steadily among the Chinese students abroad. In 1904 he was able to establish several revolutionary cells in Europe, and in 1905 he became head of a revolutionary coalition, the United League (Tongmenghui), in Tokyo. For the next three years the society propagandized effectively through its mouthpiece, “People’s Journal” (Minbao).

The rise in Sun’s fortune increased many of his difficulties. The United League was very loosely organized, and Sun had no control over the individual members. Worse still, all the revolts Sun and the others organized ended in failure. The members fell into despair, and outside financial contributions declined. Furthermore, as a result of pressures exercised by the Qing, foreign governments increasingly shunned Sun. In 1907 the Japanese government gave him a sum of money and asked him to leave the country. A year later French Indochina, where Sun had hatched several plots, banned him completely. Hong Kong and several other territories were similarly out of his reach.

In the circumstances, Sun spent a year in 1909–10 touring Europe and the United States. Returning to Asia in June 1910, he left for the West again in December after a meeting with other revolutionaries, in which they decided to make a massive effort to capture Guangzhou. This time Sun raised more money in Canada and the United States, but the uprising of April 27 in Guangzhou (known as the March 29 Revolution, because of its date in the Chinese calendar) fared no better than the earlier plots. The possibility of revolutionary success seemed more remote than ever.

But help was to come from the Qing. If only for self-preservation, the court had sponsored reform since 1901. In the next few years it reorganized the army, instituted a school system, abolished the civil-service examinations based on traditional Chinese scholarship, reconstructed many government organs, and convened provincial and national assemblies. The educated class nevertheless remained unsatisfied with the tempo of change, and the regime was rapidly losing its grip over the situation.

The revolution of 1911

In 1911 the Qing decided to nationalize all the trunk railways, thus incurring the wrath of local vested interests. Armed rebellion broke out in the province of Sichuan, and the court exposed itself to further attacks by failing to suppress it. In October of the same year a local revolutionary group in Wuhan, one of many in China by this time, began another rebellion, which, in spite of its lack of coordination, unexpectedly managed to overthrow the provincial government. Its success inspired other provincial secessions.

Sun Yat-sen learned of the Wuhan revolution from the newspapers while he was in Denver, Colo. He returned to Shanghai in December and was elected provisional president by delegates meeting in Nanjing. Knowing that his regime was weak, Sun made a deal with Yuan Shikai (Yüan Shih-k’ai), an imperial minister who had been entrusted with full power by the court. On Feb. 12, 1912, the emperor abdicated; the next day Sun resigned, and on the 14th Yuan was elected his successor.

In September, Yuan appointed Sun director-general of railway development. Their entente might have lasted if Song Jiaoren, who had reorganized the Alliance Society into the Nationalist Party and was serving as its head, had not been assassinated in March 1913, reportedly at Yuan’s instigation. This precipitated a second revolution, in which Sun opposed Yuan. When the campaign failed, Sun fled once again to Japan. While there, he unavailingly sought Japanese aid by promising vast concessions in China, and he also alienated many revolutionaries by requiring them to take an oath of personal allegiance to him. He was also criticized for marrying his secretary, Song Qingling (Soong Ch’ing-ling), in October 1915, without divorcing his first wife.

A combination of internal opposition and external pressures defeated Yuan in 1916. The next year Sun went from Shanghai to Guangdong to launch a movement against the premier, Duan Qirui (Tuan Ch’i-jui). Elected generalissimo of a separatist regime in July, Sun had to resign and leave for Shanghai toward the middle of 1918, when he lost the support of Lu Rongting, the military overlord of Guangdong.

Earlier, Lu had agreed to Sun’s gaining control over 20 battalions of armed guards if the forces would remain outside Guangdong. Accepting this condition, Sun appointed Chen Jiongming (Ch’ien Chiung-ming) as the commander and dispatched his men to Fujian. By persuading Chen to fight Lu, Sun found his way back to office for another 16 months, at the end of which Chen turned against him, and Sun had to leave for Shanghai again. From that sanctuary, he wooed the troops from Guangxi and Yunnan, and with their help he again returned to Guangzhou. In February 1923 he installed himself as generalissimo of a new regime.

Meanwhile, a new factor had risen in Sun’s political life. Unsuccessful at obtaining aid from the West and Japan, he looked increasingly to the Soviet government, which had come to power in Russia in 1917. A Soviet diplomat, Adolf Joffe, visited Sun in Shanghai in both 1922 and 1923. On the latter occasion the two issued the Sun-Joffe Manifesto declaring that the communist system was not suitable for China, that Russia intended to give up its privileges there, and that Russia had no intention of extending its influence over Outer Mongolia. At Soviet prodding, the Chinese Communist Party resolved to cooperate with the Nationalists.

In October 1923, Mikhail Borodin, a representative of the Comintern (Communist International), arrived at Guangzhou and soon gained Sun’s confidence. Early in 1924 Sun reorganized the Nationalist Party as a tightly disciplined body with authority descending from the top to the lower levels on the model of the Soviet Communist Party. Under his directive a party congress elected three communists to its central executive committee and approved the establishment of a military academy (of which Sun appointed Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] president). Part of his party-building efforts were a series of lectures Sun delivered on his own doctrine, the Three Principles of the People.

Although these actions strengthened the Nationalists, there was still considerable opposition to Sun’s authority when he died of cancer in Beijing in March 1925. His coffin remained uninterred in a temple in Xishan until 1929, when it was moved to a mausoleum in Nanjing.

Sun’s political doctrines are summarized in his Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood—the last involving the regulation of private capital and “equalizing land rights”) and his Plan for National Reconstruction, which explained basic parliamentary procedures, attacked the traditional Chinese saying that to know is easier than to do, and set forth a grandiose plan for China’s industrialization, concocted by Sun without much help from engineers or economists.

Although sanctified by his followers, Sun’s doctrine was not his major strength. All contemporary sources attribute to him a magnetic personality, a great capacity for tolerating others’ weaknesses, a singular dedication to the pursuit of power, and a knowledge of the West unequaled by that of any of his political rivals. Perhaps the last factor is the most important, for it is this that set Sun apart and made him the symbol of Chinese modernization. Quite fittingly, the Chinese communists call him “a pioneer of the revolution.”