Sun Yat-Sen
(1866–1925), Chinese revolutionary. Sun Yat-sen was born near Guangzhou (Canton) to a farming family. His personal name was Wen, his style or secondary name was Yat-sen, and his revolutionary name, by which he is better known in China, was Zhongshan (Chung-shan). Sun first attended a village school, then went to Honolulu at age thirteen with his elder brother for his secondary education, and later received a medical degree from the College for Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong. Disgusted with the ineffectiveness of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644–1912), he became a revolutionary. Travels to Hawaii, Hong Kong, and later in Britain and the United States had a profound influence on the young Sun.
In 1894, he formed the Review China Society among overseas Chinese with the goal of expelling the Manchus and forming a republic. He later formulated a set of ideals for the republic called the Three People's Principles: nationalism, democracy, and livelihood, which are roughly analogous to Abraham Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Sun also envisioned the amalgamation of the best Western concepts of government with those of traditional China in a five-power constitution consisting of the executive, legislative, and judiciary plus a censorate (to check abuses by officials) and an examination system for the recruitment of a bureaucracy. In 1905, the Revive China Society was subsumed by the Tungmeng Hui (United League), with membership among Chinese students abroad, military officers of the Qing army, and overseas Chinese.
After ten abortive uprisings between 1895 and 1911, the eleventh, the Wuchang Uprising of 10 October 1911, spread like wildfire. It resulted in Sun's election as provisional president of the Republic of China and the abdication of the Manchu emperor on 12 February 1912. Sun resigned as president in favor of General Yuan Shikai on condition that the latter supported the republic.
Yuan, however, betrayed the republic by abrogating the elected parliament, which was dominated by the Nationalist Party (the Tungmeng Hui became the Nationalist Party or Guomindang in 1912), culminating in his failed attempt to become emperor. After Yuan's usurpation attempt, politics in China degenerated into civil wars between rival warlords.
Frustrated in his attempts to obtain help from Western democracies, Sun turned to the newly established Communist government in Russia for military and organizational help in 1922 and agreed to the Russian stipulation that the Nationalists accept members of the infant Chinese Communist Party into their ranks. Sun then reorganized the Nationalist Party and commissioned his lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), to build up an army committed to his ideology. Sun died in 1925 in Beijing during a last attempt to negotiate a peaceful unification of China.
Sun is honored as the father of the republic. The Three People's Principles are the guiding ideology of the Republic of China on Taiwan, where the people have achieved democracy and where the principle of livelihood has been realized in the high standard of living and largely equitable distribution of income among all citizens.
Further Reading
Bergere, M. C. (1998) Sun Yat-Sen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Schiffrin, Harold. (1968) Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
———. (1980) Sun Yat-sen: Reluctant Revolutionary. Boston: Little, Brown.
Sharman, Lyon. ([1934] 1968) Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning. Reprint ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wilbur, C. Martin. (1976) Sun Yat-sen: Frustrated Patriot. New York: Columbia University Press.
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