Sun-Yat Sen, Forgotten Father of Modern China
Dec 07, 2023 · 2 mins read
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Before Mao Tse-tung, before Deng Xiaoping, there was Sun-Yat sen.
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Now revered in China as leader of the first popular revolution and father of the Chinese republic, Sun was in fact strikingly international.
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He spent his high school years in Hawaii, then studied medicine in Hong Kong - where to his family’s dismay he converted to Christianity under the influence of English missionaries.
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After his first failed attempt at overthrowing the Manchu Qing government in 1895, Sun had to spend years in Japan, the United States and Britain.
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His forced exile allowed him to study Western politics, and he constantly worked to get the support of the Chinese diaspora for the nationalist, anti-colonialist cause.
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Sun was raising funds in America when, after numerous attempted uprisings orchestrated from abroad, China had its 1911 revolution. The following year the first Chinese republic was formed with Sun as its president.
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Sun’s revolutionary organization, the Tongmenghui, was transformed into a political party, the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. But Sun was usurped by the rapacious general Yuan Shikai, causing China to split into two republics. Sun headed the Southern one.
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Chiang Kai-shek would unify China again along the lines set that Sun had set out years earlier in his political and philosophical treatise, Three Principles of the People (1925).
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That nationalist republic would itself be swept aside by Chairman Mao’s communists in 1948, when Chiang Kai-shek’s forces retreated to Formosa (Taiwan) to continue what they believed was the legitimate Chinese republic.
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Yet just as the American Civil War did not diminish the status of its Founding Fathers, so Sun, despite not being a communist, is that rare figure who is highly esteemed in both the People’s Republic and Taiwan.
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