Sun Yat-sen (1866 - 1925) was a Chinese revolutionary, physician and political thinker regarded as the founding figure of modern China. He organised and financed the movement that brought down the Qing dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and became the first provisional president of the Republic of China in 1912. [1] His political doctrine, the Three Principles of the People, shaped the Kuomintang he founded and is honoured on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. [2]
Early life and education
Sun Yat-sen was born on 12 November 1866 in the village of Cuiheng in Guangdong province, into a farming family. At thirteen he joined an elder brother in Hawaii, where he attended the ʻIolani School and Punahou School and was exposed to Western education and Christianity. [1]
Returning to China, he continued his schooling in Hong Kong, at Queen's College and then at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, from which he graduated in 1892 as a licensed physician. He practised briefly in Macau and Guangzhou, but turned increasingly to politics as China's defeats at foreign hands convinced him that reform of the Qing state was impossible. [3]
Revolutionary organiser
In 1894 he founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu. A failed plot to seize Guangzhou the following year forced him into a long exile, during which he travelled among overseas Chinese communities in Japan, Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe, raising funds and building support. [1]
While in London in 1896 he was detained inside the Chinese legation and was released only after British public pressure, an episode that made him internationally known. In 1905 in Tokyo he merged several groups into the Tongmenghui, a unified revolutionary alliance, and set out the programme that became the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood. [2]
The Republic
The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 triggered the collapse of Qing authority across the provinces. Sun, who was abroad at the time, returned and was chosen provisional president of the Republic of China, taking office on 1 January 1912. [3]
To secure the abdication of the child emperor Puyi and avoid civil war, he ceded the presidency within months to the military strongman Yuan Shikai. Yuan then dissolved parliament, suppressed Sun's newly founded Kuomintang and moved to make himself emperor, driving Sun back into exile and opening the era of warlord fragmentation. [1]
Later years and death
From 1917 Sun attempted repeatedly to establish a rival national government at Guangzhou in opposition to the warlord regime in Beijing. Unable to obtain support from the Western powers, he accepted assistance from the Soviet Union, reorganised the Kuomintang along Leninist lines, admitted Communists to its ranks in the First United Front, and founded the Whampoa Military Academy under Chiang Kai-shek. [2]
He travelled north in late 1924 to negotiate national reunification and died of liver cancer in Beijing on 12 March 1925. His body was later interred in the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum at Nanjing. [1]
Legacy
Sun is one of the few modern Chinese figures venerated by both the Communist Party of China, which calls him a forerunner of the revolution, and the Kuomintang in Taiwan, where he is titled Father of the Nation. His Three Principles remain embedded in the constitution of the Republic of China and in its national anthem. [3]
Parks, universities, streets and memorial halls across China, Taiwan and Chinese communities abroad carry his name, and his birthplace at Cuiheng is preserved as a museum. [2]
