Sun Yixian: father of Chinese republicanism

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Sun Yixian photographed in 1912, after his resignation from the presidency

Sun Yixian (Wade-Giles: Sun Yat-sen) was the father of Chinese republicanism and, until the rise of Mao Zedong, China’s best known revolutionary leader. Sun played a critical role in promoting and expanding Chinese nationalism, facilitating the overthrow of the Qing and forming the early Chinese republic. His ideas and political philosophy shaped and inspired China and Chinese politics in the 20th century. Yet despite his enormous impact, Sun’s life as a revolutionary was marked by frustration, usurpation and disappointment. He spent years in exile, plotting the removal of the Qing from afar. Sun’s early attempts to foment a revolution in China failed, while his contribution to the successful 1911 revolution was peripheral and indirect. Yet when the revolution came, Sun seemed its logical leader. When he was finally in a position to form a republican government, a lack of military backing forced Sun to surrender his power to Yuan Shikai. After Shikai betrayed his promise to uphold a democratic republican government, Sun spent the last dozen years of his life working to restore it. When Sun died prematurely in 1925, China was still divided and republicanism was confined to the southern province of Guangdong. But despite his death, Sun’s vision of a Republican China was eventually fulfilled.

Sun Yixian was born a peasant in Guangdong province in 1866. At age 13 he was sent to study in Hawaii, where his brother had emigrated and prospered. Sun attended Christian schools in Hawaii and excelled in various studies. Fearing that Sun might convert to Christianity, his brother returned him to China in 1883. Sun’s return to the misery of peasant life, with its burdens of hard labour, heavy taxes and archaic religious and social beliefs, sharpened his revolutionary spirit. He moved to Hong Kong and returned to his studies, gaining a degree in medicine at age 26. While in Hong Kong Sun joined a Protestant Christian church and finally converted. Sun was by now a republican who supported the overthrow of the Qing, though he did not reveal this publicly. At some point in the 1880s Sun joined the Hongmen, a Chinese secret society which had been declared illegal by the Qing. Though once comprised of criminals and gangsters, the Hongmen triads provided an ideal platform for political subversives like Sun Yixian and Jiang Jieshi (Wade-Giles: Chiang Kai-shek), who was also a member. By the start of 1894 Sun had quit his medical practice and was working full time on anti-Qing politics. He became involved in existing reformist and literary movements and also petitioned the powerful Qing minister Li Hongzhang for political reform.

“More than a thousand times”, Sun Yixian once remarked, “the question has been put to me: when and how I got my revolutionary ideas”. To this question, he seems to have varied his answers. When speaking to fellow Christians, he emphasised the liberating influence of his Christian schooling and of his association with foreign missionaries. When he was making an address at Hongkong University, the inciting force of the revolution was the sharp contrast between efficient British government of the colony and the Chinese Empire’s misgovernment. When speaking to Chinese audiences, the urge to revolution was economic and territorial encroachment of foreign powers. Doubtless all these causes and others too must be combined to account for the turning of Sun Yixian into a revolutionist.”
Lyon Sharman, historian

In late 1894 Sun, now a target for Qing authorities, decided to return to Hawaii. Once there he helped form the republican group Xingzhonghui, or Revive China Society, recruiting other Chinese nationalists and expatriates. In the autumn of 1895 Sun and several of his colleagues returned to Hong Kong, then a British dominion, and begin organising an attempted takeover in neighbouring Guangzhou. Sun’s group was infiltrated by Qing informers, however, and the Guangzhou uprising, when launched in late October 1895, was easily suppressed. Sun fled again and spent a decade in exile, mainly in Japan but also Britain, Europe, the United States and Canada. Much of his time was spent recruiting other Chinese, raising funds, drawing international attention to Qing failures and abuses, and formulating his own political philosophy. In April 1905 Sun delivered a speech to Chinese students in Brussels, Belgium, where he first outlined his Three Principles of the People.

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Sun Yixian (centre) with Tongmenghui members in 1905

By the middle of 1905 Sun had returned to Japan. In August he merged the Revive China Society with other nationalist groups to form the Tongmenghui (United League). This group spent the next few years recruiting members, producing propaganda and starting nationalist newspapers. It was in one of these newspapers, Min Bao (‘People’s Journal’) that Sun Yixian first published a full account of his Three Principles: nationalism, democracy and the people’s welfare. Nationalism, Sun wrote, was necessary to deliver self-government and return China to the Chinese. Democracy was required to ensure a new, equitable and accountable system of government. Finally, the people’s welfare was necessary to ensure a more equitable distribution of land, chiefly through the national ownership of land. By the start of 1907 Sun and his followers felt strong enough to challenge the Qing by organising uprisings in areas where royal authority was weak. The Tongmenghui organised at least six unsuccessful uprisings in 1907 – in Huanggang (May), Huizhou (June), Anqing (July), Qinzhou (September) and Zhennanguan (December) – but all failed.

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Sun Yixian, pictured shortly before his death in 1925

Sun played no direct part in organising the Wuchang uprising that triggered the 1911 revolution. Still, many of the dissident soldiers involved were well versed in and sympathetic to Sun’s political rhetoric. Sun himself was in the United States when the revolution broke out. He returned to China, arriving in December. Nationalists formed a provisional republican government in Nanjing, and on December 29th Sun was elected as its president. Sun’s rise from revolutionary-in-exile to national president took just ten weeks – but his time in office proved even shorter. With a Qing emperor still on the throne and the possibility of a military counter-revolution strong, Sun ceded the presidency to northern general Yuan Shikai, in return for Shikai’s military support for the revolution and the republican government. Yuan fulfilled part of his promise, threatening to turn his armies against the Qing and forcing the abdication of the infant emperor Puyi. But the general had no intellectual commitment to democracy, modernity or the new republic. Within a year Shikai had moved to increase his own power, at the expense of the national assembly. After a glimmer of republican hope in late 1911, Sun was again a revolutionary, fighting to topple an anti-democratic ruler.

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Sun Yixian features strongly at centenary celebrations for the 1911 revolution

In August 1912 Sun reformed the Tongmenghui and other smaller nationalist groups into a new political party called the Guomindang. In July 1913 Sun and the Guomindang attempted a second revolution against Yuan Shikai. This failed and Shikai’s forces captured and occupied Nanjing. Sun again spent several years in exile in Japan, returning to China after Shikai’s death in 1916. By this time China was fundamentally divided, a patchwork of regions ruled by powerful local warlords. Sun and the Guomindang managed to seize control of the southern province of Guangdong, where they established a military government based in Guangzhou. It was there that Sun, his military commander Jiang Jieshi and other members of the Guomindang began preparing to reunify China, both by force and persuasion.

Sun died of cancer in March 1925. His death was widely mourned but it soon triggered a power struggle and split inside the Guomindang. On the surface Sun’s commitment to revolution seems unfulfilled: he never lived to see his vision fulfilled, nor did he ever become the leader of a united Republican China. Sun’s legacy survived him, however, living on in the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); both parties embraced different interpretations of the Three Principles in their own ideologies. For this reason, both nationalists and communists regard Sun as the “father of modern China”. When the Guomindang and CCP later fell into civil war, each presented itself as the true party of Sun Yixian and his ideas, claiming their rivals had misrepresented and perverted them.

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1. Sun Yixian was born to a peasant family in Guangdong before relocating to Hawaii and Hong Kong to study. A physician by training, he became involved in revolutionary politics, both in China and abroad.

2. Sun worked in and founded several nationalist groups, such as the Revive China Society and Tongmenghui. They organised numerous uprisings, hoping to trigger an anti-Qing revolution.

3. Sun’s early attempts at revolution failed and he was driven into exile. Nevertheless, his writings and ideas helped motivate those responsible for the 1911 or Xinhai Revolution.

4. In December 1911 Sun returned to China and was elected as the president of a new republican government. He later ceded the presidency to Yuan Shikai, in return for Shikai’s military backing.

5. Sun spent the last years of his life forming the Guomindang, refining his political philosophy (the Three Principles of the People), forming a military government in Guangzhou and attempting to reunify China under a republican government.


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