Background
Mr. Sun Fo was born at Kwantung in 1891. His father was Dr. Sun Yat- sen, head of the Southern Constitutional government.
President of the Legislative Yuan
Mr. Sun Fo was born at Kwantung in 1891. His father was Dr. Sun Yat- sen, head of the Southern Constitutional government.
He travelled abroad to study, earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and a Master of Science from Columbia University in 1917. He also received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia. He married Chen Suk-ying and had two sons (Sun Tse-ping and Sun Tse-kiong) and two daughters (Sun Sui-ying and Sun Sui-hwa).
After returning to China, Sun worked 3S a secretary in the Guangzhou city parliament and at the ministry of foreign affairs and later served as the associate editor of the English-language newspaper Canton Times. He then moved to Hong Kong.
When Sun Yat-sen appointed Chen Chiungming governor of Guangdong province, Chen asked Sun Ke to prepare the legal rules for governing Guangzhou's new municipal council. In 1921 Chen appointed Sun Ke mayor of Guangzhou. Sun worked energetically to expand Canton s public works, financing those expenditures by increasing Guangzhou city's property taxes. Through his efforts, Guangzhou became southern China's most modern city.
In October 1923 the Guomindang appointed Sun Ke to its provisional central executive committee, where he drafted a constitution, new Party regulations, and a manifesto. Sun Ke helped plan the Party's first congress, held in January 1924, at which he presented his draft of the constitution.
In November 1924 Sun Yat-sen went to north China to negotiate with the warlords but became ill. Sun Ke joined his father and witnessed the signing of his two wills on March 11, 1925. One of the wills became the oath whereby future Guomindang (GMD) members swore their loyalty to the Nationalist Party. Thereafter, Sun Ke rapidly rose in the GMD. In January 1926 he became a member of the Party's central executive committee while continuing to serve as Guangzhou city’s mayor as well as member of the GMD’s political council.
On March 10-16, 1926, Sun joined the five-man standing committee of the government council in Wuhan city, and thus became a key player in the Wuhan government; along with his provincial colleague Hu Hanmin, Sun Ke and others toured Europe in 1928. After returning, Sun joined the Nanjing government and served in the state council and other high posts. But after President Jisng Jieshi illegally arrested Hu Hanmin in 1931, Sun returned to Guangdong province and joined his GMD comrades in opposing Jiang's leadership of the Party. Not until Hu was released did Sun return to Nanjing to serve as president of the Executive Yuan.
Sun continued to oppose Jiang's authoritarian rule and some of his policies, especially Jiang's moderate stance toward Japan. Both men agreed to disagree, whereupon Sun Ke resumed his career as a public servant and held many high offices. Sun participated in negotiations with the Soviet Union leading to the signing of a Sino-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1937, and in January 1938 and April 1939 went to Moscow as a special envoy of Jiang Jieshih. While there he obtained substantial loans from the Soviet regime and signed a Sino-Soviet commercial treaty.
Sun Ke spent the war years in the Nationalist capital city of Chongqing, Sichuan province. In 1948 he was elected president of the Legislative Yuan and later headed the Executive Yuan. In early 1949 Sun Ke moved the Executive "Yuan to Guangzhou because Communist military forces were rapidly moving southward. He resigned and went into retirement in March 1949 and moved to Taiwan; then he moved to France in 1951 and then finally to America in 1952. In October 1965 he settled in Taiwan, becoming a senior adviser to the Office of the President as well as president of the Executive Yuan in Msy 1966. He died on September 13, 1973, in Taibci.