Background
Sun, Zhongshan was born in 1866 in Cuiheng, Guangdong Province, China.
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Zhongshan Sun
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Education
The Medical Schools of Pok Chai Hospital. Guangzhou and Alice Memorial Hospital, Hong Kong.
Career
1905-1912, leader of the Tongmenghui [Revolutionary Alliance]. 1911, leader of the Republican Revolution. 1912, first President of the Republic of China.
1912-1925, leader of the Guomindang [Nationalist Party].
Views
In the face of successive humiliations for China in the 1880s, Sun concluded that only the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the foundation of a Chinese republic would permit national renewal. For nearly two decades he organized open and clandestine revolutionary organizations and abortive uprisings. ‘Zhongshan’, the Chinese translation of his Japanese cover name, became the name by which he was universally known. In exile he travelled endlessly to raise funds and to maintain his political organization among overseas Chinese, while seeking support from Western statesmen. A possible alliance with Kang Youwei. the leading figure in the 1898 Hundred Days Reform, failed because Sun’s republican and Kang’s monarchist views proved irreconcilable. Kang became a bitter rival but, despite repeated setbacks, the republican cause gained ascendancy. In 1911 successful internal military revolts led to the formation of a Republic with Sun as its first President, although he soon gave way to the military leader Yuan Shikai in an attempt to consolidate republican rule and to end instability. Sun was involved in continuing political conflict until the end of his life in his attempt to establish stable national rule as a basis for national reconstruction. In 1921 a rump parliament in Guangzhou returned him to a disputed presidency for a year, but his most lasting legacy from this period derives from his party reorganization and his writing. Sun’s dismay over the lack of investment and political support from the Western democracies led him to turn to the new Soviet authorities for advice and collaboration. He reorganized his political organization, the Guomindang. on Leninist lines, with power concentrated in the leadership, strict discipline and ideological control. Against objections from some supporters, he agreed to cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, with individual Communists eligible to join the Guomindang. Earlier on he established a politically committed and highly trained military force under Jiang Jieshi as a basis for enforcing unified rule in China. These activities provided the different grounds for his later veneration in both the Republic and the People’s Republic. Sun's main political programme, contained in Three Principles of the People (1928), centred on nationalism, democracy and the people’s livelihood. His notion of nationalism began with his early oppositon to Qing Dynasty rule, but later encompassed his hostility to imperialist domination. He initially proposed a three-stage development of democracy in China, starting with military government guided by a revolutionary party, followed by a period of local democracy under political tutelege, and culminating in popular political rights under a full constitutional democracy. This period could lead to a time of Confucian great harmony, with universal peace based on the virtue of humanity. Sun’s conception of democracy was initially drawn from the USA, but he later added examination and control branches of government, derived from Chinese traditional practice. Under Soviet influence he came to emphasize the importance of a tightly disciplined revolutionary party in the first two stages of his programme to achieve democracy. Regarding people’s livelihood Sun proposed an eclectic programme drawn from Henry George and other socialist theorists and adapted to Chinese conditions. He rejected Marx’s theories of class struggle and surplus value and thought Marxist theory unsuitable for China. He also proposed large-scale economic and social developments to transform China into a modern socialist state, but continuing instability and the impossibility of gaining sufficient foreign investment thwarted his plans. Much of Sun’s political thinking had Western inspiration, but failure to achieve his revolutionary programme led to some traditional philosophical reflection. In ‘Psychological reconstruction’ in Principles of Notional Reconstruction, (1917-1919), he accepted the doctrine of the sixteenth-century neo-Confucian idealist Wang Yangming that knowledge and action are one. He rejected the claim that revolution failed because ‘knowing is easy, but doing is difficult’: rather, he claimed, knowing is difficult and doing is easy. If a revolutionary party with unified leadership could provide knowledge for the people then popular revolutionary action would be easy. Instilling appropriate attitudes to overcome ignorance thus became a central revolutionary task. His views about knowledge and action deserve critical attention at both political and philosophical levels.
