Biographies
Sun Yat-sen 孫中山Founding Father, Republic of China
Sun Yat-sen, also known as Sun Chung-shan and Sun Wen, was born in 1866 in a coastal village of Xiangshan County, Guangdong Province. After receiving his early education in both Chinese and Western schools, he moved to Hawaii in 1879, where he attended Iolani and Oahu Colleges. In 1883, he returned to China to continue his studies, concentrating on the Chinese classics and history. He later moved to Hong Kong to attend Queen’s College and in 1892 graduated from Hong Kong Medical College for Chinese.
Seeing the weakness of the Ching court and the encroachment on China by foreign powers, Sun gave up his medical career to pursue political reform. In 1894, together with a group of young overseas Chinese, Sun established his first revolution organization, the Xingzhong Hui (Society for Regenerating China), in Honolulu, Hawaii. His political ideals are summarized in a set of doctrines called the Three Principles of the People, which are nationalism, democracy, and the people’s well-being and which were designed with the idea of an independent, democratic and prosperous China in mind.
Over the next 16 years, Sun and his followers launched 10 futile attempts to topple the corrupt imperial Ching court. Finally, on October 10, 1911, forces loyal to Sun took over Wuchang, the capital of Hubei Province. Thereafter, other provinces and important cities joined the revolutionary camp and declared independence from the Ching government. On December 29, 1911, Sun was elected provisional president of the new republic by delegates from 16 of the 17 provinces gathered in Nanjing. He was inaugurated on January 1, 1912, the founding day of the ROC.
To preserve national unity, Sun relinquished the presidency on April 1, 1912, to military strongman Yuan Shi-kai, who declared himself emperor in 1915. Sun and other leaders relocated to Japan to continue the revolutionary struggle until Yuan’s death in 1916. In 1917, the Provisional Assembly elected Sun to lead the Chinese Military Government based in Guangzhou, and in 1921 Sun assumed office as president of the newly formed government in Guangzhou. He devoted the rest of his life to uniting China’s feuding factions.
Sun denied the inevitability of communism in China. He believed that class struggle, an intrinsic element of communism, was not an inevitable stage in human progress. He reiterated this point in a joint declaration issued with Soviet envoy Adolf Joffe in 1923, which stated that communism was not suitable for China. He also believed that cooperation rather than class struggle was the driving force behind social development.
Sun died of illness on March 12, 1925, at the age of 59 in Beijing. In 1940, he was posthumously declared the Founding Father of the Republic of China for his lifelong contributions to the revolution.