Sun Yat-sen

Early Life and Radicalisation

Sun Yat-sen was born on 12 November 1866 in Cuiheng village, Xiangshan County, Guangdong Province, into a farming family. At thirteen he joined his elder brother Sun Mei in Hawaii, where he received a Western education at Iolani School and Oahu College, converting to Christianity. Returning to China, he studied medicine in Hong Kong and graduated from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese in 1892. He briefly practised medicine in Macau and Guangzhou, but the humiliating terms of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) — particularly the cession of Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula — convinced him that medical work was insufficient. China could only be saved through political revolution.

The Revolutionary Movement (1894–1911)

In 1894 Sun founded the Revive China Society (兴中会, Xingzhonghui) in Hawaii, the first of several revolutionary organisations he would lead. Between 1895 and 1911 he organised or inspired at least ten armed uprisings against the Qing dynasty, all of which failed. Each failure forced him into longer periods of exile in Japan, the United States, and Europe, where he cultivated overseas Chinese communities as donors and recruited intellectuals to the revolutionary cause. He articulated his political programme as the Three Principles of the People (三民主义): Nationalism (民族主义), Democracy (民权主义), and the People's Livelihood (民生主义).

In 1905 Sun merged his various organisations into the United League (同盟会, Tongmenghui) in Tokyo, bringing together the most significant strands of the republican revolutionary movement. The Huanghuagang Uprising of April 1911 — the tenth and bloodiest failed attempt before Wuchang — cost the lives of seventy-two revolutionaries whose deaths became martyrdom symbols. When the Wuchang Uprising finally succeeded in October 1911, Sun was in the United States fundraising and learned of it from newspaper reports.

Provisional Presidency and Resignation (1912)

Sun returned to China in late December 1911 and was elected Provisional President of the Republic of China by delegates in Nanjing on 1 January 1912. His authority was largely nominal: the revolutionary armies controlled the south but lacked the military strength to take Beijing. Yuan Shikai commanded the Beiyang Army — the most modern military force in China — and was the only figure capable of compelling the Qing court to abdicate. Sun negotiated a deal in which he would resign the presidency in favour of Yuan once the emperor abdicated, calculating that a constitutional republic with Yuan at its head was preferable to continued civil war. The emperor abdicated on 12 February; Sun resigned the following day.

Struggle Against Yuan Shikai and Warlordism

Yuan Shikai's presidency quickly became authoritarian. He dissolved parliament, suppressed the Nationalist Party (国民党, Kuomintang), which had won the 1912 elections, and in 1915 attempted to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor. Sun organised the "Second Revolution" (二次革命) against Yuan in 1913 — it failed within weeks — and fled once more to Japan, where in 1915 he married Soong Ching-ling. Yuan's death in 1916 left China fragmented among competing warlord factions rather than unified under a republic. In July 1917 Sun travelled to Guangzhou and launched the Constitution Protection Movement; that September an extraordinary session of parliament elected him Generalissimo of the Military Government, but marginalised by rival warlords and politicians, he was forced to resign in May 1918. In April 1921 the Guangzhou parliament again elected him head of state, this time as "Extraordinary President," and he was inaugurated that May. In June 1922, Chen Jiongming — the Guangdong warlord general on whom Sun had relied — mutinied and shelled the presidential residence; Sun took refuge aboard the gunboat Yongfeng for more than fifty days, and the Second Constitution Protection Movement collapsed. This succession of setbacks convinced him that only a disciplined party and a loyal, trained military could genuinely unify China.

Reorganisation and the First United Front (1923–1925)

By the early 1920s, Sun had concluded that his Nationalist Party needed to be fundamentally reorganised to succeed. Disappointed by the failure of Western democracies to support the Chinese republic — and impressed by the organisational discipline of the Soviet Communist Party — he accepted Soviet assistance and advice. In 1923–24 the KMT was reorganised along Leninist lines with Soviet adviser Mikhail Borodin's help, and the First United Front with the Chinese Communist Party was established, allowing CCP members to join the KMT as individuals. This alliance, controversial within the KMT, reflected Sun's pragmatic conviction that only a disciplined mass party and a trained military could unify China.

Sun established the Whampoa Military Academy in May 1924 with Chiang Kai-shek as its commandant, creating the officer corps that would lead the Northern Expedition. He did not live to see it: diagnosed with liver cancer, he died in Beijing on 12 March 1925 — aged 58 — while negotiating with the northern government in an attempt to achieve peaceful reunification. His last words were reported to be "peace, struggle, save China."

Legacy

Sun Yat-sen occupies a uniquely contested position in modern Chinese political culture. Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) claim him as their founding father: the PRC emphasises his anti-imperialism and his alliance with the Soviets and the CCP; the ROC emphasises his Three Principles and his commitment to constitutional democracy. In the PRC he is consistently referred to as the "forerunner of the democratic revolution" (民主革命的先行者). In Taiwan, portraits of Sun hang in government buildings and his image appears on currency. The divergence reflects not historical disagreement about what Sun did, but competing claims about which successor state best realises his vision.