Sun Yat-sen: The Father of the Republic of China

Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925) was the leader of the Chinese republican revolution, the first provisional president of the Republic of China, and the political figure to whom both the Nationalist and Communist parties of twentieth-century China traced their revolutionary lineage. His Three Principles of the People — nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood — became the foundational doctrine of the new China. For the full background, see the [revolution and the birth of the Republic] (index.md) and in the larger story of the fall of imperial China.

Early Life in Guangdong, Hawaii, and Hong Kong

Sun Yat-sen was born on 12 November 1866 in Cuiheng village, Xiangshan county (later Zhongshan) in Guangdong, a coastal region of south China that had long been a point of contact with the wider world. In 1878, at the age of twelve, he joined his mother in Hawaii, where he was educated at the Anglican Iolani School and the Oahu College. The wider context of the late Qing crisis — the unequal treaties, the foreign concessions, the failure of reform — was the background in which he formed his political consciousness.

He returned to China in 1883, attended the Diocesan Home in Hong Kong, and studied at the College of Medicine for Chinese, founded by the London Missionary Society. He graduated in 1892 as one of the first Chinese students to receive a Western-style medical degree. The Hong Kong he knew was a hub of anti-Qing political activity.

The Hundred Days’ Reform and the Awakening of a Revolutionary

In 1894 Sun Yat-sen wrote a long memorial to the reformist official Li Hongzhang, the central figure of the Self-Strengthening Movement, proposing a comprehensive plan for China’s modernization. Li did not respond. The next year, the First Sino-Japanese War ended in the defeat of the Qing. In 1898 the Hundred Days’ Reform attempted and failed, and the reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled into exile.

These three shocks — the rejection of his reform plan, the defeat by Japan, and the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform — pushed Sun Yat-sen from reform to revolution. In 1894 he had already founded the Revive China Society (兴中会, Xingzhonghui) in Honolulu, with the goal of overthrowing the Qing. After 1898 he devoted himself fully to the revolutionary cause, working from exile in Japan, Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia, raising money, organizing supporters, and trying to coordinate the patchwork of anti-Qing secret societies, overseas Chinese groups, and radical students.

The Three Principles of the People

The Three Principles of the People (三民主义, san min zhuyi) were first formulated by Sun in an article in 1905 and developed in a series of lectures in 1924. The three principles were:

Nationalism (民族主义, minzu zhuyi): the recovery of Chinese sovereignty from the Manchu Qing and the great powers; the recognition of the multi-ethnic Chinese nation; the unification of the country.
Democracy (民权主义, minquan zhuyi): the establishment of a republican government based on popular sovereignty, with a separation of powers, an elected parliament, and the constitutional protection of civil rights. Sun proposed a five-power constitution drawing on Western models and on the traditional Chinese censorial and examination systems.
People’s livelihood (民生主义, minsheng zhuyi): a program of social welfare and economic regulation, originally framed as Henry George’s single tax on land, later expanded to include controls on capital and state-led industrialization. The philosophical background of these ideas draws on Chinese and Western sources.

The Three Principles were a synthesis of Chinese tradition and Western political thought, and they were an attempt to give the republican movement a coherent ideology. They were a deliberate alternative to the more purely nationalist programs of the revolutionaries’ rivals and to the gradualist reformism of the constitutionalists.

The Tongmenghui and the Revolutionary Movement

In 1905 Sun Yat-sen and a group of like-minded revolutionaries, including Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren, and Hu Hanmin, founded the United League (中国同盟会, Tongmenghui) in Tokyo. The Tongmenghui was the first serious attempt to unite the patchwork of revolutionary groups under a single political program. It drew its members from overseas Chinese, students in Japan, and the secret societies of south China. It published a newspaper, Min Bao (民报, The People’s Journal), in which Sun and his allies debated the gradualists. The wider context of the revolutionary movement explains the alliances and rivalries of these years.

The revolutionary program was to overthrow the Qing, establish a republic, and reform Chinese society. It was not, at first, anti-Western. Sun Yat-sen and his colleagues were willing to take foreign loans and accept foreign help, including from the Japanese, who in the 1890s had been the first East Asian nation to modernize, and who were willing to support the Chinese revolution as a way of weakening the Qing.

The 1911 Wuchang Uprising and the Founding of the Republic

The revolutionary moment came unexpectedly. On 10 October 1911, an accidental bomb explosion among revolutionary soldiers in the Wuchang garrison in Hubei forced the conspirators to launch their planned uprising. The garrison mutinied, the viceroy fled, and within a few days the revolutionaries controlled the three cities of Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang.

The Wuchang Uprising triggered a cascade of provincial declarations of independence. By the end of November 1911, fifteen of the eighteen provinces of “China proper” had broken with the Qing. In December Sun Yat-sen returned to China from his exile in the United States. He was elected provisional president of the Republic of China on 29 December 1911, in Nanjing, the former Taiping capital. He took office on 1 January 1912.

The Abdication and the Yuan Shikai Deal

The revolution was almost derailed by a deal between Sun and the powerful Beiyang general Yuan Shikai. Yuan, who had been appointed prime minister of the imperial government, could crush the revolution militarily but chose to negotiate. The agreement, brokered in part by foreign diplomats, gave Yuan the presidency of the new Republic in return for a peaceful Qing abdication. Sun Yat-sen resigned the provisional presidency in favour of Yuan on 10 February 1912. The abdication edict was issued on 12 February 1912 by the regent Empress Dowager Longyu on behalf of the boy emperor Puyi, the Xuantong Emperor.

Sun Yat-sen spent most of the next four years in exile, plotting the overthrow of Yuan Shikai, who had by 1915 declared himself emperor. Sun’s “Second Revolution” of 1913 had failed; he was excluded from the political settlement; and his party, reorganized as the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1912, was suppressed. The wider history of the early Republic treats Yuan’s imperial ambitions and their collapse.

After Yuan’s death in 1916, China entered the warlord era, a period of political fragmentation. Sun returned to Guangzhou and in 1921 set up a rival government, the Government of the Republic of China in Guangzhou, and was elected “Grand Marshal” of a military government. In 1924, in a series of lectures to KMT officers, he reshaped the party along Leninist lines with Soviet help, accepting the admission of Chinese Communists as individual members of the KMT. The alliance would have enormous consequences in the years after his death.

Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer in Beijing on 12 March 1925, at the age of 58. The city of Xiangshan was renamed Zhongshan in his honor. His body was preserved and entombed in a mausoleum in Nanjing, designed by the American architect Henry K. Murphy. The mausoleum, on the southern slope of the Purple Mountain, is still one of the most visited monuments in modern China.

Legacy

Sun Yat-sen’s legacy is contested but central. To the Nationalists, he was the founder of the Republic and the author of the Three Principles. To the Communists, he was the precursor of the revolutionary movement, who had welcomed Communists into the KMT. To the People’s Republic, he was a “great national hero, a great patriot, and a great pioneer of the democratic revolution.” On Taiwan, he remains the “Father of the Nation” (国父, guofu).