Sun Yat-Sen was a Chinese nationalist and political leader, founder of the People’s Republic of China , son of peasants from Kuangtung who was forced to leave the country to begin his studies; upon his return he openly fought against tradition and superstition.
Biographical summary
He was born in Choihang in 1866 , the son of peasants from Kuangtung, the southernmost province of China, where foreign presence dated back to earlier times and economic transformations motivated by colonial exploitation were greater.
At a young age he left China to join a brother in Hawaii, where he completed his first studies at an English missionary school in an environment strongly marked by a rationalist and positivist orientation of Western origin, with faith in technological and scientific progress.
Completely estranged from the Confucian cultural tradition, when he returned to China he openly carried out propaganda against tradition and superstition, and due to the violent reaction of the peasants, he had to take refuge in Hong Kong in 1883 , where he completed his studies and obtained, in 1892 , a diploma that allowed him to practice medicine; at that time he converted to Christianity.
Conspiratorial activities
During this period he came into contact with Chinese secret societies and began anti-dynastic conspiratorial activity: in 1894 he founded the Association for the Renewal of China, —Hsing Chung Hui— which the following year attempted to carry out a first strike in Canton , capital of Kuangtung.
Prohibited from returning to his homeland, he took a study trip to Europe and the United States , where he engaged in proselytism and organizational activities among Chinese emigrants.
Pursued by the Chinese secret police, who had kidnapped him to take him back to his native country, where a death sentence awaited him, during those years of exile he did not give up organizing continuous attempts at insurrection in southern China from Japan and Indochina, which were always bloodily repressed.
In 1905, he founded the T’ung Meng Hui in Japan , which soon established itself as the largest revolutionary party in China, and the Min Pao newspaper, which had a great influence on young Chinese intellectuals. During those years, he outlined the fundamental lines of the revolutionary programme that would later become The Three Principles of the People: in his worldview, the material needs of the people played a decisive role and, therefore, he gave priority to the political and economic transformation of China’s archaic social structures.
In every action, the Chinese leader devoted constant attention to finding concrete solutions to these problems; with a Western intellectual background, he was inspired by the West to obtain suitable legal and political instruments with which to modernize China from the highest levels.
Nationalism also denotes a Western influence, in which democratic concepts inspired by the United States, together with authoritarianism, positivism and technocratic aspirations, converged to varying degrees. In a way that was clearly contradictory to nationalism, he believed that Western influence, which was already natural in China due to foreign domination, was profoundly beneficial.
Return to China
After the victory in the October 1911 uprising against the Manchu dynasty, he returned to Shanghai and was elected president of the newly born Republic of China in January 1912 , which at that time included only the southern provinces. He made continuous attempts at reunification and after the failures, he resigned from office in February 1912, being marginalized from the most responsible positions, and even being the object of violent persecution.
In 1913 he was forced to take refuge in Japan again, where he attempted to take control of the movement again, founding the Kuomintang, a revolutionary party, in 1914 .
In the following years he attempted on several occasions to reconstruct a republican Chinese government from the ashes of the state apparatus created in 1911. Only in 1920 did he manage to re-establish a republican regime in Canton, albeit with a very limited territorial base, of which he was elected president the following year.
He then resumed projects to modernise the country, with which he intended to involve the Western powers.
After a new and brief exile, in 1923 he returned to Canton, and taking advantage of the new international situation, he managed to consolidate the foundations of the government, reaching a political-military agreement with the newly born Bolshevik government in Russia . Within China, he established a collaboration with the communists, authorized by the first congress of the party, renamed Kuomintang, in 1924. On these solid bases, in the few months that separated him from death, he began the reunification of the country.
Death
He died in Beijing in 1925 and four years later the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum was built, where he was buried.