Three thousand years of imperial rule in China ended when revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925) deposed the last emperor and installed a republican government in his place. Considered by many the founder of modern China, Sun set up a government that sought to unify the vast country and weaken regional warlords, but it collapsed into civil war shortly after his death.
After Sun died in 1925, both the Communist and nationalist factions in China’s civil war claimed him as a guiding inspiration. To this day, he is considered a hero in both Taiwan and China—countries that agree on little else.
Sun Yat-Sen is thought to have been born in southern China, near the port city of Hong Kong. He spent much of his youth in Hawaii, which at the time was an independent country with a large community of Chinese expatriates. He was educated at an Episcopalian school and forced to return to China in 1883 after his family discovered that he was planning to convert to Christianity.
Returning to Hong Kong, he attended a medical school sponsored by the British, learned to play cricket, and was impressed by British governance of the colony. He would later claim that his years in Hong Kong made him embarrassed by the comparative backwardness and corruption of China’s imperial system.
The Chinese government was in serious decline, a fact highlighted by its humiliating defeat in a war with Japan in 1894 and 1895. As a result of the war, China lost control of Taiwan and was forced to pay a huge sum as reparation. Sun Yat-Sen participated in a failed coup in the same year, and as a result he spent much of the next ten years in exile, traveling in Europe, the United States, and Japan. While in exile, he formulated the Three Principles of the People—nationalism, democracy, and socialism—that would form the basis of his ideology.
When the five-year-old emperor, Pu Yi (1906–1967), was finally overthrown in 1911, Sun returned to China to take control of the fledgling republic. He spent most of the rest of his life trying to build political support for a strong central government and feuding with warlords who controlled many of China’s provinces. He enlisted the support of China’s tiny Communist Party—an alliance that fell apart after his death, plunging the nation into civil war.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Sun Yat-Sen entered into an arranged marriage with a peasant woman, Lu Muzhen (1867–1952), in 1884, but abandoned her in 1915. He remarried to Soong Ching-ling (1893–1981), who later became a high-ranking official in the Communist People’s Republic of China. One of his second wife’s sisters married nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), meaning that members of Sun’s family occupied influential positions on both sides of the conflict.
- Communist leaders renamed the city of Xiangshan in Guangdong province, where Sun Yat-Sen was born, Zhongshan in his honor.
- As a child, he listened to stories about the Taiping Rebellion and was intrigued by details about the war.
