Sun Zhongshan: The Man who ALMOST Made China a Free Country

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"Let there be liberty and Justice for every man."
-Inscription on a plaque at Sun Yat-Sen's tomb in Nanjing

"Of the People, by the People, for the People"
-Inscription carved into the ceiling of the same tomb

Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at my Steemit account has likely come to the conclusion "man, this guy really, REALLY hates China." Well, that's not completely true. Of course, it's not completely false either. To be plain, I do fervently, blazingly, passionately hate the CCP (especially its current scion, Xi Jinpeng) and all that they represent. Everything about them, from their infamous internet censorship, to their brutality in Tibet and Xinjiang, to their aggression against neighboring countries, their indoctrination that passes as education, and let's not forget their newest delightful little addition to their tyrannical resume, a crackdown on Christianity wherein religious believers are not only being told not to practice their religion, but to set up altars to Xi Jinpeng in place of their former religious altars... it's repulsive. They are the purest, most unabashedly evil force at work in the world today, and I am even ranking them against such actors as ISIS and North Korea when I ascribe that title to them.
But as much as I despise the current Chinese regime (and rest very well assured there are three articles coming in the next week that will absolutely skewer them), I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to acknowledge that one of the greatest patrons of Liberty in history came from China. That man, my personal hero, a man whose name should be uttered in the same breath as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, is none other than Dr. Sun Zhongshan (more commonly known in the West by his Cantonese name, Sun Yat-Sen). And for the record that's not just "Dr." in the academic sense. His doctorate was in medicine.
On a personal note, I am a confessed, fully acknowledged Zhongshan fanboy. I cannot get enough of studying this guy's life and work. My first teaching post in China was in the city of his birth (which now bears his name). I've visited his birthplace in Chui Heng. I've visited his tomb in Nanjing. I've been to the memorial in his honor in Taipei City, and the 1911 Revolution Museum in Wuhan that honors his work. Every time I pass through Tiananmen Square and see that damnable portrait of Mao on the wall of the Forbidden City, I clench my fists because it should rightfully be Dr. Sun's face up there on that wall, and it is a travesty that the only time they DO set out Dr. Sun's portrait in that square is during Golden Week, which is when they celebrate the founding of the PRC (in other words, when they celebrate the death of the nation Zhongshan created and the establishment of a regime more brutally repressive than the one he tore down).

The George Washington of China

Sun Zhongshan was the man who was chiefly responsible for overthrowing the last Chinese Emperor and creating (or at least attempting to create) a Free Republic in China. The reason the government of Taiwan still bears the name "Republic of China" is because they are the last remnant of the nation he built in 1911, which predates Mao's PRC or even the Communist Party itself, and as a side note, ponder this: Beijing considers Taiwan to be a "rebel province," but how can the parent be a rebel against the child? That's for another entry though. For now, just let it suffice to say that Sun Zhongshan is to modern China what George Washington is to America, no matter how much the CCP would like to try to give that title to Mao Zedong. As for a biography of the man, there are tens of thousands already out there so I won't spend too much time repeating what has already been said, but I want to hit a few of the highlights, and not precisely in chronological order.

Sun Zhongshan was educated in America, and you can tell it left an impression on him. Try to imagine the America he lived in. It was the early 1900's, the Constitutional Ideal was still fresh and largely uncorrupted. Manifest Destiny was largely complete, the United States had acquired its first few overseas colonies (an endeavor that would later lead to the corrupting of the Anti-Colonial ideals that built the country, but that came later), and she was on a path to soon become the world's largest economy. She had just emerged from the Civil War. She was the world's first Democratic Great-Power, and her rapid ascendancy filled the citizens with a firm belief in the rightness of her ideals, a belief that the world was following her example, that Liberty would soon come to every corner of the world. Well, Sun Zhongshan believed that, and it's obvious. The ideology of Jefferson, Washington and Paine shines through in everything he said and did, so it's only natural that he would take that ideology to heart and use it to lead his own countrymen (still languishing under an Imperial Monarchy at the time) in a revolution. So he set out to do this.

Of course, life is rarely perfect. In order to fight the Qing Emperor's Army, Zhongshan needed a military strategist, and for this, he unfortunately chose Yuan Shikai. This decision would prove to be the fatal flaw in his vision, as Yuan's goal wasn't to tear down an Empire but to set himself on the throne. The power struggles that resulted from Yuan's machinations led to the warlord era, the warlord era left China in chaos and made them easy prey for the Japanese invasion, and the Japanese invasion enabled Mao to come to power. In fact, it has been suggested heavily by numerous sources that Mao was, in fact, in collusion with the Japanese Empire to achieve this very goal, but that's another little tangent. Anyway, suffice it to say Zhongshan was a visionary who surrounded himself with the wrong advisors, and the result was that what should have been a free and liberalized China ended up becoming the Orwellian State the world is getting sick of today.
How different would things have been if he had been successful? Well, first we have to get a feel for just what Zhongshan's vision was.

Dr. Sun's Prescription for China

First of all, as he worked to bring down the Qing Empire, his intention was for each of the ethnic groups conquered by the Qing to be their own nation. The reasons for this were not one hundred percent pure. As much as I admire the man, I have to be straight-up about this: he was a little bit of an ethnocentrist, at least in his early years. Though he changed his tune later in life, he started out initially as what today's Western Media (with its fixation on 'White Nationalists') would call a "Han Nationalist." His goal was to expel the Manchurians (namely, the ruling Qing Dynasty), who he called "Tatar barbarians," and create a Han Nation. His slogan, "revive Zhonghua," referred very specifically to the Han People.

Since Sun was in exile from China at the time, the society was founded in Honolulu, Republic of Hawaii. Those admitted to the society swore the following oath:
Expel Tatar barbarians, revive Zhonghua, and establish a unified government.
(驅除韃虜，恢復中華，創立合眾政府。)

This may not have been such a bad idea, in retrospect. It would have meant Tibet would have been independent, Xinjiang would be independent, Manchuria would be independent, and Inner Mongolia would be part of the Mongolian People's Republic. This idea was discarded though, mostly on the urging of Yuan Shikai, for mostly military reasons.

Chinese nationalists such as Sun Yat-sen initially planned to expel the Manchus as "foreign invaders" and establish a Chinese nation-state modeled closely after Germany and Japan. This model was eventually discarded, out of fear that an overly restrictive view of the ethnic nation-state would dissolve the Qing Empire into several different nations, which, it was felt, would give the Western powers an opportunity to dominate China. The unifying and centralizing principles of Japan and Germany were considered examples China should follow, while the ethnically divided Ottoman Empire was seen as an example of what some Chinese nationalists feared.”

Had it not been for the chaos of the warlord era, it is likely that the result of these conflicting agendas and this desire for each of the ethnic groups under the Manchu Empire to manage their own affairs would have molded the R.O.C. into some kind of federation, similar to the U.S. but with "States" divided along largely ethnic lines. One can only presume that such an arrangement would have precluded many of the later conflicts the much more centralized PRC had in Xinjiang and Tibet, as those regions (like most others) would have enjoyed the degree of autonomy they were so infamously denied under the Mao regime. What's beginning to take shape, if we imagine a world in which he succeeded, is an alternate history in which China resembles the United States more and the Soviet Union less. Try to envision the past 70 years with China being part of the Free World, rather than being Stalin's Russia 2.0, a world in which America's only real economic competition in recent history came from a country that shared her ideals. We can only speculate as to the geopolitical ramifications of that.

The Irony of Zhongshan's Early Work

Before Zhongshan could "revive China," he knew they would need an example to follow, to prove that rising up was even possible. Here's where it gets complicated. Dr. Sun was out to overthrow what he considered a foreign empire, the Manchu. But in the waning days of the Manchu Empire the Qing Court was also in bed with Western Powers. Ergo, in Dr. Sun's mind, any revolt against the foreign Empire was inextricably linked with a revolt against the foreign West. So, in order to further his goals of overthrowing the Manchu, he felt he needed to first show the Chinese an example of an Asian nation throwing out foreign rulers. Given that the Philippines had just recently shed the yoke of the Spanish, he hoped that the Philippines would serve as an example, and here is where we come to several layers of historical irony.

As I mentioned, Zhongshan fell in love with the American ideals, but he was not a big fan of what America was doing geopolitically at the time. The European Imperialist Powers, whom America had set itself against from her inception, were carving up Asia. America, feeling the need to compete with Europe, was just beginning to do the same. Having only just finished helping the Philippines throw out the Spanish, we immediately set ourselves to the task of replacing them as the Colonial Overlords of the Philippines...
Hm... It shouldn't take more than a quick glance at my icon to know that I have a complicated view of THAT situation, but that was more than 100 years ago so let's move on. Anyway, at the time, Zhongshan was living in America, and tried to funnel arms to the Filipino rebels, in hopes that their victory over two Western Powers would make them an example for his Chinese Revolutionary Society to follow. However, America won the war and took over the Philippines (who would get their country back later by referendum rather than revolution), and Dr. Sun's plan hit is first failure.
So let's backtrack. He started off his life with a racist streak, but that streak evolved into a vision that could have prevented China's ethnic brutality in Tibet and Xinjiang. He was living in America, working against America, so that he could use the result of his work against America as an example of an American-made ideology, which he picked up in America, and help carry that ideology to China. It's hard for a black-and-white, good vs. evil analysis to pin down where this man falls, as I'll demonstrate further in the next section.

A Visionary but No Saint

Sun Zhongshan's life is filled with contradictions not easily pigeon-holed into today's ideological spectrum, and in a polarized world like the world of today, he would find himself at odds with nearly everyone on some point or another. He was baptized into the Christian Church early in life, and unlike many Easterners of the time who did this as a mark of social standing (mainly to show how "Western" and "refined" they were), by all accounts, Dr. Sun took it seriously. However, his interpretation of Christianity did not seem to incline him toward inheriting the Earth through meekness. He was a firebreather, who was known on occasion to declare that his fight was not only permitted by Christian Doctrine but indeed mandated by it.

I am a Christian; God sent me to fight evil for my people. Jesus was a revolutionist; so am I.
-Sun Yat-sen

He was also, like most revolutionaries of the time, a disciple of Marx, and was on very friendly terms with Lenin. His three principles were "Nationalism, Democracy and People's Welfare (it rolls off the tongue better in Mandarin; 'minzu, minquan, minsheng,' or '民族, 民權, 民生')," and many translations render "minsheng" as "Socialism." And, of course, he would later align himself with the Communist movement in hopes of gaining their support for his fledgling Republic. He was not the rapid, ranting, "shoot a rich man in every village" type of fanatic that Mao would later become. He believed Socialism and Capitalism were both key parts of the path toward prosperity, but I must admit, with tongue in cheek, that he was a supporter of Socialism. And, of course, it must be noted that he was not above rubbing elbows with the Triads (China's answer to the Mafia) when he felt that was necessary in his pursuit of an end to the Manchu Empire. Even his slogan, "Revive China," would likely be considered divisive today. If he were alive today, the slogan would probably have been something along the lines of "Make China Great Again," and I'll let the reader draw their own conclusions about how THAT would go over in today's media.

A Model Worth Following

He was inspired by the principles of America's Founding Fathers.
So am I.

He believed the Beijing-based government should get out of Tibet and Xinjiang.
So do I.

He was Chinese, but he lived in America, and worked to get America out of the Philippines.
I am American, but I live in China, and am working to get China out of the Philippines. ...I hope I am more successful than he was.

He used the lessons he learned in America to try and stop what he saw as America's creeping encroachments on China, (mostly through corporate bigwigs buying up slices of the country) at a time when America was first stepping onto the world stage.
I use what I see in China to stop China's creeping encroachments on America (mostly through Chinese State-media enterprises buying up swaths of America's media services), at a time when China is first stepping onto the world stage.

I knew I admired this guy for a reason.

Raises glass
Here's to you, Doctor Sun. You set out to give China something they had never had before, and have never had since: liberty. The CCP's history books may not give you due credit, but I always will.