Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was born in Kwangtung Province, near the Portuguese city of Macao. Although he was uncertain of the date, the National Government has found it to be November 12, 1866. Both his provincial and class background had effect on his later life. The Cantonese are among the most turbulent of Chinese, living at the southern edge of China and speaking a dialect far different from the majority of the country. Active, rebellious, enterprising, the Cantonese were disposed to change. Sun's use of their tongue and knowledge of their customs gave him an audience which both suffered and profited by its distinctness. Sun's family was certainly not of the gentry class, and yet not so utterly poor that it lacked all profitable connections. Otherwise his potentialities might have been thwarted by ruinous poverty, disease, or early death.
In adolescence, Sun felt the stings and urges of resentment driving him to reform and revolution. He had kin who were involved in the T'aip'ing Rebellion (1850-65), the vast peasant uprising which, under Christian collectivist leadership by the Messianic Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, swept North to the Yangtze and drowned in a sea of blood less than two years before Sun's birth. He thus had direct knowledge not merely of Chinese revolt against the alien Manchu empire, but he knew of the revolutionary technique of a religious leader. The effect of this presumptive knowledge has never been explored; it would explain a great deal in Sun's career—much of the sharp enthusiasm, the use of ecstatic slogans, the emphasis on will, his demands for faith in himself—if one could know that he followed the instance of a Chinese Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, not that of a Chinese Mazzini or Marx. The other important feature about his early life was Western education.[1]
Western training gave him a channel upward which the Confucian system had denied a hundred generations of his predecessors. Patriots, rebels, reformers—these have been sown by temperament and fortune across the centuries of Chinese social existence, but such potential heroes have been ploughed out or crippled by the language and the examinations. No man could command power—save in its transient forms: banditry, conspiracy, commerce—without mastering the Confucian canon. Once the intricate scholarship of the past gripped him, the complex, beautiful, archaic language of the mandarinate stopped up his mouth for plain utterance. He was isolated from the people. Sun escaped this by the use of the English language and the command of Western science. He was par excellence the great counter-ideologue, whose self-confidence and command of men rested upon foundations beyond the ken of his adversaries. Judge Linebarger wrote, on the basis of what Sun told him:
Like a soldier who after long study and practice has at length mastered the manual of arms so as to have complete confidence in his weapons, Sun now began to feel at last a confidence in his ability to show others the path of his new wisdom, for, while thus enjoying a steady advance under English tutelage in the ways of the foreigner, he was by no means neglecting his study of Chinese politics, even in the pressure of college work. He knew now that he would have to lead out in the Great Reform. At Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton he had college intimates, and these he sought out as often as his college course would permit.[2]
Sun lived with his elder brother in Honolulu on two occasions, and finally, after a period of discontent and rising turbulence at home, went to study medicine in Hong Kong. He was the outstanding student in the school because of his already fluent command of the English language,[3] and was graduated as one of the very first Chinese physicians to be trained in Western medicine. Through their very nature, medical studies impart to the student a sense of responsibility for others, and also incline them toward the expert's indifference to lay opinion. Throughout his life Sun never lost confidence in the powers of his own reason, or in the belief that, although difficult, it was both necessary and possible to know the form and nature of social no less than of biological processes, and to prescribe remedies for an ill civilization as well as for a sick man.
With traditional patriotism, a Cantonese background, the memory of poverty, foreign training, and contact with overseas China, Sun was already a marked man in his twenties. By 1895 he was important enough for the Imperial Chinese Legation in London to kidnap him, preparing to charter a ship to return him to China, where the torturers of the Board of Punishments waited. In a cause célèbre, Sun was released; from then on he had an international reputation.
His technique of revolution was little affected by the growing proletarian parties of Europe. He adhered to traditional Chinese methods, working through the consolidation of pre-existent secret societies, the recruitment of terrorists, the launching of insurrection after insurrection in the hope that one of them would catch the waiting tinder and blaze across China. In Japan, in America, and in Europe, he travelled, gathering funds, carrying on vigorous polemics against his fellow-exiles, the monarchist reformers. His followers were organized under a variety of names, of which Kuomintang is the last and best-known. By 1911 the revolution broke out, flared sporadically across the central and southern provinces, then lapsed into negotiations between the Republicans and the Empire. Sun Yat-sen, in America when the clash was precipitated, returned home to be elected Provisional President of the Chinese Republic, on January 1, 1912. But his revolution had begun to pass into other hands. Opportunists, no rare breed in China, leapt aboard the bandwagon, minimizing the role of the Nationalists and grasping for the materials of power: offices, guns and money, slogans. The new-born Republic was taken over by the formidable Yüan Shih-k'ai and converted into a pyramid of military dictatorships; with Yüan's death the nation fell into tuchünism and foreign meddling.
The years following were the saddest in Sun's life. He headed miscellaneous governments in Canton, lived for a while in Shanghai, and died at a fruitless unification conference in Peking. In his last years, obsessed by his clear realization of the evils which beset his country, he was even derided. He saw the vast economic maladjustments which would follow the World War, and wrote a work, The International Development of China[4] which in its grandeur anticipated the Five-Year and Four-Year Plans; his idea was to finance a spectacular modernization of China through public works by a scheme of international loans. Not only would the imports of capital goods have benefited the Western powers, but the development of a prosperous China would have provided the expansion necessary to support an imperialist capitalism. His argument was that international capitalism needed a market; China, one fourth of humanity, provided a market; international guarantees and supervision would make modernization possible; and modernization, while building state-socialism and the material basis of prosperity in China, would have enriched capitalism throughout the world. There is no evidence that anyone save his followers and friends took his plan seriously.
The next step, in 1922, was a turning from capitalist democracies, which had disappointed him, to a Russia which professed a new justice in the world. Sun negotiated with emissaries of the Third International, accepting Red help on the clear understanding that Communism was recognized, by him and by the Communists, as unsuited to China—a proposition which history calls into question. Only in his last stay in Canton did he escape the ten-year pattern of frustration which had been broken only by his happy second marriage, to Soong Ching-ling. (The author, then a small boy, remembers Sun in Shanghai as a man of gentle kindness and rueful gaiety; Sun was never too busy to speak to him, nor to remember little presents; and in the midst of revolution Sun found time to write a note of encouragement and good cheer.) With the new allies, Sun, a dying man, went South, founded the lineal predecessors of the Chungking government, called his comrades to him, and discovered an effective military helper—his first after Huang Hsing, dead in the years of Yüan. This military aide was Chiang K'ai-shek.
Just before his death Sun made sixteen lectures, out of a scheduled program of eighteen. He did not write them, but they were transcribed and roughly edited. In other years he had drafted monumental political treatises; when the manuscripts were lost he did not reconstruct them. The lectures, improvised, filled with minor inaccuracies, incomplete arguments, and appeals to immediate opinion, rank nevertheless among works of political genius. They are sharp, stirring, pointed, hopeful, concrete. They define China's position in the world, and the goals of the Chinese revolution. They adumbrate the reinforced democracy which was to come and now fights for existence. And they prescribe an economic philosophy humane beyond the dogma of the Russo-German dialecticians and far more self-conscious than the obstinate torpor of Coolidge's capitalism. Sun's lectures are today the foundation of the Chinese state philosophy, taught in all curricula, required in all examinations. As the San Min Chu I, they form an ideology with more legal adherents than Marxism and National Socialism and Fascism combined. For democrats, wherever they may be, this is a matter of importance, bearing directly on the confused uncanalized struggles of our time. China possesses a doctrine which indefeasibly associates her independence, her democracy, and her prosperity.
It would be a mistake to consider these lectures and Sun's lesser writings the only source of Sun Yat-sen's dogma. Since the government is in the hands of the Kuomintang, and Kuomintang seniority depends largely on closeness of association with Sun Yat-sen, Sun's personal, casual, unconsidered influence on his friends forms a vital background to state policy. Sun's American biographer wrote,
Some criticize the San Min Chu I, because it seems to them severe and lofty. To this I reply that there are things other than what is written in the San Min Chu I. The English and other nations have their laws, written and unwritten. So too do we, the partisans of Sun Yat-sen, have our laws, written and unwritten. And this unwritten law is to us the dearer, is closer to our hearts, and is more moving as the goal of our activity, than even the written commentaries. This unwritten law is for us, who, sitting at his feet, received his teaching, the highest of all laws of truth and fidelity, the law of bona fides.[5]
The continuing power of Sun Yat-sen is shown by the prestige and power of his kin. Sun Yat-sen had two families. Early in life, before his medical studies had ended, he was married to a woman of his own class who was devoted, family-loving, characteristically Chinese, untouched by the West, and undisposed to revolution. She bore him three children; the son, Dr. Sun K'ê, was reared largely in the United States and has been an important figure in Chinese politics ever since his return to China from Columbia University. Successively Mayor of Canton, Chairman of Kwangtung Province, Minister of Communications, of Finance, and of Railways, President of the Executive and of the Legislative Yüan, he has served with distinction. A practical and moderate man, he has always advocated a moderate, constitutional application of his father's dogma, has espoused full democratic government, stood for Party abdication, and worked for national unity. One of his sisters died young and the other married a gentleman who was later Chinese Minister to Brazil. Mrs. Sun Yat-sen, Sun K'ê's mother, lived to a ripe old age in Macao. Charitable, pious, humane, she was an enthusiastic Christian convert and a terror to sluggard officials in that European outpost of vice. She took no part in politics.
Sun Yat-sen's second family was acquired when he married Miss Soong Ching-ling. After his defeat by Yüan Shih-k'ai and the frustration of the first Republic, Sun Yat-sen felt very much in need of a companion to hearten him, help his work, and share his troubles. He had been on very close terms with C. J. Soong, a Christian business man, and had asked Mr. Soong's eldest daughter, Ai-ling, to act as his secretary. When Miss Ai-ling Soong left, her sister succeeded her. Sun fell genuinely and deeply in love with the beautiful, vivacious, American-educated girl who understood his work and desired to share his troubles. In all his life, it is likely that Sun met no one more devoted to himself, more understanding of what he sought from life and from his work for China, than Ching-ling Soong. They were married on October 15, 1915, in Japan, Sun Yat-sen having provided for separation from his first wife. The younger wife has since become world-famous as Mme. Sun Yat-sen.
Ching-ling and Ai-ling Soong had a third sister,[6] May-ling, who married Chiang K'ai-shek after Ai-ling had married H. H. K'ung. (Hence Chiang K'ai-shek's closest family connection with Sun Yat-sen consists in being brother-in-law to the second wife.) The three Soong sisters thus married the two outstanding leaders and another who stood just below. The Soong brothers were less successful, although one, T. V. Soong, has been a leading fiscal reformer and financial expert.
The beauty, American education, polished cosmopolitan manners, and sense of publicity of the three sisters have made them sensational news figures. Their eldest brother's success has added distinction to this family. The inescapable consequence has been a great deal of speculation about the "Soong dynasty"; but the surprising feature of the Soongs is not their fame and power through marriage, plus ability, but their slight cohesion as a Chinese family. They have stood together only at times of highest crisis, and not always then. Mme. Sun Yat-sen has continued along the Leftist tangent which her husband followed just before he died. For years she was the only Leftist in China who did not fear death or a more painful fate. She kept her ideals; from the homes of her family she wrote scathing denunciations of the blood-soaked tyranny of her brother-in-law, her sisters, her stepson, and her brother. Mme. K'ung appears to have worked most steadfastly in the interest of the entire family, although rivalry between her brother and her husband has been a matter of general report. Mme. Chiang K'ai-shek, the youngest of the three sisters, has been a loyal wife first of all, and has contributed enormously to the Generalissimo's international prestige. No other modern leader possesses an able publicity adviser, capable and apt, so near to himself. The family relationships of Sun Yat-sen thus display themselves in his son, constitutional and moderate, who is inclined to favor Mme. Sun, with Sun's sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law following their respective political courses with their own families—all on cordial political terms, but scarcely a monolithic family bloc.
In addition to his doctrine, his Party, his followers, and his family, Sun Yat-sen has bequeathed his name. As Chung Shan, he fills the void in Chinese polity left by the Emperor. Every Monday morning his will is read, throughout every government office in the land. His picture is seen everywhere. His sayings and slogans have become the shibboleths of revolution, union, and reconstruction. The reverence paid to him is a form of secular worship, focussed upon a magnificent mausoleum near the cenotaphs of the Ming Emperors on Purple Mountain, Nanking. All virtues and most knowledge are attributed to him; inescapably, some hard-headed people react against the cult. Dead, he is to the Chinese what the King is to the British, or the assembled forefathers to the Americans, or—save partial eclipse by Stalin—Lenin is to the Soviet Union. Perpetual leader of the Kuomintang, Sun has in death more power than life vouchsafed him. In a world wild with alarm and hungry for leadership, his sense of providential mission and of terrible political urgency no longer seems shrill or vain. His is the greatest of posthumous satisfactions: vindication by history.