Do you know the saying, “To get rid of dead wood?”
Though some of you may have seen a recent Instagram photo of me wielding a chainsaw,
I am not about to instruct you on how to prune a tree. No, we’re talking metaphorically,
and moreover about a man who really did clear out all the dead and dying branches of Chinese thought,
and replace it with revolutionary ideas.
Greetings revolutionaries and rebels! My name’s Guy and welcome to It’s History.
Our subject in this episode is the professional revolutionary Sun Yat-sen,
whose life and activities wrote the textbooks of Chinese rebellion.
In the early 20th century in China, the Qing Dynasty had been safely in power for around 100 years,
and were in constant conflict with foreign powers who were invading their country.
This gave rise to an uncomfortable realisation. The Chinese system really was not as superior after all,
and had to begin a process of alignment with European powers.
In the interior, there was stagnation in the reform process. China was in deadlock.
Thankfully, our hero, Sun Yat-sen, entered the stage.
Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866 as the son of a poor farming family in southern China.
His birthplace was not far from the Portuguese colony of Macao.
For Sun, east and west were close neighbours from the very beginning.
He moved to live with his elder brother in Hawaii at the age of 13.
There, he went to a school led by missionaries, where he studied western theories and Christianity,
which made a huge impact on the young Sun. He began to see the religious practices of his home country as fanciful.
Almost as soon as he arrived back home, he destroyed a divine figurine and was banished as a result.
As we all remember from our childhood chastisements, violence is not the solution!
Before going to Hong Kong to study in 1886, Sun got married to a woman selected by his parents.
After his medical studies, it wasn’t long before he began pursuing politics.
He was not happy with the state of politics under the Qing dynasty, a view shared by many people.
The aristocrats were conservative, corrupt and ineffective in defending China against foreign powers.
Reforms were not even on the horizon, so he started his revolutionary career.
In 1895 he organised his first rebellion against the Qing dynasty: it was a spectacular failure.
But as Britain’s grandfather preached: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal:
it is the courage to continue that counts.” Ah, dear Churchill. A great man.
Sun spent the following 16 years in exile in Europe, Canada, the USA and Japan.
He cut off his classic Chinese plaited ponytail, grew a moustache, and began wearing western clothes.
The new Sun was highly subversive. He founded the Tongmenghui League in 1905,
with whom he built up a revolutionary network throughout China. Sun supported rebellion after rebellion -
every one of which failed. But his first success was just round the corner:
he organised an attack on a newspaper group in 1911 - and it was a coup.
Revolutionary units in Wuchang had toppled 2,000 years of Chinese empire.
Sun packed his bags and returned to China, where he was installed as provisional president
in the new Chinese Republic. The southern provinces declared their independence,
but the northern lagged behind. This weakened the transitional government, which didn’t have its own forces.
Sun turned to high-level bureaucrats and Officer Yuan Shikai who was in charge of North China’s military.
To achieve his aims, Sun handed over the presidential office to Yuan Shikai,
forcing the young child emperor Puyi to abdicate.
With Yuan now the first president of the Republic, Sun had to go back into exile.
But Yuan was not such a talented politician, preferring authoritarian rule and his own constitution,
and banishing the Kuomintang, which was where Sun had his political following.
Yuan was on a power-grab mission, seeing himself as the next emperor.
When he died in 1916, China split into factions, with regional warlords fighting each other.
It was back to the status quo in China, with great divisions scarring the country.
Sun realised how dangerous this situation was, and got back on the slow boat to China.
He reformed the Kuomintang as the China National People’s Party.
In 1921, he became president of the southern Chinese military regime,
which was in competition with the government in Peking.
Sun accepted help from the Soviet Union, as he needed political, military and financial support.
In 1924, Sun travelled to North China. He gave a speech advocating the unity of China, and the end of warlord rule.
But he died a year later of liver cancer. Sun Yat-sen wasn’t just convinced of the power of revolution.
No, he also had a whole host of ideas about the power of revolution.
He named his political philosophy the Three Principles of the People, and presented it for the first time publicly in 1924.
The first principle is the People’s Community. Sun thought that the Chinese had lost their sense of community
as a result of internal and external suppression and exploitation.
It was time for them to become strong and independent once again.
The first step was to develop a new unified society of China’s five large tribes
and the numerous other smaller groups. The basis of this was a common culture and history,
complemented by western-style participation in the political process.
The second step was to rise up against colonial powers in order to gain an equal footing on the world stage.
The second principle is People’s Law. The Chinese people were to be sovereign.
A civil service in the Chinese tradition would remain responsible for the administration of state affairs.
People’s Welfare was the last of the trio. It made up the socio-economic part of the three People’s Principles
and was particularly important to Sun. It was, in fact, the state’s main responsibility to take care of feeding,
clothing, housing and transporting its people.
You see that the People’s Principles were a blend of eastern and western experiences.
Sun formulated an ideal picture of national, community-state and economic life.
The individual elements of the teachings were complementary, and were wholly dependent on each other.
They were never set in motion, less as a result of their nature or a lack of political will,
and more because foreign powers carried on meddling in Chinese affairs.
Sun Yat-sen is a cult figure today - but he was often criticised during his lifetime.
His successor was his military adviser Chiang Kai Shek. He conquered warlords in the north,
and thereby enabled China to unify formally under the flag of the Republic.
In 1949, Mao Zedong conquered the Kuomintang, and the People’s Republic was founded in China.
In Taiwan, however, the Republic of China exists to this day.
China's history in the 19th and 20th century was to define the modern day china we know today.
This timeframe is also known as the “Century of Humiliation”.
Find out how China was humiliated and what consequences are to be felt to this day by clicking up right here.
What do you think? How realistic are the Three Principles of the People?
Leave your comments and queries in the section below.
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My name's Guy, thanks for popping by see you next time.