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By Root 1360 0

scholar from the gentry, Sun came from a peasant family with no vested interest in supporting the status quo. His early background, marked by ambition and a desire for upward mobility, resembled that of many other nineteenth-century Chinese who ultimately emigrated to America. Sun grew up in a rural coastal village near Canton, from which many of his relatives had gone to America to seek better opportunity; two of them died in California during the gold rush. Other family members had settled in Hawaii, and in the early 1880s Sun moved there as well, where he studied at a mission school, became a Christian, and learned the concepts and workings of Western democracy.

For years, Sun Yat-sen drifted in search of his place in society. He studied at a medical college in Hong Kong, but the British considered him unqualified to be a doctor and barred him from practicing medicine. At the same time, the Manchu government ignored Sun’s eager offer to help them build up their national defense. In 1894, an angry and frustrated Sun created a secret organization in Hawaii called the Revive China Society, whose purpose was to oust the Manchu regime. The society worked closely with tong organizations, which, despite their illegal activities in China and the United States, were increasingly committed to the political goal of destroying the imperial government. Conspiring with other secret societies near Canton, Sun planned a poorly funded, ill-conceived military operation that was quickly discovered and crushed by local Qing officials. Many of the rebels were executed, but Sun managed to escape to Japan. Sun was now what Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao would soon become: an activist without a country, a fugitive from the law.

Then came an attempt on Sun’s life that changed the course of China’s history. In 1896 in London, he was abducted by Qing authorities, who intended to ship him back to China. Eloquent even in dire circumstances, Sun convinced a watchman to transmit a message to a friend, who helped free him. The botched kidnapping turned Sun into an instant hero. The Western media reported the sensational story of his capture and miraculous release, which gained world sympathy for his cause. Sun’s new celebrity enabled him to relaunch his movement on a different level. In the United States, his public appearances drew thousands of eager supporters, and the Chinese American community raised enormous sums of money to help him overthrow the imperial government.

Sun’s revolutionary alliance was eventually successful, and on October 10, 1911, a mutiny of army officers ended more than two and a half centuries of Manchu rule. The rebels declared the birth of a new government, the Republic of China, and elected Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. Adopting American democracy as their model, the revolutionaries called themselves the Kuomintang (National People’s Party), also known as the KMT or the Nationalists. In the United States, the KMT began to establish local chapters in cities with great concentrations of ethnic Chinese, and the influence of American culture on Sun’s new republic was plain from the beginning. His Three People’s Principles—nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood—was originally written in English, and was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its dedication to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Sun’s Republic of China, however, was doomed to an early demise. In 1912, to avoid civil war, Sun resigned in favor of Yuan Shikai, a powerful military leader from north China. However, although the Kuomintang was the dominant party in parliament, Yuan quickly undermined the fledgling republic by arrogating dictatorial power, purging the Kuomintang, silencing the press, and liquidating thousands of his enemies. His dream of democracy for China in tatters, Sun was forced to flee the country. With Yuan’s death in 1916, the central government splintered into many fiefdoms, leaving China in the control of feuding warlords.

While bloodshed and chaos reigned in China, thousands of