Sun Yat-sen

Sun fled into a long, wandering exile that would span fifteen years and transform him into an international symbol of Chinese resistance. In 1896, while living in London to raise funds and recruit allies, he was lured into the Chinese Legation and imprisoned. The Qing secret service planned to drug him and smuggle him back to China for execution. For twelve days, Sun’s life hung in the balance until he managed to get word to James Cantlie, his former medical school teacher. Through the combined pressure of Cantlie, British newspapers like The Globe and The Times, and the British Foreign Office, Sun was released. He emerged from the legation not just a survivor, but a global celebrity. He quickened his fame by publishing Kidnapped in London in 1897, turning his near-death experience into a powerful narrative of republican martyrdom.

From London, Sun traveled through Canada to Japan, arriving in Yokohama in August 1897. In Japan, he adopted the pseudonym Kikori Nakayama, a name given to him by the Japanese philosopher Tōten Miyazaki. It was from this alias that his most famous Chinese moniker, Sun Zhongshan, would later derive. Japan was a fertile ground for Sun’s network; many Japanese intellectuals and activists, motivated by a pan-Asian opposition to Western imperialism, supported his cause. During his exile, Sun also forged connections with other regional revolutionaries, such as the Philippine diplomat Mariano Ponce, and utilized the networks of the ancient Tiandihui—the Heaven and Earth Society, or triads—to navigate the Chinese diaspora and secure financial backing.

To unify his disparate, often fractious supporters, Sun articulated a political philosophy that would become his flagship legacy: the Three Principles of the People. Drawing heavily from his Western education, his admiration for American historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton, and his own Christian beliefs, Sun envisioned a modern China built upon nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood. He sought an ethnically harmonious conception of the Chinese nation that would replace dynastic loyalty with republican citizenship. For Sun, the revolutionary struggle was not merely a political coup but a moral crusade, which he frequently compared to the salvation mission of the Christian church.

The spark Sun had spent decades tending finally caught fire in the autumn of 1911. While Sun was traveling in the United States, a mutiny in Wuchang escalated into a nationwide revolution, bringing down the nearly three-century-old Qing Dynasty. Sun rushed back to China, where he was proclaimed the first provisional president of the newly declared Republic of China in January 1912. Yet, the young republic possessed no army capable of defying the remnants of the imperial military. To secure the peaceful abdication of the Qing court and prevent a catastrophic civil war, Sun made a painful compromise, relinquishing the presidency to Yuan Shikai, the powerful commander of the northern Beiyang Army.

The compromise quickly proved fatal to Sun’s democratic vision. In 1913, following the assassination of Song Jiaoren—the brilliant organizer of Sun’s newly formed political party, the Kuomintang, an act widely attributed to Yuan’s machinations—Sun launched a failed "Second Revolution" to oust the aspiring dictator. Once more, Sun was forced to flee to Japan. When he returned to China in 1917, the country had fractured into a patchwork of competing warlords. Sun established a Constitutional Protection junta in Guangzhou to defend the original republican constitution, but his plans for a Northern Expedition to reunify the country were repeatedly derailed by internal betrayal and warlord infighting, including a devastating revolt by his former ally Chen Jiongming.

In his final years, frustrated by the reluctance of Western democracies to support his cash-strapped government, Sun turned to the newly established Soviet Union and the young Chinese Communist Party. He forged the First United Front, restructuring the Kuomintang along disciplined, Leninist lines while retaining his own Three Principles as the state ideology. In late 1924, despite failing health, Sun made one final journey north from his southern base in Guangdong. He sought to negotiate a peaceful reunification of the country with the northern warlords Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin, calling for a national assembly and the abolition of the unequal treaties that had humiliated China for nearly a century.

Sun Yat-sen never lived to see the unified republic he spent his life building. He died of liver cancer in Beijing on March 12, 1925, at the age of fifty-eight. His death triggered an outpouring of grief across a fractured land, and his birthplace of Xiangshan County was renamed Zhongshan in his honor. In death, Sun achieved a unique status in modern Chinese history: he remains deeply revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. To the Republic of China on Taiwan, he is the "Father of the Nation"; to the People's Republic of China on the mainland, he is the "Forerunner of the Revolution." Beyond the monuments and the changing regimes, Sun’s true legacy lay in the shattering of the dynastic cycle, convincing a civilization that had been ruled by emperors for millennia that its future belonged to a republic of citizens.