Blogging from Shanghai, part 14

My daughter and I had the opportunity to visit the Shanghai Museum of Sun Yat-Sen’s former residence. The museum is a wonderful display of the life of a man who my father often mentioned admiringly when I was growing up.

Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary and political leader often referred to as the Father of Modern China. Sun played an instrumental role in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in 1911. He was the first provisional president when the Republic of China (ROC) was founded in 1912 and later co-founded the Kuomintang (KMT) where he served as its first leader. Sun was a uniting figure in post-Imperial China, and remains unique among 20th-century Chinese politicians for being widely revered in both Mainland China and Taiwan.

Turns out, Sun Yat-sen may have had a false claim to U.S. citizenship, as did many Chinese immigrants who were forced to assume different identities (paper sons) to skirt the racist 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Sun Yat-sen had a Certificate of Hawaiian Birth, issued by the Territory of Hawaii, substantiates that he was born in the Kingdom of Hawaii on 24 November 1870,[4] but it is commonly assumed that he was born on 12 November 1866 to a peasant family in the village of Cuiheng, Xiangshan county, Guangzhou prefecture, Guangdong province (26 km or 16 miles north of Macau). The latter claim was issued based on Sun’s typewritten testimony rather than on any documentation from witnesses.

He did spend a good deal of time in Hawaii and other parts of the United States (as well as other parts of the world). His American experience was to be of lasting influence. Sun attached particular importance to the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Sun often said that the formulation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, had been the inspiration for the Three Principles of the People. He incorporated these ideas, later in life, in two highly influential books. One, The Vital Problem of China (1917), analyzed some of the problems of colonialism: Sun warned that “…the British treat nations as the silkworm farmer treats his worms; as long as they produce silk, he cares for them well; when they stop, he feeds them to the fish.” The second book, International Development of China (1921), presented detailed proposals for the development of infrastructure in China, and attacked the ideology of laissez-faire, as well as that of Marxism adhering more to the ideas of Henry George’s, particularly land value taxation.

   Sun Yat-sen based his idea of revolution on three principles: nationalism, democracy, and equalization. These three principles, in fact, were elevated to the status of basic principles: the Three People’s Principles. The first of these held that Chinese government should be in the hands of the Chinese rather than a foreign imperial house. Government should be republican and democratically elected. Finally, disparities in land ownership should be equalized among the people, wealth more evenly distributed, and the social effects of unbridled capitalism and commerce should be mitigated by government. The latter principle involved the nationalization of land; Sun believed that land ownership allows too much power to accrue to the hands of landlords. In his nationalization theory, people would be deprived of the right to own land, but they could still retain other rights over the land by permission of the state.

In recent years, the leadership of the Communist Party of China has increasingly invoked Sun, partly as a way of bolstering Chinese nationalism in light of Chinese economic reform and partly to increase connections with supporters of the Kuomintang on Taiwan which the PRC sees as allies against Taiwanese independence.

Sun’s notability and popularity extends beyond the Greater China region, particularly to Nanyang where a large concentration of overseas Chinese reside in Singapore and Malaysia. Sun recognized the contributions that the large number of overseas Chinese could make, beyond the sending of remittances to their ancestral homeland. He therefore made multiple visits to spread his revolutionary message to these communities around the world, including Europe and the United States where Chinese immigrants contributed to his efforts.

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