Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the first president of the Republic of
China, has left a supremely ambivalent political and intellectual
legacy--so much so that he is claimed as a Founding Father by both
the present rival governments in Taipei and Beijing. In Taiwan, he
is the object of a veritable cult; in the People's Republic of
China, he is paid homage as "pioneer of the revolution," making
possible the Party's claims of continuity with the national past.
Western scholars, on the other hand, have tended to question the
myth of Sun Yat-sen by stressing the man's weaknesses, the
thinker's incoherences, and the revolutionary leader's many
failures.
This book argues that the life and work of Sun Yat-sen have been
distorted both by the creation of the myth and by the attempts at
demythification. Its aim is to provide a fresh overall evaluation
of the man and the events that turned an adventurer into the
founder of the Chinese Republic and the leader of a great
nationalist movement. The Sun Yat-sen who emerges from this
rigorously researched account is a muddled politician, an
opportunist with generous but confused ideas, a theorist without
great originality or intellectual rigor.
But the author demonstrates that the importance of Sun Yat-sen lies
elsewhere. A Cantonese raised in Hawaii and Hong Kong, he was a
product of maritime China, the China of the coastal provinces and
overseas communities, open to foreign influences and acutely aware
of the modern Western world (he was fund-raising in Denver when the
eleventh attempt to bring down the Chinese empire finally
succeeded). In facing the problems of change, of imitating the
West, of rejecting or adapting tradition, he instinctively grasped
the aspirations of his time, understood their force, and
crystallized them into practical programs.
Sun Yat-sen's gifts enabled him to foresee the danger that
technology might represent to democracy, stressed the role of
infrastructures (transport, energy) in economic modernization, and
looked forward to a new style of diplomatic and international
economic relations based upon cooperation that bypassed or absorbed
old hostilities. These "utopias" of his, at which his
contemporaries heartily jeered, now seem to be so many prophecies.
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