Sun Yat-sen Dies: Father of Modern China

Sun Yat-sen spent most of his revolutionary career in exile, raising money from overseas Chinese communities to overthrow a dynasty that had ruled for 267 years. He organized ten failed uprisings before the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 finally toppled the Qing, and he was in Denver, Colorado, when he read about the revolution's success in a newspaper. Born in Guangdong Province in 1866, Sun moved to Hawaii as a teenager, where Western education shaped his political thinking. He studied medicine in Hong Kong but abandoned medical practice almost immediately, convinced that China's political sickness required a different kind of treatment. His Three Principles of the People, developed over decades of revolutionary activism, blended nationalism, democracy, and social welfare into a framework for modernizing China. Sun served as provisional president of the Republic of China for barely three months after the 1912 revolution before yielding power to Yuan Shikai, the military strongman who commanded the loyalty of the northern armies. Yuan's betrayal of republican principles and attempt to restore the monarchy vindicated Sun's warnings but left him politically marginalized for years. Sun spent the next decade rebuilding his political base, eventually establishing a rival government in Guangzhou with support from the Soviet Union and reorganizing his Kuomintang party along Leninist lines. He accepted Communist members into the KMT in a united front strategy aimed at unifying China by military force. The Northern Expedition he planned to overthrow the warlords who had carved up the country would launch a year after his death. Sun died of liver cancer in Beijing on March 12, 1925, at age fifty-eight. Both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang claimed his legacy, and both the People's Republic and the Republic of China on Taiwan honor him as the father of modern China. His death left a leadership vacuum that Chiang Kai-shek filled with military force and the Communists would ultimately exploit.