TAMURA, E. e. a. (1998). China. Undestanding its past. Honolulu, University of Hawai Press. Pp. 148.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen was born to a farming family in southern China, near Macao, in 1866. His birthplace, Guangdong (Canton) province, which had a long history of contact with foreigners, was also the birthplace of the Taiping, an area steeped in anti-Manchu sentiment. Most of the people who left China in search of a better life were from this province. At his father's urging, Sun left China at thirteen to join his older brother in Hawai'i. There Sun attended school, thus becoming one of China's earliest Western-trained intellectuals.
Sun began his foreign schooling in the islands at 'Iolani School. After graduating, he moved on to more advanced studies at Oahu College, a missionary-founded institution known today as Punahou School. Then his brother sent him home to keep him from being baptized a Christian. But Sun was a problem at home. He desecrated an idol in the village temple by breaking off its arm. His family urged him to flee to Hong Kong to avoid the repercussions sure to come down on them all. In Hong Kong he got further schooling and attended medical school. In 1884 he was baptized a Christian. Sun was inspired by the sights and sounds of Hong Kong. As he strolled the streets of the British Crown Colony, he wondered why the orderliness that prevailed there could not be achieved in his homeland.
Sun believed it was useless to try to reform China from within. He wanted to tear down the existing order and enlist the imperialists' help in creating a brand-new Chinese republic. In 1894 he formed a secret revolutionary organization, the Revive China Society. Its stated objectives were "the overthrow of the Manchus, the restoration of China to the Chinese, and the establishment of a republican government." Sun was forced into exile when his first attempt to overthrow the Manchus was discovered in 1895. He fled to Japan. The next year he was kidnapped in London by Manchu officials and sent back to China to be executed. He was rescued by friends from Hong Kong and became an international figure. He began writing in 1903 about his theory of revolution and his vision of what it could bring, advocating nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood in his "Three People's Principles." He also drew up a "five-power constitution" that supposedly improved on the checks and balances of Western democracies by adding censorship and examination branches to the government.
Sun toured overseas Chinese communities raising money to finance mutinies and uprisings in China. In 1905 he was elected by revolutionary-minded Chinese students in Japan to lead the Tongmenghui, or Revolutionary Alliance, an umbrella organization that coordinated revolutionary efforts. Because of his subversive activities, he was shunned by foreign governments. In 1907 he was banned from Japan, in 1908 from French Indochina. Sun's Revolutionary Alliance organized ten failed uprisings. When revolution finally came in 1911, the man who would come to be called the father of the Chinese republic was in the United States, raising more money for the cause.
Sun Yat-sen returned to China to become its provisional president, but his term of office was short-lived. In 1912 he agreed, for the sake of national unity, to step aside and allow Yuan Shikai, a Manchu general who had cut a deal with the revolutionaries, to become president of the Republic of China. Sun and his followers formed the Nationalist party, or Guomindang.
But Yuan Shikai never intended to let people like Sun establish a republic. Yuan began to scheme to restore the empire and set himself up as the first emperor of the new dynasty. The Guomindang was outlawed and Sun fled to Japan. After years in exile, Sun finally became president of the Nationalist government of China in Canton in 1923 as a result of an alliance he made with the Chinese Communist Party. He died in 1925.