Dr. Sun Yat-Sen
Sun Yat-sen (孫中山, 1866–1925) is the father of the Chinese republic — the revolutionary who overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911 and authored Tridemism, the Three Principles of the People.
Life
- Born to a peasant family in Guangdong; educated in Honolulu and Hong Kong (medicine); founded the Revive China Society (1894) and Tongmenghui (1905).
- President of the provisional republic (1912), forced to yield to Yuan Shikai; decades of exile, fundraising, and failed uprisings before the 1911 Xinhai Revolution succeeded.
- Reorganized the Kuomintang on Leninist lines after 1923: the First United Front with the young CCP, Soviet advisers (Borodin), Whampoa Military Academy under Chiang Kai-shek.
- Died 1925 in Beijing; his death opened the struggle over his legacy — Chiang's 1927 massacre of the communists versus the CCP's claim to his heritage.
Thought
Sun fused Chinese statecraft, American constitutional ideas, and social reform: land-value taxation from Henry George, state capitalism from Bismarckian examples, and an explicit rejection of laissez-faire. His International Development of China (1920) proposed massive foreign-financed infrastructure — a proto-land-bridge vision of railways and ports modernizing all Asia.
Infrared treatment
Sun is cited as proof that Chinese socialism grew from native soil — a nationalist revolution that became communist because only communism completed the national revolution. His infrastructural vision is claimed for the lineage ending in the Belt and Road Initiative.