Dr. Sun Yat-Sen
Sun Yat-sen (Cantonese, or in Mandarin: Sun Zhongshan) was a nationalist and bourgeois-democratic revolutionary who established the Republic of China in 1912. He was a key predecessor of the communists in the struggle to liberate China. He was removed from power by warlord Yuan Shikai.
His ideology was based in his Three Principles (Tridemism).
His legacy has been and still is upheld by both the Communist Party of China and the KMT, despite their conflict in the Chinese Civil War.
From the streams
- Heritage politics (Political bloodsports debate): "One way the communists legitimized themselves is they would be very big on valorizing Sun Yat-sen... they're trying to go a step beyond that" — parallel to which icons American socialists should claim.
- The genealogical argument (KAMALA TRUMP DEBATE stream): "Before Sun Yat-sen there were dogmatic Chinese Marxists — carbon copies from Europe — who Sun Yat-sen rejected. Same thing with Mao... just like there were dogmatic American Marxists who got the Civil War wrong." Indigenous revolution begins by rejecting imported dogma and confronting the nation's own history soberly (Du Bois picking up Lenin and Marx, writing Black Reconstruction).
Sun anchors the claim that successful socialism is always national in form: China's revolution legitimized itself through Sun while surpassing him — exactly what MAGA Communism proposes for 1776 and Lincoln (Chiang Kai-shek, German Road to Socialism).