Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China by Nick Shepley

Author:Nick Shepley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chinese Revolution, Sun Yat Sen, Qing Dynasty, Boxer Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, Heavenly Kingdom, Chiang Kai Shek, Mao Zedong, Opium Wars
ISBN: 9781783330898
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Sun Yat Sen

The seeds of the revolution that would sweep away the Qing Dynasty were sown not in China, but in Hawaii. There seems to be some scholarly dispute as to the birthplace of Sun Yat Sen, some narratives place him as the offspring of a lowly Hakka family, who moved to Hawaii as a child to live with relatives, others argue that he was originally born in Hawaii. Whatever might be the case, he was certainly part of the vast Chinese diaspora of the late 19 th Century that had migrated across the Pacific from the 1860s onwards, helped by the final establishment of the USA as a transcontinental power and its growth into the Pacific.

Chinese migration to America and to American territories such as Hawaii was not a new phenomenon even by the late 19 th Century.

It is perhaps fitting the man who finally swept away the Qing Dynasty was an emigre in the west, surrounded by a suffused by the values of the Enlightenment, immune from the repressive power of the Chinese Imperial Government.

Sun Yat Sen returned to Hong Kong in 1888, where he began to study medicine and found himself surrounded by other young men who had embraced western scientific rationalism, and had abandoned the notion of Chinese cultural superiority. The astonishing progress in western scientific understanding by the end of the 19 th Century provided the basis and the logic for countless revolutionary groups struggling against ancien regimes across Europe and Asia, providing them with evidence of the bankruptcy of old superstitious, backward and unchanging autocracies.

Sun was anxious for more, he embraced western philosophical and political ideals and became angry and disillusioned about the lack of progress towards change that China was making. The failure of Gong’s reforms did much to alienate progressive young Chinese, who’s hopes were raised by their introduction, only to be dashed by the machinations of the dowager empress Cixi. It was this tantalising chance of change that radicalised Sun and his contemporaries, who, much like their Russian emigre counterparts conspiring against the ancien regime of Czarism at the same time, believed that only the introduction of western political and economic change would save China. The alternative was being played out before their eyes, China sinking ever further into the grasp of European imperial control, an economic, colonisation soon to be followed by a direct military and political colonisation.

Sun Yat Sen should be seen within a wider 19 th Century context of nationalism, the great radical force of the first half of the century, and following 1848, one of its greatest reactionary forces. Sun’s historical antecedents are not so much Chinese thinkers as Europeans, men such as Mazzini in Italy, who dreamt of a liberal nationalism that would lead to a rebirth or Risorgimento of the backward and divided Italian nation. The idea of the modern nation state applied itself more easily in European countries where industrialisation led the pace of change, than in largely agrarian China. In the German states

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