A Biography Of Sun Yat Sen

In view of the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen's relations with the Nanyang communities, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Chinese Heritage Centre came together to host a two-day bilingual conference on the three-way relationships between Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution in October 2010 in Singapore. This volume is a collection of papers in English presented at the conference. While there are extensive research and voluminous publications on Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution, it was felt that less had been done on the Southeast Asian connections. Thus this volume tries to chip in some original and at times provocative analysis on not only Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution but also contributions from selected Southeast Asian countries.

A Biography of Sun Yat-Sen, a record of the renowned historical personage in China, co-authored by Zhang Lei and Zhang Ping and published in 2011 by the People’s Publishing House, was listed as one of the key publications for the celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Sun Yat-sen. It has been highly regarded in the major media of the country. The book is composed of two parts, the first of which consists of five chapters that narrate his experience of overseas studies and his leadership in the establishment of the Revive China Society and the Chinese Revolutionary League, the struggle against the Qing Dynasty and Yuan Shikai, the building and protection of the Republican system. The second part of the book provides a detailed description and interpretation of the development of the democratic and revolutionary system of ideology represented by the Three Principles of the People and the Three Great Policies, and of the significance of his theories for the Chinese revolution. Different from other biographies, A Biography of Sun Yat-sen does not dwell on telling the long story about his family or daily life, but is focused on his spirit, i.e. his patriotism and enthusiasm for reform and revolution, and based on it, recounts the development and elevation of this spirit, which is revealed by the whole process of his first advocating the reform of the Qing Government to proposing the (New) Three Principles of the People. The book is an important reference for further study and understanding of Sun Yat-sen and his ideas and revolutionary cause.

A biography of the Chinese leader who dedicated his life to abolishing the Manchu dynasty and uniting China.

The Unfinished Revolution is a superb new biography of Sun Yat-sen, whose life, like the confusion of his time, is not easy to interpret. His political career was marked mostly by setbacks, yet he became a cult figure in China after his death. Today he is the only 20th-century Chinese leader to be widely revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In contrast, many Western historians see little in his ideas or deeds to warrant such high esteem. This book presents the most balanced account of Sun to date, one that situates him within the historical events and intellectual climate of his time. Born in the shadow of the Opium War, the young Sun saw China repeatedly humiliated in clashes with foreign powers, resulting in the loss of territory and sovereignty. When his efforts to petition the decrepit Manchu court to institute reforms failed, Sun took to revolution. Sun traversed the globe to canvass support for his cause. A notable feature of the book is its coverage of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and their contributions to his uprisings on the mainland, which set the stage for the overthrow of two millennia of imperial rule in 1911. But Sun’s vision of China was not to be. Within a few years the republic was hijacked and plunged into chaos. This fascinating and immensely readable work illuminates the man and his achievements, his strengths and his weaknesses, revealing how he came to spearhead the revolution that would transform his country and yet, at his death in 1925 and still today, remain agonizingly unfinished.

This biography introduces readers to the life and times of Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), a Chinese revolutionary whose popularity stretches across Greater China and into the 21st century. Concise and incisive, each interpretive biography in the Library of World Biography Series focuses on a person whose actions and ideas either significantly influenced world events or whose life reflects important themes and developments in global history. Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) was ceaselessly dynamic, leading a movement among Chinese to overthrow the last traditional dynasty of China's history and replace it with a modern-style republic. When this republic became a reality, he briefly served as its president, afterward continuing to influence his country for decades to come through the political party he created, the controversial foreign assistance he accepted, and the many writings he left behind. China is today rapidly transforming itself into the international powerhouse that Sun envisioned. In this respect, Sun's life story--occurring as it did on the dividing line between traditional dynastic rule and the search for what would replace it--enables us to understand a broad swath of China's road to contemporary prominence.

Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) occupies a unique position in modern Chinese history: he is equally venerated as the founding father of the nation by both the mainland Communist government and its Nationalist rival in Taiwan. The first president of the Republic of China in 1911-12, the peasant-born yet Western-trained Dr Sun was also a dedicated political theorist, constantly in search of the ideal political and constitutional blueprint to underpin his incomplete revolution. A decade before the public emergence in Japan of his ‘Three Principles of the People’, and weeks before even his first slim publication in 1897, Kidnapped in London, Sun was already hard at work in the Reading Room of the British Museum, planning his most ambitious book yet: a comprehensive political treatise in English on the tyrannical misgovernment of the Chinese nation by the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty. Started then abandoned twice over, destined never to be completed, let alone published, we can only conjecture what title this revolutionary book might have had. The Lost Book of Sun Yatsen and Edwin Collins is the first study of this lost work in all scholarship, Western or Chinese. It draws its originality and its themes from three primary sources, all presented here for the first time. The first is a series of interconnected lost writings co-authored by Sun Yatsen between 1896 and 1898. The second is the mass of lost political interviews with, and articles dedicated to, Sun Yatsen and his politics, first published in the British press in the aftermath the dramatic world-famous rescue of Sun from inside the Chinese Legation in London in 1896. The third source is the ‘Apostle of the Simple Life for Children’, the Anglo-Jewish Rabbi Edwin Collins (1858-1936), a devotee and practitioner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and the New Education movement it inspired, who became Sun’s writing collaborator of choice during his years of political exile from China. Drawing on this wealth of neglected material, Patrick Anderson’s book offers a genuinely fresh perspective on Sun Yatsen and his political motivations and beliefs.