Sun Yat-sen
The revolutionary revered as China's Father of the Nation by rival regimes; his 1911 revolution helped end 2,000 years of imperial rule.
Every Chinese government of the past century has claimed him. In Taipei he is the "Father of the Nation"; in Beijing he is the "Forerunner of the Revolution." Sun Yat-sen is the rare figure whom Chinese Nationalists and Communists, who spent decades killing each other, still agree to venerate. He was a physician by training, a professional revolutionary by vocation, and for most of his life a spectacular failure who kept losing until, quite suddenly, he won.
The doctor who overthrew an empire
Sun was born in 1866 to a peasant family in Guangdong, schooled in Hawaii, and qualified as a doctor in Hong Kong in 1892. He soon abandoned medicine for conspiracy, founding revolutionary societies and raising money among overseas Chinese for a string of failed uprisings against the Qing dynasty. In 1896 Qing agents seized him inside the Chinese legation in London and planned to ship him home for execution; a press outcry forced his release and made him a celebrity revolutionary overnight. When the rebellion that finally worked broke out at Wuchang in October 1911, Sun was not even in China; he read about it in a newspaper in the United States. He hurried home and on 1 January 1912 was sworn in as provisional president of the new Republic of China, ending more than 2,000 years of imperial rule. Within weeks he handed the presidency to the general Yuan Shikai in exchange for the last emperor's abdication, a bargain that soon collapsed into the chaos of warlord rule.
Three principles and a Soviet bargain
Sun's enduring legacy is a slogan and a party. His Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood) remain the common vocabulary of Chinese politics on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, quoted in Beijing and enshrined in Taiwan's constitution alike. To turn the ideas into power he built the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party. Frozen out by the Western democracies, he took help where he could find it: in 1923 he signed a pact with a Soviet envoy, accepted Comintern advisers who reorganized the KMT along Leninist lines, and formed a united front with the newborn Chinese Communist Party. In 1924 he opened the Whampoa Military Academy to build a revolutionary army, installing a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek as its commandant.
The succession he never settled
Sun died of liver cancer in Beijing on 12 March 1925, at 58, while negotiating with northern warlords to reunify the country. He left no clear heir, and the movement he had held together by force of personality split. Chiang Kai-shek used his command of the Whampoa army to win the resulting power struggle, then in 1927 turned on the Communists and slaughtered them in Shanghai, opening a civil war that would run, on and off, for more than two decades until Mao's victory in 1949. Both the winner and the loser of that war would spend the rest of their careers claiming to be Sun's true successor. The embalmed founder still lies in a vast marble mausoleum on Nanjing's Purple Mountain, a monument built by a republic that no longer governs the mainland, tended by the state that replaced it.