If Sun’s political legacy remains his title of guofu (国父), or “father of the country,” his intellectual legacy is a series of lectures he gave to students in Guangzhou laying out his “Three Principles of the People,” the sanmin zhuyi (三民主义). Sun’s first principle, “The Principle of Race,” minzu zhuyi (民族主义), established the importance of nationalism… Read more »
With prompting from Russia, Sun arranged an alliance between China’s Nationalist and Communist parties in 1923 to fight the remaining colonial powers and work towards reunification. The great legacy of this move was the cementing of Sun’s role as the father of modern China in the eyes of both the Nationalists and the Communists. Sun… Read more »
Like earlier reformers we’ve looked at, Sun drifted back towards more traditional parts of Chinese culture as he got older. When Liang Qichao shocked China with the announcement that Japan had claimed all of Germany’s territorial concessions in the wake of World War I, riots broke out in Beijing. Spurred on by the New Culture… Read more »