From Democracy : Its Meaning And History, Sun Yat-sen, 9 March 1924
Inasmuch as democracy is the political tendency of the day, China should also advance toward it. For this reason, thirty years ago my fellow revolutionists came to the decision that revolution was necessary to save China from decadence and collapse, and that democracy should be the cardinal principle of our revolution. This principle of ours was bitterly condemned not only by the Chinese but by a great many foreigners, for at that time there were a good many powerful autocratic governments which in many ways were considered progressive. For instance, the Russian Tsar combined in him the absolute power both of the state and the church. The German Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor made themselves the heads of their powerful armies and navies. While these autocrats still existed, many people in China could not be convinced that democracy was possible ; they thought that the only road to political stability was the concentration and perpetuation of power. For this reason, Yuan Shih-k�ai and Chang Hsun attempted the restoration of the monarchical system.Now the three great autocratic governments ; namely, the German, and Austrian, and the Russian autocracies, have been overthrown, and they have been replaced by a democratic form of government. The very fall of these autocratic governments is the strongest evidence of the power and influence of the democratic political tendency which is sweeping through the entire world. Some time ago, I was asked what strength and influence the revolutionists possessed that was strong enough to overthrow the Manchu government. I offered no explanation except my faith in the power of democracy. When the Revolution did break forth in 1911, the Manchu government was overthrown without the slightest difficulty.
SUN YAT SEN : His Political and Social Ideals
a source book, compiled, translated and annotated by Leonard Shihlien Hsu.
Los Angeles : University of Southern California press, 1933, pages 176-7.
From Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant, 1935
The Empress Dowager had died in 1908, having arranged the death of the imprisoned emperor Kuang Hsu the day before. She was succeeded by Kuang�s nephew, P�u Yi, now Emperor of Manchukuo. In the last years of the great Dowager and the first of her infant heir, many reforms in the direction of modernizing China were effected by the Government : railways were built, chiefly with foreign capital and under foreign management ; examinations for public office were abandoned ; a new system of schools was established, a National Assembly was called for 1910, and a nine-year program was laid down for the gradual establishment of a constitutional monarchy, culminating in universal suffrage growing step by step with universal education. The decree announcing this program added : �Any impetuosity shown in introducing these reforms will, in the end, be so much labor lost..�13 But the Revolution could not be halted by this deathbed repentance of an ailing dynasty. On February 12, 1912, the young Emperor, faced by revolt on every side and finding no army willing to defend him abdicated ; and the Regent, Prince Ch�un, issued one of the most characteristic edicts in Chinese history :Today the people of the whole Empire have their minds bent upon a Republic. . . . The will of Providence is clear, and the people�s wishes are plain. How could I, for the sake of the glory and the honor of one family, thwart the desire of teeming millions? Wherefore I, with the Emperor, decide that the form or government in China shall be a constitutional republic, to comfort the longing of all within the Empire, and to act hi harmony with the ancient sages, who regarded the throne as a public heritage.14The Revolutionists behaved magnanimously to P�u Yi : they gave him his life a comfortable palace, an ample annuity, and a concubine. The Manchus had come in like lions, and had gone out like lambs.
The new republic paid for its peaceful birth with a stormy life. Yuan Shi-kai, a diplomat of the old school, possessed an army that might have impeded the Revolution. He demanded the presidency as the price of his support ; and Sun Yat-sen, only beginning to enjoy his office, yielded and retired magnificently to private life. Yuan, encouraged by strong financial groups native and foreign, plotted to make himself emperor and to found a new dynasty, on the ground that only in this way could the incipient break-up of China be stayed. Sun Yat-sen branded him as a traitor, and called upon his followers to renew the Revolution ; but before the issue could come to battle Yuan took sick and died.
China has not known order or unity since. Sun Yat-sen proved too idealistic, too good an orator and too poor a statesman, to take the reins and guide his nation to peace. He passed from one plan and theory to another, offended his middle-class supporters by his apparent acceptance of communism, and retired to Canton to teach and inspire its youth and occasionally to rule its people.* China, left without a government that all sections would recognize, deprived of the unifying symbol of the monarchy, broken of its habit of obedience to custom and law, and weak in the patriotism that attaches the should not to a district but to the country as a whole, fell into an intermittent war of north against south, of section against section, of property against hunger, of old against young. Adventurers organized armies, ruled as tuchuns over isolated provinces, levied their own taxes, raised their own opium,15 and sallied forth occasionally to annex new victims to their subject population. Industry and trade, taxed by one victorious general after another, fell into disorder and despair ; bandits exacted tribute, stole and killed, and no organized force could control them. Men became soldiers of thieves lest they should starve, and ravaged the fields of men who, so despoiled, became soldiers or thieves lest they should starve. The savings of a lifetime or the modest stores of a thrifty family were, as often as not, appropriated by a general or looted by a robber band. In the province of Hunan alone, in 19331, there were 400,000 bandits.16
* He died at Peking in 1925, at the most opportune moment for his conservative enemies.In the midst of this chaos (1922) Russia sent two of its ablest diplomats, Karakhan and Joffe, with orders to bring China into the circle of the Communist Revolution. Karakhan prepared the way by surrendering Russia�s claims to �extra-territoriality,� and by signing a treaty that recognized the full authority and international status of the revolutionary government. The subtle Joffe found little difficulty in converting Sun to communism,† for Sun had been rebuffed by every other power. In an incredibly short time, with the help of seventy Soviet officers, a new Nationalist army was formed and trained. Under command of Sun�s former secretary Chiang Kai-shek, but guided largely by a Russian adviser, Michael Borodin,‡ this army marched northward from Canton, conquered one city after another, and finally established its power in Peking.* In the moment of victory the victors divided ; Chiang Kai-shek attacked the communist movement in Oriental style, and established a military dictatorship realistically responsive to the will of business and finance.
† That is somewhat inexact : Sun Yat-sen (etc) did accept help from the U.S.S.R (the only power who would recognize them) but did not quite accept the Soviet system or the Soviet version of 'communism'. Please see Sun-Joffe statement. [WPT]
‡ The real name Michael Grusenbeg. [WPT]
* From that time on the city, whose name had meant �northern capital,� was renamed Peiping, i.e., �the north pacified� ; while the Nationalist Government, in order to be next to its financial sources at Shanghai, maintained its headquarters at the �southern capital,� Nanking.
13. Peffer, 93. [i.e. PEFFER, N.: China: The Collapse of a Civilization. New York, 1930. I did not find this author entirely reliable. (WPT)]
14. G & H, 314. [i.e. GOWEN, H. H. and HALL, JOSEF W. ("Upton Close") : Outline History of China. New York, 1927.]
15. N. Y. Times, Feb, 11, 1914.
16. Eddy, [Sherwood], Challenge of the East, 73. [New York, 1931.]The Story of Civilization, vol. I,
New York : Simon and Schuster, 1942, pages 810-12, notes p. 995.
From Soviet Russia in China by Chiang Chung-Cheng (Chiang Kai-shek), 1956
It was for the purpose of saving China from being partitioned that Dr. Sun Yat-sen began to work for a national revolution. He sought to free China from the oppression of colonial powers, to abolish the unequal treaties and to build up China a s a free and independent nation. Though the Revolution of 1911 resulted in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the establishment of the Republic, the creative task of revolution and national reconstruction remained to be achieved. Remnants of the Manchu regime and northern war lords led by Yuan Shih-kai persisted in their attempts to restore the monarchy and to overthrow the new Republic. . . .New York : Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pages 12-13.
From BORODIN : Stalin's Man in China, Dan N. Jacobs, 1981
Sun had spent his life in the service or reuniting and revivifying China. For more than a quarter century, ever since 1896 when he had been rescued by Scotland Yard from the Chinese legation in London where he had been held by agents of the Manchu government, Sun had been the symbol, sometimes the only symbol, of revolution in china. Again and again in the early twentieth century, Sun had attempted to oppose the Manchus and failed. Each time his solution to failure was fundraising, where he had his greatest expertise. In the board rooms of Chinese banks, in the back rooms of Chinese laundries, in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants across the United States and Canada, in Malaysia and England, wherever there were Chinese, he preached the need to drive out the Manchus and to modernize China. . . .As he traveled the world, Sun epitomized change in China to millions of Chinese, particularly those living overseas. And when the revolution finally succeeded in 1911 and Sun returned to China—he was in Denver, Colorado, when it broke out—he was enthusiastically received as a great hero. But Sun was quickly frozen out of the regime that followed the collapse of the empire. . . . By 1920, Sun was desperately trying to maintain a foothold in Canton in South China, where he headed a jerry-built local regime.
For Sun, the role of chief enemy, formerly played by the Manchus, was now held by the militarists who had divided China into hundred of tiny fiefdoms . . .
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England :
Cambridge University Press, 1981, pages 109-10.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/sun_yat.htm
" The Chinese Revolution in 1911 overthrew the Manchu dynasty. "Note the page contains a FALSE DATUM : "Sun continued with his work and espoused his "Three Principles" - Nationalism, Democracy and [this is false] Socialism". The Three Principles were Nationalism, Democracy and Livelihood — the Chinese term has also by some authors been translated as 'subsistence' and, it seems, can also be translated as 'survival'. — (WPT).http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/sun_yat_sen1.html
". . . Sun . . . was a Chinese patriot of a more traditional kind, an admirer of rebels who had pitted their lives against the ruling Manchu dynasty (or Qing) and was at home within the conspiratorial worlds of Chinese secret societies. "By 1894 . . . China was sliding into chaos as the Manchu dynasty weakened and Japan defeated China in a brief and humiliating war." "Over the years, Sun developed . . . ideas into a comprehensive plan for restoring economic and moral strength to his country, first by expelling the Manchus and then by curbing the foreign powers." ". . . when the Manchu dynasty at last collapsed in 1911, in some measure because of the ceaseless pressure exerted by Sun and his revolutionary followers, he was named provisional President of the new Chinese republic."http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/sunyat.html
(by Sun Yat-sen ) "So in our own time was the Manchu yoke thrown off by the Chinese." "No vengeance has been inflicted on the Manchus and we have endeavored to live side by side with them on a n equal footing." " . . . under Manchu occupation the Chinese were forced into the position of the vanquished, and suffered oppression for more than two hundred and sixty years." "According to my plan, the progress of our revolution should be regulated and divided into three stages: First, military rule; second, political tutelage; third, constitutional government. The first stage is a period of destruction, during which military rule is installed. The revolutionary: army is to break doom (as it did) Manchu despotism, sweep away official corruptions, and reform vicious customs."http://www.president.gov.tw/1_roc_intro/e_xpresident/
Sun gave up his medical career and devoted himself to the cause of overthrowing the Manchu dynasty and establishing a republic. . . . In October 1894, together with a group of overseas Chinese youths, Sun set up his first volutionary organization, the Hsing-chung Hui (Society for Regenerating China), in Honolulu, Hawaii . . . . In August 1905, he formulated the Three Principles of the People--nationalism, democracy, and ['livelihood'] social well-being--which, he believed, were the guidelines for building a modern China. Over the next 16 years, Sun and his followers launched ten armed attempts to topple the corrupted Manchu government. The last stroke came on October 10, 1911, when Sun's supporters took over Wuchang, the capital of Hupei Province . . .On December 25, 1911, Sun was elected provisional president of the new republic in Nanking by a revolutionary alliance, which controlled 16 of the country's 22 provinces. He was inaugurated on January 1, 1912, the birthday of the Republic of China--Asia's first democracy.
http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/libraries/eastasian/china/toqing.html
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/qing.htm