Rana Mitter on the legacy of Sun Yat-sen
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This episode of Chinese Whispers is sponsored by Alliance Witton Investment Trust. From the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s, the financial crash in 2008, to the COVID epidemic and Liz Truss's doomed premiership, there has been no shortage of economic crises over the last 58 years. And yet, throughout that time, every single year, without fail, we've paid out an increased dividend to our shareholders.

In fact, Alliance Witton's history dates all the way back to 1888. And today, we manage around £5bn in assets. If you're looking for a less stressful way to invest in stocks and shares, learn more about Alliance Witton and find your comfort zone. Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? Walking around Taipei a couple of years ago, I spotted a familiar sight. A bronze statue of a mustachioed man, caning his right hand, left leg striding forward. The man is Sun Yat-sen, considered modern China's founding father. I recognised the statue because a larger version of it stands in the city centre of Nanjing, the mainland Chinese city that I was born and raised in.

That one figure can be celebrated across the strait, both in communist PRC and Taiwanese ROC, is a curious legacy left behind by Sun. March 12th this year is the centenary of his death. So what better opportunity to look at his legacy? And who better to discuss Sun Yat-sen than historian Rana Mitter, who needs no introduction for Chinese Whispers listeners. Rana, always a pleasure to have you on Chinese Whispers. Thanks for joining again. Great to be with you, Cindy. Always good to be back on Chinese Whispers.

Now, Sun Yat-sen or Sun Zhongshan is a name that all Chinese grow up with, especially if you, like me, grew up in Nanjing, where he was buried. But for Westerners who might not know the name, could you give us a kind of three minute pen portrait of who he was and why was he important?

Absolutely. I think if I had to give you a one-sentence portrait, Cindy, I'd say that he's the single most important figure in the Chinese revolution that overthrew the last emperor who wasn't actually in China when the revolution took place. Because it's the ideas and the activism of Sun Yat-sen, I mean, the most common way that he's known in China itself, at least in Mandarin, is Sun Zhongshan, but Sun Yat-sen is a sort of version of his Cantonese name. He was from Guangdong in southern China.

He was a revolutionary figure. He dedicated much of his life, the late 19th century, to trying to overthrow the last dynasty of China, as it turned out to be the Qing dynasty, which he felt was corrupt, backward, holding China back from what he thought should be a really much more advanced and cosmopolitan future. And

even though he had to travel around the world trying to raise funds and raise interest in the idea of a revolution in China, which was one of the reasons he was actually out of the country when it happened in 1911, when the last emperor was overthrown. His contribution to that revolution, he's known often on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, in the mainland of China, the PRC, and in Taiwan as the Guofu, the father of the nation.

And that is because his activities are felt to be so important, so central to shaping the ideas of how China could move on from being an empire to being a republic, that even today, 100 years after his death, which is going to be commemorated in March, March the 12th, I think, in fact, he's still thought of as that kind of pivotal figure. So revolutionary activist and someone who,

for most of his life, was working to overthrow the dynasty. Very quickly born in southern China. He gets a Western education as well as a Chinese education. He becomes a Christian quite early on, actually. That's a very important element throughout his life. And perhaps we could talk a little bit about how that Christianity affected his politics a bit later on, because it's one of the things that people often don't realise, that it's actually part of that early 20th century Chinese politics in quite a big way. He joins a lot of underground societies, hangs out with a lot of gangsters, secret societies, as they were known.

and uses them as a sort of muscle gang, so to speak, in terms of trying to get to the overthrow of the dynasty. And then much of the last part of his life is spent trying to find other sponsors to help him consolidate the revolution. He's president of China, but for about six weeks, basically, he starts the job on January 1st, 1912.

and then basically does a Liz Trust. He's forced to resign pretty much exactly six weeks later, I think February. But he didn't crash the market. Actually, one of the things that happens at that time is that there's a lot of speculation about what a new Chinese republic might mean for the international markets. But we can get back to that that

question. But no, in his case, he's not deposed by the markets. He's deposed by a warlord, a Chinese militarist, a man called Yuan Shikai, who basically kicks him off the throne because he, Yuan Shikai, wants to install himself ultimately as the new emperor, which he doesn't quite succeed in doing. But Sun Yat-sen then basically spends that last part of his life from 1912 to 1925, when he dies of cancer, that last 13 years looking for international help,

to get him back to the presidential palace. And he looks to the Japanese, spends a lot of time in Japan, both before and after the revolution. He looks to the West. And finally, he looks to perhaps the single most consequential partner, the Soviet Union, a newly formed Bolshevik state. And they're out in the world stage looking for partners. And Sun Yat-sen, at the end of his life, from 1923 to 1925, he's in.

with the Soviets, even though he wasn't himself a communist. He had a much more interesting form of a sort of kind of socialism. We'll talk more about his ideas, I hope, in a bit. But a long, in some ways, quite sort of picaresque life. I've tried to

summarize it as quickly as possible. But I can say that when it comes to Sun Yat-sen, there's always a new story, always a new anecdote, always a new aspect to his life. One last thing I'll mention, I won't go into details, but we maybe pick it up. He was kidnapped off the streets of London and held in the Chinese embassy. If you know, it's still there actually, important place near the BBC in central London today, and was nearly kind of shipped out in a crate and executed in China. But fortunately, the actions of his British fans actually got him released eventually. So a life full of adventure, Sun Yat-sen.

And that was by the Qing government at the time because he, as you've mentioned already, was a revolutionary, not a reformer. He didn't believe in this kind of constitutional empire. He wanted to overthrow them. So let's talk about his ideas now then because he's most well known for the three principles of the people, Saming Zhuyi. Outline those for me. So the three principles of the people, Saming Zhuyi, as you put it, Cindy, are essentially the pillars of the philosophy that Sun Yat-sen thought should exist.

underpin a new Chinese Republic. He didn't just want to overthrow the old empire. He wanted to actually form a new kind of constitutional Republic that would last and, you know, not to spoil the end for people, but it didn't really work out very well. But the three ideas were these.

The first one was an idea that might be translated either as popular rights or even as democracy, minxue. The second one is the idea of nationhood, and that's minzu. Sometimes the Chinese word nationalism comes from an aptly termed minzu zhui.

And the third one, and perhaps this is the toughest one to translate, Min Sheng, some people translate it to socialism, others as people's livelihood or people's welfare. And socialism for us in the 21st century, because it's associated with either left-wing governments in Europe or with kind of Marxism and so forth, I think maybe isn't the best translation. So I'll stick with people's welfare. But it is in some sense a socialistic idea. Another

phrase which Sun Yat-sen was keen to make, you know, almost a slogan of his, 天下为贡. In other words, you know, everything, the whole empire or the whole everything under heaven is for the common good.

expresses that idea that actually, even if property shouldn't be common, it's not communism in that sense, the idea that there is a public sphere, that there is something that is shared and not purely private, and that should carry on into a republican form of government. All of these are part of the mix. So this is basically a form of what you might call social welfare in one nation, bearing in mind, of course, that 1911, 1912, 1913, the time when Sonia Hassan

He's rushing back. He's actually in America when the revolution takes place in autumn of 1911. But he rushes back or strolls back, actually, to be fair. He doesn't make that much of a push of it and gets put on the presidential throne, presidential chamber, you might say. But then he's keen to try and exercise the idea that you're going to have some kind of constitutional republic. They have parliamentary elections. And these three ideas, the three people's principles, nationalism, democracy and politics.

people's livelihood, they sit at the heart of what his thinking is. Would it be totally inaccurate to say that he's kind of envisaging an early form of a social, democratic, liberal state with a clear national identity? Or for the kind of modern developed countries that we see that are not uncommon these days? You're right, but it's complicated, as these things always are. So

In terms of what he was aspiring to do, I think that that's right. His belief in constitutional parliamentary democracy was real. He didn't actually run for office. So basically, sometimes people will tell you one of the kind of great misleading things that China couldn't have a democracy and it's never had a general election and it wouldn't work if it did. Well, this is not true. It's actually had several general elections, usually at slightly odd times during the early 20th century. And one of them was essentially in the aftermath of

the 1911 revolution, so 1912-1913, there's a polling process. Men only get to vote. Tan Chunying, amongst others, a major Chinese feminist at the time, and other Chinese suffragettes, you know, do these smashing windows to try and get into the room where the men are seeking the right to actually give out the vote, but only to other men. Sadly, in this case, they don't succeed. Women don't get the vote in China until 1947. But there's male

suffrage, not universal, but widely spread, and political parties. And brilliant young man Len Song Chow-Ren runs essentially at the head of this new party. And this is Sun Yat-sen's party, the Kuomintang. It's sometimes abbreviated to KMT or GMD in Western usage. Still exists today on Taiwan, and we'll get to that. But basically, the Kuomintang is formed for this election.

Sun Yat-sen himself doesn't stand formally at the head of the party, but expects to have a big role. And in doing all of this, he's basically putting forward the idea that an elected constitutional republic is the right way that the state should go forward. And yes, it should offer social welfare. But he also believes in a period of what's sometimes translated as tutelage. In other words, that maybe...

the whole population getting universal suffrage, even just the men, universal suffrage all at once is too much for an agrarian country like China that's just come out of empire. So you have to have a period of development, of tutelage, of training in democracy before you can go for the full version. And bearing in mind, think about the time we're talking about, 1911 to 1913,

Well, which countries have universal suffrage at that point? Britain doesn't. Women can't vote. And actually, various property-owning males get, you

significant rights over non-property owners at that time too. You can find other examples, states, France too. So in that sense, China isn't too much out of sync on this. And it isn't actually until much later after Sun Yat-sen's death that the kind of growth of that, the establishment of an attempted sort of social democratic republic comes about. But yeah, you're absolutely right, Sydney, the aspiration, the idea,

is very much part of that. Let me add one other element actually, which is also in Sun Yat-sen's writings, because he also puts forward in the early 1920s, in the years shortly before his death, a bigger blueprint of what kind of China he wants. And one element of that, it'll resonate with Xi Jinping, it will resonate with Donald Trump, might well resonate actually with Boris Johnson.

infrastructure. He is a big infrastructure guy. One of the things that's attributed to Sun Yat-sen, I've never quite managed to track down whether it's literally true, but it's broadly true, is he's one of the first people to advocate building a massive dam at the top of the Yangtze in the Three Gorges to essentially provide cheap, effective hydropower for energy, for

for a China that's going to obviously rev up, turbocharge, to use Boris Johnson's term, you know, turbocharge its economy and really turn into a major, prosperous, economically self-sufficient nation. Now, we know that it's not until the 1990s that that project actually gets underway. But way back in the 1910s, Sun Yat-sen, as well as thinking about democracy, as well as thinking about social welfare, is also thinking about engineering and infrastructure. He's a very wide-ranging thinker. Part of the tragedy, perhaps, is that he got very little chance to actually

Yes, and I want to come back to his premature death a bit later as well, Rana. But just in the way that you've described his ideology, you know, in the kind of the idea of tutelage and the idea of participation, representation, reminds me with my kind of politics undergraduate hat on of thinkers like John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, you know, there's a kind of idea of, you know,

not communism, not equality, perfect equality, but equality before the law and actual just kind of de facto individual rights. But there was one part where he was unfashionable to the liberal sensibility, let's put it that way, which is his nationalism, which seems to have at times veered into outright racism or hand supremacy. So, again, this is an interesting and I think in some ways quite complex question.

So ideas of race became immensely significant in late 19th, early 20th century China. Social Darwinism was a really powerful strand of thinking. And I'm sure, you know, as the Chinese whispers know an awful lot, so I didn't say too much, but just to remind you that social Darwinism is the idea drawn from biological ideas of evolution that Darwin discovered, but applied to the

applied misleadingly through a social science lens to the idea that not just species but races were in competition with each other for superiority.

Even though this idea doesn't really have any scientific, well, has no scientific basis at all, it is nonetheless something that took off in a big way in East Asia, Japan and China in particular, in the late 19th century. And people like Sun Yat-sen were very touched by it, as were most thinkers of the time. Some of them turned into outright racial nationalists. People like Jiang Binglin are people who basically advocate that the ruling ethnic group, the Manchus, who are in charge of the Qing dynasty,

are basically an alien ethnic force who need to be removed by violent force if necessary. Now, Sun Yat-sen never advocated that as far as I know. He did make comments that essentially the way in which this particular ruling ethnic group was in charge had to be overturned to provide a nationhood

that was broader. But it's worth noting that as part of that first Chinese Republic, there was an acknowledgement of five races, you know, the Han Chinese who are the kind of dominant group, you know, over 90%. And then, oh, I'm not going to get this wrong, but I'm trying to think of the other four. I think it's Tibetans, Mongol, Manchu, and Korean, I think is the fifth one. Yeah. Listeners to writing. Yeah, Sydney and I are now kind of on.

Skating on the edge of the ice there as well. And the idea was that all of these would be in the flag of the first Republican flag of China essentially has colored stripes which represent these different races. So, yes, you are right that when it came to saying who comes first in that hierarchy in a kind of broad sense,

it was the Han majority and not the Manchus in his view. But the kind of eliminationist, violent view of people like Zhang Binglin, who actually said we have to get rid of the Manchus, I mean, this involves violence and possibly death, that that was not, I think, Sun Yat-sen's view at all. And that's influenced partly, again, I mentioned that he was a Christian. He converted quite early, so much so I think his family got a bit worried because they didn't think this was a very appropriate thing for him to be doing. But actually, he remained a very strong Christian all of his life. And that, in

That, in some ways, I think, contrasts with that wider social Darwinist view, which enables me, by the way, to point out that in some senses, the influence of communism and social Darwinism in China in the late 19th and early 20th century, Cindy, means that the two biggest Western thinkers influencing China in that whole century were Marx and Spencer, the latter being Herbert Spencer, of course, the social Darwinist.

Right, I just had a look and that last ethnicity, that last nation is actually the Muslims. I just want to push you a little bit on this point about race because it feels a bit like this alliance with the other nations, with the other ethnicities, however you want to translate it. There is one ethnicity which is above all, it is Han-centric nevertheless. And you can see that in his slogans such as expel the Tatars, revive Zhonghua, you know, reviving the Chinese nation. And that's a slogan that has been

borrowed from the Ming Dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang. So it does seem like there is one favourite, you know, one first amongst equals, as it were. That's true, actually, Cindy. But let's, I'm not saying but anything, let's say and.

Let's look for a moment at some of the reasons that Sun would have been pushed in that direction. And again, this involves a cognate, which I think will be very familiar to Chinese whispers listeners and spectator readers, which is about constituencies and playing to them. Let's think about who the people are who were supporting Sun Yat-sen. Because as I've mentioned, almost in passing the introduction, the guy's not actually, I think he's in Denver, Colorado when the

revolution takes place. He's not even Chinese. How is it that this guy, oh, he's in Hawaii and various other, but you know, he's raising funds amongst the overseas Chinese, his reputation becomes very high. But how does that guy get to be the president of China? Why does he have the prestige? And there are a variety of answers, but the one I'd point us to in terms of getting to your question of why he takes particular political positions, including these quite stern ones based around the idea of race, is in part because who's supporting him.

So just to take one grouping, for instance, a newly emergent middle class, a sort of commercial middle class in China's cities, they form things like shanghui, chambers of commerce. In other words, they form, I don't want to sort of get into Marxist language that talks about, you know, the petit bourgeois and the grand bourgeois, but there's something about that there as well. You know, a new kind of commercial class that draws on the emergence of global capitalism. Now, you know,

Global capitalists around the world have all sorts of different views, and I'm sure you know that from your readership. But it is nonetheless the case that when they exist in a national context, often they do tend to push the state, quite often in the idea of stronger nationhood. There's a very practical reason. If you're a merchant in late 19th century China, you're forming your market, you're really ticked off by the fact that your tariffs are

very much a word at the moment. Your tariffs are being decided actually by an external body, something called the Chinese Maritime Customs. It works for the Chinese government, but it's run actually by the Brits. A guy called Sir Robert Hart from Portadown in Northern Ireland is the guy who runs it for about half a century. He's a great man. The Chinese government actually love him, but he's not a Qing dynasty official. So these sorts of things push

commercial interests of certain sorts, particularly modern commercial interests, in a more nationalistic direction. Or, to take one other example from almost the other side of the spectrum as to why Sun Yat-sen becomes a sort of flexible figurehead who fits lots of different narratives. And, you know, we know that all the best politicians, best in the sense of most successful, can represent themselves differently to different groups. So let's take that group that I mentioned briefly before, the secret societies, you know, the Hongbang, the Qingbang, the Red Gang, Green Gang, these sorts of guys. They're

not kind of cosmopolitan merchants looking for kind of terror for fall. These are thugs. I mean, these are guys who basically for centuries have run these kind of underground mafia type organizations. And they love Sun Yat-sen as well because he is, I mean, you mentioned the Ming dynasty just now. They are loyalists in many cases to the long forgotten Ming dynasty, reminding our listeners that the Ming dynasty fell from power in 1644.

So by the late 19th century, these dudes have been gone for a long time. They haven't come back. Unless in the imagination of some of the kind of peasant rebel groups or kind of more blue collar underground groups, maybe, you know, the restoring the Ming could be the way to go. Now, Sun Yat-sen is not about restoring the Ming. He's about establishing a republic, but he is about getting rid of the Qing. And that's enough in some of these cases for him to lock on.

to the idea that the secret societies have that he's going to overthrow the existing order and bring about something that they find emotionally more congenial. So he's a shapeshifter intellectually. And that's one of the reasons why nationalism as a sort of wrapper, as a kind of framework, works so well for these different messages he's sending to different people.

That's fascinating. Well, that brings me on very nicely to my next question, which is more about his legacy, because we're talking not just about his life, but in the 100 years since his death. And he is one of those rare figures where, as you mentioned at the beginning, Rana, across the Taiwan Strait, both the Republic of China, Taiwan itself, and the People's Republic of China, the communist China now, do venerate him or at least they venerate some image of him. How has he found such cross party appeal in the century after his death?

You're absolutely right that he is probably the only major historical figure of that era who sits comfortably, to some extent, on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. And I would say that that was truer, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago than it is now.

And the reason essentially is that he provides a linking point to that moment of transformation that is the 1911 revolution that overthrows the last emperor, this particular moment. So in the mainland of China,

you can commemorate Sun Yat-sen, and indeed that's likely to happen in... My bet is that if they go where they went last year, where they did the 99th anniversary of his death, which actually also was commemorated, they'll go to Zhongshan Park in Beijing. In other words, the park named after his personal name, and do some sort of ceremony there. Because what they can say is, look, the old feudal society, you know, Fengjian, this term that's usually used as a kind of catch-all for the old empire and everything before the modern era...

was swept out of the way, and Sun Yat-sen must be given credit for doing this sweeping away. And then, one of the reasons we're doing this podcast now, he had the good fortune to die relatively early in 1925, before the communists came to power. So he never did anything specific that they could point to that was essentially destructive of the communists coming to power, which his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, certainly did. And in fact, the

when he died, he was formally allied with the Soviet Union. So that's even better from that point of view. So that works symbolically. But then across the water in Taiwan, well, for many decades, from 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, the nationalists, go to the island, they

essentially claimed that they are maintaining the true legacy of Sun Yat-sen. He was the guy who founded the Chinese Republic. The Chinese Republic at that point, 1949, 1950s, is having a bit of a downtime. It's had to sort of head over to the island for a temporary period, but they're going back. We're going back. We're going to take the mainland. Of course, they never take the mainland, and eventually that fades. But the reason that that has become more controversial is that even today,

the successor party, the Kuomintang, the KMT, the same name of the party, but today it's a democratic party in a multi-party system in a liberal state, which is Taiwan. I mean, you know, the KMT of today is not the KMT of 100 years ago. And yet they do still maintain the historical connection and the commemoration of Sun Yat-sen as the founder. And it looks like Eric Chu, the current leader of the KMT, is going to do some sort of remembrance ceremony on March 12th of this year.

Not coming along, I suspect, are the ruling party, the DPP, who are currently in power under President Lai Ching-teh, William Lai, and of course their substantial presence in the legislature as well. Because the DPP today in Taiwan make a really radically alternative narrative case, which is that they are a separate state that has emerged on the island.

And that whatever happened in the mainland 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago is of no real relevance to the narrative they want to put forward. So they are unlikely to be saying anything about Sun Yat-sen. And that means that in a weird way, there will be a unified because top down and censored commemoration in the mainland. But in Free Taiwan, there will probably be two radically different narratives, one of which still tries to incorporate Sun Yat-sen and the other one which pretty much ignores him.

And yet, nevertheless, do the Taiwanese have swing accent to thank for their democratic transition when it happened in the late 80s and 90s? I mean, the three principles of the people are written into the ROC constitution. And obviously, this idea of transition to democracy is...

rocky as it was in Taiwan and pretty, you know, bloody at times as well. It did happen and Taiwan is one of the most successful cases of modern democratic transition. Taiwan is an immensely successful, it's an odd irony in a sense that the, you know, one or at least the one major unrecognized state in the

the region, Taiwan, Republic of China on Taiwan, to give it its still official name that it uses, is probably the most vibrant liberal democracy. It has a full multi-party system. It has very free press, has very free internet. It has

Very progressive socially, what we here would call woke. Yeah, well, whatever term you want to use. But it's had, I think, the first trans-identified minister in Asia, probably in many countries, in fact, Audrey Tang. So, you know, all sorts of things. They're also actually alive in some ways very productive.

productive sort of ethnic politics. I mean, some of the great figures of Taiwan pop culture, Amei the singer, who actually is an indigenous Taiwanese Aboriginal by origin, became a big figure in the mainland and in Taiwan and across various communities. So it's all, you know, very complex and lively society. And it's a great place to visit, I should say as well. I'm

The democracy which emerged in Taiwan is relatively recently right. It emerged at the same time as some of the other Asian developmental states like South Korea that democratized in the 1980s as well. No one in Taiwan has yet declared sudden martial laws happened last December with Korea, so we hope. Although a lot of people in Taiwan noticed and started talking about that. But the democracy path

is a lot to do actually with the indigenous Taiwanese Chinese. And particularly, there's a magazine called Meilidao, Formosa, it's often translated, in the 70s, which was a repository of dissident thinking. And, you know, a lot of political prisoners at that time, at the end of the Chiang Kai-shek period in power, and then with his son, Jiang Jingguo, taking over. And we shouldn't

downplay those human rights abuses. That having been said, yes, you can see a path through Sun Yat-sen. Why? Because Sun Yat-sen himself dies in 1925 of liver cancer, relatively young, not super young, but younger than he should have been.

There's a fight over his succession. Eventually, the person who gets to the top is Chiang Kai-shek, who a lot of people know is essentially the leader of China on the mainland from 1927 all the way to 1949, then has to flee to the island. Chiang Kai-shek stays in power basically as a dictator, and there's nothing very democratic about what he does all the way till his death in 1975. But there's a direct link then to his son, Zhang Jingguo,

who basically between 1970... Actually, I think technically he takes power in 1977, if I haven't read this intervening brief period. But anyway, from the 70s to the 80s, Jiang Jingguo may not be the primary figure who is pushing democratization, but he doesn't push back against it. He knows essentially that it's going to have to happen. And with the emergence of a kind of indigenous democratic movement, he's

He basically, you know, it's almost a Gorbachev thing, you might say, except perhaps more successful in many ways. It doesn't tear the state apart. It actually kind of reinvents it. And by the late 1980s, you then get the move on to a new generation of people, still under the KMT, still the same party from Sun Yat-sen all the way to then Li Donghui in the early 1990s. The first indigenous Taiwanese Chinese president of Taiwan Republic of China and one who is elected by popular vote in, I think, 1992.

And basically, that sort of caps the transition in terms of democratization. Taiwanese society also changes during that time and embraces, you know, not only democracy, but also trying to deal with the darker side of Chiang Kai-shek's period as dictator. So, for instance, the film, I think it's called

Beitang, City of Sadness, Hou Xiaoxian, one of the great Taiwanese directors, does a film that brings to mind the February 28th events when Taiwanese protesters are mown down in the streets and arrested and executed by Chiang Kai-shek's authority. So the dark side of the legacy of Sun Yat-sen is still very much there and remembered, but the democracy

democratization, it's absolutely true, would not have happened had they not drawn on some of those ideas like the three people's principles, the idea of people's rights and democratization that do owe a point of origin in the thinking of Sun Yat-sen himself.

And so Rana, I think you're absolutely right to pick out the fact, the curious fact that it's in Taiwan where Sun Yat-sen arguably has more of a succession in ideas and in people and in political governance that he is remembered in a much more diverse way. Whereas, you know, in mainland China, where I grew up, Sun Yat-sen was absolutely venerated, not necessarily as a central political figure.

but at least as one of the, I think the phrase is like a front runner of the revolution, a pioneer of the revolution. And as you say, it's because he died so young. The communists couldn't point to anything that he did later on. I dread to think what he would have done if he had been in the anti-rightist movements in the 50s or lived bizarrely long to the Cultural Revolution. Well, many of the most venerated figures in Chinese history in general are the people who died early enough that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, could use them.

Worth noting that Mao himself in 1940, in his essay on new democracy, which I expect you were made to read in Nanjing High School, or I imagine you were anyway, talks about the new three people's principles. Mao puts forward a set of ideas that is much, much more radical than anything that Sun Yat-sen put forward. But he feels he has to tip the hat. He has to sort of pay tribute.

to this founding idea of the free people's principles, which are very much kind of in the air, even the 1930s and 1940s, and then say, but we, the communists, take these ideas and we move on and he redefines them. But he feels it's important politically to take that legacy of Sun Yat-sen and then reinvent it by name as a way of saying, and this is what we, the Chinese communists, will do in what we call new democracy.

Do you think Sun deserves his reputation as one of the leading figures of that time or one of the most influential figures to have lasted since then? Because, you know, as you say, he was president for six weeks. He wasn't even in China when the revolution started. Arguably, he wasn't the most successful in China.

Was it not things like being the kidnapping in London, for example, or the fundraising or the English speaking that actually gave him a kind of profile that perhaps, you know, as you know, Rana, being a historian, isn't necessarily the most deserved compared to the other colleagues he had in the movement or in the reform movement? I mean, first of all, it's worth saying that, you know, most of the, for instance, Marie-Claire Bergère's fantastic biography of Sun Yat-sen or other works on him is well worth finding out about.

I would say that he is deserving still of a significant place in history. It's worth noting that he was personally, I think, often a very difficult man. He was not necessarily a nice person to be around. And this is true of many kind of, you know, senior Chinese politicians. He took quite a few wives, didn't he? And mistresses. Yeah, not simultaneously, I should say. Well, the mistresses, yeah, I mean, the wives. But actually, the one who became famous, Song Qingling, actually ended up as, I think, president of the People's Republic of China. She went quite far to the left and became a kind of iconic figure. She, of course, was one of three sisters.

daughters of a merchant called Charlie Sung. One of them married Chiang Kai-shek. That was Sung Mei-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. One married Sun Yat-sen and lived on into the 1970s in mainland China under the communists. And Su Ai-ling was married to Kung Xiang-si, allegedly the richest and allegedly, allegedly the most corrupt man in China in the 1930s and 40s, I believe.

The most successful matchmaking tiger dad in history. I have to say in terms of, yeah, definitely crazy rich, it has to be said, in all sorts of ways. But yeah, so his personal reputation was often, you know, hot tempered, bad judgment towards various things too. But I think the reason that it's still worth noting that he has historical significance, even though he wasn't actually in the presidential palace for very long, is that he managed essentially to bring together these different threads of

that shaped modern Chinese history during that period, that pivotal period of the late 19th and early 20th century. He understood, at least from his point of view, that the goal was not reform, but revolution. Now, I think there's lots of counter arguments that people have made. You know, we get into that part of Chinese history and say, well, maybe China could have reformed like Japan and become a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. But Sun Yat-sen, for good or ill, took the other thread and has to get some of the credit, if you

I think it's credit for China turning into a republic, which is not the most obvious thing for a new Asian state to do at the time. There's only one other republic really at the time, sort of the semi-republic in the Philippines. So, you know, this wasn't a common formation at the time. And then his ability, as I've said before, I think to be able to define a program that even when he himself was not in power,

has defined a way forward for China that people would have to, you know, it's not accidental that Mao Zedong would come back, you know, 15 years after his death and say, you know, we want to pay tribute to a new people's principles, because he actually understood that the kind of resonance that Sun had in that sense. And one other thing that is very significant for the Communist Party,

you know, we might have our own questions about whether or not this was ultimately a good thing for China, was of course he was the man who basically brought in the Soviet Union. So when the Comintern come along and basically send the Asian demand called Adolf Joffe in 1923, and there's a document signed, the Joffe-Sun Agreement, this is basically the moment at which something that shapes Chinese politics to this day becomes embedded in the system, and that's Leninism. Mm.

It's often forgotten that before the communists came along, and they were very, the Chinese communists, they were very much influenced by Leninists amongst other things. The Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, the KMT was also a Leninist party. The idea of a vanguard that would essentially gather views from the wider population, but then implement orders through essentially a system of terror if persuasion wouldn't work. This is something that Chiang Kai-shek

understood very well. He didn't share any, by the time he got to the 1920s and took over power after the struggle, after the death of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek never really advocated any of the policies of Lenin, but his tactics in terms of that collaboration

that kind of top-down, terror-driven politics. That's something that comes in through the Soviet influence in large part. And that Soviet influence is there because Sun Yat-sen essentially made that alliance, the United Front, in 1923. So in terms of the significance of what comes later, all the way up to the establishment of the People's Republic, you can see a thread,

through back to Sun Yat-sen. Ron, actually that mention of the Soviet Union reminds me because I just want to kind of touch on his views on individual liberty once again. You know, I've got a quote here. He's very famous for describing the Chinese people as a sheet of loose sand, because at the time in particular, people just didn't unite. They didn't have a national interest. They were everyone out for themselves or for their families. And he thought that was one of the reasons that China was so weak.

But I've got a quote here where he says, just as each grain of sand loses its freedom in the rocks, the individual in China would have to give up his or her freedom when society becomes strongly organized. It's a really interesting collective view of what makes a strong country, which sounds more Soviet than perhaps John Strickmill. So I think that's entirely correct. The difficulty comes from the fact that, as we've been saying more than once, the guy dies in 1925. So we don't know what would have happened afterwards.

I think that if you look at the reality of the 1920s in Republican China, which is often nicknamed the warlord era,

This is not a time, sadly in my view, that liberal individualism has much chance for political purchase. It exists in culture. Writers like the great feminist writer Ding Ling write about the emergence of individualized female sexuality, for instance, at that time. That's a very important cultural thread. But in terms of liberal politicians getting a foothold, the fact that basically

warlord leaders, militarist leaders with a huge army behind them, would just come and take over Beijing or launch wars, which happens all the time in that period, is not very conducive to liberal politics. We can look at what happens to his successors later on. Chiang Kai-shek, who we've mentioned more than once, essentially becomes the paramount leader for a couple of decades after Sun's death,

I think all his life is never really convinced by the idea that a more liberal politics, even when the possibility is there, is a good idea. But he does take part 20 or so years later in 1946, 47 in constitutional debates about how China's going to have what we might these days call a hybrid democracy, in which actually there are going to be more checks and balances on the Chinese president and his parliament at that time. And some elements of that then carried over into Taiwan. And at the same time, there are people by that stage who

who come out of that Sun Yat-sen tradition but are more liberal in the proper sense. Jiang Tingfu, who is a kind of former professor, as you know, all the professors follow the same sort of line. So Jiang Tingfu starts off... Academics have always been lefty, have they? Well, apart from anything else, Jiang Tingfu, of course, has a long history here at Harvard, where I'm speaking to you from, where he taught one of the great Duyens of Chinese, American Chinese history, John King Fairbank. But he starts off as quite a hardcore guy. His views are very similar to Sun Yat-sen. You need to have a kind of a Peter the Great or...

a kind of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to kind of force the nation together. But by the 1930s and 40s, Jiang Tingfu has reversed position and said, actually, no, liberalism is really the way forward. Or this Sun Yat-sen's son's son. Sorry, I have to get that out there as well. Sun Ke.

who is certainly, I mean, he's actually more of a kind of almost Soviet-influenced leftist, a bit like Henry Wallace, people who know that, the quite leftist vice president of the United States under FDR, who got fired by the Democratic Party, essentially, because he was too far left. But, you know, the positions went in different directions. But there are certainly liberals during that period. The sad reality for those who, you know, would want to advocate liberalism in China in that era is that an era of constant war and revolution is

is an immensely difficult one in which to embed liberal values. And I think that has not very much to do with their...

unsuitableness for China. I think they'd be very suitable for China as Taiwan today shows as a Chinese society. But they do not work well in a period when essentially there is huge amounts of internal displacement and war. And I think that in the end was the real problem. Yeah, I mean, it's probably quite anachronistic of me to even try to use that term to describe what was happening in politics 100 years ago. No, no, it's not because people discuss it. And there's lots of essays by people like Jiang Tingfu and

others who talk about, you know, what is liberalism? So it is not an actress on the grounds they discuss it. The problem is they find it very difficult to find a place for it to have purchase. And that, you know, is the key question. I personally think that the China of today, which, while it has economic problems, is actually pretty stable, could loosen up and liberalize a lot more than it is at the moment because the social conditions are very different from what they are in the 1940s. But I don't actually see today's

China and the Xi Jinping taking that particular route. No.

And so, Rana, outside of China and Taiwan, then, can we talk about Sun's legacy globally? Does he have a legacy globally? I mean, his idea of anti-imperialism, of course, was the theme of the 20th century, but not necessarily traced back to him personally. For sure. And I would say that, you know, compared to Mao, whose influence at his height in the 1960s and 70s, you know, was genuinely global from Paris to Peru, that hasn't been quite so true for Sun Yat-sen directly. But there is one place, and maybe, as I said, a slightly unexpected place, where 20

20, 30 years ago, there was quite a sort of flurry of officially sponsored interest in Sun Yat-sen. And that was in Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, where actually writing and consideration of the writings of Sun Yat-sen became, you know, something of an intellectual hub or intellectual element. I'm not sure how far, I mean, the colonel was...

I think the kindest thing one could say was an eclectic thinker in various ways. But actually, he did draw to some extent on the writings of Sun Yat-sen for all the good that it did him. Outside of that, I think, as I say, it's that longer legacy that's probably more important rather than the kind of direct name. But some of those ideas like infrastructure and social welfare have certainly had, I think, a wider interest in the global south.

What was Gaddafi interested in, in terms of, was it the three principles of the people? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Gaddafi wrote his own kind of green book of revolutionary theory, which I have to confess I'm not particularly conversant with. But I think some of those ideas of combining nationalism, the idea of a kind of popular movement where the top leader, you know, tutelage again, I think that term we've had, you know, the top leader doesn't get dislodged.

But there's sort of a kind of the idea of the mass line, which eventually Mao takes over these sorts of things. There's a sort of kind of element of a kind of quite Leninist politics there with Gaddafi, too. But I think maybe some of those ideas about popular participation, infrastructure, anti-imperialism and so forth, social welfare had a certain appeal.

Fascinating. And finally, Rana, I do have to let you go. But before you do, do you say a word about your new podcast, Face Off? Thanks very much indeed. Well, I have been delighted to be working with Jane Perlez, who many people will know as having been the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times. And she and I have been launching a new series of the podcast Face Off.

America and China, which looks at ways in which those two countries may come into confrontation, but also may find ways in which they actually have to deal with each other as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be in World War III, I'm glad to say, but we're talking about issues like artificial intelligence. Where is it that the Chinese way and the American way might either clash or cooperate? It's an absolutely fascinating discussion with a real expert on the

subject or some of the issues that are also I think going to be shaping the potential for a US-China trade war and we're going to talk about tariffs and all these sorts of issues so Jane and I have a series of fantastic guests and we'd love everyone to if you're into Chinese whispers I think you're going to love Face Off do download both that series and indeed series one which is also still available online and hope you find it a really good lesson. So

So do check it out after you finish Chinese Whispers. Thanks so much, Mana. Always a pleasure, Cindy. Great to speak to you.

And if listeners will excuse one more podcast plug, I just want to raise your attention to the fact that I joined broadcaster Ian Dale on his President's, Prime Minister's, Monarch's and Dictator's podcast very recently. We were talking about, of course, Xi Jinping. I wrote a 3,000-word biography of Xi in Ian's latest book, The Dictators, and we discussed the Chinese leader's life in this podcast episode. So you can go check that out wherever you get your podcasts from as well.