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 Taking Lessons from History;

Part Two, Dr. Sun Yat Sen

by David Law

Sun Yat Sen was born in 1866, the son of a farmer, in the village of Cui Heng (Choy Hung) in the Town of the Blue Valley in Southern China. He grew up in a farming community but his elder brother  in Hawaii offered to have him educated and so at the age of 12, he moved to Honolulu where he attended an Anglican boys' school to study about the Bible and English.  Later, at the age of 17, he returned to China and continued his studies at a medical school in Hong Kong. 

He had become very religious and was able to preach and convert the younger students to Christianity.  He originally thought about becoming a missionary, but he also noted how China was facing a national crisis because of the increasinly corrupt  Qing Dynasty.  Thus he turned his zeal towards national  politics.   

The Qing Emperors had not only become  tyrannical despots, their ineptitude had led to foreign domination of China.  To coin a phrase, the enemy was not only at the gates of China, but had blown the gates apart.  The French had taken over Annam (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), the British had colonized Hong Kong, and five other Chinese ports had been ceded to the Western powers. Chinese society was breaking down from opium addiction.  Because the nation had become overtaxed by corrupt government ministers, millions of Chinese left China to emigrate to the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa, and America.   

Compared to Burma today, SLORC-SPDC has ceded the control of Hainggyi, Koko Islands, and islands in the Arakan and Tenasserim to the Red Chinese Navy. 

In addition, as every child in Burma knows, Upper Burma has been taken over by illegal Chinese infil-"traitors" who have bought Burmese NRC citizenship papers cheaply for only $500 each.  The vast timber forests in the North and East have been plundered.  Thousands of villages have been burned down.  Millions have become displaced and destitute. The Salween River is slated for ruin with the rampant construction of  dams.  The natural gas fields off the Mon Coast and Arakan Coasts are being exploited at 90% for foreigners and the remaining 10% for SPDC, leaving the People with Nothing.  Inflation and crimes rates are rising out of control as are Drugs and HIV. Due to extortion, outright robbery, arson, and genocide,  millions of desperate  Burmese, Shan, Karen/nis, Chins, Mons, Arakans, Rohingyas, Kachins, Nagas and many more have fled as refugees. 

Coming back to the history of Sun Yat Sen, thus, while he was a medical student, he began to use his leadership abilities to conduct secret activities against the State. 

He married his first wife, Lu Mu Zhen, in 1884, and studied in medical school until he graduated in 1892 and began working as a doctor in Guangzhou, Macao, and in Honolulu.  He had studied the works of Henry George and Karl Marx and came to believe that China needed to pick up some of the ways of the West in order to become modernized.   

By then he was heavily involved in politics; in 1894, he wrote a Memorandum to the Qing government demanding total reform but  was rejected.  He then formed a "Revive China Society"  to overthrow the Qing Dynasty which comprised of Manchu foreigners, revive their own native Chinese people, and to establish a people's government.  

At the age of 29, in the year 1895, he  formulated his beliefs  in the Confuscian maxim, "the earth and the universe belong to everyone."  In Hong Kong, he organized a hard-core group called "Dare to Die" and made his first revolutionary plot.  However, everyone in his group was arrested and executed and he was the only one who escaped.  This would become known as  the Guangzhou Uprising of 1895  and  he had to flee  to London.  By then, the Qing government had placed a bounty prize of $50,000 on his head, and the Chinese embassy staff in London managed to kidnap him and was planning to take him back to China where he would be executed. 

However, Dr. Sun was able to smuggle a note to his medical mentor, Sir James Cantlie, who then alerted the British government.  The  Foreign Ministry raised a terrific protest and was able to procure his release, which made him famous throughout the world as a man of great determination and fearlessness.  The Qing government raised the bounty prize for his capture to more than $50,000 and so Dr. Sun had to stay on the run to escape capture. 

He kept moving around from UK to US to Japan, touring the world several times, all the time organizing the Overseas Chinese and non-Chinese alike.  He had become a professional revolutionary raising money for his uprisings in China.  He called his organization, the "Save China League."    Many of the Overseas Chinese he met across the world contributed money to his Cause, and from 1895 to 1911, he kept sending back all the collected money  back to China to finance one uprising after another.   

General Aung San, on the other hand, also had to escape in disguise from Burma to evade capture from the British.  He first tried to enlist help from the Chinese Communists and did not succeed, instead, he found a Japanese officer, Colonel Suzuki, who arranged for his famous Thirty Comrades to be trained in Hainan and then sent back to Burma as part of a liberating force.  General Aung San, like Dr. Sun Yat Sen, learned Japanese.  Dr. Sun's other name was  Zhong Shan which translates into Central Mountain, or Nakayama, his Japanese name.  

In 1900, one of his men, Miyazaki, (another Japanese name), was arrested in Singapore where they were trying to set up their headquarters.   Dr. Sun came to rescue him, but he himself got arrested.  He was  released but received a five-year ban from reentering Singapore.  Nevertheless, he went ahead with the Huizhou Uprising in October 1900, which also failed.   

In 1905, he united other revolutionary bodies in Tokyo and formed a new organization called the Revolutionary League and formulated his Three Principles of the People, namely: Nationalism, Democracy, and Social Reform (this last principle has been called Equality or Socialism in other biographies).   

In 1906, the ban from reentering Singapore expired and he came back to form a branch office and continued to finance more uprisings in China although each one failed.   

In 1907 Dr. Sun set up the Chong Shing Press in Singapore which published revolutionary literature that was used to foment rebellions in four different areas of China:  Huang Gang,  Hui Zhou, Qin Zhou, and  Zhennan Guan.   

Then in 1908 there were two more uprisings in Qin Zhou and  Hekou. 

In 1910, there arose the NINTH uprising of the New Army which, like all the others, failed.  Undaunted, Dr. Sun convened a Conference in Penang and decided on planning for yet another massive uprising in Canton that failed as all the others.

The following year in April 1911, there was a second uprising in Canton which also came to nought, and 86 revolutionaries were killed.  

It is significant that Dr. Sun chose Malaya and Singapore as a staging point for his revolutions.  He was a native of southeastern China and thus these two southeast Asian lands were close convenient launching areas for his rebels. Of course, French Indochina or Burma would have been closer, but apparently, conditions there were not helpful for him.  Perhaps it is because there were more sympathetic Overseas Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaya.   Likewise, we need to select dependable areas near Burma as our launch pads. 

By 1910, he was seeking refuge on a South Sea Pacific island --  a wanted man,  a hopeless leader,  and a failure as a prophet. His messages were intercepted and his communication lines were delayed.   He was hunted wherever he went,  haunted with failure after failure, and yet he kept up an optimistic outlook as he went on with his crusade.   

He maintained  his contacts with his military underground network throughout China and kept sending money to them, continually making  plans for more uprisings through the Patriots' Association, another of his many organizations.   

In September 1911, there was a bomb explosion in Hanchow set up by his men; the incident encouraged other uprisings that spread through dozens of districts and overwhelmed the government troops.  On 10 October 1911, the Uprising in Wuchang succeeded and a military government in Hubei was established.  This spread across China and finally resulted in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty.  The 10th of October  1911 came to be recognized as the official day of the Republic of China which is still celebrated in Taiwan today.  (The communists, on the other hand, celebrate 1 October 1948 as their Liberation Day) 

The news of the successful uprising reached Dr. Sun while he was in America in Colorado and he started to travel east; by the time he reached St. Louis, he read in the newspapers that the Revolution had succeeded and he had been appointed the first President of the new Chinese Republic.  He reached China and took the oath of office as President in January 1912. 

His wife, Song Qing Ling, wrote in the Wesleyan that this was the greatest event of the 20th century in which 400 million people (1/4 of the world's population at that time)  had been freed from a system of absolute monarchy of 4000 years.   

In comparison, if the 50 million people of  Burma were to be liberated today, they would be 1/5th of the population of the mainland portion of S.E.Asia (excluding Philippines and Indonesia.) after being oppressed by a military dictatorship for almost 50 years.  The first time Ne Win tasted power was during his Caretaker Government of 1958.  In 2008, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of military dictatorship in Burma.  

However, Dr. Sun wanted to develop the economic system of the nation as China had become impoverished and so he selected one of his men, General Yuan, to be the President in his place, trusting him to lead the nation to democracy.  Meanwhile, Dr. Sun chose to  become the Minister of Transport and Trade, hoping to build railroads to support what he hoped would become a growing economy.   

But later in 1912 General Yuan became a dictator and declared himself the new Emperor killing and imprisoning anyone who stood in his way.   Dr. Sun tried to declare a Second Revolution in 1913 which failed and he had to flee to Japan to seek asylum.  There, in 1914, he reorganized his Kuo Min Tang into the China Revolutionary Party to continue the Second Revolution against the new self-anointed "Emperor" Yuan.  

In 1915, he married his second wife, Song Qing Ling, one of  the daughters of a powerful industrialist.  His youngest daughter was married to Chiang Kai Shek who later became Sun Yat Sen's secretary.  He  set up a Bible Literature publishing firm, which, in addition to producing Christian books, also printed many provocative revolutionary books.  Dr. Sun and his men continued their Second Revolution until the "Emperor" Yuan was killed.  In 1917, Dr. Sun returned to China where he declared an Emergency Congress in Guangzhou, forming a new military government in which he was the supreme Generalissimo.   

During the 4 May 1919 movement, the Revolutionary Party was changed to the Kuo Min Tang (National People's Party) to continue the struggle across the nation.  The following year,  Generalissimo Sun ordered his troops to drive out the Gui Xi warlords as the nation was still wracked in civil war with regional warlords defying the national government.   

In 1923 the Soviet Union suggested to Dr. Sun that there should be cooperation between his KMT and the Chinese Communist Party and he accepted, forming a United Front between the two, in order to hasten the conquest of the rest of the nation.  He adapted the beliefs of the KMT to make it more acceptable to the Communists and received help from the Soviets.  Chiang Kai Shek was sent to Russia to learn about political and military sciences and came back to direct the new Whampao Military Academy in order to train new officers for the KMT and to make the new government militarily stronger.  (All this was before the breakup between KMT and the Communists) 

In the previous year, 1922, one of the warlords, Chen, who had originally been supportive of Dr. Sun, refused his orders to drive out other troublesome warlords. Instead, Chen himself betrayed Dr. Sun and revolted, compelling Dr. Sun to flee with his wife disguised as an old countryside peasant woman.  Mrs. Sun had a miscarriage as a result of all the stress.     Dr. Sun later rallied his troops and quelled the Chen revolt and he himself had to deal with the remaining troublesome warlords to regain national control.  

It became obvious that the KMT government needed to strengthen themselves in order to conquer the rest of the country and extend their power base from his native southern China to overwhelm the rebels in the north.  

The lessons to be learned from the struggles of Dr. Sun are that there will be more than one enemy that must be conquered.  Overthrowing the Qing Dynasty was only the beginning of his troubles. Likewise, overthrowing the SPDC in Burma is only the first of many battles to come.  Just like Dr. Sun had to deal with one betrayal after another,  Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will also undergo similar betrayals.

In the case of Dr. Sun, even after becoming President, he had to contend with different warlords in each part of the country.  Likewise, there are over a dozen ceasefire warlords collaborating with SPDC which could create problems for the new Liberation Government after the fall of SPDC.  

In late 1924  the northerners invited Dr. Sun to  Beijing for a national reconstruction conference.  He was already a sick man as he went there; soon after arrival, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and early in 1925, he died.   

After his death, there was a struggle between  Chiang Kai Shek, his right-hand man, and his old revolutionary comrade, Wang Ching Wei, that split the KMT.  Each faction claimed to be the true heir of Dr. Sun, but eventually Chiang's faction won over the KMT.  Dr. Sun's widow, Song Qing Ling assumed a high position in the government.   

Dr. Sun, at his death, did not see the unification of China, nor was there any peace or prosperity.  The nation was to be wracked with Japanese oppression and civil war for years to come between the KMT and the Communists.  However it is to Dr. Sun's credit that both these warring factions honored him as the Father of the Chinese Revolution and his Mausoleum in Nanjing today is revered by both sides,  the only leader in China to be so honored.   

In Burma, General Aung San, until recently, had been honored by both the NLD and the SPDC as the Father of Modern Burma.  All through the MaSaLa years, Ne Win at least allowed the Portrait of Aung San to be displayed albeit alongside his own state portrait.  It is a tragic shame today that Than Shwe has stopped honoring the Father of the Nation, and the Daughter of the Nation is in danger of being annihilated.   

As a footnote to the political philosophy of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, he believed that the only way for China to be modernized was to become westernized.  By this, he meant the overthrow of the feudal monarchy system and adopt a western-style democracy. 

He saw the goal of democracy attainable in three stages.  

1. The first stage is a military dictatorship which he did achieve in 1917 when he became the Supreme Generalissimo.  He believed that the Chinese were not ready to vote and exercise a free-willed democracy and that the people needed to be controlled; in essence it would be a "guided democracy."   

Dr. Sun could be trusted to be a "good dictator" who would see this stage carried out properly.  General Than Shwe, in his so-called seven step road map to democracy is also seems to be  trying to do the same thing, but Than Shwe is no Sun Yat Sen and cannot be trusted at all.   True, a pretentious Than Shwe  can claim his "disciplined democracy" is the same as   Sun Yat Sen's "guided democracy."   However, no one in Burma or the rest of the world has any faith in Than Shwe and  his shameless shenanigans.

2. The Second Stage would be a time of  Political Tutelage  during which  the dictatorship would gradually train the people in leadership positions and give regional autonomy in gradual stages.  Dr. Sun never lived to see this stage come to fruition.   

Under Than Shwe and SPDC, this second stage will be a joke, a complete sham, just like the National Convention, just some fancy window display to look good in the eyes of the world.  Those who assume leadership positions will simply be sycophants (flatterers, phah det akaung dway) and rubber-stamping yes-men.  In Burmese, the latter are nodding chameleons (gaung nhyeint det poke thin nyo), always changing their colors to suit their  bosses'  whims and fancies.

3.  The Third Stage that Sun Yat Sen envisaged was the emergence of True Democracy as a successful transformation of the Political Tutelage (Naingan Yay Da-bekkhan or Discipleship).  In Taiwan, and in South Korea,  for many decades, there was a military dictatorship which, in the 90's, gradually gave way to the Political Tutelage of the Second Stage and today, finally, both nations have achieved a fair semblance of True Democracy.   

However, in Burma, at least during the lifetime of SPDC,  this stage will never become reality.  It will be just like the Goal of Socialism, or Myanmart Soshellit Pandaing, which was always a national joke during the Era of the Socialist Error.  Every stupid political speech during Ne Win's time ended with an exhortation to "march toward the Soshellit Pandaing!"   Likewise,  today,  SPDC crows about " trying to achieve the Democracy Pandaing."  SPDC will first have to be  replaced by a Liberation Government which will then have to struggle for many years thereafter.   

In closing, the pathway taken by Dr. Sun Yat Sen serves as an inspiration for us in the Liberation of Burma.  Let us take lessons from him and  not despair that our 1988 Uprising failed.  After all, during his time from 1895 until 1911, over ten uprisings failed, and even after he became President in 1912, he still had to continue fighting until he died in 1925.   

Ayaydawboan Aung Yah Myi!

(Our)  Cause Must  Succeed! 

David Law

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