"There are two great classes in their society. The first class is the extremely rich, and the first is the extremely miserable poor. The rich have too much property, and they always use the power of capital to manipulate the national power to suppress the poor; most of the poor Reluctant to be suppressed by a few rich people, and think of various ways to resist the rich. That kind of action by the poor against the rich is called a social revolution. The cause of the social revolution is that the rich and the poor are too uneven in society."
-- Sun Yat-sen on American Capitalism
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary, physician, first president and founding father of the Republic of China. He was born on November 12, 1866, in the village of Cuiheng, Xiangshan County (now Zhongshan City), Guangdong Province.
Sun played an instrumental role in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty during the years leading up to the Double Ten Revolution on October 10, 1911. He was appointed to serve as provisional president of the ROC when it was founded in 1912. He later co-founded the Kuomintang (KMT), serving as its first leader. A uniting figure in post-Imperial China, he remains unique among 20th-century Chinese politicians for being widely revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
After finishing primary education, Sun moved to Honolulu in the then Kingdom of Hawaii, where he studied at ʻIolani School. There he learned English, history, mathematics, science, and Christianity, and graduated in 1882. In 1883 he returned home to China. In 1886 he began courses in medicine, earning the license of Christian practice as a medical doctor from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese in 1892.
During a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty in 1888, Sun met a group of revolutionaries who shared his increasing frustration by the imperial government’s refusal to Modernize. Not long after earning his degree, he quit his medical practice in order to devote his time to transforming China, founding the Revive China Society to replace the dynastic system with a modern nation-state in the form of a republic.
Numerous failed rebellions against the Qing Dynasty over the course of the next two decades led to Sun’s exile. In Japan at the time of the 1898-1902 Philippine Revolution and Philippine-American War, Sun helped procure weapons salvaged from the Imperial Japanese Army for the Philippine independence movement in the hope that he could use the archipelago as a staging point of a successful revolution in China.
End of an empire
On October 10, 1911, a military uprising took place at Wuchang, without Sun’s direct involvement as he was still in exile. This revolution succeeded in ending over 2000 years of imperial rule in China. When Sun learned of it from press reports, he immediately returned to China from the U.S. October 10th became known as Double Ten Day.
On December 29, 1911, a meeting in Nanjing of provincial representatives elected Sun Yat-sen as the provisional president. January 1, 1912, was set as the first day of the First Year of the Republic. The new Provisional Government of the Republic of China was created along with the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China.
Sun’s chief legacy resides in his developing the political philosophy known as the Three Principles of the People: nationalism (non-ethnic and independent from imperialist domination), democracy, and the people’s livelihood (welfare, free trade and tax reform).
In 1912 a merger of small parties produced a new political party called the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT). The emperor may have been deposed, but local warlords controlled much of the nation, and China’s new government had no military forces of its own. In a far-flung land without a recognized central government, Sun advocated reunification.
In 1915 Sun wrote to the Second International, the global union of socialist parties based in Paris, asking it to send specialists to help China set up the world’s first socialist republic. At the time there were many theories and proposals of what China could be. Socialists were themselves divided, of course, splitting apart into opposing national movements during World War I. :rose-fist:
By the early 1920s Sun had become convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of political tutelage that would eventually transition to democracy. In order to hasten his goal, he began a policy of active cooperation with the Communist Party of China (CPC), established in 1921. Sun and the Soviet Union’s Adolph Joffe signed the Sun-Joffe Manifesto in January 1923. Sun received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of communist members into his KMT. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin praised Sun and the KMT for their ideology, principles, and attempts at social reform, and congratulated him for fighting foreign imperialism. Sun returned the compliment, calling Lenin a “great man,” and sent his congratulations on the revolution in Russia.:lenin-cat:
In November 1924, Sun suggested a gathering for a “national conference” of the Chinese people and called for the end of warlord rule and the abolition of all unequal treaties with the Western powers. He died of liver cancer on March 12, 1925, at the age of 58 in Beijing.
Sun Yat-sen’s legacy
After Sun’s death, a power struggle between his young protégé Chiang Kai-shek and his old revolutionary comrade Wang Jingwei split the KMT over the claim to Sun’s legacy. When the Communists and the KMT split in 1927, marking the onset of the Chinese Civil War, each group claimed to be his true heirs, a conflict that continued through World War II. Sun’s widow, Soong Ching-ling, sided with the Communists and after they won served from 1949 on as vice-president of the PRC and briefly as honorary president before her death in 1981.
Sun Yat-sen remains unique among 20th-century Chinese leaders for his high reputation in both the PRC and ROC. On the mainland, Sun is seen as a Chinese nationalist, proto-socialist, and forerunner of the Revolution. He is even mentioned by name in the preamble to the Constitution of the PRC. In recent years, the leadership of the CPC has increasingly invoked Sun, partly as a way of bolstering Chinese nationalism and economic reform, and partly to increase connections with supporters of the Kuomintang on Taiwan, which the PRC sees as allies against Taiwan independence. A massive portrait of Sun continues to appear in Tiananmen Square for May Day and National Day.
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Sun Yat-sen: Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary :some-controversy:
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Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at an event marking Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s 150th birth anniversary :xi:
Hola Camaradas :fidel-salute-big: , Our Comrades In Texas are currently passing Through some Hard times :amerikkka: so if you had some Leftover Change or are a bourgeoisie Class Traitor here are some Mutual Aid programs that you could donate to :left-unity-3:
The State and Revolution :flag-su:
:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:
Remember, sort by new you :LIB:
Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:
Follow the ChapoChat twitter account :comrade-birdie:
THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:
COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:
Join the fresh and beautiful batch of new comms:
!genzedong@hexbear.net :deng-salute:
!strugglesession@hexbear.net :why-post-this:
!paganism@hexbear.net :anarchist-occult:
!neurodiverse@hexbear.net :Care-Comrade:
:xi-clap:
Just remember hombre, vpns will protect you from lazy copyright claimers, but they're not strong enough for real opsec. And this is coming from someone who's been using a vpn to pirate for years.
errrrrr :oh-shit:
ngl, i legit don't know how i would have copied that link after i specifically googled for a different tweet, but okay. fixed it.
the big megathread posts are seriously my favorite posts on this site, always well done, always informative, always directing me on where to learn more if i'd like. if you're here on a regular basis, read them every day!
:hammer-sickle: :stalin-heart: :heart-sickle:
you're the best, i can't stress that enough
My boyfriend has an interview today with a recruiter for a job in town. Please send good vibes 🥰
You may find yourself in a struggle session
You may find yourself on a forum arguing
You may ask yourself "well, how did i get here?"
You may say to yourself "This is not my struggle session
This is not my argument"
And you may say to yourself "My god, what have I done"
Walk into school
Day going good
See someone with a fucking ahego hoodie
It's in full color too
Day ruined
:doomjak: I am going to destroy my glasses.
being an adult means you can set up a blanket fort in your living room and not take it down for over a week :comfy: i may make this a permanent fixture
do it! at least for like, the weekend, use thumbtacks to hold stuff up if you need, and strip your couch/bed for comfy cushions and make it into a nest
Just noticed I haven't seen an update from @MaybeNickCage, so I'm assuming she succeeded.
How I always thought waking up to bird song would be: 😇 Good morning beautiful creatures of the sky and trees, serenade me with your song
How it actually is: 😡 SHUT UP YOU STUPID CRETIN I WANT TO GO BACK TO SLEEAP
This reminded me of a meme, I spent way too long looking for it but I found it, hope you enjoy https://i.redd.it/p4rzerw8iin31.jpg
Lol this just gave me a flashback to the campfire song that starts "Way up in the sky/ the little birds fly/ way down in the nest/ the little birds rest" and ends "GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING/ the little birds say/ I open my eyes/ I roll out of bed/ I open the window/ AND SMASH THE BIRD'S HEAD." Morning rage!
wild to see one of my friends go from pro-warren lib to full blown ML. its possible to change lib minds, but i think they gotta be angry or frustrated enough. also he is chinese-american and was genuinely sick of the sinophobia pre- and post-covid, so that probably helped too.
go from pro-warren lib to full blown ML
from a technocratic dictatorship of the bureaucracy to a more full throated defense of the PMC against democracy.
I'M FINALLY GETTING MY CPAP TODAY! It's been FOUR MONTHS since I started the process of actually getting diagnosed, going through insurance, and trying a bunch of "less intensive" interventions first to appease my doctor. I wish I had just bought the damn thing out of pocket
Getting vaccinated today!
spoiler
Not for covid but for brain membrane infections lmaaooooooo
I'm probably not getting a vaccine for covid for like 5 years, cause I live in the middle of nowhere, with the most incompetent government in the world, that regularly forgets that the northern half of the country exists.
Hi everyone! I've been around here for a while now, but finally decided to make an account.
:covid-cool: