Sun Yat-Sen, His Life And Its Meaning: A Critical Biography PDF
Preview Sun Yat-Sen, His Life And Its Meaning: A Critical Biography
SUN YAT-SEN His Life and Its Meaning A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY SUN YAT-SEN His Life and Its Meaning A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY by LYON SHARMAN STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Stanford University Press Stanford, California Copyright 1934 by Lyon Sharman L.C. 68-17141 Printed in the United Sûtes America First published in 1934 by the John Day Company, Inc. Reissued in 1968 by Stanford University Press INTRODUCTION by Lyman P. Van Sly\e LYON SHARMAN’S purpose in writing this “critical biography” was not primarily to belittle Sun Yat-sen but to inveigh against the deadening effects of the cult that had grown up in his name. She saw that by casting Sun and his theories into bronze—by creating what she called a “lacquered image” of an all too human and fallible man—the Kuomintang was trying to impose an unchallengeable orthodoxy on the Chinese mind, an orthodoxy defined less by Sun himself than by the leaders and ideologues who claimed to be his sole heirs and interpreters. These last were Sharman’s real targets, but instead of attacking them directly (Chiang Kai-shek, for example, is mentioned only four times in passing), she attacked the cult they were creating as the source of their own legitimacy. As Sharman makes clear, Sun Yat-sen was far from being the prophet and demigod that his successors made him out to be. Like Hong Kong, near which he was born, Sun belonged partly to two worlds and fully to neither; both the West and China he knew at the surface but not at the core. Perhaps for this reason he was almost entirely unaware of the organic nature of society, and of the vastly different ways in which different societies function. Plans hatched from Western ideas he only half understood inevitably failed in a China he understood no better. From Western thought he would take an idea here, a doctrine there, unaware that he was detaching them from the setting that gave them meaning and that they were often in- vi Introduction compatible : republicanism, Henry George’s socialism, the Five-Power constitution, dictatorship, tutelage, democracy, Communism. For Sun, ever confident of his ability to reconcile all contradictions, the word and the deed were identical; each reverse gave rise to new words until failure again dashed his hopes. His indomitable optimism and his periods of depression stemmed from the same source. The apotheosis of Sun Yat-sen was perhaps made inevitable by the Republic’s urgent need to create those myths and traditions that every nation seems to need for justification and legitimacy. If the old sanctions of the Imperial system were gone for good, new sanc tions had to be found quickly. In the days following Sun’s death in March 1925, only two alternatives seemed possible: one was Sun’s Three People’s Principles, the other Marxism-Leninism. For the Kuomintang there could be only one choice. Sun was to be China’s George Washington. It soon became apparent, however, that Sun’s grandiose schemes for China’s future bore little relation to its present or to its past. The harder Sun’s self-appointed heirs tried to link the Three People’s Principles to a kind of Confucianism, the more vitiated both became. In the end the cult of Sun Yat-sen left its believers in limbo, between East and West, past and future. Sensing this difficulty, the Kuomin tang increasingly tried to anchor Sun's doctrine in traditionalist ideas —with the result that Sun’s deified memory became more and more irrelevant to Kuomintang policy. This was the state of affairs at the time Lyon Sharman began her book. Sharman’s biography of Sun is not a work of detached scholarship; it is far too personal a document for that, and she is much too con cerned with China’s fate to be dispassionate. Her work is based en tirely on Western sources—she did not read Chinese—and it contains errors and omissions of varying importance. For example, the term min-tsu (“nationalism” in its ethno-cultural rather than its purely Introduction tnt political sense) she frequently renders as “people’s clan,” which is both incorrect and clumsy. She fails to note the removal of Sun’s re mains from Peiping to the great mausoleum near Nanking (p. 312). And she misreads Sun’s relation to the Chinese Communists; he was much less pliable than she indicates. In 1922, for example, when he suggested an alliance with the then minuscule Chinese Communist Party, it was almost certainly with a view to bringing the young Communists under his control and gaining the full support of the Communist International. When he assured his right-wing col leagues that the Communists would either submit to his leadership or be expelled, he meant it; such an attitude is entirely consistent with his insistence on undivided and unconditional loyalty from all his followers. In general, Sharman is strongest in her recreation of Sun’s person ality, weakest in her sense of the larger sweep of Chinese history. Her recommendations for reform are now so dated as to seem almost quaint. And yet this book, written in the early 1930’s, has remained for over thirty years the most important biography of Sun Yat-sen available in English. If today Sharman’s research seems thin and uneven, within the scope of her materials she worked with discrimi nation and care. At her best, her tough-mindedness, sensitivity, and concern for China make an eloquent combination. Above all, she never lost sight of the humanity of her subject. She saw that to deify Sun was in the end to demean him by implying that he could not stand honest appraisal; so that given the situation in China in 1934, “if the human Sun Yat-sen is to be saved for posterity, it must be done by Western biographies.” Her contribution to this cause, for all its personal bias and defects of detail, is the main justification for reprinting her work. Of the author herself, little is generally known; indeed, so little was known in 1934 that several reviewers, including scholars, thought she was a man. Abbie Lyon Sharman, née Abbie Mary Lyon, was viii Introduction bom in Hangchow in 1872; her father, David Nelson Lyon, was a Presbyterian missionary. She lived in China until she was eight, when her family returned to the United States. She graduated from Woos ter College in 1894, and two years later married Dr. Henry Burton Sharman, a theologian. In 1906 she received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. In the late 1920’s she returned to China for about three years, during which time she began work on Sun Yat-scn. Her other writings include a collection of sketches of her early child hood, two volumes of poetry, a short play, and some materials con cerning her father’s ministry in China. She died near Los Angeles in 1957. TO CHINA Known by a memory, crisp but incomplete, Home of my childhood, not of all the years, Are you but a dear dream, colored by my youth, Or are you half a dream and half a truth? Dreams are what we feed on—dreams and fears; Bare truth we cannot eat without some sweet Of dreams. Spirit of what loveliest seems, Teach me to bite the truth, yet taste my dreams.
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