Table Of ContentSUN 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.
