Sun Yat-sen and His Followers

The advent of the 20th century ushered in a momentous juncture in China's tempestuous modern history. The final imperial dynasty, the Qing (Manchu), had been toppled in 1911 and a republic proclaimed in 1912. Although the Cantonese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen had been the leading figure in the anti-Manchu movement, he and his new Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), were soon cast aside. China descended into a decade of dictatorships, warlordism, political fragmentation, and constant warfare among contending (and often foreign-backed) militarists. It was a bitter parody of Sun's "Three People's Principles" for China, namely nationalism, democracy, and people's welfare.

While in political exile in Japan, the middle-aged Sun married twenty-two-year-old Soong Qingling (Ching Ling) in 1915. She was one of the three famed Soong sisters, daughters of the Shanghai tycoon Charlie Soong. She had been educated at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia, and after returning to China had gone on to Japan to work with Sun in his revolutionary cause.

From 1918 through the early 1920s Sun ineffectually attempted to build a secure political and military base in southern China centered on Canton, in preparation for a campaign against the militarists to the north. In 1923, at a low ebb in his political fortunes, and spurned in his earlier efforts to gain support from the West, Sun turned to Soviet Russia for help. He agreed to an alliance with the Russians, to collaboration with the fledgling Chinese Communist party (CCP) organized in Shanghai in 1921, and to a radicalized program of mass mobilization of labor and the peasantry. The Soviets in turn provided Sun's movement with military and political advisers and assistance and helped reorganize the Kuomintang and build a revolutionary army. The reinvigorated and immensely strengthened Nationalist movement, with effective input from dedicated young Chinese Communists, was soon poised in southern China for a northern expedition to unify China.

Sun died of cancer in March 1925, leaving a legacy of unfinished revolution to successors split into left- and fight-wing camps. The new National Revolutionary Army, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, swept through southern and central China in 1926-1927, aided by a massive upsurge of the peasant and labor movements led largely by Communist cadres. (The Hunanese Mao Zedong was a central figure in organizing the peasantry.) But by the spring of 1927 the now anti-Communist Chiang had broken with the left wing of the Kuomintang and turned on his erstwhile Communist allies to massacre thousands of Communists and leftists in Chinese-ruled Shanghai. Spearheaded by gunmen of Shanghai's potent Green Gang, the coup crushed the powerful Communist-led labor movement in control there. Following the coup came a violent purge of Red elements throughout China, the suppression of radical peasant and labor organizations, and a total break with Soviet Russia.

After some futile and costly insurrectionary efforts, at the end of 1927 and in early 1928 the remnant Communist military forces took refuge in the hinterland of southcentral China. There, under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, they would regroup, organize so-called soviet areas and a large Red Army, and wage a peasant-based mobile-guerrilla-style revolutionary armed struggle. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek consolidated his power, based primarily on his military ascendancy and foreign support. He dominated the mercantile-industrial heartland of the lower Yangtze Valley and effected a series of uneasy and unstable accommodations with regional militarists in the rest of China. A national government was formed in October 1928 with its capital in Nanking. Chiang was president and also in command of the army and leader of a purged Kuomintang.

His new links and status had been further enhanced by marriage in December 1927 to the younger sister of Madame Sun Yat-sen, the attractive Soong Meiling. The "Soong dynasty" connection was dearly a propitious one for Chiang. (The third Soong sister, Ailing, was the wife of China's wealthiest banker, H. H. Kung; a brother, Harvard-educated T.V. Soong, was a key Kuomintang financial and political figure.) Chiang had also embraced the Soongs' Methodist faith with his new marriage. As reported in the Shanghai Times , the wedding "was a brilliant affair and the outstanding Chinese marriage ceremony of recent years." Held in the ballroom of Shanghai's plush Majestic Hotel, with some 1,300 invited guests, it followed by only eight months the April coup and massacre in the same city.

Soong Qingling (Madame Sun) remained fiercely loyal to her husband's memory, and to the policies he espoused in the years immediately preceding his death. She left for Europe (initially for Moscow) after the collapse of the left in China, in the summer of 1927.

She returned briefly in 1929 for Sun's belated state funeral and the entombment of his remains in the newly constructed mausoleum on Purple Mountain in Nanking, which was the symbol of the Nationalist government's proclaimed continuity with Sun as its founding father. The deceased Sun Yat-sen was "ambitiously" referred to as "the George Washington of China" by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanking-based national government under Chiang's control. Though probably a great man who had immeasurably benefited China, Sun was also a dreamer and an idealist, as well as a dangerous radical who strongly tended toward Communism.

In 1931 Madame Sun came back to live in her home in the French Concession in Shanghai. There she continued her determined and courageous opposition to Chiang's government, which she regarded as a counterrevolutionary reversal of Sun's goals and principles. As the widow of the officially revered Dr. Sun, with her younger sister married to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, her older sister to China's top banker and major government figure, and her brother T. V. the financial wizard of the Nanking regime, Soong Qingling openly and uncompromisingly condemned Chiang and his regime as betrayers of Sun's legacy and retained links to, and support for, the liberal and revolutionary opposition. She was a guiding force in the China League for Civil Rights, which sought human rights in general, and legal protections and fair trials for the thousands of political prisoners, usually accused as Communists.