Empress Dowager Ci Xi, the remarkable woman who had ruled China with an iron fist since 1861, died in 1908. The three-year-old Pu Yi (whose tragic life story was told by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in The Last Emperor) ascended the throne. This child emperor, though, was unable to breathe new life into the two-thousandyear- old dynasty. In 1911 the curtain fell: In the city of Wuhan, a group of Republican officers rebelled, and the revolution soon spread like wildfire. In 1912, Pu Yi abdicated the throne and Sun Zhongshan (known in the West as Sun Yatsen, his Cantonese name) was appointed the first president of the Republic of China.

The Three Principles of the People

Born in Guangdong province, Sun Yatsen and a few fellow revolutionaries set up the Tongmenghui (usually translated as the ‘Chinese Revolutionary Alliance’) with the goal of overthrowing the Qing dynasty. This alliance would later transform itself into the Kuomintang (the KMT, or ‘National People's Party’), which would govern large parts of China from 1927 to 1949. After losing the civil war to Mao Zedong's Communists, however, the KMT had to flee to Taiwan. A Christian who had initially opted for a career as a physician, Sun saw his task as curing the Chinese people from their centuries-old feudal load. The ideological foundation of that pursuit was expressed in his famous Sanmin zhuyi (‘Three Principles of the People’):