Sun Yat-sen - Hardcover

'Bergere has produced not only a first-rate scholarly biography but an important history of China during the late Qing and early republican periods. General readers will find this an enjoyable and stimulating study which does not demand a great deal of prior knowledge, while students will profit from its fourteen pages of biographical sketches and its copious references and bibliography.' History Today

Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the first president of the Republic of China, has left a supremely ambivalent political and intellectual legacy so much so that he is claimed as a Founding Father by both the present rival governments in Taipei and Beijing. In Taiwan, he is the object of a veritable cult; in the People s Republic of China, he is paid homage as pioneer of the revolution, making possible the Party s claims of continuity with the national past. Western scholars, on the other hand, have tended to question the myth of Sun Yat-sen by stressing the man s weaknesses, the thinker s incoherences, and the revolutionary leader s many failures. This book argues that the life and work of Sun Yat-sen have been distorted both by the creation of the myth and by the attempts at demythification. Its aim is to provide a fresh overall evaluation of the man and the events that turned an adventurer into the founder of the Chinese Republic and the leader of a great nationalist movement. The Sun Yat-sen who emerges from this rigorously researched account is a muddled politician, an opportunist with generous but confused ideas, a theorist without great originality or intellectual rigor.