Sun Yat-sen and the world
Scholars have carried out studies on Sun Yat-sen’s world view, the relationship between Sun Yat-sen and Japan, Soviet Russia (including the Communist International), the United States, Korea and so on.
Some scholars thought that Sun Yat-sen’s world view was “to fathom the world for the sake of China”. Sun advocated the sharing of civilization and joint development and held that the relations between countries must be equal and reciprocal. It has been stressed that “the transformation from the cultural world view to the national world view was the manifestation of Sun Yat-sen’s awakening”.94
Some scholars pointed out that Sun Yat-sen took the world view as an important theoretical pillar of the Republican Revolution and “the construction of New China”: he advocated “absorbing the world culture”, “drawing widely upon other countries to make innovations”; he proposed that China should “make achievements in the field of world economy” and revitalize its industry, and insisted on taking “Europe and the United States as a model” to seek “balanced development” of the society, which reflected his view of cultural integration with the world vision and the consciousness of the times.95 Some scholars focused on the formation, development, connotation, and ideological basis of Sun Yat-sen’s view on the trend of the world.96
As for Sun Yat-sen’s idea of the Great Harmony, researchers thought that Sun Yat-sen’s understanding of “the world” had experienced a process from the neighbor countries to the far-off countries, from the small world to the large world, from the superficial understanding to the deep one, and his revolutionary ideal was also far different from the ancient doctrine of the Great Harmony because of his different view of the world. All kinds of frustrations and the dark realities after the 1911 Revolution made Sun Yat-sen reflect on his thought of the Great Harmony seriously, and thus made a clearer discussion of it in his later years. “Only by taking the Chinese people as the basis of the Asian cosmopolitan first, could we then expand to achieve the cosmopolitanism of the entire human race, that is, the world of real Great Harmony -this was Sun Yat-sen’s ideal world”.97
In order to verify the authenticity of the “Sino-Japanese Treaty”, on December 26, 2000, 14 Guangdong scholars held a seminar at Zhongshan University, and they generally believed that the “Sino-Japanese Treaty” was authentic.98 Some scholars pointed out that we should not exclude the possibility of the existence of the “Sino-Japanese Treaty”. However, because the situation was quite complicated and some contradictory phenomena had not been explained reasonably, it should be kept as “a doubt remained to be verified” for the time being. Assuming that these documents did exist, they could be regarded as the revolutionary strategy adopted by Sun Yat-sen, who started from the principle of placing the interests of the revolution above everything else in order to achieve the established revolutionary goals; this strategy made a compromise with Japan at the expense of our country’s important interests, which was closely related to the difficult revolutionary environment. Sun’s emphasis on using external forces, and his concept of sovereignty as well.
In his late years, Sun Yat-sen founded Whampoa Military Academy, which has been universally recognized as having been influenced by Soviet Russia. Scholars thought that Soviet Russia’s influence on Sun Yat-sen was mainly manifested in the following aspects: in theory, Sun founded the army on the basis of doctrines and established the system for political work; he insisted that the army should be governed by the Party and established the system of party representatives, and emphasized the combination of military force and the masses. In practice, he founded the Whampoa Military Academy to cultivate the core team and set up the Party Army, transformed the old armies by the model of the Party Army and made them an integral part of the revolutionary army.99
Between 1879 and 1911, Sun Yat-sen had visited the United States seven times, leaving many revolutionary historical sites. Some scholars made systematic analyses of issues like the impact of American political and economic thinkers and political systems on Sun Yat-sen’s early thoughts, and the relationship between the Three People’s Principles and Lincolnism.100 Some scholars analyzed the relationship between Sun Yat-sen and the Wo Hing Society (Zhi Gong Tang) during the period of the Society to Restore China’s Prosperity.101
There has been a rise in the research on the relationship between Sun Yat-sen and Korea in recent years. Some scholars studied Sun Yat-sen’s consistent support for Korea.102 Other scholars have studied the interactive relationship of mutual support between the Chinese revolution led by Sun Yat-sen and the independence movement of Korea from the perspective of the Zhen Tan Weekly (a Chinese weekly published by the leader of the Korean Independent Movement in Shanghai in the 1920s).103 Some scholars compared Sun Yat-sen and Kim Ok-gyun’s relationship with Japan and analyzed the similarities and differences between their views on Japan.104
