Sun Yatsen: Seeking a Newer China

by Peter N. Stearns and David B. Gordon

This biography introduces readers to the life and times of Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), a Chinese revolutionary whose popularity stretches across Greater China and into the 21st century.

Concise and incisive, each interpretive biography in the Library of World Biography Series focuses on a person whose actions and ideas either significantly influenced world events or whose life reflects important themes and developments in global history.

Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) was ceaselessly dynamic, leading a movement among Chinese to overthrow the last traditional dynasty of China's history and replace it with a modern-style republic. When this republic became a reality, he briefly served as its president, afterward continuing the influence his country for decades to come through the political party he created, the controversial foreign assistance he accepted, and the many writings he left behind. China is today rapidly transforming itself into the international powerhouse that Sun envisioned. In this respect, Sun's life story--occurring as it did on the dividing line between traditional dynastic rule and the search for what would replace it--enables us to understand a broad swath of China's road to contemporary prominence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321333063
• ISBN13: 9780321333063
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

I learned a lot!

I enjoyed reading "Sun Yatsen: Seeking a Newer China" and learned much about him and China while doing so. I recommend this book to others fascinated and interested in the dramatic changes which took place only one hundred years ago. Dr. Sun Yatsen became a founding icon of both the PRC and the ROC yet he was a revolutionary leader who personally did not found a lasting government in China, didn't raise a powerful army, and died before his dream of a united, modernized China was achieved. Dr. Gordon takes us on a journey through this fascinating career of Sun Yatsen showing us the progressive and the darker sides of his personality and, especially, of his work. We read about a career of mixed results and mixed motives. And through it all Dr. Gordon shows us the abiding aims of Sun Yatsen - the modernization of the China he and many others of his time saw mired in an Imperial past and the vaulting of China into what they saw as its rightful place as a leading nation of Asia and of the world. We learn that Sun Yatsen was ready and willing to use just about any means within his reach to achieve his goals, not unusual for revolutionary figures. But rather than dwell on Sun Yatsen's iconic status, in Dr. Gordon's book, we discover Sun to be a flesh and blood man. Setting this biography of Sun Yatsen in the larger world of Asia, Europe, and even the United States of America, Dr. Gordon offers us the rapidly changing world that Sun Yatsen grappled with as he sought to advance his ideas and his nation.