Beijing may now view Sun Yat-sen as their patriarch, but his address at the University of Hong Kong would have made them tremble

The father of 20-century China, Sun Yat-sen is revered as an iconic figure by seemingly every faction of Chinese politics. Both the Beijing government and the capital’s student dissenters claim him for their own. He is also as much beloved by the mainland as he is by Taiwan, and his principals have adorned the principles of both Chinese Nationalists and the Communists simultaneously. Sun began his life as the son of a poor farmer, yet by the time of his untimely death in 1925 he would come to be considered one of the towering giants of modern China. Raised in Hawaii, he studied at a missionary school, but eventually earned a medical degree in Hong Kong. And it was the Hong Kong colony that set the stage for his dazzling attack on China’s then political climate. Having spent years in exile, he returned to China to found the Koumintang (the Nationalist Party). Rejection of imperial rule and national self-belief were his main agenda, and his address at the University of Hong Kong, on 20 February 1923, set out his vision.

The student union president, Edward Ho-tung, welcomed Dr Sun by saying his name was indistinguishable from China itself. In words that would now trouble Beijing, Ho-tung acclaimed: “If a love of liberty was a test of greatness, then Dr Sun would be associated with the name of greatness itself.” Huge applause greeted Sun as he took the lectern. Speaking in English, he addressed the crowded hall with the now famous rhetorical question: “Where and how did I get my revolutionary and modern ideas?” The answer was: “I got my idea in this very place; in the colony of Hong Kong.” Hong Kong impressed Sun a great deal because there was “orderly calm and because there was artistic work being done without interruption.” He told the students he went to his home in Xiangshan [now Zhongshan, Guangdong province] twice a year and immediately noticed “the great difference”. There was “disorder instead of order, insecurity instead of security.” The difference of the governments also impressed him very much: “I saw the outside world and I began to wonder how it was that foreigners, Englishmen, could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no places like Hong Kong.”

Dr Sun then told the crowds that Hong Kong, and especially its University, were his intellectual birthplace. Students could see that this was not a prepared speech but an impassioned address to their hopes. Sun said that during his stay at home he applied himself to sweep the streets, an admission that garnered huge applause. “And many young men followed me,” he added. But then he began to study government. Again, in a phrase that would make the Central Politburo blanche, Sun found that “in the government in China, corruption among the officials is the rule.” The higher he went up the government, the more corrupt he found it. Finally he went to Beijing [then Peking], but he found things there “one hundred times more corrupt and rotten than areas in Canton [Guangdong], and I was forced to the opinion that, after all, village government was the purest government in China.”

Sun had admired good government in England, but also saw the same corruption, the same injustices at court, and the same cruelty within the English nation. “But Englishmen love liberty,” said Sun. “He shall no longer stand these things, and he shall change them. Why can we not change it in China?” Finally, Sun set out his philosophy that would become his legacy, the Three Principles of the People (三民主義). “We must change the government first, before we can start anything,” he rallied. “Without good government, a people can do nothing, and in China we have no government and have been miserable for many centuries.” When asked why he would not remain a doctor, Sun answered: “It is necessary to give up my profession of healing men and take up my part to cure the country.” Yet within two years the great man would be dead from liver cancer.