Anniversary celebrations for the 1911 revolution have - yet again - highlighted Sun Yat-sen's place in history. The one figure who bridges the nationalist-communist ideological divide, Sun and his legacy remain controversial.
Being 'Father of the Nation' is a mixed blessing - the label creates more idealisation than any human can possibly live up to. As Americans are slowly learning, uncritical reverence of historical figures can be problematic when their actions are viewed through the prism of modern-day values. George Washington owned slaves and Thomas Jefferson procreated with his; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's maternal grandfather was an opium merchant in China, and so on. Facts are often inconvenient, and Sun's Hong Kong connections, both real and mythologised, are no exception.
'Where did I get my revolutionary ideas?' he asked rhetorically, when giving a speech (delivered in English) to the student's union at the University of Hong Kong in 1923. Sun graduated from the precursor institution, the Hong Kong College of Medicine, in 1892, but had left Hong Kong permanently long before the university was established, in 1912. Despite this being his only visit to HKU, the institution harps on about its (tenuous) links with the 'Founder of Modern China' at every opportunity.
In his speech, Sun contrasted Hong Kong's peace, stability and order with the corruption, nepotism and physical danger in his home district, across the delta.
'I compared Heungshan with Hong Kong and, although they are only 50 miles apart, the difference of the governments impressed me very much. Afterwards, I saw the outside world and began to wonder how it was that foreigners, that 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.'
By any objective standards - and Sun openly admitted it - Hong Kong was demonstrably more advanced than what surrounded it. This admission points out something else; the profoundly shattering sense of inferiority, subsequently written about as 'national humiliation', which afflicted so many Chinese of Sun's era.