Sun Yat-sen's durable and malleable legacy
This year, Chinese around the world are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the downfall of the Qing dynasty and the foundation of the first democratic republic in Asia. Central to both was Dr Sun Yat-sen, the exiled leader of the revolutionary movement and the first president of the new republic.
Even 86 years after his death, scholars are still arguing over Sun's philosophy. He wrote and spoke a great deal, to different audiences that wanted to hear different things. This has given politicians and historians a treasure house from which to choose what they want from his ideas.
The government in Taiwan is very clear. With the end of martial law in 1987 and the implementation of democracy from the county level to the presidential palace, it has been able to put into practice the policies set out in Sun's main political document, 'The Three Principles of the People'.
For its part, Beijing has ruled out democracy or the separation of powers which Sun advocated. But it finds different things in his legacy. Yang Tianshi, professor of modern history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, gave an excellent exposition of this view this month.
In his version, Sun was a socialist revolutionary. He had seen the economic prosperity and scientific advances of the US and western Europe and argued that China had much to learn from them. But he saw that their political systems were controlled by a small elite and the huge wealth gap in society.
In 1915, after his revolution had failed and power had passed to military warlord Yuan Shikai , Sun wrote to the Second International, an organisation of socialist and labour parties from 20 countries based in Paris, and asked it to send a team of specialists to help China set up the world's first socialist republic - two years before the Bolshevik Revolution.
The mainland analysis of Sun also focuses on his weaknesses - his lack of financial and military power and his moral hypocrisy.
After the October uprising, he went to Britain and France to ask for money but banks would not lend to him, because they did not know which side would win the civil war. He was forced to borrow from Japanese companies which demanded China's industrial assets as collateral.
Baptised a Christian in 1883, Sun married a woman from his native village the next year. In 1903, in Yokohama, he married a 16-year-old Japanese woman. Finally, in October 1915, he married Song Qingling, who insisted that he divorce his first wife.
The mainland sees Sun as a socialist who did not have the military or financial means to complete his revolution; it was left to the Communist Party, 38 years later, to finish the job he began. For Beijing, the real revolution was not in 1911 but in 1949, and Sun was a pioneer in this revolution.
For the nationalist government, on the other hand, Sun is the key figure, the founder of its party and the person who set out the broad policies that guided it for the next 100 years. This makes the anniversaries this year more significant in Taiwan than on the mainland.
What is most remarkable about Sun today is that he is admired on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, with statues and streets named after him in Taipei and Tianjin, Chiayi and Jiangmen. His globe-trotting life, the loyalty he invoked among his followers, both Chinese and foreign, and his rich legacy of speeches and writings have inspired the two big political parties and millions of Chinese, at home and abroad, to honour his memory.
In a divided nation, he is a figure of unity - in the future, that may be his greatest historical contribution.
Mark O'Neill worked as a Post correspondent in Beijing and Shanghai from 1997 to 2006 and is now an author, lecturer and journalist based in Hong Kong
