Anniversary reminds us of Sun Yat-sen’s hope for unified China

Your full-page photo coverage of Sun Yat-sen’s life, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth (“Leading light Sun”, November 14), reminded us he was China’s first president in the country’s modern history, and is revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Sun is also revered in Hong Kong, Singapore, and in other cities globally where he visited during his many years of revolutionary activities. In Japan, where he made many friends and supporters among Japanese intellectuals, he used the surname Nakayama.

In 1923 in Guangzhou, Sun Yat-sen brought together the Kuomintang (KMT) and the newly established Communist Party of China to join the First United Front that would later participate in the 1926-1927 Northern Expedition.

During the decades of the 1930s and the early 1940s, the modernisation efforts of the KMT were hampered by Japan’s military occupation of China’s sovereign territory.

At the end of the second world war, the country’s civil war between the military forces of the Communist Party and the KMT held up the country’s structural development.

But after the KMT moved its base to Taiwan, China’s development programmes followed two paths, with the KMT relying mainly on American aid while the Communist Party initially relied on Russian assistance that was later followed by the opening of diplomatic and economic ties between China and the US and a host of other countries.