6 To Become Mme Sun
From past experience, Sun knew that President Li had no burning ambition to rule China. He sent good-will gestures to Li, hoping that Li would hand the top position to him. Li disappointed him; he only offered him a special title: senior adviser to the government. Sun turned it down in disgust, and tried to convince some Nationalist members of parliament to demand that he be made the president. As there was no constitutional basis for this move, the Nationalists declined to oblige. In the end, some tentatively suggested that perhaps they could propose Sun to be the vice president. When his emissary reported this, Sun flew into a towering rage and told him, ‘You must be careful. I am going to start a rebellion now … I will launch a military campaign. You lot had better be careful.'
Sun began preparing a war against the Li government. For this he needed money. The First World War gave him a chance. In early 1917, America broke diplomatic relations with Germany and invited China to take similar action. America had traditionally been China's friend, and promised China that it would have much to gain if it joined the Allies. The parliament debated the issue for weeks, with ministers from the Allies and Germany listening from the public galleries. On 10 March, it approved cutting off relations with Germany. Documents from German archives reveal that Germany had tried to bribe Beijing out of making the decision, and had particularly targeted Prime Minister Duan Qi-rui, a former soldier who spearheaded the move to join the Allies. The Germans offered Duan $1 million for himself personally; Duan turned it down flat. (A former protégé of Yuan Shi-kai, Duan had also been instrumental in forcing his patron to abandon his emperor dream.)
Germany wanted to have Duan removed and the policy reversed. It started secret talks with Sun Yat-sen, through Sun's liaison Abel Tsao. The German consul general in Shanghai, Herr Knipping, reported to Berlin that Sun was eager to collaborate, and that in return, he ‘demanded two million dollars'. The German chancellor agreed, and Sun got 1.5 million Mexican silver dollars (one of the currencies used in China at the time).*1 This was Sun's first big foreign sponsorship.
Sun planned to use the money to set up his base and settled on Canton, the prosperous southern coastal city cradled by low hills with a population of a million. In his youth Sun had shunned it for its feel of antiquity. Now modernisation had begun. Old alleys were being broadened into roads for automobiles. On the new, potholed avenues, cars rocked their passengers wildly on the satin-covered seats. For Sun, most importantly, a group of members of parliament from Beijing were there who could form his initial support base. China's first parliament had seemed chaotic and messy as reported by the free press, and there had been petitions for a fresh election. Under this pressure, President Li announced the suspension of parliament in June 1917 and called a new election – a move that was actually a violation of the constitution. Around a hundred members of parliament left Beijing in protest, and Sun Yat-sen, with the German money, was able to pay for most of them to come and operate in Canton. Also with the German money he persuaded a cash-strapped fleet under an old friend, Cheng Bi-guang, to follow him. In August, Sun formed a ‘government' in Canton to rival Beijing, claiming he was defending the constitution.*2
To the assembled members of parliament Sun demanded to be made the ‘provisional president' of China. They balked, arguing that according to the constitution their number was insufficient to elect Sun to office. It was not their aim to overthrow Beijing anyway; they only wanted the parliament to be reinstated. Sun erupted into one of his by now frequent mighty rages, and hurled insults at the Speaker. A compromise was reached and the title ‘grand marshal' was bestowed on Sun (with the Canton government called a ‘military government'). Sun assumed the title with much pomp, donning a gold-tasselled and red-sashed uniform, a plume, and a ceremonial sword.
Sun at once started a war against Beijing. Soldiers were paid fifteen yuan a month if they enlisted with weapons and ten yuan if without. His German funds depleted fast. The grand marshal had no authority to raise taxes, and when he ordered the Canton administrators to hand over money, they refused. Sun burst into another torrent of verbal abuse, and issued orders to the navy to shell the office building. The navy said no; Sun boarded a ship and fired the cannon into the city himself. This incensed and estranged the naval chief, Cheng Bi-guang. Before long, this old friend of Sun's was shot dead next to a pier. According to one of Sun's sidekicks who had been closely involved in this and other assassinations, Sun's secretary Zhu Zhi-xin arranged the killing. Sun was later reported to say that the death was ‘an execution, for disobeying orders'.
The members of parliament were horrified by this heavy-handed ‘dictatorship'. They regretted being associated with Sun and found a way to force him to leave. They voted to abolish the post of grand marshal, and replaced it with a collective leadership of seven men, of whom Sun was one. They had calculated that Sun would not tolerate shared leadership. Indeed, Sun resigned at once and left Canton on 21 May 1918. He had been the grand marshal for less than a year.
People who saw him at this time were struck by how shrunken he looked: at fifty-one: his hair thin and grey, his shoulders drooping, his expression spiritless. One eye was infected and badly swollen, leaking a trail of tears down his drawn face. He was gnawed by a deep grievance. He, the first man to advocate republicanism, had not been given his due. His greatness was not properly recognised, and what he deserved – to be president of China – persistently eluded him. He felt ‘completely and helplessly alone', a situation which, he said, was ‘not just my plight, but the plight of the republic'.
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Ching-ling had mostly stayed in Shanghai while Sun was in Canton. Little Sister May-ling came home to Shanghai from America in July 1917, after an absence of ten years; then their father was in the throes of cancer and died on 3 May 1918. These events, and the fact that Sun was not in Shanghai, brought Ching-ling back together with her family.
When Canton threw Sun out, he wanted to come to Shanghai, and Ching-ling secured the French consul's consent that he could live with his wife in the French Concession. The Suns' home was a European-style mansion with a large garden. It sat at the bottom of a short cul-de-sac with just a couple of other houses in front – which made it relatively easy to guard. On the sitting-room wall was a picture of George Washington. Sun took it seriously when people sometimes said that he was China's George Washington.
The married Ching-ling grew more beautiful than before. Julian Carr, the tobacco magnate from North Carolina who had been her father's patron from the old days, visited Shanghai around this time, and commented that she was ‘the handsomest young woman' he saw in China.
The Suns had many visitors, and she charmed them all. George Sokolsky, an American reporter who frequented the house, remarked that she had ‘a personality so sweet and lovable' that she quite easily overshadowed her husband. Her ‘presence in the room, her friendly laughter, her refined conversation left an impression more lasting than did the personality of the somewhat dour and always dreamy political leader'. For each visitor, Ching-ling ‘had a warm welcome, a gentle manner, a kind word', but she was also ‘there to save the doctor's time and energy, to safeguard his peace'. In the morning, she played tennis with him. After breakfast, he read and wrote, and she copied out his manuscripts. She worked as his secretary and was self-effacing. ‘She appeared always on the scene; yet always she was behind the doctor, not beside him … guarding the great man … never once obtruding her personality in a manner to deflect even a ray of glory from her husband.'
With her as his secretary, Sun wrote a pamphlet grandly titled The Sun Theory, an oeuvre of which he was mightily proud. It contained one theme: ‘It's easier done than said' (xing-yi-zhi-nan), a reversal of the old proverb ‘It's easier said than done'. Sun announced that the old proverb was the source of all the ills of the country, and that his aphorism was ‘the only way to save China', even ‘the truth of the universe'. To argue his case, he started with stating the desirability of foods like bean curd, wood-ear fungus and pigs' intestines, followed by a spiel about the importance of money, with lectures thrown in about language, Darwin, science, Japanese reforms and the necessity of developing the economy. All these subjects were lumped together in no particular order, regardless of coherence or relevance.
With this hotchpotch Sun asserted the superiority of the man who had ‘said' it first. By this, he meant himself, who had been the first to advocate republicanism. And he maintained that such a man must be obeyed. The leading liberal scholar of the day, Hu Shih, spotted what Sun was getting at and pointed out sharply: Sun wrote the book to say ‘Obey me.' ‘Do as I say.' ‘After a careful study of this book, we cannot but conclude that this is the only possible explanation.'
Ching-ling, who had written impressively argued essays in her college days and liked to poke fun at self-importance, revered this stuff. Her sister May-ling, perceptive, with superb intuitive intelligence, observed to her friend Emma Mills: ‘Do you know, I have noticed that the most successful men are usually not the ones with great powers as geniuses but the ones who had such ultimate faith in their own selves that invariably they hypnotise others to that belief as well as themselves.'
Ching-ling was certainly mesmerised by her husband. Writing to Allie, she said, ‘I still retain my admiration for him, I am as much a devoted worshipper of his character as I ever was … And the best thing I could wish for you, dear Allie, is that you may soon find your own ideals materialized into a human ideal & surely then happiness will come. Of course you are very happy now, too, but the happiness of a married life is different & much superior.'
—
Sun lived for more than two years in Shanghai. During that time, another general election was held, in 1918, which produced the next president, Hsu Shih-chang, a politician known as ‘a scholar and a gentleman' and respected for his integrity. The election was boycotted by five Canton-influenced provinces, but the government elected by the rest of the country was recognised internationally. President Hsu made offers of peace and reunification to Canton, and people responded, with many in key positions leaving the southern city. Sun plotted to get back to Canton and continue his war, this time against President Hsu. For him power could only come through the barrel of the gun. When the nationalistic May Fourth student demonstration took place in 1919 (an event regarded as a milestone in Chinese history), some young people called to seek his advice. Sun showed scant interest in their movement, but said, ‘I'll give you 500 guns to take care of the Beijing government. What do you say?' He sent three different groups of envoys to Germany to invite the German army to invade China and attack Beijing. The Germans thought he was ‘crazy'. He implored Japan via its consul in Shanghai to back him in his war, offering to give Japan Manchuria and Mongolia when he succeeded. The Japanese ignored him.
It was now nearly a decade since China had first functioned as an electoral democracy. As the society was experiencing unprecedented freedom, smart ambitious people mulled over unconventional ideas about how the country should be run, trying to get their ideas put into practice. One such was Ch'en Chiung-ming, an officer of the Cantonese army. Before he embarked on a military career, he had trained as a lawyer and was elected a member of the provincial assembly in Guangdong in 1909. Officer Ch'en subscribed to the belief that China was too big to be run by a highly centralised government and a better alternative would be a federal system (like that of the United States). To start with, he believed, each province should have great autonomy and run its affairs well. To turn his vision into reality, Officer Ch'en set his heart on making Guangdong province, with Canton as its capital, a showcase for what he planned to do: build schools, houses, roads, parks and other public facilities. His problem was that he was only an officer, with no mandate to govern the province, and nobody would listen to him. He thought of Sun Yat-sen and fancied he could use Sun's name for his purpose. Sun seized the chance to get him to take over Canton, and arrived himself in November 1920.
Officer Ch'en soon regretted becoming bedfellows with Sun. His goal was poles apart from Sun's, which was to use Canton as a base to wage wars in order to rule the whole of China. A contest of wills quickly ensued. And in this, the officer was no match for Sun. In no time, Sun set up another government to rival Beijing. And this time, unlike in 1917 when he had only managed to be made grand marshal, he had himself declared the ‘grand president of the Chinese Republic' on 7 April 1921. Thus Sun Yat-sen, the Father of China, split the country and formed a breakaway state, against the elected and internationally recognised government – something no other province did.
After visiting Canton and Sun, the US military attaché Major Magruder observed that Sun was driven by the ‘one motive in life and that of self-aggrandizement', and that for this personal goal he would stop at nothing and would sacrifice anyone. Magruder's successor, Major Philean, made the same observation: ‘His eyes are fixed on [Beijing] – his destination. He believes that the whole of China will be at his feet … and the whole country will obey him.'
In May 1922, Sun began a military drive north to try to overthrow President Hsu, on the grounds that Hsu had not been elected by all twenty-two provinces. Hsu did not want another war and offered to resign, together with Sun, to pave the way for a new election. He tendered his resignation immediately after he completed a major diplomatic manoeuvre. The Japanese had been occupying a part of Shandong province since the First World War. At the post-war Versailles Conference in 1919, China had failed to get it back, which triggered the nationalistic May Fourth student protest. Through skilful negotiations, Hsu's government successfully compelled the Japanese to return the territory in 1922. After he signed the ratification in Beijing on 2 June, President Hsu handed in his resignation the same morning, and left the capital in the afternoon. (This diplomatic victory has been airbrushed out of history books.)
Sun had not expected that Hsu would give up his presidency so easily and had rashly said that he would resign with Hsu. Now public opinion called on him to fulfil his promise, and to stop his war. He acted as though he had said no such thing. Officer Ch'en and his troops, who had long wanted peace, were fed up and made it clear that they would not fight for him; they demanded Sun's resignation in a press release. On 12 June, Sun called a press conference, at which he denounced the Ch'en army in yet another tirade of abuse. Threateningly, he declared: ‘People say Sun Yat-sen is “a big cannon” [someone who brags wildly], I will show you what the big cannon really is this time. I will use eight-inch cannons to fire poison gas … and reduce the sixty-plus battalions of the Ch'en Army to dust within three hours. It's true that to slaughter more than sixty battalions of army men, and frighten the inhabitants of the entire city, is too violent and cruel; but if I don't do this, they will not mend their ways.' He asked the newspapers to publicise his threats.
This was the last straw for Officer Ch'en. He made up his mind to drive Sun out. During the next few days, soldiers were deployed around Sun's ‘presidential palace', which sat at the foot of a hill. Halfway up the low hill, at the end of a decorated covered walk, was his residence, an elegant villa in a lush garden. It enjoyed a wide view of the city streets below and the Pearl River beyond. From this presidential compound, Sun received messages urging him to leave. He refused.
About an hour after midnight on 16 June, a warning came that the compound would be attacked at dawn. Sun decided he had better escape. He put on a white cotton summer gown and a pair of sunglasses, and left with a few guards in plain clothes, taking with him the most secret documents. Once down from the house they were in the streets of Canton. They took rickshaws to the pier nearby, where they hired a motorboat which carried them to a gunboat loyal to Sun. In no time, within an hour and a half at the most, Sun was safe. He did not bring his wife with him.
At dawn, Officer Ch'en's army began to attack the Suns' house, unaware that the grand president had already gone. As Ching-ling was still in the presidential palace, Sun's guards, numbering more than fifty, vigorously fought back.
—
Ching-ling had volunteered to stay and cover Sun's flight. ‘I thought it would be inconvenient for him to have a woman along with him, and urged him to leave me behind for the time being,' she wrote for a Shanghai newspaper immediately after the event. She said elsewhere that she had told her husband, ‘China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' In love, she was ready to sacrifice herself for him.
What the young woman did not realise was that after he had reached safety, her husband still did not want her to escape. He was on the gunboat many hours before dawn, and well before the scheduled attack by Officer Ch'en's army. There was ample time for him to have sent Ching-ling a message telling her that he was safe – and that she could leave. But he did not. He had in fact dispatched a man back to the presidential palace – but only ‘to reconnoitre', not to do anything else. So Ching-ling had no idea that her husband had reached safe haven, and she bravely stayed put.
As day broke, she wrote, the attackers began to charge at her house. Sun's guards fought back using ‘rifles and machine guns, while the enemy employed field guns … My bath was smashed to bits … By eight o'clock our store of ammunition was running low, so we decided to stop shooting and preserve what was left until the last possible moment.' It was only then that she consented to depart. She and three attendants crawled along the covered walk to try to get down the hill. ‘The enemy soon concentrated fire on this passage and flying bullets whistled about our ears. Twice bullets brushed past my temple without injuring me.'
Unlike her husband's smooth exit, her flight was ‘a life and death struggle'. ‘From eight in the morning till four that afternoon we were literally buried in a hell of constant gunfire. Bullets flew in all directions. Once the entire ceiling of a room I had left only a few minutes before collapsed.'
One of the attendants was struck by a bullet and could not go on. Wearing his hat and a raincoat of Sun's, Ching-ling made it into the streets with two other guards. She saw soldiers everywhere, ‘who had by this time gone completely mad'.
I was absolutely exhausted, and begged the guards to shoot me. Instead they dragged me forward, one on each side supporting me … Corpses lay about everywhere … Once we saw two men squatting face to face under a roof. Closer observation revealed that they were dead, their eyes wide open. They must have been killed by stray bullets.
Again our way was cut off by a group of the mob running out of a little passage. The whisper ran through our party that we should lie flat in the street, pretending to be dead. In this way we were left unmolested; then we rose and continued our journey. My guards advised me to avoid looking at the corpses lest I should faint. Half an hour later, when the rifle shots were thinning out, we came to a small farmhouse. The owner tried to drive us out, fearing the consequences of sheltering us; his attempt was forestalled, however, by a timely swoon on my part.
I woke up to find the guards washing me with cold water and fanning me. One of them went out to see what he could of the way things were going, when suddenly there came a tattoo of rifle shots. The guard indoors rushed to shut the door; he told me that the other one had been struck by a bullet and was probably dead by this time.
While the firing subsided I disguised myself as an old countrywoman, and with the guard in the guise of a pedlar we left the cottage. I picked up a basket and a few vegetables on the way, and carried them with me. At last we reached the house of a friend … we spent the night there. Shelling never ceased the entire night, and our relief was enormous when we heard cannon shots at last from the gunboats. Dr Sun, then, was safe.
So she did not know that Sun was safe until then. This was why she had stayed in the presidential palace when Officer Ch'en's army charged. Sun clearly intended to make his wife the bait so that the charge would develop into a heated battle. This gave Sun an excuse to bombard Canton from his gunboats. Scores of local and foreign representatives came to implore him to stop shelling, and he shut them up by pointing to the attack on his house by Ch'en's army. In a press release, he claimed that the attack had started ‘several minutes after' he escaped and ‘I ordered the navy to open fire because I am outraged and because I am determined that justice should be done.'
As his cannons roared, Sun was thrilled. People around him remembered that he ‘chatted and laughed', and proclaimed that ‘I am satisfied with the battle today!'
At this moment, his wife's life was hanging in the balance. After two hellish days and nights, she was at last able to make a telephone call to a friend, who managed to send a boat to collect her and escort her to Sun's gunboat. Throughout her escape from death, her husband did not lift a finger to help her. They met briefly, after which she left for home in Shanghai.
During her flight, Ching-ling suffered a miscarriage; she was told she would never be able to conceive again.
The blow was crushing. Ching-ling longed for children. Heartache would shadow most of her life. In the years to follow, close friends noticed that any talk to do with childbirth caused her to look ‘pained' and to ‘change the subject'. Her reaction was ‘almost pathological'. Later, her unfulfilled need to have children would fundamentally affect her behaviour. In the immediate aftermath, she omitted to mention the miscarriage when she wrote her account. It was too raw. Her anguish was noticed by the American friend of her sister May-ling, Emma Mills, who was in Shanghai at the time and saw Ching-ling arriving, incognito, in a peasant woman's outfit. ‘Small, slight, very pale, and altogether the loneliest thing I have ever seen,' Emma wrote in her diary. (She stayed for supper and helped May-ling with a tailor who came by to put together some clothes for Ching-ling.)
What her husband did to her inevitably dawned on Ching-ling. She had very nearly died; she had lost her child and had no hope of ever having children. For Sun to use her to cover his escape may be excused, but for him to set her up as a target to bring about an enemy assault, knowing that she was likely to die – that was too much. Such behaviour would be enough to kill the love of any normal woman. And Ching-ling's love for Sun did not survive the ordeal. Later, her friend, the American journalist Edgar Snow, asked her how she fell in love with Sun. Snow recorded: ‘“I didn't fall in love,” she said slowly. “It was hero-worship from afar. It was a romantic girl's idea when I ran away to work for him … I wanted to save China and Dr Sun was the one man who could do it, so I wanted to help him.”'
The love-stricken letters she wrote tell a different story. She had been in love; it was just that the unreserved, whole-hearted love had died. The scales fell from her eyes and she saw the ugly side of her husband. He was no nobler, no better than she and did not deserve her sacrifice. Detachment replaced passion in her relationship with him. She did not wish to leave him, but she wanted to do ‘deals'. And Ching-ling worked out exactly what she would ask for herself: she wanted to play a public role as his political partner. She would no longer go on as his secretary, typing away in the background when Sun and visitors were having discussions. She would join the talks. And she would appear in public side by side with him – she had made this request in the past but it had been turned down, on the grounds that the public were not used to seeing their leaders' wives. Now, she was determined to have her way. Most likely, she wrote the account of her escape for the Shanghai paper in order to show Sun and his associates what she had been through, and to prove to them she had earned the right to have her demands met.
Meanwhile, Sun's shelling of Canton failed to get him back to the city. In August he met up with his wife in Shanghai, and agreed to Ching-ling's demands. He seemed to feel he was in his wife's debt. In the future he would ask his associates to ‘look after' Ching-ling. Those who had opposed her appearing in public as Sun's partner no longer did so; they were bowled over by her bravery and her self-sacrifice for Sun. They started to treat her reverently.
From now on, an assertive Ching-ling emerged in the public eye, and gained a high profile in her own right (starting the practice of a leader's spouse being a public figure). She wrote to her American friend Allie on 15 September: ‘Will you do me a great favour? I am in need of some visiting cards of the latest fashion. Will you please order 200 cards for me? at once from Tiffany's or any other good engraving store. Please choose the style of type that is simple yet beautiful. Simply the name on the card: Mrs SUN YAT-SEN.'
Later, the simple ‘Mrs' was deemed inadequate for the status of the consort of the Father of China. The French title of respect, ‘Madame', replaced it, and Ching-ling became known as Mme Sun Yat-sen.
*1 The money was transferred to Canton through the Holland Bank and the Bank of Taiwan – according to a report by the American consul general P. S. Heintzleman.
*2 Having taken the German money, Sun's government declared war on Germany when it looked doomed.