In the fifth year of Guangxu (1879 AD), Sun Yat-sen, a 14-year-old teenager from Xiangshan, Guangzhou, left his hometown, crossed the ocean, took a large steel ship, followed his mother Yang Shi, and came to the middle of the Pacific Ocean
Honolulu
(today's Hawaii), to his brother Sun Mei.
In the four years since, Sun Yat-sen has received a Western-style education, Western science and political theory have occupied his mind, and the color of traditional Chinese thought has gradually faded.
At that time, the strength of the West and the decline of the Qing Dynasty were already in stark contrast in the world. Due to the high-pressure rule of the Qing Dynasty, ordinary people at home and abroad could not see the strong contrast between home and abroad, but Sun Yat-sen, who returned to China after studying, had a deep understanding of this gap between inside and outside.
Sun Yat-sen was increasingly dissatisfied with reality, but he was not a natural revolutionary, and he tried to find ways to become rich and strong. He believes that the wealth and strength of the country lies in
"People can do their best, the land can do their best, things can make the best use of them, and goods can flow freely"
At this moment, his first thought was that the Qing Dynasty should take reform measures - top-down reform, not "bloody armed rebellion".
Sun Yat-sen decided to give the current viceroy of Beiyang a subordinate governor
Li
Go to the book and explain your ideas. Sun Yat-sen, with ardent expectations, handed over the "Book of Li Hongzhang", but it was like a stone sinking into the sea: he did not even see Li Hongzhang's face.
When Sun Yat-sen was still young, he forgot that in the traditional Chinese society of seniority and prestige, how could his status as a "nobody" at that time and his reputation as a cloth cloth cloth attract Li Hongzhang's attention? If Li Hongzhang is something that everyone can see, then how can the authority and status of Li's feudal officials be highlighted?
More importantly, at that time, the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War was in a state of imminent outbreak, and Li Hongzhang knew in his heart that all his attention was on this matter, and he had no energy and interest in reading a small character book.
Li Hongzhang's disregard made Sun Yat-sen feel extremely disappointed, and this flesh-and-blood young man, at this time, was still holding on to a little hope, thinking that Lord Li could look at his own improvement plan in his leisure season, "The Book of Li Hongzhang".
Sun Yat-sen took advantage of the waiting time to travel from Tianjin to Beijing. What dealt him a heavy blow was that in the city of Beijing, where the walls, streets, and houses were very dilapidated, the old lady Cixi, regardless of the security of the country, openly embezzled the funds of the Beiyang Marine Division and used them to carry out her sixtieth birthday and build the Summer Palace. Before Sun Yat-sen could adjust his anger, thousands of miles away in Shandong, the bad news that "the Beiyang Marine Division was completely destroyed" came.
Immediately after that, the Qing Dynasty signed the Treaty of Maguan with the small state of Japan, which further lost power and humiliated the country.
The decay of the Qing Dynasty completely disappointed Sun Yat-sen, who deeply felt that there was no way to repay the country, "If you save the country, you can only overthrow this rotten Qing Dynasty." "Armed revolution" became a new concept in Sun Yat-sen's mind.
On November 24, 1894, Sun Yat-sen returned to Honolulu, united with all patriotic overseas Chinese, and established the Xingzhong Association, which clearly stated that it was necessary to "revitalize China and save the situation" and directly denounced the Qing Dynasty for bringing calamity to the country and the people.
The following year, Sun Yat-sen went to Hong Kong to unite more people with anti-Qing ideas to form the Xingzhong Association, most of whom were patriotic modern intellectuals, but also some anti-Qing party members, who were very radical and willing to take risky and violent means to overthrow the Qing Dynasty.
However, these people, including Sun Yat-sen, lacked a clear understanding of how to launch a revolution in traditional monarchy China, and their plan was somewhat unrealistic: to organize a revolution to infiltrate Guangzhou, and to unite a part of the jianghu people, form a contingent of thousands of people, set fires everywhere in the city, take advantage of the chaos to attack Guangzhou in one fell swoop, occupy Guangdong, and then expand the results of the battle to the whole country.
In the hearts of Sun Yat-sen and others at that time, the Qing Dynasty had decayed like a torn piece of paper, a little lightly, but a hole.
However, "
The ideal is very full, the reality is very bone
”。 According to the original plan, Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionary Lu Haodong and others infiltrated Guangzhou on October 26, 1895, but the planned insurrection personnel and munitions were not in place as scheduled, and the date of the uprising was repeatedly postponed. It was very dangerous to do so, but the revolutionaries lacked the proper sense of secrecy and revealed the plan of the riot to Dr. He Qi, Sun Yat-sen's teacher, in advance. Through this Ho Kai, the British newspaper in Hong Kong knew about the plan of the riot in advance and issued a statement in support of the revolution. The Qing government paid close attention to this news, and soon after Sun Yat-sen and others infiltrated Guangzhou, they conducted a large-scale search and arrest of them, and Lu Haodong, Zhu Guiquan, Qiu Si and others were arrested and sacrificed heroically.
After the failure of the Guangzhou Uprising, Sun Yat-sen still did not learn the lessons in time, and still insisted on the revolutionary concept of "occupying the city and controlling the whole country", and by the time of the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, a total of eight armed uprisings were launched, of which the more famous ones were
The Huizhou Uprising in 1905, the Zhennanguan Uprising in 1907, and the Huanghuagang Uprising before the Xinhai Revolution in 1911
Eight uprisings, still without exception, all ended in failure.
For 17 years, Sun Yat-sen was often forced into exile, but he repeatedly lost battles, constantly raised funds, organized and developed the revolution, and gradually he naturally became the leader of the Chinese bourgeois revolution.
However, the revolution itself was a risky affair, and Sun Yat-sen was almost executed by the Qing Dynasty.
Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary thinking and political thinking are all Western-style, and he is also blindly superstitious about the Western diplomatic system, and he believes that foreign countries pay attention to the law, so Qing diplomats have no right to arrest people abroad. In the United States, Sun Yat-sen once ran to the Qing Dynasty legation in the United States to publicize the revolution, and the Qing Dynasty really couldn't do anything with him. Sun Yat-sen also studied diplomatic documents and found that there was no extradition treaty between China and Britain, and he was even more confident and bold in his activities near the Qing Dynasty embassies abroad.
On the morning of October 10, 1896, Sun Yat-sen came to the embassy in Britain to look for his compatriot Deng Tingheng, who did not expect that this fellow countryman would betray him. Deng Tingheng first stabilized Sun Yat-sen, and then lured him to the second floor of the embassy and imprisoned him, and the Qing officials of the embassy prepared to escort Sun Yat-sen back to China for execution.
The situation was so critical that after being imprisoned, Sun Yat-sen was completely isolated from the outside world, and every day he could only see the British servant Cole who cleaned the cell. He seized the time and did Cole's ideological work, passing on the news of his arrest to his teacher Condry through him.
In five days, Kang Deli raced against the clock, and by calling the police, sending letters to the British Foreign Office, and contacting media reports, kang de li exerted great pressure on the Qing Dynasty embassy, and finally rescued Sun Yat-sen from the tiger's mouth.
This incident, which almost killed Sun Yat-sen, did not frighten Sun Yat-sen; on the contrary, he won more support from overseas public opinion, and it also made him even more superstitious that "the Western powers are China's friends" and "they support the Chinese revolution, and they hope that China will become stronger." It was not until later in his revolutionary career, in the face of the tragic reality, that Sun Yat-sen gradually became sober: the West is unreliable, "the revolution has not yet succeeded, comrades still need to work hard," and "the matter of the revolution must depend on ourselves."