Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen. By MARIE-CLAIRE BERGE!RE. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. viii, 480 pp. $49.50.

As a subject for biography, Sun Yat-sen resembles a lighthouse built to guide the unwary biographer onto shoals and rocks. The man usually described as the father of the modern Chinese Republic was a founder of parties who had little taste or talent for organization, a patriot anxious to sell off bits and pieces of his country's sovereignty in return for political support, and an idealist who rarely, if ever, had an original idea. Sun has attracted hagiographers who deny the contradictions he embodied and debunkers who can barely contain their glee in pointing them out. In her expert, judicious, and stimulating book, Marie-Claire Berg@re guides the reader away from facile judgments. Relying mainly on secondary literature for the basic facts of Sun Yat-sen's life, especially earlier studies by Harold Z. Schiffrin and Martin Wilbur, Bergere offers both a whole life of Sun and an extended meditation on why he is so difficult to understand.

Berg@re's own path-breaking work on coastal regions, like Sun's native Guangdong Province as home to the "other China" of merchants and other traders in licit and illicit goods and ideas, helps her situate Sun as a man of the margins who had the wit or "acute perceptiveness" to see that crossing cultural borders might generate significant political capital as well as raise the actual cash needed to mount a challenge to the Qing dynasty. Unlike more intellectually brilliant figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Sun tended to act rather than agonize. Sun was...