FIREBRAND OF CHINA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18709, 15 May 1924, Page 7

FIREBRAND OF CHINA.

DR. SOT YAT SEN ILL.

RUMOUR OF HIS DEATH.

A REMARKABLE CAREER.

By Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright. (Received 5.5 p.m.) Renter. PEKING. May 13. Advices from Hongkong state that Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the ex-President of the Republic of China, has been unconscious for the past two days suffering from brain fever. It is now rumoured that he is dead. For some considerable time past Sun Yat Sen, known as " the stormy petrel of China, has been pinpricking the authorities of the foreign community in Canton. In his role as Southern " President he has incessantly sought to foist his theories into applied politics. Prior to the great revolution in China, in 1911, Sun Yat Sen, by the sincerity of his motives, by modesty of behaviour, by the strength of his case against the autocratic rule of the Manchus, and aided by a few dramatic incidents, gained the sympathies of "Western peoples and won success in his own land. He was born in 1867 at Canton and as a young man joined the Young China party of 18 members, sworn to end or mend the Manchu Dynasty. He was the only on© to escape when shortly afterwards the conspirators were discovered, the 17 others losing their heads. In the succeeding years of travel and proclamation of the gospel of reform, Sun Yat Sen's adventures were all but endless. Not the least of them was his being kidnapped and held for 10 davs at the Chinese Legation in London. His diplomatic captors intended to send him to China as " insane," and he was saved from certain death by the anonymous letter of the wife of an English servant at the Legation. It led to Lord Salisbury interfering, and the prisoner's release. At one time a price of £100,000 was set On his head.' Sun Yat Sen's earlier work was completed when, in 1911, 130,000 foreigndrilled troops broke the power of the Manchus and established the republic with Sun Yat Sen as its first President. With commendable altruism he almost at once handed over that high position to an experienced statesman of the former regime, Yuan Shih-kai. China as a republic rapidly became and remains to this day, however, not a nation led. by statesmen, but a civil war cockpit for the corrupt machinations of self-seeking politicians and war lords. Sun Yat Sen plunged into the new game, and not only disappointed, but disgusted, his old well-wishers. The main political quarrel divided China into north and south, and Sun, whose strength has ever been in the Kwangtung Province, led the southern forces against the north. Having raised revolution against a Monarchist China, he continued latterly to ferment it against a Republican Peking. In the spring of 1921 he set up a "Parliament" in Canton and was declared " President in Southern China. This Parliament was dissolved in the summer of 1922, and Sun fled to Shanghai. Returning to the fray he battled for Canton against the forces of his erstwhile lieutenant, General Cheng Chiung-ming, who had been promoted over his head. Sun again secured Canton and recommenced certain demands which he had repeatedly lodged with the customs people since the creation of the Southern Parliament, namely, that a proportion of the customs duties levied in Canton and other southern centres should be paid to the de facto Government of Canton and not to the de jure (Central) Government of Peking. These requests were naturally refused by foreign Powers and by the authorities in control of the customs. He took part in the scramble in October last for the Peking Presidential chair of Li Yuanhung, but was "outbid with the others by Tsao Kun. As a " set-off" to this he once more entered upon his old southern game of " customs baiting." Ever ready to fly off at tangents, Sun Yat Sen was of with the ever-growing Bolshevist 'evil in the southern port, entertaining Soviet emissaries and conducting more or less open negotiations with them. Evidence of the contrariness" of his character and political beliefs, however, was provided by himself in his recent book dealing with schemes for the reorganisation of China. Despite his Communist sympathies, he advanced in its pages schemes which would, as one American diplomatist said, require more capital .than there is in all the world to carry them out.