Sun Yatsen: Seeking a Newer China

I enjoyed reading "Sun Yatsen: Seeking a Newer China" and learned much about him and China while doing so. I recommend this book to others fascinated and interested in the dramatic changes which took place only one hundred years ago. Dr. Sun Yatsen became a founding icon of both the PRC and the ROC yet he was a revolutionary leader who personally did not found a lasting government in China, didn't raise a powerful army, and died before his dream of a united, modernized China was achieved. Dr. Gordon takes us on a journey through this fascinating career of Sun Yatsen showing us the progressive and the darker sides of his personality and, especially, of his work. We read about a career of mixed results and mixed motives. And through it all Dr. Gordon shows us the abiding aims of Sun Yatsen - the modernization of the China he and many others of his time saw mired in an Imperial past and the vaulting of China into what they saw as its rightful place as a leading nation of Asia and of the world. We learn that Sun Yatsen was ready and willing to use just about any means within his reach to achieve his goals, not unusual for revolutionary figures. But rather than dwell on Sun Yatsen's iconic status, in Dr. Gordon's book, we discover Sun to be a flesh and blood man. Setting this biography of Sun Yatsen in the larger world of Asia, Europe, and even the United States of America, Dr. Gordon offers us the rapidly changing world that Sun Yatsen grappled with as he sought to advance his ideas and his nation.