Sun Yat-sen left behind a checklist

Today is the 160th anniversary of the birth of Republic of China (ROC) founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙). The two sides of the Taiwan Strait intend to mark the day as if the other were trespassing.

Beijing set up a preparatory office for the commemorations in November last year, under the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and has framed the anniversary around “national rejuvenation” and opposition to Taiwanese independence.

Taipei has answered by telling people to stay home. Last month, the Mainland Affairs Council urged the public not to travel to China for the events, saying that attendance would “echo the Chinese communists’ narratives,” and has signaled that officials who need government clearance to travel would not get it.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said the move exposed an intent to “betray the nation and history.”

Each government is treating a man who died in 1925 as a trophy, and each assumes that whoever holds the trophy holds legitimacy. We could ask what either side actually gains from the contest.

Sun was educated in Honolulu and Hong Kong, organized from Yokohama and Penang, raised money in San Francisco. In 1896, he was held for 12 days inside the Qing legation in London until his former medical professor raised the alarm. He was a product of the Chinese diaspora rather than of any single state, and died before the ROC he founded could consolidate anything resembling a stable order. A man so unmoored from one territory makes a poor title deed for anyone.

Sun’s Three Principles of the People are nationalism, democracy and people’s welfare. He first set them out in 1905, and later told audiences they were his rendering of Abraham Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Beijing’s commemorations lean almost entirely on the first principle, recasting a republican revolutionary as a prophet of unification, and say little about the democracy he spent years writing and speaking about.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is noticeably cooler toward Sun than the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the party he founded. When the central bank announced in October last year that the next series of banknotes would carry no political figures, Beijing accused the DPP of “de-Sinicization” and pushing Sun off the currency. One side reads Sun by amplification, the other by subtraction. Each venerates about one-third of the man and shelves the rest.

Sun left behind not a monument, but a checklist. Does the economy deliver broad welfare? Do citizens choose their leaders and can they remove them? Is national identity a source of dignity or an instrument of coercion? Any society that invokes Sun should be willing to answer all three, and the questions can be put to Beijing, Taipei or anyone without taking a position on sovereignty. It is worth noticing which government would find the second question awkward.

When history becomes a loyalty test, nuance is the first casualty. Taiwanese who take an interest in Sun risk being cast as politically unreliable, while those who ignore him risk being cast as ungrateful to their heritage.

In 2016, 37 retired generals from Taiwan sat in the Great Hall of the People, stood for China’s national anthem and listened to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) warn against “separatism.” Former senior officers lending their rank to a state ceremony of that kind is a legitimate national security concern, and a democracy is entitled to set rules for people who once held its secrets.

An academic reading archives, or a private citizen paying respects to a figure her grandparents revered, is something quite different. The council’s warning would carry more weight if it drew that line plainly instead of treating the public and generals as one undifferentiated risk.

Beijing might notice that young Taiwanese are drifting away from Sun even as its calls for “unification” grow louder, and that they are unlikely to be won back by being told their reverence is mandatory. Nor does Taipei strengthen its civic culture by signaling that a founding figure has become an embarrassment.

Both governments should hand the anniversary to historians, teachers and museums, and let the politicians sit in the audience. Sun’s letters and papers are scattered across Taipei, Nanjing, Tokyo, Honolulu and the Southeast Asian communities that bankrolled his uprisings. Digitizing and opening those archives would do more for his memory than any speech. So would conferences that bring in academics from across the Strait and from where Sun actually lived. It would lower the temperature at a moment when cross-strait relations need fewer flashpoints, not more.

Sun once wrote that the tide of the world is vast and mighty, and that those who ride it prosper while those who resist it perish (世界潮流, 浩浩蕩蕩, 順之則昌, 逆之則亡). He had the end of imperial rule in mind, but the line fits the custody fight over his memory just as well. A man claimed by everyone belongs to no one. That is not a loss. It might be the one thing about Sun that both sides can still agree on, and perhaps the only neutral ground left between them.

Y. Tony Yang is an endowed professor at George Washington University. He earned his law degree from National Taiwan University and his doctorate from Harvard University.