ABSTRACT
It is well known among scholars, Chinese and Western, that the first book published under the name of Dr Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), revolutionary thinker and the ‘Father of Modern China’, was the slim memoir in English, Kidnapped in London, published in early 1897. Likewise, there is no mystery that Sun’s second published work would only emerge twenty-two years later in 1919, first in Chinese and then in an English language version as Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary. Yet who knew that by the time of the publication of Kidnapped in London, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Sun was already hard at work planning another much longer and more ambitious book in English, a comprehensive political treatise on the tyrannical misgovernment of the Chinese nation by their usurpers, the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty? Who knew that Sun, so early in his revolutionary career, was so close to formulating a blueprint for the corrupt Manchu regime’s wholesale destruction and replacement by constitutional democratic republican government? And who knew that Sun’s new form of government was planned to arise, not from a patchwork of piecemeal reforms bestowed downwards from on high, but from the irresistible upwards trajectory of the revolutionary actions and demands of the Chinese masses from below? Started then abandoned twice, destined never to be completed, let alone published, we can only conjecture what title this revolutionary book might have had.
