ABSTRACT
The first significant twentieth-century report of Sun’s attitude to education reform in China is his reported conversation with Yan Fu (严复) in London in 1905. This conversation, widely cited in subsequent writings on Sun, is often taken to indicate Sun’s expressed affinity for immediate revolutionary action in preference to extended preliminary political theorising: ‘You are a thinker, I am a doer’, Sun is said to have finally exclaimed to Yan Fu, at the end of a mutual exchange of views between them as to China’s imminent prospects for reform.
