Text/Xu Yongchao
As a second-generation official, Sun Ke's life was destined to live in the shadow of his father Sun Yat-sen. Who made him the son of Sun Yat-sen?
In 1891, Sun Ke was born. At that time, Sun Yat-sen was propagating the revolution everywhere, and he had no time to inquire about his son's growth. Therefore, in Sun Ke's childhood, his father was an unattainable person. In 1906, Sun Ke entered St. Louis College in Honolulu. Four years later, Sun Yat-sen came to Honolulu. Under the influence of his father, the 19-year-old Sun Ke joined the League. In July of the following year, he rushed to San Francisco at the behest of his father to prepare for the University of California. Later, due to the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, Sun Ke threw himself into propaganda work and studied for a year.
In September 1912, Sun Ke officially enrolled. Sun Yat-sen instructed him to pay equal attention to literature and science, and also sent a large number of books, such as "The End of the Chronicle of The Tongjian Chronicle", "Reading the Theory of Tongjian", "Theory of Mutual Aid", "The Origin of Species", "The Complete Works of Shakespeare", and other books that his father wanted him to read, and Sun Ke read them one by one.
After returning to China in 1917, Sun Ke first served as the secretary of the Grand Marshal's Office (the Grand Marshal was Sun Yat-sen), and then became the secretary of the Senate President. From 1921 to 1926, Sun Ke served as the mayor of Guangzhou three times. During this period, he vigorously advocated municipal reform, which changed the appearance of Guangzhou.
In modern times, Guangzhou was an important trade center in the south. At the beginning of the Republic of China, Hu Hanmin had planned to revitalize the municipal government, but because of the war, the plan could not be realized. After Yang Yongtai assumed his duties, although he made some reforms, his time was relatively short and his actions were limited.
After Sun Ke arrived in office, he formulated the draft "Guangzhou Interim Regulations" with reference to the US municipal system, which was officially promulgated in February 1921. In order to make Guangzhou's municipal government look new, Sun Keduo chose international students as municipal administrators. This has sparked criticism from old-fashioned factions for not knowing the realities of the local situation and lacking work experience. But these criticisms have proved to be exaggerated.
At that time, the streets and alleys of Guangzhou were full of various temples, and Sun Ke took these temples into public ownership, and their land was auctioned publicly as construction funds; then, Sun Ke asked people to build roads in the city to make traffic more convenient, and at the same time successfully transformed the sewage system that had fallen into disrepair; "The park is the heart of the city", Sun Ke said deeply. Therefore, after planning the municipal government, he immediately began to build a park; for civic education, Sun Ke also attached great importance to: on the one hand, to ensure that children attend school, on the other hand, to set up a "citizen university", all citizens who aspire to further education, regardless of their academic age, can enroll; in order to maintain urban order, Sun Ke vigorously rectified the police confrontation and severely cracked down on gambling, opium smoking and other bad behaviors. Under the efforts of Sun Ke, Guangzhou has rapidly moved toward modernization, and people have praised it as "handling for several years, achieving remarkable results, and it is the first successful time since our country held municipal administration." Guangzhou's prosperity led to a significant increase in government taxes, thus providing a large amount of money for the revolutionary cause.
It was also during the period when he was in charge of Guangzhou that Sun Ke gradually had the title of the leader of the "princely lineage", in fact, during this period, his power and influence in the party were very limited, and he did not have his own power group.
After Sun Yat-sen's death, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and Chiang Kai-shek competed with each other, suffering from insufficient strength and prestige, and Sun Ke had to survive in the cracks. After the September 18 Incident, Sun Ke thought that the time had come to seize power, and after some maneuvering, he actually let Chiang Kai-shek go to the field for the second time, and he himself sat on the seat of the chief executive. As a result, within a month of being happy, he was forced to resign and leave. It turned out that he had won Chiang Kai-shek's plan to retreat into advance, and he ordered Song Ziwen to remove all the important file boxes and cash of the Ministry of Finance before leaving his post, and also left ten million yuan in arrears. Sun Ke was not a clever woman, but it was also difficult to cook without rice, and under the constraints of Chiang Kai-shek, he had to resign as chief executive.
However, Chiang Kai-shek was well aware that Sun Ke's weak personality and full of anger did not pose much of a threat to him, and that he was after all The son of Sun Yat-sen and could prop up a façade for his regime. Therefore, Chiang Kai-shek made him the president of the Legislative Yuan the following year.
During his term as president of the Legislative Yuan, Sun Ke was the first representative to call for the end of the training of the government and the implementation of constitutional suppression for sixteen years, and Sun Ke organized forty jurists to follow Sun Yat-sen's Theory of the Three People's Principles, which lasted three years and changed their drafts seven times, and finally promulgated the "Draft Constitution of the Republic of China" (also known as the "Five-Five Constitution Draft") on May 5, 1936.
Unfortunately, his constitution was always a blank piece of paper, and during the Kuomintang rule, "the rule of law always accompanied Chiang Kai-shek."
With the collapse of the Kuomintang regime on the mainland, Sun Ke fled overseas, and later became a Yugong in the United States, and his life was very hard and unsatisfactory. In 1965, Sun Ke, who was in his seventies, went to Taiwan again to serve as the director of the examination. In 1973, Sun Ke died at the age of 83.
Looking back on Sun Ke's life, conceptually, he admired the Anglo-American democratic system, but in reality, he had to succumb to dictatorship. As the son of Sun Yat-sen, he could never and could not get rid of his father's shadow, and Hu Hanmin said that he "had a revolutionary temper because he was the son of Sun Yat-sen; because he grew up in a foreign country and was an international student, he had the temper of a foreigner; because he was an only son, he had the temper of a great young master." Indeed, his personality is indeed flawed, but objectively speaking, Sun Ke is not a waste of firewood that will only lose his temper, handling Guangzhou municipal affairs and drafting the "Five-Year Constitution Grass", which can be commended, but he is too angry, and it is difficult to do anything in the power field after all.
This man, who has been engaged in politics all his life, has never understood politics in his lifetime.