Throughout this life, Sun retained
an admiration of Japan, though on occasion he would admit it was treating
China even worse than the "white" powers were doing. At the very least,
Sun showed a willingness to make startling concessions to the Japanese for
opportunist reasons--e.g., to get their support against Yuan Shikai. For
example, in January 1914, "Sun Yat-sen gave his blessing to Chen Qimei's
expedition to Manchuria. Not much is known of this expedition, but the
plan probably involved having the revolutionaries make contact with Prince
Su's monarchists and help establish the separatist kingdom of Manchuria
that some Japanese leaders already had in mind. It is known that, unlike
Song Jiaoren and a number of other revolutionary leaders, Sun had never
evinced any passionate nationalism with regard to these regions of the
northeast. Perhaps that was because they had formally been the territory
of barbarian tribes, only annexed to China at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Sun considered that these territories were 'not all of
China,' if they were lost, 'the true China,' the China of the Han, would
still remain." Bergere, pp. 265-66.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA265
Also in 1914, appealing for Japanese aid, Sun offered Japan a quasi-
monopoly of the Chinese market, explaining that this vast market and
China's vast natural resources would support Japan's prosperity as India's
resources had in the nineteenth century supported the expansion of Great
Britain--and Japan would even be spared "the trouble and expense of
stationing troops!" Bergere, pp. 262-3.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA263 In 1915 he was
willing to offer Japan even more than it had sought in the Twenty-One
Demands, in an attempt to outbid Yuan for Japanese support. Finally,
there was Sun's famous "pan-Asianism" speech in Kobe in November, 1924. [1]
(As one might expect, Wang Jingwei, when he became Japan's puppet
"president" of China, loved to cite Sun's pro-Japanese writings as
justifications of his course. (Wang had an anthology of Sun's writings on
Japan published under the title *China and Japan: Natural Friends--
Unnatural Enemies* [Shanghai 1941].)