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In 1896, Sun Yat-sen visited England, invited by his old friend, the missionary and doctor James Cantlie. After having been in London for ten days, Sun somehow--and just how this came about is, as we shall see, disputed--found himself held at the Chinese Legation, cut off from communication with the outside world, and in grave danger of being shipped back to China and executed for his involvement in an abortive 1895 anti-Manchu uprising. For Sun's own account, see his *Kidnapped in London* at https://archive.org/details/kidnappedinlondo00suny Here is the summary in Audrey Wells, *The Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen: Development and Impact* (2001), pp. 10-11:

"Sun Yat-sen reached London on 1 October 1896. He spent his first few days visiting the British Museum and other tourist attractions. The Chinese Legation, alerted to his presence by Chinese diplomats in the USA where Sun had spent three months fund-raising before coming to England, employed Slater's Detective Agency to follow him as he posed a threat to the Manchu dynasty.

"Sun would often visit his friends, the Cantlies, who lived in Devonshire Street, near Portland Place where the Chinese Legation was situated. On 11 October 1896, as he was passing it on his way to visit Dr. James Cantlie, some Chinese officials kidnapped him. Accounts of how this took place vary, but it is clear that they forced him into a locked, guarded room on the third floor of the Chinese Legation. Its Secretary was, surprisingly, a Scottish military surgeon, Sir Halliday Macartney, who had fought against the Taipings. When Sun had arrived in London, Macartney had tried in vain to get the British Foreign Office to agree to Sun's being extradited to China. Now that Macartney held Sun captive he informed the Manchu government of his prize prisoner and awaited instructions.

"As the week passed, Sun records in his book *Kidnapped in London* that only prayer gave him solace. He faced the prospect of being shipped back to China where he would be executed by having his eyelids cut off and then his body chopped into small fragments.

"On 16 October 1896, Sun Yat-sen arose from praying in his guarded room at the Legation. He later wrote that he felt a calmness and hope that made him realise that his prayer was answered. He renewed his attempts to persuade an English porter, Cole, who brought his food, to take a message to his friend Dr Cantlie, and this time the porter agreed to do so. On receiving the news Dr Cantlie informed Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office, which took no relevant action. He then alerted *The Times* which waited to see what the Foreign Office would do. Aware of this, the Foreign Office began to pressure Macartney, warning that *The Times* was holding the story. Cantlie finally applied to an Old Bailey judge for a writ of 'habeas corpus' against the Legation. The newspaper *The Globe* heard of this and broke the news of Sun's kidnapping on 22 October 1896. The next day all the London newspapers published the story. Soon angry Londoners and journalists surrounded the Chinese Legation clamouring for Sun's release. In the afternoon of 23 October Sun was freed. The following day he wrote a letter to *The Times* thanking its readers for their support, public spiritedness and love of justice.

"Sun's kidnapping made him famous and later facilitated his fund-raising activities around the world..."

There are some mysteries surrounding this incident, as Marie-Claire Bergere notes in her *Sun Yat-sen,* (Stanford UP 1998), pp. 62-3:

(1) Just how did Sun come to be imprisoned in the Legation? "The incident gave rise to the most contradictory explanations and indeed continues to do so. According to Sun Yat-sen's testimony, given immediately after he was freed, he was abducted, or rather lured by a ruse to the entrance of the Legation, which he had not identified, and was bundled inside in the course of a scuffle, then overcome inside the building. According to the Chinese diplomats, Sun Yat-sen went of his own free will to the Legation, in quest of information. Alerted by his questions, the legation staff apprehended him on his second visit. A third, later version also exists, based upon oral statements made by Sun Yat-sen's companions, according to whom Sun Yat-sen had told them that he had indeed gone willingly and with his eyes wide open to the Legation, out of defiance and revolutionary ardor, and had only invented the story of the kidnapping to make the legation's attitude more reprehensible.

"Each of these versions has its supporters, and each incorporates a number of considerable improbabilities: how could Sun Yat-sen not have recognized the Chinese Legation, which was close to the Cantlies' home and past which he had walked on several occasions before the Cantlies strongly recommended that he should give it a wide berth? It is inconceivable that Sun Yat-sen, on the run from imperial spies for several months past and with a price on his head, would have risked entering the lions' den. Such a concept of patriotic fervor would have been of a naivete bordering on plain stupidity. More might have been known had the private detectives hired to shadow him done their job properly. But whether as a result of the inclement weather or quite simply human error, Sun's guardian angels had lost his trail on that fateful Sunday..."

(2) Just how did Sun finally get George Cole, the Legation's steward, to help him? (For a week Cole had declined to pass Sun's messages on to Dr. Cantlie and instead brought them to Macartney.) Cole was later to say that Sun won him over by appealing to class solidarity and declaring himself to be the leader of a Chinese socialist party. Sun, OTOH, "subsequently claimed that it was to the Christians of Armenia then being persecuted by the Turks that he compared himself, to arouse Cole's compassion; in Victorian England, Christian pity probably was more highly prized than proletarian sympathy, and Sun was concerned to win the compassion and sympathy of the public. Perhaps the decisive argument lay
in the twenty pounds sterling that Sun Yat-sen handed over to Cole, with the promise of a further thousand to follow..." Bergere, p. 63.

Anyway, let's say that neither proletarian class solidarity nor Christian compassion nor even money (after all, presumably Macartney and the Imperial government could have outbid Sun) moves Cole, and Sun is indeed sent back to China and executed. Consequences? Is there still a Revolution of 1911?

Here one should note that Sun had no *direct* role in the 1911 Revolution:

"The man whom historians consider the founding father of the Chinese nation and whose name more than any other they associate with the revolution of 1911 and the establishment of the Republic in fact played no direct part in the chain of events that, leading from the Wuchang insurrection of October 10, 1911, to the imperial edict of abdication of February 12, 1912, brought about the collapse of the Manchu empire. After heading or inspiring a whole series of antidynastic uprisings, Sun Yat-sen missed his rendezvous with history and it was only from afar, *in absentia,* that he took part in the downfall of the imperial regime." Bergere, p. 198. The Wuchang insurrrection "was the work of groups of local revolutionaries who had recruited men from the New Army and also enjoyed support from the secret societies and urban elites. The links between these local organizations and the movement led by Sun Yat-sen and the Tokyo group were extremely tenuous..." p. 201. But there is still the question of whether the revolution would have taken place, at least when it did, if not for the prior unsuccessful attempts at insurrection by Sun and his followers. Sun, the movement he led, and the anti-Manchu propaganda the movement disseminated were by this time known even by many anti-Manchu elements who had no direct ties with him or his movement.

And even if there would have been a revolution without Sun, it might have been a different kind. Sun later remarked that of his Three Principles of the People--Nationalism, Democracy and the People's Livelihood--many of his original followers really cared only about the first, and to them it simply meant ousting the "foreign" Manchu dynasty. Some of them, Sun remarked, would have been satisfied with a monarchy if only it was a *Chinese* monarchy.

Also, through the principle of the People's Livelihood, Sun introduced a "social" (though not necessarily socialist, at least in the Marxist sense) component into Chinese revolutionary thought. This component was neglected by many of the revolutionaries--who after all were dependent on the support of merchants and other upper-class elements--but was to bear fruit in the Kuomintang-CCP United Front of the 1920's which Sun initiated. Indeed, without this United Front, relatively short-lived as it was, I am not certain that China would ever have become Communist; the CCP had only a few hundred members when Sun (despite his non-Marxism) invited its members to join the KMT. But the benefits of the United Front were not one-sidedly in the Communists' favor; the KMT's success in uniting most of China by the late 1920's would probably have been impossible if not for the United Front and the alliance with the USSR, which had provided military and organizational aid when the KMT was weak. If Sun Yat-sen had died in 1896--or for that matter 1920--China might have been divided into warlord domains indefinitely and even more vulnerable to Japan than it was in OTL.
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