Empress Dowager Ci Xi, the remarkable woman who had ruled China with an iron fist since 1861, died in 1908. The three-year-old Pu Yi (whose tragic life story was told by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in The Last Emperor) ascended the throne. This child emperor, though, was unable to breathe new life into the two-thousandyear- old dynasty. In 1911 the curtain fell: In the city of Wuhan, a group of Republican officers rebelled, and the revolution soon spread like wildfire. In 1912, Pu Yi abdicated the throne and Sun Zhongshan (known in the West as Sun Yatsen, his Cantonese name) was appointed the first president of the Republic of China.

The Three Principles of the People

Born in Guangdong province, Sun Yatsen and a few fellow revolutionaries set up the Tongmenghui (usually translated as the ‘Chinese Revolutionary Alliance’) with the goal of overthrowing the Qing dynasty. This alliance would later transform itself into the Kuomintang (the KMT, or ‘National People's Party’), which would govern large parts of China from 1927 to 1949. After losing the civil war to Mao Zedong's Communists, however, the KMT had to flee to Taiwan. A Christian who had initially opted for a career as a physician, Sun saw his task as curing the Chinese people from their centuries-old feudal load. The ideological foundation of that pursuit was expressed in his famous Sanmin zhuyi (‘Three Principles of the People’):

In the years when my intellectual hunger seemed insatiable, I read many books on philosophy: General introductions like The History of Philosophy by Hans Joachim Störig, but also the works of the great thinkers themselves. My favourite philosopher was Friedrich Nietzsche. His poetic way of writing, and surprising use of metaphors, made his thinking more accessible than the often elaborately-phrased thoughts of Kant and Hegel. In Nietzsche's writing, fiction and philosophy seemed to merge effortlessly. Growing older, I am less susceptible to the charms of the ‘Philosopher with the Hammer’, but one of his observations has guided me through the years: ‘It (i.e. philosophy) always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself… In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS…’

What are my ‘images’ of China? Which ‘morality’ has shaped those images? For ten years I have studied sinology at Leiden University. I have been a China expert at the ministry of Economic Affairs, and from 1985 I lived for twenty years in Beijing: First as a banker, then as a businessman. I have travelled through all the provinces and autonomous regions of this continental state; I slept in creaky tents, dirty guesthouses and five-star hotels. I have climbed the huge mountains of Tibet and swam in the Li river, which shaped the surreal Karst mountains of Southern China which have inspired countless Chinese painters. Observing carefully, I have experienced China to the bone, but as a Sinologist I have also tried to make intellectual sense of what I saw. I read hundreds of books and thousands of articles; yet never reached the point that I fully came to understand the shapeless mass of what is being called ‘China’. By studying sinology, I have been put on a road of discovery that knows no end.