Madame Sun Yat-sen chose a different side from her famous sisters
Soong Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, and was honoured by both rival parties as the 'mother of modern China'. When civil war split the country, she backed the Communists while her family went the other way. She became the only woman, and a non-Communist, to serve as head of state of the People's Republic.
She was born in Shanghai on 27 January 1893 into the influential Soong family. Her father, Charlie Soong, came from Hainan, fell in love with America as a youth, was converted to Christianity in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1880, and returned to China as a missionary and businessman. Determined that his daughters receive a Methodist education in the United States, he sent them to Wesleyan College in Georgia, where Ching-ling took the Christian name Rosamonde, after the daughter of the minister who had baptised her father; friends called her Suzie.
In 1915 she became Sun Yat-sen's third wife. She championed his alliance between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party and opposed Chiang Kai-shek's break with the Communists in 1927. During the war against Japan she joined her sisters in the wartime capital Chongqing as a show of national unity, but her continued support for the Communists during the civil war cost her ties with her family. As a leader of the Kuomintang's left wing, she founded its Revolutionary Committee.
After 1949 she held largely symbolic but senior posts in Beijing, serving as Vice Chairman of the People's Republic from 1949 to 1954 and again from 1959 to 1975, and representing China abroad in the early 1950s. Premier Zhou Enlai called her a national treasure. When President Liu Shaoqi was purged in 1968, she and Dong Biwu became de facto joint heads of state until 1972, and from 1976 to 1978 she was acting head of state again while the presidency was abolished.
The Cultural Revolution tested even her protection. Zhou Enlai placed her name first on a list of officials to be shielded, yet Red Guards invaded her Beijing home and destroyed her parents' tombs in Shanghai. She appeared less often after 1976. A few weeks before her death on 29 May 1981, she was admitted to the Communist Party and named Honorary Chairman of the People's Republic of China.
Source: Soong Ching-ling
