Is Sun Yat-sen Dead? The Foreign Press Drops a Clanger on Running Dr Sun’s Obituary Eight Months Early!

Posted: January 18th, 2024 | No Comments »

The Useful Idiots around these days always like to say the western media gets it all wrong on China. It’s usually a question of interpretation, but sometimes they do drop a clanger – as in 1924 when they declared a very much alive (well, suffering from liver cancer, but still with us) Dr Sun Yat-sen dead. Hard to say exactly where it started – probably an over zealous stringer in Shanghai or Hong Kong. This has happened before, famously during the 1900 Boxer Uprising when the New York and London Times newspapers declared all foreigners in Peking slaughtered – they weren’t – that was a Hong Kong stringer (the whole story is in my history of the foreign press corps in China up to 1949, Through the Looking Glass – Hong Kong University Press).

Anyway, the Sun Yat-sen is dead story flashed round the world on May 15, 1924…thre story is invariably sourced as out of Hong Kong…Here, a rather uncharitable obit from the Melbourne Argus….

And here a somewhat odd piece on the same day from The Morning Press of Pennsylvania that dredges up poor old Puyi and Wanrong (or Henry and Elizabeth in thir assumed English names)…

Reuters got on the case and contacted Eugene Chen in Shanghai who insisted that Dr. Sun was perfectly well after an indisposition.

In actual fact Sun was to live for another eight months or so and died in May 1925

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