The Cult of Guofu and Revolutionary State-Building in Nationalist China

This paper explores the cult of Sun Yat-sen as “Father of the [modern Chinese] nation” to elucidate the changing roles and conceptions of filiality—particularly in relation to state legitimation and governance—from the late-imperial through the republican periods. This paper’s analysis proceeds through an approach that insists on the inadequacy of merely studying the cult of Sun Yat-sen through a comparative lens of national symbolism. Instead, it analyzes both Sun Yat-sen’s and, after his death, the Chinese Nationalist Party’s [GMD] conscious engagement with the mythology of the American founding fathers and the elevation of Lenin in the Soviet Union. After Sun’s death, his namesake cult borrowed from political imaginings of Washington and Lenin to establish a form of civil religion designed to promote revolutionary mobilization and to justify the GMD’s one-party, authoritarian rule. Simultaneously, the cult drew upon elements of the imperial cult of filiality, thereby exploiting the imperial legacy and the deep-rooted social value of filial obedience, to strengthen the GMD’s authority. Similar to the imperial cult of filiality, the cult of Sun Yat-sen combined persuasive and coercive means and enforced ideology through ritual-legal practices. However, unlike its imperial predecessor, which facilitated the emperor’s exclusive claim to political authority, this new civil religion could not be monopolized by any single national leader. This cult provides an illustrative example of foreign-inspired concepts and practices being localized and integrated into a social and intellectual discourse that—though influenced by foreign discourses—linked the empire to the nation-state in China.