A SHEET OF LOOSE SAND

In 1924, Sun Yat-Sen spoke amid the rubble of the recently fallen Qing Empire, famously arguing that a Chinese Revolution could not proceed as an attempt to replicate European revolutions. Indeed, Sun, canonized on both sides of the Taiwan Straits as father of modern China, lamented that the goals of a Chinese Revolution must be articulated through the specificity of Chinese conditions. And for this reason, the ends of Chinese revolution must be “just opposite to the aims of the revolutions of Europe.” European revolutions, he explained, insist on their own universal character, and in doing so obfuscate the specificity