The decision of the ex-president of Free China to begin his visit to the people’s republic by paying obeisance at the tomb of Sun Yat-sen certainly strikes a newsworthy note. Sun, our former correspondent, is the founder of the democracy we call Free China. He is one of the most important figures in Chinese history. That he is revered by both the Communist regime at Beijing and the freely elected government on Taiwan is no small thing.

In the visit today, the former Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, left flowers and bowed three times to Sun’s statue, Global Times reports. “The people of both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese nation,” Mr. Ma declared. He speaks to the goal, shared by both Taipei and Beijing, of a reunified China. It’s clear that Sun’s vision of unity could never survive Communism and that the logical base is a free, multi-party democracy.

The visit to Sun’s tomb reminds that his death led to the divide of China between Communism and Nationalism. Sun, hailed for toppling the old imperial tyranny and serving as the first president of the republic, bridged the divide between the factions. “His earnestness and sincerity,” the Sun wrote in an editorial when Sun died in 1925, “gave the movement a standing in Europe and America that it could not have achieved under any other man.”

After he died, civil war ensued. Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat by Mao led to the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan. There, Sun’s principles were incubated for decades, leading in the 1980s to the birth of a vibrant multi-party system. On the mainland, even as the Communists continue to pay lip service to Sun’s ideals, his dream of democratic self rule by the Chinese people and an accountable central government has been betrayed.

All the more astute of Mr. Ma, then, to make Sun the focal point of his visit to the mainland. The trip comes at a time of rising tension between China and Taiwan, and as the island democracy prepares for its 2024 presidential election. The voting will likely center on whether to back the party of incumbent Tsai Ing-wen, who has steered Taiwan on a more independent course, or Mr. Ma’s Nationalists, who advocate closer ties with the mainland.

Sun’s legacy offers a way out of the current impasse. Sun was born at Zhongshan, not far from Hong Kong, and his outlook was forged as “a child of the coasts and the open sea and of an extended China exposed to cosmopolitan influences,” as one biographer, Marie-Claire Bergère, explains. He lived for a time in America, and this experience helped shape his democratic ideals, including an admiration for Abraham Lincoln.

Sun compared his “Three Principles of the People,” his theory of democratic rule, with Lincoln’s ideal of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Yet he was also a man of the 20th century, and he explained his theory of government to modern audiences by noting that “the people are masters of the nation,” and so they “should act towards the government as I did towards the chauffeur,” a reference to his driver at Hongkow. 

If it’s difficult to imagine Xi Jinping taking directions from a voter in the back seat, that is testament to how far China remains from achieving Sun’s vision. Writing for The New York Sun from exile in 1913, Sun Yat-sen lamented how “despotism” had “throttled the real Republic of China.” Yet he foresaw democracy’s return, when the “tyrant of Pekin will hurry from the country quite as ignominiously as ever a culprit left his former haunts.”