"In the construction of a country, it is not the practical workers but the idealists and planners that are difficult to find."
Mythologized by both Chinas — PRC and Taiwan — who claim to be the true heirs to his legacy, Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925) is not quite a "pure" type, but definitely the closest to EIE. Some SHS people, I've heard, have been typing him as LSI, but it's not particularly plausible (he was an original vision generator, producing the flag and the slogans, other people did the actual work, and, unlike most LSI's, he wasn't good at holding on and consolidating power — he, for instance, handed the presidency to Yuan Shikai, who some years after proceeded to engage in his failed imperial restoration). Chiang Kai-Shiek is a far better LSI candidate in Sun's vicnity.
The biographer Marie-Claire Bergère described Sun as "a kind of media genius, born for jetliners, the fax, and television, despite having had to content himself with steamers, the telegraph, and the press," which is already typologically telling. He definitely paid a lot of attention to the impression he was making. Fitting the EIE type, Sun was ideologically stubborn, organizing about ten failed uprisings between 1895 and 1911. He, repeatedly, broke with anyone proposing a negotiated settlement with the Qing. When the successful one finally came at Wuchang, he learned about it from the Rocky Mountain News over breakfast in Denver. Still, his Ni-creative future-mindedness finally paid off, even without his actual physical presence, with him playing the role of an inspirator. He was in near-continuous visionary agitated motion, exile to exile, and, indeed, EIE and LIE are quite internally tense types, especially if having an accent on each other.
His later insistence on the Northern Expedition rather than accommodation with the warlords also points to his EIE-style rejection of compromise solutions, which was unambigiously correct that time — the socion needs rejecters of compromise (the three Betans SLE, EIE, LSI, as well as ILE score the highest here) as well as compromisers. The Three Principles were formulated early and restated for the rest of his life.
The 1896 London kidnapping by the Qing Chinese Legation shows how he managed to put himself and his cause on display: released thanks to his friend and former musical teacher, Dr. James Cantlie, who alerted the British press, he immediately wrote an account titled Kidnapped in London, which made his enemies grind their teeth, since it converted his own incarceration into an international reputation. Even his post-mortem fate as a respected Chinese national symbol points to his ability to self-mythologize.
Bergère describes him as an "opportunist making contradictory promises" — first to Japanese, then French, then British, then Soviet. Frankly, neither EIE nor LIE are that strongly against mendacity — Talanov's stats have them score +1 on a -3 to +3 mendacity scale. EIE lying is more in the style of an emotional orator being seized by an impulse to make grandiose Earth-shattering claims with their factuality being a secondary concern, LIE approach is more pragmatical and opportunistic. I have the impression that Sun combined both mentalities here. Quite rigid about the ultimate ideological goal, he could be quite "dynamic" and fuild about the destination.
His brief and bigamous (to be fair, bigamy wasn't that remarkable for a Chinese man of his class and generation) 1906 marriage to a teenage Japanese girl, Kaoru Otsuki, whom he quickly abdicated, was largely ignored by posterity (although both Chinas did have the decency to acknowledge Otsuki as his wife), but is something he's being increasingly criticized now, in the MeToo era. He did the same thing to Lu Muzhen, whom he divorced in 1915 to marry Soong Ching-ling, over the objections of essentially everyone around him including her father. It appears that he was a man who could make anyone in the room believe in the republic, and could not sustain an obligation to anyone once he left it.
Sarcastic meme referencing Sun's second marriage, also reflecting his ideological influence
The content of his ideology is where the LIE accent shines the strongest. Unlike EIE's with overly strongly expressed Betan quadral values, he most pointedly wasn't a traditionalist — even his conversion to Christianity (quite a non-traditional move), as Wikipedia puts it, was "related to his revolutionary ideals and push for advancement." His "200,000 li of railway" project and The International Development of China are the same optimistic expansive-developmental accent, which also flattens the reactionary-aristocratic parts of "canonical" EIE, while also increasing the sheer future-mindedness. It is this combination of emotional suggestion and foresight that ensured his titles as Father of the Nation (RoC) and Forerunner of the Revolution (PRC).
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