The influence of his teachers, Huang Shouyi and Qu Fangmei, caused Song to make no effort to pursue the civil service examinations, and he was interested mainly in his time's world events and the counterculture.

Because of his revolutionary activities, Song in 1904 was forced to flee China for Japan, where he studied western political thought and made contacts among the expatriate Chinese student population and Japanese Pan-Asianists.

In 1905, together with Sun Yat-sen, Song helped to found and was a leading activist in the Tongmenghui, which was an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the formation of a republic.

Song returned to China in 1910 after the Xinhai Revolution and traveled to Hong Kong the next year to organize the Second Guangzhou Uprising.

After the 1912 declaration of the Republic of China, Song helped to transform the Tongmenghui into the Kuomintang, also known as the KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party.

Song Jiaoren was only 30 when he was tasked by Sun Yat-sen to organize the Kuomintang for the 1912 Chinese democratic election campaign, the first in China.

[3] One of Song's main political goals was to ensure that the powers and the independence of China's elected assemblies were properly protected from the influence of the office of the president.

By mid-1912, clearly Yuan dominated over the provisional cabinet that he had named and was showing signs of a desire to hold overweening executive power.

Yuan Shikai ejected the Kuomintang from China's elected assemblies in 1913, dissolved parliament in 1914, declared himself emperor in 1915, and died in 1916.