Letter from Sun Yat-sen to Henry Ford. (Ford Motors/screenshot)

The father of modern China once invited Henry Ford to China to create a “new industrial system,” to help the then-struggling country. Sun Yatsen, who founded the Nationalist Party and helped to overthrow the ruling Qing dynasty, wrote a letter in 1924 asking Ford to visit South China, where “much of the intelligence, energy and wealth of this country can be found.”

I know and I have read of your remarkable work in America. And I think that you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale. In a sense it may be said that your work in America has been more individual and personal, whereas here in China you would have an opportunity to express and embody your­ mind and ideals in the enduring form of a new industrial system.

Without economic development, China was in danger of becoming the cause of the next world war, Sun added ominously, and it is “more or less hopeless to expect much” aid from the “Governments of the Powers,” a reference to the Allied powers that triumphed in World War I.

“There is much more to hope, in my opinion, from a dynamic worker like yourself, and this is why I invite you to visit us in South China, in order to study, at first hand, what is undoubtedly one of the greatest problems of the Twentieth Century,” Sun wrote.

Here is Sun’s full letter, which was given to journalists in Hong Kong on Sunday night by Ford Motors, whose chief executive Alan R. Mulally and David Schoch, president of Asia Pacific, are in town hoping to become an approved taxi cab supplier for the city. (Mullally, in case you’re wondering, wouldn’t comment on recent rumors he might leave the company to head Microsoft or Boeing beyond saying: “I’m very happy serving Ford.”)