Chiang Kai-shek

• 1. Introduction

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  Chiang Kai-shek was born on the 31st of October 1887, in Xikou, a small town in Fenghua, Zhejiang, about 30 kilometers west of central Ningbo. His father died when he was eight years old. His mother, whom he later described as the "embodiment of Confucian virtues," raised him alone in a family of salt merchants. In a 1945 speech to the Kuomintang, he recalled the feeling of that childhood: "I felt throughout my childhood that my mother and I were fighting a helpless lone war. We were alone in a desert." That sense of embattled isolation shaped a man who would go on to lead the Republic of China through some of the most violent decades in modern history. He unified a fractured nation under the Nationalist flag. He fought Japan across eight years of total war. He lost mainland China to Mao Zedong's Communists and retreated to Taiwan, where he ruled for another quarter-century. He died on the 5th of April 1975, still president, still claiming sovereignty over a mainland he had not seen in more than 25 years. What made Chiang Kai-shek the leader he became? How did a boy from a salt merchant family become the Generalissimo of China? And what does his legacy look like when you hold both the praise and the condemnation in the same hand?

• 2. Many Names, One Man

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  Chiang carried at least four distinct names during his lifetime, each marking a different phase of his identity. At birth, his grandfather gave him the milk name Chiang Jui-yuan, meaning "auspicious beginning." In 1903, when the sixteen-year-old Chiang traveled to Ningbo as a student, he chose the school name Chih-ch'ing, meaning "purity of aspirations." Sun Yat-sen knew him by that name for years.

  In 1912, while in Japan, Chiang began publishing articles in a Chinese magazine he had founded himself, called Voice of the Army. For those articles, he used the pen name Chieh-shih, which quickly became his courtesy name. Some scholars trace it to the I Ching; others note that its second character, shek, meaning "stone," echoes the second character of his formal register name. The English rendering "Kai-shek" reflects a Cantonese romanization of that courtesy name, while the surname "Chiang" follows Mandarin Wade-Giles, making the name the world knows him by a hybrid of two different systems.

  Sometime in 1917 or 1918, as he grew closer to Sun Yat-sen, Chiang changed his personal name to Chung-cheng, deliberately choosing a name that resonated with Sun's own name, Chung-shan. The name means uprightness, rectitude, and orthodoxy. During his authoritarian rule in Taiwan, that name remained the one his supporters preferred. Taipei's major international airport bore it. The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in the city was officially called the Chung Cheng Memorial Hall in Chinese. Chung Cheng High School in Singapore was named after him. A name chosen as a political statement in the years of revolution would outlast the man himself.

• 3. Revolutionary Formation

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  Chiang began his military education at the Baoding Military Academy in 1906, then traveled to Tokyo Shinbu Gakko in 1907, a preparatory school designed for Chinese students who intended to enter the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. In Japan, he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, equestrianism, Japanese, and English. He ate the standard meal of Japanese soldiers: rice with salted fish or umeboshi. He grew to admire bushido. He served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.

  There he also found something more consequential than military technique. His compatriot Chen Qimei brought him in 1908 into the Tongmenghui, Sun Yat-sen's underground brotherhood against the Qing dynasty. When news of the Wuchang Uprising reached Japan in 1911, Chiang returned to China immediately, intending to fight as an artillery officer. He served under Chen as one of his chief lieutenants in Shanghai.

  Chiang's early friendship with Chen Qimei also drew him into the orbit of Shanghai's Green Gang, the criminal syndicate headed by Du Yuesheng and Huang Jinrong. The Shanghai International Settlement police charged Chiang with various felonies during that period; none resulted in trial or imprisonment. When Yuan Shikai's agents assassinated Chen on the 18th of May 1916, Chiang succeeded Chen as leader of the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Shanghai. He was 28 years old, and Sun Yat-sen's political fortunes were at their lowest point.

• 4. Seizing Power

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  Sun Yat-sen died on the 12th of March 1925, leaving a vacuum at the heart of the Kuomintang. Three men contested the succession: Wang Jingwei, Liao Zhongkai, and Hu Hanmin. Liao was assassinated in August. Hu was arrested on suspicion of connection to the murder. Wang seemed positioned to lead, but Chiang moved first. In the Canton Coup of March 1926, declaring martial law on the 20th of that month, he cracked down on Communist and Soviet influence over the National Revolutionary Army and forced Wang into exile.

  On the 27th of July 1926, Chiang launched the Northern Expedition, a military campaign Sun Yat-sen had long planned: to conquer the northern warlords and unify China under the KMT. He led the central column himself, aiming for Nanjing, while Wang Jingwei's column moved toward Wuhan and Bai Chongxi's column went east toward Shanghai. During the Soviet's May Day parade that year, Chiang's portrait had been carried alongside those of Karl Marx, Lenin, and Stalin; Western observers called him the "Red General." That image did not last.

  On the 12th of April 1927, Chiang carried out a purge of thousands of suspected Communists and dissidents in Shanghai. The killings spread across the country in what became known collectively as the White Terror. More than 300,000 people died in anti-Communist suppression campaigns in the year following April 1927. Some estimates put the total toll at millions, most in rural areas. The purge drove the Communists from the cities into the countryside, began the Chinese Civil War, and secured Chiang's authority at a cost that critics have never allowed him to escape.

  To consolidate his claim as Sun's political heir, Chiang married Soong Mei-ling on the 1st of December 1927, making himself the brother-in-law of Sun's widow, Soong Ching-ling. To win the approval of Soong's mother, he first divorced his wife and concubines and promised to study Christianity. He read the Bible Soong Mei-ling gave him twice before deciding to convert, and three years after the marriage was baptized in the Soong family's Methodist church.

• 5. The Nanjing Decade

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  From 1928 to 1937, Chiang's government in Nanjing attempted to modernize a country still fractured by warlords, poverty, and foreign encroachment. The administration moved to reform the legal and penal systems, stabilize prices, reform banking, build railroads and highways, improve public health, and develop industry and agriculture. The national academy of sciences, Academia Sinica, was founded during this period. The literacy rate rose as average citizens received education that had been denied under the dynasties.

  Chiang also launched the New Life Movement, combining Confucian moral values with Christianity, nationalism, and authoritarian discipline. Historian Frederic Wakeman described the movement as "Confucian fascism." Chiang sponsored the Blue Shirts Society, modeled explicitly on the Italian Blackshirts and the Nazi Sturmabteilung. In a 1935 speech, he stated that "fascism is what China now most needs." Close ties with Nazi Germany during the mid-1930s gave Nationalist China access to German military and economic assistance, though the relationship collapsed after Japan launched a full-scale invasion in 1937.

  The government under Chiang gave women reserved seats in parliament, supported women's suffrage and education, and moved to abolish polygamy and foot binding. The Soong family complicates any clean accounting of the era. The family embezzled approximately $20 million during the 1930s and 1940s, a period when the Nationalist government's total annual revenues were less than $30 million. President Truman later said of the Nationalist leaders: "They're thieves, every damn one of them." He also said they "stole $750 million out of the billions that we sent to Chiang."

  Chiang himself was by most accounts not personally corrupt. In 1934, he ordered seven military officers who had embezzled state property to be shot. When division commanders pleaded with him to pardon another criminal officer, he executed the man as soon as they left. His authority within the government was total: according to historian Odd Arne Westad, "no other leader within the KMT had the authority to force through even the simplest decisions."

• 6. War Against Japan

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  After the Xi'an Incident of December 1936, in which allied commander Zhang Xueliang and general Yang Hucheng of Shaanxi kidnapped Chiang and held him for two weeks, Chiang was forced into forming a Second United Front with the Communists against Japan. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, Chiang sent his best-trained and -equipped soldiers to defend Shanghai. The battle cost over 200,000 Chinese casualties and stripped Chiang of the political core of his Whampoa-trained officer corps.

  By December 1937, Nanjing had fallen and the Nanjing Massacre had begun. Chiang moved the government first to Wuhan and then to Chongqing, trading territory for time. He stretched Japanese supply lines and mired Japanese soldiers in China's vast interior, but at staggering cost to civilians. In 1938, the National Revolutionary Army deliberately destroyed the dams around Zhengzhou during the retreat from that city. The resulting Yellow River flood killed between 800,000 and one million people and left four million homeless. The KMT was slow to provide disaster relief.

  The Changsha Fire of 1938, another scorched-earth measure ordered by the Nationalists, destroyed much of the city, killed 20,000 civilians, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. It began without warning to the residents. Three local commanders were later executed for the organizational failure, while KMT-controlled newspapers blamed non-KMT arsonists.

  Chiang attended the Cairo Conference in 1943, where Allied leaders discussed the terms of Japan's eventual surrender, including the retrocession of Taiwan. He was named Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the China war zone and was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1942. His American-educated wife Soong Mei-ling, known in the United States as "Madame Chiang," maintained the support of the American China Lobby, which saw in the couple the prospect of a Christian and democratic China. General Joseph Stilwell, the American military advisor who worked directly with Chiang, held a sharply different view: Stilwell estimated that at least half of the $100 million spent constructing air bases for Operation Matterhorn was embezzled by Nationalist party officials.

• 7. Defeat and Taiwan

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  Chiang resigned as president on the 21st of January 1949, as Nationalist forces collapsed and defected in mounting numbers to the Communists. Acting president Li Zongren attempted to negotiate a settlement with Mao's forces but could not reach workable terms. Chiang, though no longer holding formal office, continued to issue orders to the army; many officers obeyed him rather than Li. He moved US$200 million of gold and foreign currency belonging to the central government to Taiwan, funds that Li desperately needed to cover government expenses.

  In the early morning of the 10th of December 1949, Communist troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT-controlled city on the mainland. Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo directed the defense from the Chengtu Central Military Academy. They flew out of Chengdu Fenghuangshan Airport on an aircraft named May-ling and arrived in Taiwan the same day. Chiang Kai-shek never returned to the mainland.

  In Taiwan, Chiang imposed martial law and the White Terror, which imprisoned about 140,000 Taiwanese for real or perceived opposition to the KMT. Martial law lasted until 1987; the associated political repression continued until 1992. He was re-elected by the same Eternal Parliament five times in six-year terms, in 1954, 1960, 1966, and 1972, for a total of 25 years as president until his death. The Temporary Provisions that enabled this explicitly overrode the constitution's two-term limit.

  Chiang also oversaw a sweeping Land Reform Act and, with American foreign aid during the 1950s, laid the groundwork for what would become Taiwan's rise as one of the Four Asian Tigers. A Party Reform Program launched in 1950 aimed to expand KMT membership from 80,000 to 500,000 within five years and mandated that government positions be filled primarily by technocrats drawn from top universities. He remained internationally recognized as the legitimate leader of China by the United Nations until 1971, when the ROC's seat was transferred to the People's Republic. He died on the 5th of April 1975, still making plans, still refusing to concede the mainland was gone.