Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang Kai-shek,

On Oct. 31, 1887, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese general and president whose regime collapsed to the Communists in 1949, was born. Following his death on April 5, 1975, his obituary appeared in The Times

April 6, 1975

OBITUARY

The Life of Chiang Kai-shek: A Leader Who Was Thrust Aside by Revolution

By ALDEN WHITMAN

Twenty-two years after rising to the leadership of China in a bloody coup against the Communists in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek lost the . . . gained. And . . . maintained. . . . Communist revolution. Thrust aside at the age of 62 by the convulsion that shook half a billion people and an ancient culture, he spun out his long life on the small island of Taiwan in the East China Sea 110 miles from the mainland.

There he presided sternly over a martial group of 2 million Nationalist refugees and about 11 million Taiwanese. At first he talked aggressively of returning to the mainland by force; but as that possibility faded he waited hopefully for the Communist regime to collapse of its own inner tensions and for the Chinese to welcome back a faithful statesman.

That did not take place either. On the contrary, the People's Republic of China grew in internal strength and international might, displacing Chiang's regime in the United Nations in 1971 and winning diplomatic recognition by 1972 from all the major powers except the United States. And even this country, as a result of President Nixon's visit to Peking in 1972, all but dropped Chiang diplomatically. His bitterness in his last years was enormous.

During his years as China's leader, Chiang ruled an uneasy and restive country, beset by intractable domestic strife as well as by armed conflict with Japanese invaders. Although China had a national government for these two decades, there was so much political, social and economic turmoil, so much Japanese aggression to cope with--it started in 1931 in Manchuria and intensified in 1937--that national unity was more fiction that reality.

Nonetheless, Chiang was the visible symbol of China; a member, with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, of the Big Four; his nation's supreme commander in World War II; and the principal architect of a domestic policy that aimed, however unsuccessfully, at internal stability.

To the world, Chiang's lean, trim, erect figure bespoke resoluteness and determination. His asceticism and personal austerity seemed to befit a man of dedication to the ideal of a China resurgent against insuperable odds.

Faced Herculean Tasks

Having emerged to power in a country the victim of a quarter-century and more of political decay, Chiang faced Herculean tasks once his National Government at Nanking was recognized by the Western powers in November, 1928. With the nation in fragments, he chose to seek political unification by force of arms in precedence to attacking fundamental social and economic problems, especially those centering on agriculture, in which the great bulk of the population was engaged. Only later, and under enormous pressure, did he turn his attention to rebuffing the Japanese.

The choice proved unwise, for his campaigns and his battles with local satraps permitted the Communists to befriend the peasantry, harness the forces of social revolution that had been gathering since 1911 and, ultimately, to align themselves with a nascent nationalism in the anti- Japanese war.

Had China been more than a geographical expression in the nineteen-twenties, Chiang might have imposed a viable government on it. But the weaknesses of the social system were such that his regime was quickly enmeshed in corruption and guile. Despite Chiang's personal probity, he could not contain the rapaciousness of others, with the result that his policies were sapped from the start.

Compounding this state of affairs, the Chinese family system, once a force for stability, proved unsuited to modern nationalism. Many officials thought more of bettering their families than they did of furthering the national interest, a concept difficult in any case for many Buddhist- and Confucian-oriented Chinese to grasp and apply. One result was that widespread nepotism, from which not even Chiang himself was entirely immune, enfeebled the Government and its bureaucracy.

To many Americans Chiang was a heroic and embattled figure, the embodiment of a "new" China struggling to adapt politically and culturally to the 20th century. He was widely pictured as indomitable and as a bulwark against Communism in Asia.

From the nineteen-forties onward, Chiang's chief promoters and partisans were collectively known as the China Lobby. According to W. A. Swanberg, the historian and biographer, "the China Lobby was an amorphous group, preponderantly Republican, boosting Chiang for reasons of anti- Communism and also as an issue against the Democrats." It included such persons as Alfred Kohlberg, an importer of Chinese lace; Representative Walter H. Judd, Republican of Minnesota; Senator William F. Knowand, Republican of California; Mrs. Claire Chennault, widow of the Flying Tiger leader; Thomas Corcoran, the Washington lawyer; Senator Styles Bridges, Republican of New Hampshire; William Loeb, the New Hampshire publisher; and Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune.

Because of an emotional and ideological commitment to Chiang and his command of three national magazines, Mr. Luce was among the lobby's most powerful members. His periodicals published eulogistic articles about Chiang and optimistic assessments of the situation in China.

From 1945 to 1949, the lobby tirelessly pressured Congress and the Administration for military and economic aid to Chiang, at least $30-million of which was reported to have been pocketed by his generals. In all, about $3 billion in arms and aid was given Chiang, Seymour Topping estimated in his book "Journey Between Two Chinas." Much of the military equipment, he added, wound up in the hands of Communists.

At the same time Gen. David Barr, chief of the American military advisers to Chiang, reported to Washington that there was "complete ineptness of military leaders and widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces."

Such was the influence of the China Lobby, however, that this somber evaluation of Chiang's leadership was submerged. The notion was advanced that abandonment of the generalissimo would be an act of surrender to Communism.

After the Nationalist debacle which . . . foreseen by General . . . many other Americans on the scene; the China Lobby helped to savage a number of Foreign Service officers in China who had long warned of Chiang's fatal shortcomings. In the McCarthyite atmosphere of the early fifties, such diplomats as John Paton Davies and John Carter Vincent were accused of having "lost" China to the Communists. Even Dean Acheson, President Harry S. Truman's Secretary of State, and Gen. George C. Marshall, who had headed a fruitless mission to China just after the war, were not immune from attacks, although both were stanch anti-Communists.

Indeed, in the early fifties, the myth was widely propagated that Chiang was more the victim of State Department "subversives" than of his own weaknesses.

Even in exile in Taiwan, Chiang retained a remarkable image in the United States. The China Lobby and Mr. Luce continued to praise him and to urge American financial and military support of him; but into the bargain Chiang fitted into the Communist-containment policy of the Eisenhower Administration, a circumstance that helped to fortify his position militarily and diplomatically. A pro-Chiang policy carried over into the nineteen-sixties also.

Policy Widely Supported

Although it seemed evident to many that his Taiwan regime was not a world power, it retained not only its membership in the United Nations but also its seat as a permanent member of the Security Council until 1971. The United States consistently voted against the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations, and it was widely supported in this policy by Americans who saw desertion of Chiang as a betrayal of an old ally and as a concession to the forces of Communism. As recently as October, 1972, Chiang's partisans, describing him as a "brilliant leader," publicly deplored his Government's ouster from the United Nations.

Another aspect of Chiang that appealed to many in this county was his conversion to Protestantism-- he joined the MethodistChurch in 1931--and his professed devotion to New Testament ideals. Missionaries portrayed the generalissimo in a favorable light, citing his protection of their activities and his comprehension of Christian ethics. Some of the more visionary of his admirers hoped that he would lead the way to the Christianization of China.

Chiang, however, was not a missionary ruler, despite his creation of the New Life Movement, a politico-spiritual program containing elements of Christianity. Deeply imbued with Confucius' thought, he believed with the pre-Christian philosopher, "If the ruler is virtuous, the people will also be virtuous." He also believed in rigorous self-examination of his moral actions, and he kept a diary in which he set down every week the results of his introspection. This gave him both an inner certainty and an insularity to criticism.

Scolding his subordinates, he seemed like a Savonarola, an impression reinforced by his drawn, monklike face with its severe cropped mustache and his shaven pate. And, like a monk, he set aside a time for daily meditation and Bible reading. Moreover, he regularly attended Sunday religious services.

Unlike some of his associates, Chiang Kai-shek, whose given name can be rendered in English as "Firm Rock," led an austere and frugal life, albeit in surroundings of imperial opulence. He made a point of eating simply and sparingly, drinking powdered milk or weak green tea. He did not smoke, gamble or indulge in recreations more frivolous than walking.

He dressed customarily in a natty but otherwise undistinguished brown high-necked tunic and matching trousers. But relaxing at home he would wear a traditional long gown and skull cap. He spoke a rough Mandarin for state occasions, although his conversational tongue was the Ningpo dialect.

Another aspect of Chiang's traditionalism was his belief in a system of personal loyalty, in which the subject was loyal to the ruler, the son to the father, the younger to older. This led to situations where he imputed disloyalty to his critics; it also led to his reliance on a very small circle of advisers, only a few of whom felt they could speak up to him with impunity.

Added to this was a shortness of temper that exhibited itself in bizarre ways. Once, for example, Chiang was witnessing a movie at home that contained a scene displeasing to him. He stalked out and ordered the hapless projectionist thrashed soundly. And, on a more consequential level, he was capable of jailing or otherwise punishing those who crossed him.

Chiang was very much a product of the breakup of the Manchu Dynasty and the conditions of near- anarchy that ensued. He was born in the waning years of the dynasty--on Oct. 31, 1887, at Fenghua, ChekiangProvince, 100 miles south of Shanghai. The son of a petty salt merchant and his "second wife," or concubine, he had a grim boyhood. On this 50th birthday he recalled:

"My father died when I was 9 years old. The miserable condition of my family at that time is beyond description. My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the target of much insult and abuse.

"It was entirely due to my mother [a devout Buddhist] and her kindness and perseverance that the family was saved from utter ruin. For a period of 17 years--from the age of 9 until I was 25 years old--my mother never spent a day free from domestic difficulties."

Meeting with Dr. Sun

The events of his youth are obscure, but somehow he was able in 1906 to enter the PaotingMilitaryAcademy, where he did well enough to be sent to Japan in 1907 for two years of advanced instruction. There he became acquainted with a number of Chinese revolutionaries, including, it is said, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, one of the principal founders of modern China.

Chiang joined the Tung Meng Hul, a secret society that was the forerunner of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist party, which he dominated after Dr. Sun's death in March, 1925. When revolts broke out in China in October, 1911, Chiang resigned from the Japanese Army (he had signed up as an officer), returned to the mainland and took the field against the Manchu forces. A capable commander, he led a successful attack on Hangchow and later held military positions in the Shanghai area.

In the next 10 years, however, his fortunes were mixed, and it is believed that at one point he quarreled with Dr. Sun. According to O. Edmund Clubb's "Twentieth Century China," Chiang, made his [temporary] exit from the political scene in 1913 and engaged in brokerage in Shanghai for nearly a decade."

"It was during that period," the book said, "that he established connections with the powerful political and financial figures in Shanghai that were to have so important an influence on his later orientation."

By 1921-22 Chiang returned to miliary-political life as chief of staff of Dr. Sun's Canton-based regime. Rickety and in constant clash with warlords and with the shadowy official government in Peking, this regime fortuitously sought and received military and political help from the newly established Soviet Union.

Chiang was sent to Moscow to help organize this assistance, meeting many of the top Soviet revolutionaries in the process. One result of his mission was that scores of Soviet advisers went to China and became influential in the Kuomintang, attempting to give it a left-wing orientation. Indeed members of the new Chinese Communist party were encouraged to join it. Chiang, as another consequence of the mission, organized the WhampoaMilitaryAcademy, which trained officers for the Kuomintang army.

With Dr. Sun's death the bond between Communists and Chiang's more conservative group in the Kuomintang dissolved and in a tragedy of plot and counterplot Chiang slaughtered thousands of Communists and workers in Canton and Shanghai and, in 1927-28, organized his own National Government at Nanking.

According to some China specialists, Chiang was materially helped by Shanghai financial interests and wealthy landowners.

"The bankers and industrialists of Shanghai, led by the brilliant Soong-Kung Family group, had now come to terms with Chiang," George H. Kerr wrote in "Formosa Betrayed," adding:

"Apparently, Chiang made a bargain. In return for financial support on a large scale he agreed to exclude left-wing elements and Communists from the new 'National Revolutionary Government.'

"The bargain was cemented by a marriage between Chiang and an 'unclaimed jewel' of the Soong family, the beautiful Soong Mei-ling, aged 26, the youngest sister of T. V. Soong [the powerful banker]."

The marriage with the American-educated and Christianized Miss Soong was clouded at the outset by disputes over Chiang's divorce from a previous wife. His subsequent baptism, however, mollified his missionary critics, who became his most persistent and influential advocates among Americans.

Over the years Mrs. Chiang was not only a close confidante of her husband but also his best link with the economic power structure. Members of her family held key Government and party posts and dealt also in diplomacy.

With the coup that brought Chiang to power, the Chinese Communist party was shattered. Its leaders and some members fled the coastal cities and found refuge in the ChingkangMountains of Kiangsi. Over the next few years Chiang, with the expert advice of imported Nazi generals, sought to eliminate the Communists; but despite several proclamations of success the Communists proved elusive. In fact, they battened on campaigns against them and, after breaking free of an attempt to trap them in Kiangsi, conducted the epic Long March through the wilderness of western China and reached safety in Yenan in the northwest.

Meantime, Chiang's regime failed to achieve unification of China. True, there was a national currency and a national legislative apparatus; but what passed for a national administration at Nanking was in fact only one of many regional factions of limited authority and influence. Instead of subduing the more powerful northern warlords, Chiang preferred to make deals; if they would accept him as titular head of state, he in return would respect their local sovereignty.

Thus the Nationalist regime became a loose coalition of military chieftains bound to Chiang by pledges of personal loyalty. This situation was exacerbated by the diversion of Nationalist energy and money into futile pacification drives against the Communists.

What made these campaigns so vain was that social and land reform under the Nationalists was largely a matter of rhetoric. The Communists, meanwhile, were winning the peasantry by putting their reforms into effect.

Despite his aloofness, Chiang was aware that he governed a volatile country; but his ideological recipe was vague and moralistic, whereas that of the Communists was precise and empirical. The New Life Movement, for example, encouraged the . . . piety, and . . . while the Communists, in addition to promising an exciting new world, took active steps to improve living conditions in the here and now.