China: Chiang Kai-shek: Death of the Casualty

In the early 1940s, at the height of the Japanese invasion of China, Chiang Kai-shek wrote a book about China’s past “humiliation” and future “reconstruction.” He titled it China’s Destiny, but Chiang might have called it My Destiny. He saw little distinction between his own fate and that of the giant, sprawling, poverty-stricken land that he ruled for just over 20 years. All his life, the lean and ambitious soldier fought bravely, though in the end vainly, to shape history to his personal specifications. When he died of a heart attack last week at the age of 87 in his exile capital of Taipei, he was still clinging to the sacred fiction that it was he and nobody else who was the legitimate father of all of modern China. His death could hardly have been more dramatically timed. To Chiang, the rout of anti-Communist forces in Indochina must have seemed the inevitable continuation of the long and losing Asian struggle against Communism, in which he was the principal casualty.

Clear-eyed, strong-jawed, supremely self-assured, Chiang Kai-shek (the name means “firm rock”) was one of the century’s major figures. As a revolutionary and ardent nationalist, he had an epic career embracing both triumph and tragedy. Sixty years of his life were consumed by bitter uphill struggles: first against the crumbling Manchu dynasty, then against the warlords who flourished in its ruins, next against invaders from imperial Japan and finally against the Communist peasant army that foreclosed his dream of dominance in China and chased him to an unhappy exile on Taiwan.

Paradoxically, the generalissimo cast a longer shadow on the century than on China itself. At the peak of his international prestige, he was a smiling, greatcoated member of the wartime Big Four, along with Roosevelt (his great champion in the West), Stalin and Churchill. He was a founder of the United Nations, gaining for China a permanent seat on the Security Council. It was in America that his image was most exalted. “To American eyes,” said Churchill, “he was one of the dominant forces in the world. He was the champion of ‘the new Asia.’ ” But when he failed to live up to his image as China’s man of destiny, and the new Asia so ardently expected by Americans failed to materialize, Chiang found himself abandoned by the Truman Administration. That placed Chiang at the center of an unhappy chapter in postwar U.S. history: the hate-filled witch hunt for those who “lost China.”

In fact, China was never really “lost”: it had never been won. The U.S. tended to see Chiang’s China as a unified nation with an effective central government, even idealizing it as a breeding ground for an American-style democracy. But it was none of these. Just before his death, Sun Yat-sen had described China as “a heap of loose sand.” Chiang Kai-shek tried to build on that sand the foundations of a modern and united country. But during Chiang’s entire tenure as China’s leader, the country remained beset by outside aggression, deep internal divisions, corruption and inefficiency in Chiang’s ruling party and, not least, his intractable insistence on shortsighted, ineffective policies.

The Communists, who have now ruled longer than he, succeeded precisely where Chiang failed. The generalissimo never completely freed himself from the militarists and the feudal landlords who stood in the way of fundamental reforms. The Communists, on the other hand, swept the past away. But their accomplishment came only at incalculable social and personal cost, and even they, after 26 years of rule, have not solved all the problems of lack of stability and cohesion that have historically plagued China.

In reunifying China after more than a decade of debilitating fragmentation, Chiang performed a critical service for the nation, one that paved the way for greater centralization under the Communists. But in the final analysis, given the scope of his problems, it is not surprising that he was unable to construct a durable political system. “In great things,” Erasmus once wrote, “it is enough to have tried.” Chiang’s try was on a grand scale. His failure in the end diminishes but should not obscure his historical importance.

Born the son of a small-town salt merchant in Chekiang province on China’s central coast, Chiang trained as a soldier, spoke like a revolutionary, and seemed destined for power. His climb began with an introduction, through a friend, to Sun Yatsen, the zealous revolutionary whose nationalistic movement brought down the already doddering Manchu empire in 1911. Cadet Chiang, a 24-year-old student at a military school in Japan, rushed home to join Sun’s fledgling revolution. Chiang rose steadily through the military ranks of Sun’s Canton-based Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). At 31, he was a general—and a powerful figure in his own right.

Sun died in 1925, and Chiang soon took command of the Kuomintang. Over the next two years he led his armies on a brilliant series of campaigns against the warlords that resulted in a precariously unified nation. Despite his ardent opposition to Communism, Chiang at first collaborated with the vigorous fledgling Chinese Communist Party and its Soviet advisers; but with the work of reunification well advanced, he turned against the Communists, executing thousands and driving others out of the new national government. Among those he shunted aside was the head of Kuomintang propaganda, a firebrand named Mao Tse-tung. In the midst of these heady successes, Chiang took a portentous step in his personal life, marrying Soong Meiling, a delicately beautiful, Wellesley-educated younger sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow. In doing so he put aside his first wife, the mother of his son and heir, Taiwan’s current Premier Chiang Ching-kuo; he became a convert to Christianity before the wedding.

By 1928, when he was installed as head of the Nationalist government, the generalissimo’s power and influence were at their crest. Even then, however, Chiang was continuously troubled by rebellious warlord generals, rival Communist governments and revolts within his own Kuomintang. When Japanese troops marched into Manchuria in 1931, the Nationalist army was already fully occupied with a series of vast, costly annihilation campaigns against the Communists’ rural bases. Not until 1936 did Chiang agree to set aside the civil war and join the Communists in the fight against the Japanese invaders. His armies tied down huge numbers of enemy troops.

After the U.S. entered the war in 1941, however, the “Gimo” rarely took the offensive, even when his armies were numerically superior to the Japanese. General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell kept pressing Chiang to reorganize his army and be more aggressive. But Chiang had different priorities than his impatient American advisers; he felt it necessary to conserve his men and his Lend-Lease arms for use against the Communists after the Japanese surrender when, he foresaw, there would be an inescapable struggle for control.

Meanwhile the U.S., deeply moved by China’s suffering under the Japanese onslaught, came to idolize Chiang and especially his wife. An enrapt Wendell Willkie spoke of her combination of “brains, persuasiveness and moral force … with wit and charm, a generous and understanding heart, a gracious and beautiful manner, and a burning conviction.” Others resented her imperious will and her attempts to influence U.S. wartime strategy on Chiang’s behalf. At that time the generalissimo wanted the U.S. to place less emphasis on the war against Germany and more on the fight against Japan; he sought more arms and supplies without convincing Stilwell and others that he would really take the offensive.

By the war’s end, the Communists had a poorly armed though well-trained and disciplined army of 1 million, recruited largely from the peasantry. The Nationalists, with 3 million combat troops and ready access to U.S. ships and aircraft, easily won the postwar race to reoccupy the one-third of China that had been under Japanese control. Yet, three years after the start of the civil war, Chiang was a refugee on Taiwan —vowing to recover the mainland with the help of 2 million Nationalist followers who had joined him on the island.

What had happened? After launching a classic, successful guerrilla war, the Communists had consolidated their base areas in the countryside while Chiang’s troops remained isolated in the cities. Meanwhile, as inflation soared and long-delayed reforms did not materialize, popular support of the Nationalists vanished. Basically, Chiang and his Kuomintang had failed to address themselves to the essential problems of China: rural poverty, illiteracy, unjust taxation, usury and excessive land rents. His idea of revolution was a conservative one: the New Life Movement, which sought to revive filial piety and other Confucian virtues, appealed only to the established minority. Mao’s revolution, promising land reform and a total upheaval of the old system, attracted millions.

Chiang’s supporters in the U.S. blamed his defeat on the Truman Administration, which had rejected the Gimo’s appeals for a massive increase in U.S. aid after the war and cut off support entirely after the Nationalists’ flight to Taiwan. The flow resumed six months later at the outbreak of the Korean War, reaching a total of $4 billion before it was finally ended in 1965; Washington regarded Chiang as an important ally in the U.S. efforts to contain Communism in Asia.

On Taiwan, the fleeing Nationalists did a better job economically than politically. They thwarted Taiwanese aspirations for self-rule. But land reform, followed by a successful drive to attract foreign capital, has transformed Taiwan into Asia’s second fastest growing state, after Japan.

As he became older, Chiang turned many of the details of government over to his son Chiang Ching-kuo, now 64. Since being named Premier in 1972, the son has taken effective control of the government. Tough and practical-minded, he has cracked down on corruption within his father’s old guard and has opened higher positions within the Kuomintang’s hierarchy to Taiwanese. He has quietly shelved his father’s quixotic crusade for retaking the mainland, insisting instead that the people of China will some day rise up and overthrow the Communists. Former President Nixon’s 1972 journey to Peking produced dismay and anxiety on Taiwan. Since then, U.S.-Taiwan relations have stabilized; they are courteous, if not quite so close as before. For his part, Chiang Ching-kuo is relieved that Washington shows no present inclination to meet Peking’s demand that the U.S. sever diplomatic ties with Taipei.

The generalissimo, in severely declining health, did not even appear in public during the final two years of his life. But until the end, Chiang held the title of President of the Republic of China, insisting that he was the sole legitimate ruler of the entire country. Even after Taiwan’s expulsion from the U.N. in 1971, Chiang rejected all attempts at compromise. As long as he was alive, recovery of the mainland stood, in his words, as “the inalterable national purpose.” As the world embarked on the quest for a new relationship with his enemy in Peking, Chiang never budged. And thus, the world simply had to step around him.