Chiang Kai-Shek: An Unauthorized Biography

292 Pages·2015·2.22 MB·English

by  Emily Hahn

Chiang Kai-Shek
An Unauthorized Biography
Emily Hahn
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1. FLASHBACK 1887–94
2. IDEALS AND REVOLUTION 1905–12
3. “STORMS OF TEMPER” 1912–23
4. THE STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESSION 1923–26
5. SUCCESS, AND A BREAK WITH MOSCOW 1926–27
6. MARRIAGE 1927
7. JAPAN MOVES IN 1927–32
8. CONSOLIDATION 1932–36
9. THE INCIDENT 1936–41
10. STILWELL VS. CHENNAULT 1941–43
11. CHINA OF THE BIG POWERS 1943
12. VINEGAR JOE RETIRES 1943–4
13. MANCHURIAN DOUBLE CROSS 1944–45
14. THE MARSHALL MISSION 1945–47
15. FLIGHT 1947–9
16. THE END?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek did not co-operate on this book; on the contrary,
he doesn’t want anything published about himself as long as he is kept off the
mainland. He feels that in these circumstances he is not worth attention. The
author doesn’t agree.
1 FLASHBACK 1887–94
That night in Takata, near the northwest coast of Japan, there was a dinner party
in a restaurant. Uniformed men with shaved heads and stockinged feet sat cross-
legged on the matting floor and toasted each other, and laughed a good deal and
sang marching songs. They were young and cheerful. It wasn’t an elaborate or
expensive party; just a routine dinner, a farewell gesture from the Japanese
officers of the town garrison for three Chinese brothers in arms. These Chinese
had been with them for several years, training in the Imperial Army by special
arrangement with the War Office in Peking. Now they were going home. Their
plans, like many other Chinese plans, had suddenly been changed by an
accident, due to some clumsy unknown, miles away in Hankow. There, a bomb
had gone off in a cellar and blown the lid off the latest revolution against the
Ching Dynasty. It was October 1911.
Somebody filled one of the tiny cups with water instead of rice wine, and with
a sweeping gesture handed it to his neighbor, a Chinese. “Military people don’t
drink sake,” he said. “Please drink water instead. According to the bushido spirit
of Japan, drinking water means that the soldier won’t return alive.”
All the Japanese nodded approvingly and in silence watched the little
ceremony that followed. Two of the guests took a sip, but the last one to hold the
cup, a solemn young man named Chiang Kai-shek, swallowed all the water that
was left.
“Gentlemen, thank you for the honor you have done me,” he said.
“And as he drank his face was red with emotion,” said General Nakaoka,
trying valiantly in 1928 to recall whatever he could of the long-forgotten
incident. “Whoever dreamed that the student of those days would ever be
chairman of the Chinese Government? None of us thought that Mr. Chiang was
going to be a historic personality.”
Still less, he might have said, did anybody in the regiment think that some day
the Japanese, above all people, would have violent reactions to Chiang’s name.
In 1911 he was one of the most obscure Chinese students that had ever been sent
over to finish his military training in Asia’s up-to-date army. Most youths in his
category were related to the noble families of China and had got their places
through political pull, but Chiang Kai-shek was a nobody.
The officers were sorry later on that they had neglected to notice him. By the
time Nakaoka gave his newspaper interview the Japanese had developed a keen
interest in that all but forgotten young man, and were even proud of him. In 1928
he was famous as the Chinese leader who had suddenly broken with Russia and
taken the new Republic out of Communist clutches. Still, there it was; nobody
among the Japanese in his old regiment remembered him except in a vague way,
in that scrap of the general’s reminiscence. Only a sergeant, a man named
Shimoda, could add more to the picture.
“The only thing remarkable in him,” said Shimoda, “was the impressive and
forbidding expression which would instantly come upon his face when he was
ordered to clean the stables.”
The twenty-four-year-old Chiang sailed to Shanghai in a state of elation that
his code of manners made it necessary to conceal. It was against his philosophy
of self-control to exhibit emotion, but he had waited a long time for this moment.
This, he felt, was it at last; this time the revolution would succeed. He liked the
Japanese well enough after all these years of arduous training; he admired their
endurance, and he had long since got used to their scanty diet of cold rice
garnished with a little fish and pickle. He knew he had been lucky to get the
chance of training with the only modern army in the Far East. Most of the boys
sent over from home on the government training scheme were naturally pro-
Manchu. But Chiang was different. Already, in spirit, he was a seasoned
revolutionary. Nor was it only in spirit that he knew his way around that dimly
lit world of the fugitive in which his revered leader, Sun Yat-sen, had lived his
adventurous life. Already he felt like a veteran. He didn’t look like one—he
looked like a boy of sixteen—but it is the feeling that counts.
Chiang knew Shanghai well; the foreign settlements, the great walled estates,
the hotels, and the drab Chinese city full of pigtailed workers. It looked normal
when he landed, but something was going on behind the humdrum façade of
streets and people. Not only China had been rocked by that amateurish little
bomb. The world was following developments.
The French Concession and the International Settlement offered the
conspirators who were Chiang’s friends their only safety in all the country.
Protected by the flags of Europe, Sun Yat-sen’s followers had for years been
holding their meetings and taking up collections for armaments.
As soon as his ship had docked, the young soldier hurried to the house of his
good friend Chen Chi-mei. Whatever was happening, Chen would know the true
story. There had been other alarms and they had always turned out to be false or
abortive, but this time, Chiang knew, things were better prepared than they had
ever been before. There would be popular support in widespread districts. This
time, revolution against the Manchus couldn’t be quelled. That was why he had
insisted upon coming back to his country instead of staying on in the hope of
more training. One couldn’t go on forever just preparing. A keen young soldier
must find his place in the sun; he need not forever accept a role in the
background, giving way to spoiled scions from the higher social circles of
Peking. There had been a lot of that already—too much. Chiang had suffered a
long, long time from resentment and a feeling of neglect. He had a passionate
and jealous nature.
He was born in Chikow, a village near the town of Fenghua, in Chekiang.
Chekiang is a small province on the Chinese seacoast, south of Shanghai. The
land is fertile, and it is counted a wealthy province. Chikow is inland among the
hills, where farms are tip-tilted, in a mountain range that runs north and south
along China’s edge. We have seen its mountains, or their prototypes, in Chinese
paintings; austere, jagged outlines against the sky, softened here and there by
floating scraps of mist.
He could not have been more widely separate from our country if he had been
born in 1587 instead of 1887; his people knew almost nothing about America or
any other land, though Americans knew a little—not much, but a little—about
China. There were stories of the East told in America: there were pictures
painted by Chinese, and missionaries’ stories, and there were live Chinese, too,
quite a few of them living in California cities or wandering inland to set up
shops and laundries. Americans, if they were interested, learned a good deal
about China, and her people—the black-haired women who wore trousers, and
the men’s long pigtails. But in Chekiang, America was only a vague name.
From his birth the baby was never out of hearing distance of rushing water. A
brook flowed along the foot of the bluff where his house stood. Like the
neighbors, his family farmed bits of ground in the nearby valley, but Kai-shek’s
father Chiang Su-an was also a shopkeeper. (As a child, Kai-shek had another
name; as he grew older and went to school the name was changed, and later he
took yet another. But the unfamiliar syllables are confusing enough without this
added elaboration, and we had better ignore it.) Su-an was the local salt
merchant. Salt was a government monopoly and Chiang held a license to trade in
it; his income was steady if modest. Just how modest it was is difficult for a
Westerner to estimate.
Were the Chiangs poor? We might think so. But Chiang Kai-shek in his
memoirs speaks of his grandfathers as having been wealthy men. The Chiang
grandfather had been a salt merchant like Su-an, and the maternal grandfather,
Wang, had moved into Chekiang from Anhwei and become a landowner. “After
the fall of the Taiping kingdom,” says Chiang, “he felt heartbroken … and
traveled to the west of Chekiang … In a few years the rice fields increased and
the estate became very rich. For scores of li the property was all his.”
Chiang’s official biographers have been victims of a conflict. They want to
prove that their hero has illustrious family connections, if only because it would
be discourteous not to say that he has. Yet there was a new fashion, even before
the Communist conquest, to emphasize the virtues of the simple life—Lincoln is
very well thought of in China. The nearest thing to Lincoln that can be found in
their history is the Confucian sage Mencius, and they have worked hard to show
parallels between his life and Chiang Kai-shek’s. Mencius had a wise, self-
sacrificing mother who brought up her son admirably, in spite of abject poverty,
and Chiang’s chroniclers point out the things he can claim in common with the
sage—the widowed mother, the poverty … Perhaps they overdid it; he wasn’t as
poor as all that.
Chiang Kai-shek himself is taciturn about his background. If he hadn’t
become a Christian and joined the Southern Methodist Church, the notion of
being ashamed of his history might never have entered his head. He did become
a Methodist, though, and he is ashamed; and it is possible, as a matter of fact,
that anybody in China would have been affected to a certain extent in the
twenties by our opinions on morality, no matter what religion he held. It may be
irrational of Chiang to criticize his Buddhist family for not living according to
Christian ideas of propriety, but in these matters few of us are governed by
reason. The particular fact he does not wish to dwell on is that his mother,
twenty-two years younger than her husband, was not Su-an’s first wife, the “big
mistress” of the house. She was the “little mistress,” the second wife—a
concubine, we would call it. This worries the Generalissimo.
No blame attached to Miss Wang for assuming this relationship. There was
nothing illicit about a concubine’s status. She had her place in the family, by law
and custom, and her children enjoyed equal rights with those of the first wife.
She was considered as good a woman as any in the community: the rank of