On an island, with dreams of the mainland

In 1949, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, longtime leader of Nationalist China, lost the civil war he had been fighting off and on against the Chinese Communists since 1927. He fled to Taiwan, where he was reunited with the gold, silver and art treasures he had thoughtfully sent ahead. Two months earlier, on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong had proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Mao was a winner, Chiang was a loser. Mao was widely recognized as one of the great figures of the 20th century; Chiang, vilified in China, was soon forgotten elsewhere -- except in the United States, where Henry Luce and other admirers kept the flame burning.

In recent years, however, the era in which Chiang led China, the so-called Republican period, has been reexamined and reevaluated, not least by American historians using archival material in the PRC as well as on Taiwan. The efforts of Chiang and his supporters to reform China, to modernize China, have received significantly favorable reviews. Scholars today are less likely to focus on the corruption rampant in his regime or on the repressiveness of his security forces. They remind us of how little control Chiang’s central government had over the country -- how much of it was still ruled by provincial warlords only nominally loyal to Chiang. They point to the civil strife that erupted frequently, as various warlords and politicians coalesced to challenge Chiang. They tend to be less critical of his determination to root out the Communist armies that controlled part of the country. And of course everyone concedes that Japanese aggression hampered efforts toward domestic reform. Most of all, as the extent of Mao’s brutality toward his own people became apparent, the viciousness of Chiang’s Kuomintang regime seemed relatively benign.

Jonathan Fenby, former editor of the Hong Kong South China Morning Post, appears to have read everything about Chiang’s career on the mainland -- and used almost everything indiscriminately. He has written a useful account of Chiang’s rise to power in the 1920s and his failures through 1949, with a little more gory detail than necessary and no bit of juicy gossip left out about Chiang or his last wife, the beautiful American-educated Soong Meiling..

Fenby describes Chiang’s emergence in the early 1920s as the principal military figure in the entourage of Sun Yat-sen, erstwhile first president of the Republic of China, established in 1911. Sun had been pushed aside within a few years of the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. The country became no more than a geographic entity with a powerless central government and a host of regional warlords who were often hardly more than bandits. With support from Soviet Russia, Sun’s political party, the Kuomintang, or Nationalists, was reorganized as a Leninist party, combined forces with the infant Chinese Communist Party and set out to eliminate the warlords, throw out the foreign imperialists and reunite the country. Chiang led the military effort. After Sun died suddenly in 1925, Chiang gradually outmaneuvered rivals on the right and on the left within the Kuomintang and struck against the Communists and his Soviet advisors, outmaneuvering Stalin as well. Defeating some warlords, co-opting others and gaining support from Chinese businessmen and gangsters, Chiang’s forces ultimately prevailed. By 1928 the country was at least nominally reunited under a central government, with its capital in Nanking and Chiang as its leader.

Over the next few years, Chiang and his supporters, with some success, tried to create a modern government in China and to improve the lot of the Chinese people by providing a modicum of physical security and by developing the economy. The Nanking government attracted reformers, both Chinese and foreign, and a little financial support for some of its projects from the League of Nations and American organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the forerunners of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. There were important advances in literacy and public health, even prospects for desperately needed land reform -- none of which is discussed by Fenby.

But Chiang had two overwhelming obstacles to his vision of a strong and independent China under Kuomintang rule: the Chinese Communists and the Japanese.

The Communists had their own armies and sporadic support from the Soviet Union. They controlled large chunks of territory. Chiang saw communism as a cancer to be excised and devoted enormous sums of money and energy to an unsuccessful effort to eliminate the challenge. He might well have succeeded, had it not been for the Japanese. Indeed, Fenby quotes Mao thanking the Japanese for making his ultimate victory possible. In 1931, the Japanese army, fearing that Chiang might extend his control to their sphere of influence in Manchuria -- the three northeastern provinces of China -- staged an incident that they used to drive all Chinese forces out of the region. Ignoring protests from the United States and the League of Nations, they turned Manchuria into the puppet state of Manchukuo. In the mid-1930s, the Japanese extended their occupation to other areas of North China. Fenby begins the book with the well-known story of the 1936 Xi’an incident, when troops sent to eliminate Mao’s base in northwest China turned against Chiang, took him prisoner and demanded to be allowed to fight the Japanese instead. Chiang was forced to accede to their wishes, and Mao and his followers were spared. And in 1937 the Japanese began a full-scale war that ended only with their defeat by the United States in 1945.

Fenby devotes considerable space to Chinese-American relations during World War II, and he is more sympathetic to Chiang’s side of the familiar Chiang-Stilwell contretemps than are most American scholars. He understands why Chiang, for all his unquestioned faults, ought not to have been treated as if he were subordinate to an American general sent to advise him. He was China’s leader and as such entitled to respect, but Joseph Stilwell was contemptuous and wrote doggerel in his diary and in letters to his wife in which he referred to Chiang as “Peanut.” The critical problem between the two men, too often ignored by Chinese and American scholars eager to place blame, was that although China and the United States were allies, their priorities were quite different: Each was fighting two wars, but not the same two. The Americans were fighting the Germans and the Japanese, with a Europe-first strategy, hoping that the Chinese would keep the Japanese busy. Chiang was fighting the Japanese and the Communists, assuming the Americans would defeat Japan while he concentrated his efforts against the internal threat. Neither was satisfied with the other’s action against Japan.

When the war ended, Chiang and Mao fought a civil war for control of China. Despite beginning the fight with vastly superior forces and equipment, Chiang was defeated because his government was corrupt and repressive, his generals inept, his own leadership questionable and because the war weakened his finances, resulting in hyperinflation. Chiang lost the mandate of heaven. The Chinese people lost whatever faith they may have had in his regime and were ready to try something different. Fenby gives too much credence to the old China Lobby lament that the U.S. shared responsibility because it cut off arms supplies to Chiang in an effort to stop the fighting. As Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, the American military advisor most sympathetic to Chiang, conceded, the Nationalist army had never lost a battle for lack of weapons and could have stopped the Communists from crossing the Yangtze with broomsticks if the will had been there.

And so Chiang flew off to Taiwan -- and there, regrettably, Fenby ends his tale. In fact Chiang lived 25 more years, dying of a heart attack in 1975, and the story of his rump regime on Taiwan is arguably as fascinating as that of the mainland years. The Truman administration decided to abandon Chiang and the island to the Communists, or at least to orchestrate a coup against Chiang in 1950, but both the coup and the Communist invasion were preempted by the outbreak of war in Korea. Early in the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur and Chiang collaborated to reinvolve the United States in the Chinese civil war by resuming support for Taiwan. In the mid-1950s, a renewed coup attempt, by an American-educated general backed by the CIA, failed. Aided by a powerful lobby in Washington, Chiang manipulated the American government throughout the 1950s and 1960s into providing him with military equipment, economic aid and protection against the Communists, including a mutual defense treaty to which Eisenhower grudgingly agreed in 1955. His supporters in the United States kept the government from seeking rapprochement with the PRC until the Nixon and Kissinger initiative in 1971, and he died before Washington finally recognized Beijing as the government of China and ended its alliance with Taiwan.

The civil war Chiang lost never ended. As long as he lived and for years afterward, his government claimed to be the legitimate government of China and pledged to recover the mainland. As his strength declined, he thwarted American hopes for the liberalization of Taiwan by arranging for his son to succeed him. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, recognized the futility of winning back the mainland and, to the surprise of most Americans and Chinese, began the process that turned Taiwan into a prosperous democracy. Today its people, with substantial American support, seek to preserve its de-facto independence from a Communist government bent on “reuniting” it with the rest of China; thus the Taiwan Strait is one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, a source of great tension between Washington and Beijing. Chiang would have been outraged by the “Taiwanization” of the island, by the defeat of his Kuomintang by Chen Shui-bian’s Democratic Progressive Party, but he likely would have been delighted by the lasting potential for confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. *