Chinese history

The man who lost China

History may have judged Chiang Kai-shek too severely

May 7th 2009 IN IMPERIAL

China, overthrown rulers Corbis

were ill-treated in the

official histories written by
the dynasty that
succeeded them. They
were blamed for all the
evils that justified the
transfer of the mandate of
heaven. Today, not all
Chinese history is written by its latest winners, the Chinese
Communist Party. But its victory certainly colours views of the
Republican period that preceded the revolution.

One casualty of this has been the reputation of the Republic's

leader, Chiang Kai-shek. During the second world war, he was a
hero in the West, feted in Cairo in 1943 by Winston Churchill and
Franklin Roosevelt as the free world's great hope against Japan
and the Communists in China. But, after the war, as the armies of
his Kuomintang (KMT) government crumbled in the face of Mao
Zedong's Communists, Chiang's standing likewise disintegrated.

The KMT was a dictatorial regime that had risen to power partly
through exploiting its links with Shanghai gangsters. It was
monstrously corrupt and mismanaged the economy into
hyperinflation. It collapsed, largely, it seemed, under the weight of
its own fecklessness and cruelty, and ended up ruling just Taiwan,
from where Chiang dreamed ever more forlornly of recovering the
mainland. Alliance with the dictatorship he brutally established
there seemed one of those embarrassing right-wing
entanglements the cold war foisted on America. Chiang himself,
with his glamorous wife, Soong Mayling, his cool, austere manner
and his comic-book title, “the Generalissimo”, seemed
somewhere on the spectrum between joke and monster.

This enthralling book by Jay Taylor of Harvard In this section

University shows that these conventional views Spring bringers

of both Chiang and the Chinese civil war are The man who lost China

caricatures. It is the first biography to make full Future shock

use of the Chiang family archive. This includes The millennium bug

Chiang's own diary, in which he wrote at least a Living daylights

page of classical Chinese daily from 1918 to Golden globes

1972. The picture that emerges is of a far more Reprints

subtle and prescient thinker than the man

America's General Joseph Stilwell used to refer to as “peanut”,
and Britain's chief of staff, Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,
dismissed in Cairo as “a cross between a pine marten and a
ferret”.

In the 1930s Chiang soon realised that his flirtation with Italian-
style fascism and a corps of Chinese “blue shirts” was a mistake,
asking “how would I differ from the Communists?” He foresaw
that the Japanese occupation would never be defeated until
America joined the war. Personally incorruptible, Mr Taylor
believes, he also understood the damage that graft did to the
KMT. Indeed, he seemed to know that the better-disciplined, more
fiercely motivated Communists would win one day.

Yet they need not have done. Mr Taylor recounts one of the
pivotal moments in China's civil war. This was the Xi'an incident of
1936, when Chiang was kidnapped by a warlord and pressed to
form a united front with the Communists against the Japanese.
Freed, Chiang had the chance of “an all-out military solution to
the Communist problem”. But when an aide suggested finishing
off the Communists, he “bent his head and did not answer. He
had given his word.” How Mao must have laughed.

Other allies proved as fickle as Mao. In 1971, as Richard Nixon

and Henry Kissinger prepared their opening to China, and
consequent ditching of Taiwan, their plans reached Chiang not
from Washington, DC, but from Zhou Enlai, China's premier. Mr
Taylor assumes he passed on a chilling exchange in which the
author claims Mr Kissinger seemed to “tolerate a military takeover
of the island by the Chinese”.

By then, however, Chiang had come to think that the loss of the
mainland might have been “providential”. It had allowed him to
achieve “true progress” in developing Taiwan, impossible on the
mainland because of “subversion” and civil war. But Taiwan was
also an unpleasantly repressive place. Its impressive strides
towards democracy, which have seen the KMT both lose power
and regain it, came long after his death in 1975. It was his son,
Chiang Ching-kuo, who will be remembered for ushering in
political reform.
Under the elder Chiang, the KMT remained what it had become in
the 1920s, when, during its first united front with the Communists,
it was, like them, built with Soviet advice on Leninist lines. Chiang
Kai-shek's Taiwan was in effect a one-party dictatorship presiding
over a capitalist economy, pursuing hell-for-leather growth. Rather
like present-day China, in fact. In this sense, Mr Taylor concludes,
Chiang was not such a loser after all.
This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition