Chiang Kai-shek

President of China (1948-1949) and president of the Republic of China (1950-1975)

• Born: October 31, 1887
• Birthplace: Qikou, Fenghua County, Zhejiang Province, China
• Died: April 5, 1975
• Place of death: Taipei, Taiwan

Chiang was the most important person in the Kuomintang government during the Nanjing decade. He led the government and Chinese armed forces through eight years of war against Japan (1937-1945) until Allied victory, became president, and lost the civil war to the Chinese Communist Party. He and his Kuomintang followers fled in 1949 to Taiwan, where he presided until his death.

Early Life

Chiang Kai-shek (chang ki-shehk) was born in the village of Qikou, in Fenghua county, Zhejiang Province. Chiang’s grandfather had begun a successful business as a salt merchant, which Chiang’s father, Chiang Ch’ao-ts’ung (Jiang Chaocong), had continued. His mother, née Wang, was his father’s third wife. Chiang had an elder half brother, half sister, a younger brother (who died as a child), and two young sisters by his mother. His schooling began at age five; his own and others’ memory of his early years was that he was a mischievous boy. His grandfather’s death in 1895, followed by that of his father in 1896, resulted in division of the family’s property that left his mother in financially straitened circumstances for many years as she struggled to rear and educate her children.

At fourteen, Chiang married a girl chosen by his mother, née Mao. She bore him a son, Ching-kuo (Jingguo), in 1909, who became president of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1978 and died in office in 1988. Chiang had a traditional Chinese education in the classics up to 1906, when he obtained his mother’s permission to go to Japan to pursue a modern military education. Since he could not enter a military academy in Japan without Chinese government sponsorship, he first gained admission to a Chinese military academy, studied there for a year, then won a scholarship to study in Japan. There he met Chen Qimei, an associate of Sun Yat-sen, and joined the Tongmenghui (United League), which Sun had organized in 1906 with the goal of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in China. Chiang was graduated from the Shimbu Gakko (military preparatory school) in 1910 and served for a year in the 13th Field Artillery Regiment of the Japanese army, until the outbreak of the revolution against the Qing Dynasty in 1911. He then resigned from the Japanese army, sailed for Shanghai, and participated in military actions that overthrew the dynasty. With Sun’s resignation as provisional president of the Chinese Republic early in 1912 and the eclipse of the Kuomintang by strongman Yuan Shikai and warlords, Chiang spent much of his time until 1918 in Japan or in Shanghai.

Life’s Work

In 1918, Chiang received a summons to join Sun in his new government in Canton (now Guangzhou). He assisted Sun in military affairs and became the rising star of the Kuomintang. In 1923, he headed a group that visited the Soviet Union to study its party and military and political organizations and to inspect its military schools and facilities. While there, Chiang met Leon Trotsky, Georgi Chicherin, and other Soviet leaders. He submitted a report to Sun on his return in 1924. It showed his keen appreciation of some Soviet policies that contributed to the strength of the Red Army, but he was suspicious of Soviet communism and its intentions in China. In 1924, Chiang was appointed commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy, which Sun had ordered him to establish to train officers dedicated to the Kuomintang cause. Chiang took personal command in the training of the first three classes of about two thousand cadets.

After Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang took a centrist position in the party’s ideological disputes and supported continued cooperation with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists. After securing Kwangtung and neighboring areas for the Kuomintang, Chiang was appointed commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army in 1926 and launched the Northern Expedition to unify China under the Kuomintang. Victorious against numerically superior warlord armies, Chiang’s troops quickly drove through south China and captured Nanjing and Shanghai in early 1927. Chiang thereupon broke with the left-wing Kuomintang government in Wuhan that was headed by Wang Jingwei but that was manipulated by Soviet advisers, established a rival government in Nanjing with the support of right-wing Kuomintang leaders, expelled Soviet advisers, and purged Chinese Communists in areas under his control. The dissolution of the left-wing Kuomintang government in Wuhan in July, 1927, left the Nanjing Kuomintang government without challengers as Chiang resumed leadership of the campaign to unify China in 1928. The Northern Expedition ended in triumph with the capture of Beijing and the peaceful accession of the northeast (Manchuria) at the end of 1928. Thereupon the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government received international recognition.

Chiang dominated the Nationalist government politically and militarily during the Nanjing decade (1928-1937) and survived all challenges mounted by dissident politicians and generals who vied for power. His government was, however, pinched between the Communists, who sought to launch their power in China through armed rebellion, and Japanese imperialism, which aimed to subjugate China before it could modernize and defend its sovereignty. Chiang believed that China must be unified and modernized before it could face Japan. Therefore, he launched campaigns to eliminate the Communists and dissident warlords, on one hand, while on the other he sought German military advice to modernize his army; he created an air force and supported measures to build industries, roads, and railways.

Professing adherence to Sun’s political program for China, the government proclaimed in 1929 the beginning of a period of political tutelage, in preparation for constitutional rule. During the next years, new law codes and other reforms to modernize the Chinese economy and infrastructure were put into effect, but no land reform took place.

Chiang’s marriage to Song Meiling (Soong Mei-ling) in 1927 obtained for his government assistance from the modern financial community in which the Soong family was prominent. All the while he negotiated and made concessions to Japan, trading space (Manchuria and parts of northern China) for time. He was, however, compelled to halt his anticommunist campaign, which had much reduced but not eliminated that group as a result of the Xi’an Incident in December, 1936. Chiang was kidnapped and held for two weeks by a powerful subordinate general but was freed on his verbal promise to stop the anticommunist campaign and head a united front of all Chinese parties against Japan. During the Xi’an negotiations, the Soviet Union pressured the Chinese Communists to work for Chiang’s release and support his leadership so that China could act as bulwark against Japanese designs on the Soviet Union. Japan’s attack on China in July, 1937, which led to an eight-year war, sealed the United Front between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists and catapulted Chiang to the height of power as supreme military commander and party leader.

Chiang led China through eight years of war, at first heroically as it resisted a militarily superior and brutal enemy. Japan conquered the coastal regions but could not defeat a determined Chinese government that had retreated to Chongqing in the inaccessible interior. The stalemated war of attrition and accompanying inflation and other sufferings led to the deterioration of Chinese morale. The government became increasingly authoritarian and corrupt. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and United States’ and other Western colonies in Southeast Asia, the Chinese-Japanese War became part of World War II. The initial drubbing the Japanese gave to the Westerners earned for the Chinese, who had fought and held out alone, international respect. Limited United States aid after it entered World War II led to friction between the two governments. Meanwhile, the United Front with the Communists had long since broken down, as the Communists took advantage of opportunities provided by the war to increase vastly their territory and power. On his part, Chiang reserved some of his best units to blockade the Communists. Both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists prepared for the civil war to come.

Chiang’s prestige peaked as the China he led won international equality in 1943, after a century of humiliations by Western powers, with the abrogation of remaining unequal treaties with the United Kingdom and the United States. He met British prime ministerWinston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Cairo Conference in 1943 to discuss Allied war goals; China was promised return of all Japanese conquests since 1895. When titular chair of the National Government Lin Sen died in 1943, Chiang was elevated to that position also. China was recognized as a Big Four Allied power, a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, and a holder of one of five permanent seats on its Security Council.

After victory against Japan on August 14, 1945, the government returned to Nanjing. The National Assembly convened by the Kuomintang in 1946, but boycotted by the Communists, adopted a constitution that ended the period of political tutelage. Chiang was elected president by a new National Assembly under the terms of the constitution in 1948, but his vice presidential candidate was defeated by a rival Kuomintang general Li Zongren. The real contest for control of China had resumed between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in renewed civil war in 1946. United States special ambassador George C. Marshall had attempted but failed to mediate a truce that he had hoped would be followed by the formation of a coalition government. The Nationalists received economic and military aid from the United States up to 1948, and the Chinese Communists received from the Soviet Union Japanese weapons that it had captured in Manchuria. From seeming strength in the beginning, the Nationalist position deteriorated rapidly in 1948. Chiang resigned the presidency in January, 1949, to let vice president Li Zongren salvage what he could of the Nationalist debacle. When Li also failed to stem the Communist advances, Chiang and his loyal supporters retreated to Taiwan. Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

Chiang resumed his presidency of Taiwan in March, 1950, but the precarious position of the Nationalist government did not improve until Communist North Korea attacked South Korea in June, 1950. This action, and Communist China’s intervention on behalf of North Korea with more than a million “volunteers” led the United States to order its Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait and to sign a Mutual Defense Treaty with the Nationalist government in 1954. Taiwan received U.S. military aid and economic aid until the mid-1960’s to build up its war-ravaged economy. Meanwhile, Chiang supervised the reform of the Kuomintang and carried out a nonviolent land reform. These factors and a sound education system combined to bring about marked and sustained economic growth on Taiwan that has continued at an accelerated rate after Chiang’s death. He was reelected to a second six-year term as president in 1954 by those members of the National Assembly who had been elected on the mainland seven years earlier and who had retreated to Taiwan with his government; suspending the constitutional provision that limited the presidency to two terms, he was elected to a third term in 1960, a fourth term in 1966, and a fifth one in 1972, dying in office in 1975.

Significance

Chiang was truly one of China’s and the world’s key history makers of the twentieth century. From the time he set out to unify China as commander in chief of the Northern Expeditionary Army in 1926 until the defeat of the Kuomintang by the Communists in 1949, he was the dominant person in Chinese politics and played a pivotal role in the government. His authority, however, was always challenged, by rival generals and politicians in the Kuomintang and by the Chinese Communists. Thus, while he was China to the world for two decades, he never was able to assert absolute dictatorial power as his critics claimed. Chiang was a complex person, a dedicated Chinese nationalist, follower of Sun, and, after his marriage to Song Meiling and conversion, a Christian. Above all, he was a soldier-politician. While his government was mired in corruption during its last years on the mainland, and while many of his relatives benefited from the corruption, he himself remained incorruptible and lived a sternly simple life. A man of monumental ego, he equated himself with China and could not brook a vision of China other than his own. Thus he was trapped by his own failings and by international circumstances beyond his control. He was caught in the vise of Japanese imperialism and Communist armed insurrection. Even though the Allied cause finally triumphed over Japanese imperialism, the China that he had led was destroyed in the process. Thus he ended his career in eclipse on Taiwan, while his archenemy, Mao, ruled mainland China.

Bibliography

Chang, Hsin-hai. Chiang Kai-shek: Asia’s Man of Destiny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1944. Sympathetic biography of Chiang’s life up to the date of publication, with background information about China since its first defeat by Great Britain in 1842.

Chi, Hsi-sheng. Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937-1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982. An analysis of the weaknesses in the Chinese military and political systems and how they could not withstand the strains of an eight-year war.

Crozier, Brian, with Eric Chou. The Man Who Lost China: The First Full Biography of Chiang Kai-shek. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. A generally unsympathetic analysis of Chiang’s career and by no means a “full” biography.

Fenby, Jonathan. Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost. London: Free Press, 2003. A comprehensive, well-researched biography in which the author reevaluates Chiang’s life.

Furuya, Keiji. Chiang Kai-shek: His Life and Times. New York: St. John’s University Press, 1981. At almost one thousand pages, even this abridged edition gives a great deal of information. Many subheadings makes this a good reference book.

Linebarger, Paul M. A. The China of Chiang Kai-shek: A Political Study. Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1943. A sympathetic and laudatory study of Chiang and his politics.

Morwood, William. Duel for the Middle Kingdom: The Struggle Between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung for Control of China. New York: Everest House, 1979. An account of the Kuomintang-Communist struggle up to 1949, with emphasis on the two main protagonists.

Taylor, Jeremy E. “The Production of the Chiang Kai-shek Personality Cult, 1929-1975.” China Quarterly, no. 185 (March, 2006): 96-110. Describes how and why a personality cult of Chiang, which was believed to have been promoted by the Taiwanese government, was created in Taiwan.

Tong, Hollington K. Chiang Kai-shek, Soldier and Statesman: Authorized Biography. 2 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1938. A detailed, fulsome, and laudatory account of Chiang through the final years of the 1930’s.