 Chiang Kai-shek (October 31, 1887 - April 5, 1975) was a Chinese military and
political leader who assumed the leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT) after the
1925 death of Sun Yat-sen. He commanded the Northern Expedition to unify China
against the warlords and emerged victorious in 1928 as the overall leader of the
Republic of China (ROC). Chiang led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War,
during which Chiang's stature within China weakened, but his international
prominence grew. During the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949), Chiang attempted to
eradicate the Chinese Communists, but ultimately failed, forcing his government
to retreat to Taiwan, where he continued serving as the President of the
Republic of China and Director-General of the KMT for the remainder of his life.
Early life
Chiang Kai-shek was born in the town of Xikou, China, approximately 33 km (20.5
miles) southwest of downtown Ningbo, in Fenghua County, Ningbo Prefecture,
Zhejiang Province. However, his ancestral home, a concept important in Chinese
society, was the town of Heqiao in Yixing County, Wuxi Prefecture, Jiangsu
Province (approximately 38 km or 24 miles southwest of downtown Wuxi, and 10 km.
or 6 miles from the shores of the famous Lake Taihu).
His parents were Chiang Zhao-cong and Wang Cai-yu, part of an upper-middle class
family of salt merchants. His father died when he was only three, and he wrote
of his mother as the embodiment of Confucian virtues. In an arranged marriage,
Chiang was married to fellow villager Mao Fu-mei (1882–1939). Chiang and Mao had
a son Ching-kuo and a daughter Chien-hua.
Chiang grew up in an era in which military defeats had left China destabilized
and in debt, and he decided to join the military. He began his military
education at the Baoding Military Academy, in 1906. He left for the Military
State Academy in Japan in 1907. There he was influenced by his compatriots to
support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and to set up a
Chinese Republic. He befriended fellow Zhejiang native Chen Qi-mei, and, in
1908, Chen brought Chiang to the Revolutionary Alliance. Chiang served in the
Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.
Rise to Power
With the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising, in 1911, Chiang Kai-shek returned to
China to fight in the revolution as an artillery officer. He served in the
revolutionary forces, leading a regiment in Shanghai under his friend and mentor
Chen Qi-mei. The revolution was ultimately successful in overthrowing the Qing
Dynasty and Chiang became a founding member of the Kuomintang.
After takeover of the Republican government by Yuan Shi-kai and the failed
Second Revolution, Chiang, like his Kuomintang comrades, divided his time
between exile in Japan and haven in Shanghai's foreign concession areas. In
Shanghai, Chiang also cultivated ties with the criminal underworld dominated by
the notorious Green Gang and its leader Du Yue-sheng. Chiang had numerous
brushes with the law during this period and the International Concession police
records show an arrest warrant for him for armed robbery. On February 15, 1912,
Chiang Kai-shek shot and killed Tao Cheng-zhang, the leader of the Restoration
Society, at point-blank range as Tao lay sick in a Shanghai French Concession
hospital, thus ridding Chen Qi-mei of his chief rival. In 1915, Chen Qi-mei was
assassinated by agents of Yuan Shi-kai and Chiang succeeded him as the leader of
the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Shanghai. This was during a low point in Sun
Yat-sen's career, with most of his old Revolutionary Alliance comrades refusing
to join him in the exiled Chinese Revolutionary Party, and Chen Qi-mei having
been Sun's chief lieutenant in the party.
In 1917, Sun Yat-sen moved his base of operations to Guangzhou and Chiang joined
him in 1918. Sun, at the time was largely sidelined and without arms or money,
was soon expelled from Guangzhou, in 1918, and exiled again to Shanghai, but
restored again with mercenary help in 1920. However, a rift had developed
between Sun, who sought to militarily unify China under the KMT, and Guangdong
Governor Chen Jiong-ming, who wanted to implement a federalist system with
Guangdong as a model province. On June 16, 1923, Chen attempted to expel Sun
from Guangzhou and had his residence shelled. Sun and his wife Song Qing-ling
narrowly escaped under heavy machine gun fire and were rescued by gunboats under
the direction of Chiang Kai-shek. The incident earned in Chiang Kai-shek the
trust of Sun Yat-sen.
 Sun regained control in Guangzhou, in early 1924, with the help of mercenaries
from Yunnan. He then undertook a reform of the Kuomintang and established a
revolutionary government aimed at unifying China under the KMT. That same year,
Sun sent Chiang Kai-shek to spend three months in Moscow studying the Soviet
political and military system. Chiang left his eldest son Ching-kuo in Russia,
who would not return until 1937. Chiang Kai-shek returned to Guangzhou and in
1924 was made Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy. The early years at
Whampoa allowed Chiang to cultivate a cadre of young officers loyal to him and,
by 1925, Chiang's proto-army was scoring victories against local rivals in
Guangdong province. Here he also first met and worked with a young Zhou En-lai,
who was selected to be Whampoa's Political Commissar. However, Chiang was deeply
critical of the Kuomintang-Communist Party United Front, suspicious that the
Communists would take over the KMT from within.
Throughout his rise to power, Chiang Kai-shek also benefited from membership of
the semi-clandestine nationalist Hongmen fraternity, to which Sun Yat-Sen also
belonged, and which remained a source of support during his leadership of China
and later Taiwan.
Succession of Sun Yat-Sen
With Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, a power vacuum developed in the KMT. A power
struggle ensued between Chiang, who leaned towards the right wing of the KMT,
and Sun Yat-sen's close comrade-in-arms Wang Jing-wei, who leaned towards the
left wing of the party. Though Chiang ranked relatively low in the civilian
hierarchy, and Wang had succeeded Sun to power as Chairman of the National
Government, Chiang's deft political maneuvering eventually allowed him to emerge
victorious. Chiang, who became Commander-in-Chief of the National Revolutionary
Forces in 1925, launched in July 1926 the Northern Expedition, a military
campaign to defeat the warlords controlling northern China and unify the country
under the KMT.
The National Revolutionary Army branched into three divisions - to the west,
Wang Jing-wei led a column to take Wuhan; to the east, Bai Chong-xi led another
column to take Shanghai; while Chiang led in the middle to take Nanjing—before
they were to press ahead to take Beijing. However, in January 1927, allied with
the Chinese Communists and Soviet Agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang Jing-wei and his
KMT leftist allies (including Hu Han-min and Soong Ching-ling), having taken the
city of Wuhan amid much popular mobilization and fanfare, declared the National
Government to have moved to Wuhan. After taking Nanjing in March (and with
Shanghai under the control of his close ally General Bai), Chiang momentarily
halted his campaign and decided to break with the leftists.
On April 12, Chiang began a swift and brutal attack on thousands of suspected
Communists. He then established his own National Government in Nanjing,
supported by his conservative allies. The communists were purged from the KMT
and the Soviet advisers were expelled. This earned Chiang the support and
financial backing of the Shanghai business community, and maintained him the
loyalty of his Whampoa officers (many of whom hailed from Hunan elites were
discontented by the land redistribution Wang Jing-wei was enacting in the area),
but led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang Jing-wei's National
Government, though popular with the masses, was weak militarily and was soon
overtaken by a local warlord, forcing Wang and his leftist government into
joining him in Nanjing. Finally, the warlord capital of Beijing was taken in
June 1928 and in December, the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xue-liang pledged
allegiance to Chiang's government.
Chiang made gestures to cement himself as the successor of Sun Yat-sen. In a
pairing of much political significance, Chiang married, on December 1, 1927,
Soong May-ling, the younger sister of Soong Ching-ling (Sun Yat-sen's widow,
whom he had proposed to beforehand but was swiftly rejected) in Japan and thus
positioned himself as Sun Yat-sen's brother-in-law. (To please Soong's parents,
Chiang had to first divorce his first wife and concubines and promise eventually
to convert to Christianity. He was baptized in 1929.) Upon reaching Beijing,
Chiang paid homage to Sun Yat-sen and had his body moved to the capital Nanjing
to be enshrined in a grand mausoleum.
Tutelage over China
Chiang Kai-shek gained nominal control of China, but his party was too weak to
lead and too strong to overthrow. In 1928, Chiang was named Generalissimo of all
Chinese forces and Chairman of the National Government, a post he held until
1932 and later from 1943 until 1948. According to KMT political orthodoxy, this
period thus began the period of political tutelage under the dictatorship of the
Kuomintang.
The decade of 1928 to 1937 was one of consolidation and accomplishment for
Chiang's government. Some of the harsh aspects of foreign concessions and
privileges in China were moderated through diplomacy. The government acted
energetically to modernize the legal and penal systems, stabilize prices,
amortize debts, reform the banking and currency systems, build railroads and
highways, improve public health facilities, legislate against traffic in
narcotics, and augment industrial and agricultural production. Great strides
also were made in education and, in an effort to help unify Chinese society -
the New Life Movement was launched to stress Confucian moral values and personal
discipline. Standard Mandarin, then known as Guoyu, was promoted as a standard
tongue. The widespread establishment of communications facilities further
encouraged a sense of unity and pride among the people.
These successes, however, were met with constant upheavals with need of further
political and military consolidation. Though much of the urban areas were now
under the control of his party, the countryside still lay under the influence of
severely weakened yet undefeated warlords and communists. Chiang fought with
most of his warlord allies, with one northern rebellion - against the warlords
Yen Hsi-shan and Feng Yu-xiang - in 1930 during the Central Plains War. It
almost bankrupted the government and cost almost 250,000 casualties in both
sides. When Hu Han-min established a rival government in Guangzhou in 1931,
Chiang's government was nearly toppled. A complete eradication of the Communist
Party of China eluded Chiang. The Communists regrouped in Jiangxi and
established the Chinese Soviet Republic. Chiang's anti-communist stance
attracted the aid of German military advisers, and in Chiang's fifth campaign to
defeat the Communists in 1934, he surrounded the Red Army only to see the
Communists escape through the epic Long March to Yan'an.
 Wartime Leader of China
After Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chiang resigned as Chairman of the
National Government. He returned shortly, adopting a slogan first internal
pacification, then external resistance, which meant that the government would
first attempt to defeat the Communists before engaging in the Japanese directly.
But Japan's advance on Shanghai and bombardment of Nanjing in 1932 disrupted
Chiang Kai-shek's offensives against Communists. Though it continued for several
years, the policy of appeasing Japan and avoiding war was widely unpopular. In
December 1936, Chiang flew to Xi'an to coordinate a major assault on Red Army
forces holed up in Yan'an. However, Chiang's allied commander Chang Hsueh-liang,
whose forces were to be used in his attack and whose homeland of Manchuria had
been invaded by the Japanese, had other plans. On December 12, Chang Hsueh-liang
and several other Nationalist generals kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek for two weeks
in what is known as the Xi'an Incident. They forced Chiang into making a Second
United Front with the Communists against Japan. Though he lost his chance to
finish off the communists, Chiang refused to make a formal public announcement
of this United Front as many had hoped and his troops continued fighting the
Communists throughout the war.
All-out war with Japan broke out in July 1937. In August of the same year,
Chiang sent 500,000 of his best trained and equipped soldiers to defend
Shanghai. With about 250,000 Chinese casualties, Chiang lost his political base
of Whampoa-trained officers. Although Chiang lost militarily, the battle
dispelled Japanese claims that it could conquer China in three months and
demonstrated to the Western powers (which occupied parts of the city and
invested heavily in it) that the Chinese would not surrender under intense
Japanese fire. This was skillful diplomatic maneuvering on the part of Chiang,
who knew the city would eventually fall, but wanted to make a strong gesture in
order to secure Western military aid for China. By December, the capital city of
Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese and Chiang moved the government inland to
Chongqing. Devoid of economic and industrial resources, Chiang could not
counter-attack and held off the rest of the war preserving whatever territory he
still controlled, though his strategy succeeded in stretching Japanese supply
lines and bogging down Japanese soldiers in the vast Chinese interior who would
otherwise have been sent to conquer southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.
With the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the opening of the Pacific War, China became
one of the Allied Powers. During and after World War II, Chiang and his
American-educated wife Soong May-ling, commonly referred to as Madame Chiang
Kai-shek, held the unwavering support of the United States China Lobby which saw
in them the hope of a Christian and democratic China. Chiang Kai-shek's policies
were far from Christian or democratic, but this remained unknown to the US
public due to strong state-imposed censorship in China and self-imposed
censorship in the US during the war years and after. This was especially
fomented by the Chiangs' close friendship with TIME magazine publisher Henry
Luce.
 Chiang's strategy during the War opposed the strategies of both Mao Ze-dong and
the United States. The US regarded Chiang as an important ally able to help
shorten the war by engaging the Japanese occupiers in China. Chiang, in
contrast, used powerful associates such as HH Kung in Hong Kong to build the ROC
army for certain conflict with the communist forces after the end of World War
II. This fact was not understood well in the United States. The US liaison
officer, General Joseph Stilwell, correctly deduced that Chiang's strategy was
to accumulate munitions for future civil war rather than fight the Japanese, but
Stilwell was unable to convince Franklin D Roosevelt of this and precious
Lend-Lease armaments continued to be allocated to the Kuomintang. Chiang was
recognized as one of the Big Four Allied leaders along with Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin and traveled to attend the Cairo Conference in November
1943. His wife acted as his translator and adviser.
Losing China
When Japan surrendered in 1945, Chiang's Chongqing government was ill-equipped
to reassert its authority in eastern China. It was able to reclaim the coastal
cities with American assistance, and sometimes those of former puppet and
Japanese troops, a deeply unpopular move. The countryside in the north was
already largely under the control of the Communists, whose forces were better
motivated and disciplined than those of the KMT.
Following the war, the United States had encouraged peace talks between Chiang
and Communist leader Mao Ze-dong in Chongqing.
Distrustful of each other and of the United States' professed neutrality, they
soon resorted to all-out war. The U.S. suspended aid to Chiang Kai-shek for much
of the period of 1946 to 1948, in the midst of fighting against the People's
Liberation Army led by Mao Ze-dong.
Though Chiang had achieved status abroad as a world leader, his government was
deteriorating with corruption and inflation. The war had severely weakened the
Nationalists both in terms of resources and popularity, while the Communists
were strengthened by aid from Stalin, and guerrilla organizations extending
throughout rural areas. The Nationalists initially had superiority in arms and
men, but their lack of popularity, poor morale, and apparent disorganization
soon allowed the Communists to gain the upper hand.
Meanwhile a new Constitution promulgated in 1947, and Chiang was elected by the
National Assembly to be President. This marked the beginning of the 'democratic
constitutional government' period in KMT political orthodoxy, but the Communists
refused to recognize the new Constitution and its government as legitimate.
Chiang resigned as President on January 21, 1949, as KMT forces suffered massive
losses against the communists. Vice President Li Tsung-jen took over as Acting
President, but his relationship with Chiang soon deteriorated, as Chiang still
acted as if he were in power, and Li was forced into exile in the United States
under a medical excuse (under Chiang's direction, Li was later formally
impeached by the Control Yuan). In the early morning of December 10, 1949,
Communist troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT occupied city in mainland
China, where Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo directed the defense
at the Chengdu Central Military Academy. The aircraft May-ling evacuated them to
Taiwan on the same day, forever removing them from the Chinese mainland.
Presidency in Taiwan
Chiang moved his government to Taipei, Taiwan, where he formally resumed his
duties as president on March 1, 1950. Chiang was reelected by the National
Assembly to be the President of the ROC on May 20, 1954 and later on in 1960,
1966, and 1972. In this position he continued to claim sovereignty over all of
China. In the context of the Cold War, most of the Western world recognized this
position and the ROC represented China in the United Nations and other
international organizations until the 1970s.
Despite the democratic constitution, the government under Chiang was a
repressive, authoritarian, single-party state consisting almost completely of
non-Taiwanese mainlanders; the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period
of Communist Rebellion greatly enhanced executive power and the goal of retaking
the mainland allowed the KMT to maintain its monopoly on power and to outlaw
opposition parties. The government's official line for these martial law
provisions stemmed from the claim that emergency provisions were necessary,
since the Communists and KMT were still technically under a state of war,
without any cease-fire signed, after Chiang retreated to Taiwan. His government
sought to impose Chinese nationalism and repressed the local culture, such as by
forbidding the use of Taiwanese in mass media broadcasts or in schools. The
government permitted free debate within the confines of the legislature, but
jailed dissidents who were either labelled as supporters of Chinese communism or
Taiwan independence. His son Chiang Ching-kuo and Chiang Ching-kuo's successor
Lee Teng-hui would, in the 1980s and 1990s, increase native Taiwanese
representation in the government and loosen the many authoritarian controls of
the Chiang Kai-shek era..
Since new elections could not be held in their Communist-occupied
constituencies, the members of the KMT-dominated National Assembly, Legislative
Yuan, and Control Yuan held their posts indefinitely. It was under the Temporary
Provisions that Chiang was able to bypass term limits to remain as president. He
was reelected (unopposed) by the National Assembly as president four times in
1954, 1960, 1966, and 1972.
Defeated by the Communists, Chiang purged members of the KMT previously accused
of corruption, and major figures in the previous mainland government such as HH
Kung and TV Soong exiled themselves to the United States. Though the government
was politically authoritarian and controlled key industries, it encouraged
economic development, especially in the export sector. A sweeping Land Reform
Act, as well as American foreign aid during the 1950's laid the foundation for
Taiwan's economic success, becoming one of the East Asian Tigers.
Death and Legacy
In 1975, 26 years after Chiang fled to Taiwan, he died in Taipei at the age of
87. He had suffered a major heart attack and pneumonia in the months before and
died from renal failure aggravated with advanced cardiac malfunction at 23:50 on
April 5.
A month of mourning was declared during which the Taiwanese people were asked to
put on black armbands. Televisions ran in black-and-white while all banquets or
celebrations were forbidden. On the mainland, however, Chiang's death was met
with little apparent mourning and newspapers gave the brief headline "Chiang
Kai-shek Has Died." Chiang's corpse was put in a copper coffin and temporarily
interred at his favorite residence in Cihhu, Dasi, Taoyuan County. When his son
Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, he was also entombed in a separate mausoleum in
nearby Touliao. The hope was to have both buried at their birthplace in Fenghua
once the mainland was recovered. In 2004, Chiang Fang-liang, the widow of Chiang
Ching-kuo, asked that both father and son be buried at Wuchih Mountain Military
Cemetery in Sijhih, Taipei County. The state funeral ceremony is planned to take
place during the spring of 2006. Chiang Fang-liang and Soong May-ling had agreed
in 1997 that the former leaders be first buried but still be moved to mainland
China in the event of reunification.
Chiang was succeeded as President by Vice President Yen Chia-kan and as KMT
party leader by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, who retired Chiang Kai-shek's title of
Director-General and instead assumed the position of Chairman. Yen Chia-kan's
presidency was mainly symbolic, with real power held by Premier Chiang Ching-kuo,
who became President after Yen's term ended three years later.
Chiang Kai-shek's current popularity in Taiwan is sharply divided among
political lines, enjoying greater support among KMT voters and the mainlander
population. However, he is largely unpopular among DPP supporters and voters.
Since the democratization of the 1990s, his picture began to be removed from
public buildings, while many of his statues have been taken down; in sharp
contrast to his son Ching-kuo and to Sun Yat-sen, his memory is rarely invoked
by current political parties, including the Kuomintang.
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