Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) was born to the third wife of a salt merchant in the village of Hsikou (Xikou), Chekiang province, China. His father died when Chiang was three years old and the boy was raised in genteel poverty. Given a classical Chinese education in preparation for the Imperial civil service examination, Chiang was a rather moody and solitary child who sought from an early age to dominate his fellow students. When the civil service examination system was abolished in 1905, Chiang chose to become a soldier. He sought admission to a Japanese military school but was rejected because he had not been recommended by the Chinese government. However, Chiang remained in Japan long enough to learn something of the language before returning to China to attend the Paoting Military Academy in 1906. On the strength of his language experience, he was permitted to take a competitive examination to study in Japan, and was admitted to the Shimbu Gakko military academy in 1907.
Chiang
helped organized fellow Chinese expatriates into a revolutionary cell
aligned with the nationalist movement of Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang. Chiang sought to model
reform in China on the example of Japan, with the
encouragement
of Japanese pan-Asians. In 1911, he slipped away from Japan and
returned to China, mailing his uniform and dagger to military
headquarters to show that he was not an ordinary deserter. At Shanghai, Chiang was immersed in the
murky world of revolutionary politics, forging links with the Chinese
underworld (particularly a secret society called the Green Gang) and
helping
overthrow the governor of Chekiang at Hangchow.
At the same time, he became the sworn brother of Zhang Jingjiang, a
wealthy financier.
Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen was outmaneuvered politically by Yuan Shikai, a former Imperial general who had defected to the Kuomintang. Yuan became the first President of of the Republic but flouted the authority of the new Parliament. When seven provinces attempted to secede, Yuan quickly defeated their forces and outlawed the Kuomintang. In 1941 he had himself declared dictator for life, and began preparations to assume the title of emperor. Chiang attempted an attack on Shanghai Arsenal that ended in fiasco, and he fled to Japan and joined Sun Yat-sen in exile. Returning to Shanghai in November 1915, Chiang continued to stir up revolution until Yuan's death in 1916.
With Yuan dead and the Kuomintang in disarray,
China entered a period of warlordism in which military governors fought
each other for power. Sun Yat-sen began rebuilding his movement in Canton, naming Chiang as commander of
the revolutionary army. However, Sun had lost most of his support, and
Sun and Chiang fled to the International Settlement in Shanghai. Here
Chiang ran wild until 1920, when Chen Jiongming seized control of
Canton and invited Sun back.
In 1901, at the age of fourteen, Chiang had entered an
arranged marriage to nineteen-year-old Mao Fu-mei. Though Mao gave
birth to Chiang's only son, the marriage was unhappy, and Chiang
discarded Mao to marry Chen Jieru in 1921. There seems to have been
genuine affection between the two, but Chiang would discard Jieru in
turn, in 1927, in favor of a political marriage to Soong Mei-ling.
During the period between 1922 and 1928, Chiang received significant assistance from the Russians, who saw in the Kuomintang an effective counterweight to Japanese influence in China. At this time, the Chinese Communists were part of the Kuomintang. Chiang helped establish the Whampoa Military Academy on an island in the Pearl River outside Canton, where Russian advisers trained a generation of officers to a standard of professionalism previously unseen in China. Political indoctrination to ensure loyalty was a key element of the training. When Chen turned against the Kuomintang in 1923, Chiang helped Sun escape, and later directed then mercenaries who drove Chen out of Canton. This cemented Chiang's status as Sun's political heir.
After
Sun's death in 1925, Chiang outmaneuvered his rivals to become the
acknowledged leader of the Kuomintang. Chiang took the pragmatic
attitude that, if he was in charge of the army, he was in charge, and
did not concern himself much with civilian titles. Chiang first
defeated another attempt by Chen to seize Canton, then seized Hainan early in 1926. Then, with his
base secure, Chiang organized the Northern Expedition to unify all
China under the Kuomintang. By March 1927, the Northern Expedition had
seized Wuhan and Nanking in central China.
The units that seized Wuhan were dominated by
Communists who, under prodding by their Russian advisers, proclaimed
Wuhan
the capital of China and headquarters of the Kuomintang. Faced with
this bid by the Communists to take control of the Kuomintang, Chiang
launched a sudden, brutal purge of Communists on April 12 and expelled
the Russian advisers. Chiang then allied himself with the landlords,
financiers, and businessmen of China, and it was at this time that he
professed Christianity and married Soong Mei-ling, sister of Sun
Yat-sen's widow.
The Nanking Decade of 1927-1937 was arguably the
most rapid period of progress in China until the death of Mao Tse-tung.
Though Chiang believed China was not ready for liberal democracy (which
he once described as "a poison to be expelled from the country's body
politic"), and
though he ruled as a military dictator, he also established the
institutions of modern
government, regularized China's foreign relations, and worked to
improve China's infrastructure. However, Chiang had little
understanding of economics or of the politics of mass movements, and he
never really understood the plight of China's huge population of
uneducated rural peasants. His approach to them was based on the New
Life movement, a weird mixture of Confucian paternalism and Methodist
puritanism which sought to eradicate opium, foot binding, tobacco, and
alcohol. Ironically, this movement had significant Fascist trappings,
including a corps of Blue Shirts modeled after Hitler's Brown Shirts.
Chiang was determined to crush the surviving Communists, who he perceived as puppets of Russia and as the only real threat to his position. After initial campaigns based on maneuver ended in costly defeats, Chiang settled on a more successful strategy of building fixed fortifications around the Communist base areas, then slowly contracting this fortified perimeter. In 1934, the Communists of the Kiangsi base area were able to break out of a portion of the Kuomintang perimeter held by a warlord of questionable loyalty to Chiang, beginning the Long March that would take them to Yan'an in northern Shensi province. During the Long March, Mao Tse-tung was able to outmaneuver political opponents to take control of the the Chinese Communist movement, apparently with the backing of Stalin, who saw China united under Chiang as the best counterweight to Japan but was not prepared to completely abandon his ideological allies.
Chiang had been powerless to resist the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931, and wished to avoid further confrontation until he had finished eradicating the Communists. However, continued Japanese encroachments on northern China forced the issue. In 1936, Chiang flew to Sian with the intention of organizing a final offensive against the Communists. Instead, he was kidnapped by Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang), former warlord of Manchuria, who compelled Chiang to call off his campaign against the Communists and agree to a United Front against Japan. The outbreak of general war between Japan and China following the Marco Polo Incident of 1937 kept Chiang from repudiating this agreement.
The Japanese breakout from Shanghai in 1938
destroyed the
best of Chiang's divisions, and thereafter the Japanese Army ran riot
in the Yangtze river valley,
capturing Nanking and Wuhan and advancing as far as I'chang. However, as the Japanese Army
became stretched ever thinner, Chiang's armies were able to stalemate
the
Japanese, winning an occasional victory in the field (as at Changsha) but usually just harassing
the overextended
Japanese supply lines.
Chiang was a skilled politician but poor
general. For
political reasons, he continually worked to centralize control of the
Chinese
armies, which destroyed the initiative of his field commanders. His
regime become noted for widespread
corruption and incompetence, with top officials skimming their take
from American aid that passed
through their hands.
Mei-ling was an important political asset to her husband during this period. A Chinese-American educated at Wesley College, Madame Chiang spoke flawless English and was fluent in several other languages. She charmed influential American publishers, particularly the Luce family (publishers of Time and Life), and heavily influenced American reporting on the war in China. Her brother, T.V. Soong, was a banker and the leader of the powerful China lobby in Washington.
Chiang in turn was a mixed political blessing to
the Allies. His refusal to
bow to the Japanese, combined with his outspoken opposition to
colonialism, helped put the lie to the Japanese claim to be fighting a
war of Asian liberation. However, his anticolonialism was also welcomed
by Indian nationalists
and estranged him from the British,
to the point where Chinese forces were not welcome in Burma until it was much too late for
them to make much difference. The United States and Britain would
continue to diverge in their views on China throughout the war.
When the Pacific War broke out, Chiang was
delighted, correctly foreseeing that that the Americans would destroy
the Japanese Empire. He demanded an American chief of staff, whom he
thought would direct the American gravy train into China. Instead, he
got "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell.
Stilwell had been attaché to China during the Nanking Decade, knew the
language, but harbored a deep contempt for Chiang even before arriving
in China in early 1942. Stilwell never became an effective chief of
staff, in part because Chiang had no intention of turning control of
his armies over to a foreigner, and in part because Stilwell was much
more interested in leading men
in combat than in directing armies from
the rear.
During the first Burma
campaign, Stilwell discovered that Chiang was
communicating directly with his Chinese commanders and contravening
Stilwell's orders, which may explain why Stilwell embarked on the stunt
of walking out of
Burma with a small headquarters when he was supposed to be leading the
Chinese forces. Stilwell later ignored Chiang's plight when the
Japanese Icho-go offensive
threatened to overrun southern China and penetrate Szechuan province,
Chiang's final stronghold. There is evidence that Stilwell hoped to
see Chiang overthrown and replaced with someone more pliant, in effect
having the United States take control of the Chinese government.
The end of the war with Japan in 1945 led to open war with the Communists, who drove Chiang and his followers to Taiwan in 1949. Here Chiang continued to exercise tight political control until his death, which opened the way for true democratic government.
Following Chiang's death, Madame Chiang emigrated
to the United States, where she died in 2003 at the age of 106.
References
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia (c) 2007-2008 by Kent G. Budge. Index
