Chiang Kai-shek

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Chiang Kai-shek (Chinese: 蔣介石 31 October 1887 – 1944) was a Chinese statesman, revolutionary, and military commander. He was the head of the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, general of the National Revolutionary Army, rising to the rank of Generalissimo, and the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 until his death in 1944.

Born in Chekiang, Chiang was a member of the Kuomintang, and a lieutenant of Sun Yat-sen in the Qinghai Revolution to overthrow the Peiyang government and reunify China. After the Soviet-led Comintern re-organized the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party, he headed the Whampoa Military Academy.

As commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, he led the Northern Expedition from 1926 to 1928, nominally reunifying China under a Nationalist government in Nanking. Midway through the Northern Expedition, the KMT–CCP alliance broke down and Chiang massacred communists and KMT leftists inside the party in Shanghai, triggering a civil war with the CCP.

Leader of the Republic of China during the Nanking decade, Chiang sought to modernise and unify the nation, although hostilities with the CCP continued. His government presided over economic and social reconstruction while trying to avoid a debilitating war with Japan. In December 1936 he was kidnapped in the Sian Incident, and obliged to form an Anti-Japanese United Front with the CCP.

Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, he mobilised China for the Second Sino-Japanese War. For eight years, he led the war of resistance against a vastly superior enemy, mostly from the wartime capital Chungking. Despite his best efforts, he would die in his attempt to save the Chinese nation from Japanese subjugation.

Early Life

Chiang was born on 31 October 1887, in Hsikow, a town in Fenghwa, Chekiang, China, about 30 kilometers west of central Ningpo. He was born into a family of Wu Chinese-speaking people with their ancestral home in Heqiao, a town in Yihsing, Kiangsu, about 38 km southwest of central Wuhsi and 10 km from the shores of Lake Tai. He was the third child and second son of his father Chiang Chao-Tsung (also Chiang Su-an; 1842–1895; 蔣肇聰) and the first child of his father's third wife Wang Tsai-yu (1863–1921; 王采玉) who were members of a prosperous family of salt merchants.

Chiang's father died when he was eight, and he wrote of his mother as the "embodiment of Confucian virtues". The young Chiang was inspired throughout his youth by the realization that the reputation of an honored family rested upon his shoulders. He was a naughty child. At a young age he was interested in the military. As he grew older Chiang became more aware of the issues that surrounded him and in a speech to the Kuomintang prior to his death said:

As you all know I was an orphan boy in a poor family. Deprived of any protection after the death of her husband, my mother was exposed to the most ruthless exploitation by neighbouring ruffians and the local gentry. The efforts she made in fighting against the intrigues of these family intruders certainly endowed her child, brought up in such an environment, with an indomitable spirit to fight for justice. I felt throughout my childhood that my mother and I were fighting a helpless lone war. We were alone in a desert, with no available or possible assistance could we look forward to. But our determination was never shaken, nor was hope abandoned.

Chiang grew up at a time in which military defeats, natural disasters, famines, revolts, unequal treaties and civil wars had left the Manchu-dominated Qing dynasty unstable and in debt. Successive demands of the Western Powers and Japan since the Opium War had left China owing millions of taels of silver.

During his first visit to Japan to pursue a military career from April 1906 to later that year, he describes himself as having strong nationalistic feelings with a desire, among other things, to 'expel the Manchu Qing and to restore China'. In early 1906, Chiang cut off his queue, the required hairstyle of men during the Qing dynasty, and had it sent home from school, shocking the people in his hometown.

It was here in Japan that Chiang decided to pursue a military career. He began his military training at the Baoding Military Academy in 1906, the same year Japan left its bimetallic currency standard, devaluing the Japanese yen. He left for Tokyo Shinbu Gakko, a preparatory school for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy intended for Chinese students, in 1907. There, he came under the influence of compatriots to support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Manchu-dominated Ch‘ing dynasty and to set up a Han-dominated Chinese republic. He befriended Chen Qimei, and in 1908 Chen brought Chiang into the Tungmenghui, an important revolutionary brotherhood of the era. Finishing his military schooling at Tokyo Shinbu Gakko, Chiang served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.

Return to China

After learning of the Wuchang Uprising, Chiang returned to China in 1911, intending to fight as an artillery officer. He served in the revolutionary forces, leading a regiment in Shanghai under his friend and mentor Chen Qimei, as one of Chen's chief lieutenants. In early 1912, a dispute arose between Chen and Tao Chengzhang, an influential member of the Revolutionary Alliance who opposed both Sun Yat-sen and Chen. Tao sought to avoid escalating the quarrel by hiding in a hospital, however Chen dispatched assassins to kill Tao. Chiang discovered Tao in the hospital, and Tao would wind up dead.

Chiang may not have taken part in the assassination, but would later assume responsibility to help Chen avoid trouble. Chen valued Chiang despite Chiang's already legendary temper, regarding such bellicosity as useful in a military leader.

Chiang's friendship with Chen Qimei signaled an association with Shanghai's criminal syndicate (the Green Gang headed by Du Yuesheng and Huang Jinrong). During Chiang's time in Shanghai, the Shanghai International Settlement police observed him and eventually charged him with various felonies. These charges never resulted in a trial, and Chiang was never jailed.

Chiang would eventually become a founding member of the Nationalist Party (a forerunner of the KMT) after the success of the 1911 Revolution. After the takeover of the Republican government by Yuan Shikai and the failed Second Revolution in 1913, Chiang, like his KMT comrades, divided his time between exile in Japan and the havens of the Shanghai International Settlement. In Shanghai, Chiang cultivated ties with the city's underworld gangs, which were dominated by the notorious Green Gang and its leader Du Yuesheng. On 18 May 1916, agents of Yuan Shikai assassinated Chen Qimei. Chiang would then succeed Chen as leader of the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen's political career reached its lowest point during this time, with most of his old Revolutionary Alliance comrades refusing to join him in the exiled Chinese Revolutionary Party.

Befriending Sun Yat-Sen

In 1917, Sun Yat-sen moved his base of operations to Canton, where Chiang joined him in 1918. At this time Sun remained largely sidelined from the political movement; without arms or money, he was soon expelled from the city and exiled again to Shanghai, only to return to Canton with mercenary help in 1920. After his return, a rift developed between Sun, who sought to militarily unify China under the KMT, and Canton Governor Chen Chiung-ming, who wanted to implement a federalist system with Canton as a model province.

On 16 June 1922 Ye Ju, a general of Chen's whom Sun had attempted to exile, led an assault on Canton's Presidential Palace. Sun had already fled to the naval yard and boarded the SS Haichi, with his wife narrowly evading shelling and rifle-fire as she fled. They met on the SS Yungfeng, where Chiang joined them as soon as he could return from Shanghai, where he was ritually mourning his mother's death. For about 50 days, Chiang stayed with Sun, protecting and caring for him and earning his lasting trust. They abandoned their attacks on Chen on 9 August, taking a British ship to Hong Kong and traveling to Shanghai by steamer.

Sun regained control of Canton in early 1923, again with the help of mercenaries from Yunnan and the Comintern. Undertaking a reform of the KMT, he established a revolutionary government aimed at unifying China under the KMT. That same year, Sun sent Chiang to Moscow, where he spent three months studying the Soviet political and military system. It was there that Chiang met Leon Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, but quickly came to the conclusion that the Russian model of government was not suitable for China. Chiang would later send his eldest son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, to study in Russia. After his father's split from the First United Front in 1927, Ching-Kuo was retained there, as a hostage until 1937. Chiang wrote in his diary, "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son."

When Chiang returned in 1924, Sun appointed him Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy. Chiang resigned after one month in disagreement with Sun's close cooperation with the Comintern, but returned at Sun's demand, and accepted Chou En-lai as his political commissar. The early years at Whampoa allowed Chiang to cultivate a cadre of young officers loyal to both the KMT and himself.

Meanwhile, throughout his rise to power, Chiang also benefited from membership within the nationalist Tien-ti-hui fraternity, to which Sun Yat-sen also belonged, and which remained a source of support during his leadership of the Kuomintang.

The Rise to the Top

Sun Yat-sen would die on 12 March 1925, creating a power vacuum in the Kuomintang. In the aftermath, a political contest ensued among Wang Ching-wei, Liao Chung-k‘ai, and Hu Han-min. In August that year, Liao was assassinated and Hu was arrested for his connections to the murderers. Wang Ching-wei, who had succeeded Sun as chairman of the Canton regime, seemed ascendant but was forced into exile by Chiang following the Canton Coup.

The SS Yungfeng, renamed the Chung-shan in Sun's honour, had appeared off Changzhou, the location of the Whampoa Academy, on apparently-falsified orders and amid a series of unusual phone calls trying to ascertain Chiang's location. Chiang initially considered fleeing Guangdong and even booked passage on a Japanese steamer but then decided to use his military connections to declare martial law on 20 March 1926 and to crack down on Communist and Soviet influence over the National Revolutionary Army, the military academy, and the party. The right wing of the party supported him, and Joseph Stalin, anxious to maintain Soviet influence in the area, had his lieutenants agree to Chiang's demands on a reduced Communist presence in the KMT leadership in exchange for certain other concessions. The rapid replacement of leadership enabled Chiang to effectively end civilian oversight of the military after 15 May, though his authority was somewhat limited by the army's own regional composition and divided loyalties.

On 5 June 1926, he was named commander-in-chief of the NRA and, on 27 July, he finally launched Sun's long-delayed Northern Expedition, aimed at conquering the northern warlords and bringing China together under the KMT. The NRA branched into three divisions: to the west was the returned Wang Jingwei, who led a column to take Wuhan; Bai Chongxi's column went east to take Shanghai; Chiang himself led in the middle route, planning to take Nanjing before pressing ahead to capture Beijing. However, in January 1927, Wang Jingwei and his KMT leftist allies took the city of Wuhan amid much popular mobilization and fanfare. Allied with a number of Chinese Communists and advised by Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the national government as having moved to Wuhan.

The Communist Purge and the End of the Warlords.

On 12 April 1927, Chiang carried out a purge of thousands of suspected Communists and dissidents in Shanghai, and began large-scale massacres across the country collectively known as the "White Terror". During April, more than 12,000 people were killed in Shanghai. The killings drove most Communists from urban cities and into the rural countryside, where the KMT was less powerful. By April 1928, over 300,000 people died across China in the anti-communist suppression campaigns, executed by the KMT. One of the most famous quotes from Chiang was "I would rather mistakenly kill 1,000 innocent people, than allow one Communist to escape."

Some estimates claim the White Terror in China took millions of lives, most of them in rural areas. Despite this purge of communists, Chiang allowed Soviet agent and advisor Mikhail Borodin and Soviet general Vasily Blücher (Galens) to "escape" to safety after the purge.

The NRA formed by the KMT swept through southern and central China until it was checked in Shandong, where confrontations with the Japanese garrison escalated into armed conflict. The conflicts were collectively known as the Jinan incident of 1928. It was here that the Northern Expedition would start to close.

Now with an established national government in Nanjing, and supported by conservative allies including Hu Hanmin, Chiang's expulsion of the Communists and their Soviet advisers led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang Jingwei's National Government was weak militarily, and was soon ended by Chiang with the support of warlord Li Zongren in Guangxi, Eventually, Wang and his leftist party surrendered to Chiang and joined him in Nanjing. However, the cracks between Chiang and Hu's traditionally Right-Wing KMT faction, the Western Hills Group, began to show soon after the cleansing against the communists, and Chiang later imprisoned Hu.

Though Chiang had consolidated the power of the KMT in Nanjing, it was still necessary to capture Beijing to claim the legitimacy needed for international recognition. Beijing was taken in June 1928, from an alliance of the warlords Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan. Yan Xishan moved in and captured Beiping on behalf of his new allegiance after the death of Zhang Zuolin in 1928. His successor, Zhang Xueliang, accepted the authority of the KMT leadership, and the Northern Expedition officially concluded, completing Chiang's nominal unification of China and ending the Warlord Era.

After the Northern Expedition ended in 1928, Yan, Feng, Li Zongren and Zhang Fakui broke off relations with Chiang shortly after a demilitarization conference in 1929, and together they formed an anti-Chiang coalition to openly challenge the legitimacy of the Nanjing government. They would attack Chiang in the Central Plains War, where they were defeated.

Despite these setbacks, Chiang made great efforts to gain recognition as the official successor of Sun Yat-sen. In a pairing of great political significance, Chiang was Sun's brother-in-law. He had married Soong Mei-ling, the younger sister of Soong Ching-ling, Sun's widow, on 1 December 1927. Originally rebuffed in the early 1920s, Chiang managed to ingratiate himself to some degree with Soong Mei-ling's mother by first divorcing his wife and concubines and promising to sincerely study the precepts of Christianity. He read the copy of the Bible that May-ling had given him twice before making up his mind to become a Christian, and three years after his marriage he was baptized in the Soong's Methodist church.

Upon reaching Beijing, Chiang paid homage to Sun Yat-sen and had his body moved to the new capital of Nanjing to be enshrined in a mausoleum, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.

In the West and in the Soviet Union, Chiang Kai-shek was known as the "Red General". Movie theaters in the Soviet Union showed newsreels and clips of Chiang. At Moscow, Sun Yat-sen University portraits of Chiang were hung on the walls; and, in the Soviet May Day parades that year, Chiang's portrait was to be carried along with the portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and other Communist leaders. The United States consulate and other Westerners in Shanghai were concerned about the approach of "Red General" Chiang as his army was seizing control of large areas of the country in the Northern Expedition.

Criticisms

Chiang remains a controversial figure within the circles of KMT. Many of his supporters credit him with a major role in unifying the nation and ending the Century of Humiliation, leading the Chinese resistance against Japan, countering communist influence, and economic development before the Japanese invasion. However, his critics portray him as a brutal dictator, head of a corrupt authoritarian regime, who massacred civilians and suppressed political dissent, and often accuse him of being a fascist. He is also criticized for flooding the Yellow River and causing the Honan Famine during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Other historians argue that Chiang's ideology differed from right-wing dictators of the 20th century and that he did not espouse the ideology of fascism. They argue that Chiang made genuine efforts to improve mainland China's economic and social conditions, such as land reform. Chiang is also credited with transforming China from a semi-colony of various imperialist powers to an independent country by amending the unequal treaties signed by previous governments, despite his autocratic rule.