Generalissimo – Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost
By Jonathan Fenby
Published by The Free Press, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Chiang in charge

A towering biography of Chiang Kai-shek that helps explain Japanese aggression, World War II, Mao and ultimately China, if not Taiwan too.

The Nation
Published autumn 2005
From a mountain of material on one of the last century’s most compelling world leaders, Jonathan Fenby mines a small but perfect gem of an episode to begin his terrific biography of Chiang Kai-Shek. In 13 pages of ornate scene-setting, he recounts the 13 days in 1936 that came to be known as the Xi’an Incident, during which Chiang was abducted by military rebels demanding that he unite his Nationalists with Mao Zedong’s communists to repel the Japanese invasion.
Chiang scoffed, ready to die instead, and meanwhile Moscow dubbed his kidnapping a plot by the Japanese, who had just signed an anti-communism pact with Germany. Stalin needed Chiang, and at Mao’s behest, Chiang was released.
Urged to act immediately on his interrupted plan to crush Mao, the Generalissimo declined and, putting his chief abductor under house arrest, ignored an opportunity that would have turned history on its head.
Fenby’s deft description of the Xi’an Incident is utterly engaging even without the final polishing he gives his gem. It ends up positively glowing thanks to its moving side-portrait of the chief abductor, Zhang Xueliang, who was called the Young Marshal.
Zhang’s house arrest ended in Taiwan in 1991, and he died in Hawaii 10 years later, age 100, a hero to Mao and Jiang Zemin. But at first, Chiang banished him to a hostel in the eastern port of Ningbo. It was just up the hill from the village where the Generalissimo was born.
Thus begins Fenby’s life of Chiang Kai-Shek, with history shuddering and a return home, to peach blossoms and terraces of tea.
Fenby is a former Guardian editor whose tenure at the helm of the South China Morning Post in the late ’90s was tainted by office politics in which Beijing played a role. He currently co-edits a website called EarlyWarning.com that purports to give subscribers a leg up on world events.
Somehow he’s found the time to author this comprehensive (500 pages plus maps, photos, bibliography) and necessary fresh look at Chiang, a man who was once characterised as “stubborn, disrespectful, egotistical and somehow took these as compliments”.
The detail can be testing, right from Chiang being wet-nursed by a neighbour, but is never wearying. There is considerable anecdote of a personal nature – at 32, for example, he lured a 13-year-old girl into a hotel room and told her that refusing sex with him “would diminish the morale and spirit of the revolution” (he married her two years later) – but Fenby remains focused on events of far greater import to the times.
In doing so he embraces much of the 20th-century history of China and, by ready extension, some of the reasons the world is as we know it today.
In the epilogue, he offers a lengthy and eminently fair assessment of Chiang, suggesting that despite all his failures, he (but not Mao) was the unifying personality needed to prevent China from allying with Japan, a possibility that could have resulted in the Soviet Union’s defeat and upset the whole balance of World War II.
Fenby notes that China is now, after the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and other horrors, becoming more like it was under Chiang, “returning to a more normal state”. His era is seen as “less of the nightmare painted after the communist victory and more of a period of missed opportunities under a regime and ruler who lacked the resources and strengths to carry their mission to a conclusion”.
And such missed opportunities. Chiang very nearly eradicated the communists, their legendary Long March being in fact an epic retreat from doggedly pursuing Nationalist forces, but in a recurring motif, the Generalissimo – a feeble tactician who constantly changed his mind, infuriating a successive string of Soviet, German and American advisers – always found a way to let victory slip away.
Efforts to stay on the same side against the Japanese through the ’30s and the war were repeatedly scuttled by Chiang and Mao’s insistence on reserving strength for their inevitable battle against one another, and both weathered charges of consorting with the invaders in the interest of a post-war détente.
Chiang reasoned that Japan would withdraw from China as it became engaged by Russia and the West, but Roosevelt wobbled and Stalin and Churchill let him down, with London accepting Tokyo’s apologies for affronts against the British during what was being regarded as “the China incident” while ignoring such open atrocities as the Rape of Nanking.
Fenby leaves to other authors a full accounting of that particular six weeks of medieval-style butchery that left at least 300,000 Chinese dead, but can’t avoid the extent of the brutality, which in one case saw two Japanese lieutenants stage a race to see who could behead 100 prisoners fastest. As reported, almost like a sporting event, in Japanese newspapers, they were unsure who reached 100 first, so extended the competition to 150 heads.
Elsewhere in the book is an astonishing chapter on the many bickering warlords of sprawling, splintered China in the 1920s, who Chiang had to overcome with guns, bribes and ideology. The Dogmeat General, the Philosopher General, the Model Governor and the Christian General, every one of whom was a thug of saleable loyalties, could populate a wonderful volume of their own.
And then there is Meiling. Chiang’s third wife – he packed the second one off to America so he could marry into Shanghai’s influential Soong dynasty – was Time magazine’s 1938 Woman of the Year, fame that she parlayed into a celebrity tour of the US in 1943 that would have made Princess Diana blush.
Variously codenamed “Snow White” and “Madame Empress” by American intelligence, Meiling was “the most powerful woman in the world” that year, Fenby writes. But becoming the first Chinese and the first woman ever to address both houses of Congress, staying at the White House and being feted by Hollywood royalty as she collected billions of dollars for the Nationalist cause was a notion that soon soured.
Roosevelt and his electorate tired of her demands and her grandiosity as they learned more about how their dollars were being wasted, though few would have known that she bedded presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie while he was checking out Chiang on FDR’s behalf and even sought to buy him the presidency.
Ultimately Roosevelt, and more so his successor Harry Truman, came to see China as a hopeless case, though they never went as far as Churchill’s dismissal of “425 million pigtails”.
Meiling pulled Chiang’s strings with aplomb, but even she couldn’t stop him from losing China – it was his alone to lose. Solely in command, he had allowed graft to flourish and inflation to crush the citizenry, Fenby writes, and the opium dealer Mao, although he still had to impose his revolution on China, had an easier road because of him.
In December 1949, as communist forces led by Deng Xiaoping closed in on Chiang’s last bastion of Chungking, the Generalissimo had scores of old foes assassinated, got on a plane, and flew to Taiwan. He was sure America and Russia would engage in a third world war that would bring him back to the mainland.
He died in 1975, and his son and then Lee Teng-shui brought economic prosperity to an island that has since shunned the Nationalist control freaks in favour of democracy. Chiang’s body remained unburied for three decades, lest his dream of a homecoming be mocked – until early this year.