November 9, 2003
NO ONE CRIES FOR THE GENERALISSIMO'S:
The Marxist and the Methodist: a review of CHIANG KAI-SHEK AND THE CHINA HE LOST By Jonathan Fenby (Murray Sayle, The Spectator)
As Fenby’s story develops this folklorique crowd clears and the ultimate protagonists step forward. First off the mark was the Gimo, six years Mao’s senior and a simpler soul. In 1926, appointed military chief of Dr Sun’s party, the Kuomintang or Nationalists, he set off from Canton with an army officered by Whampao graduates to reunite China and, incredibly, succeeded. In March 1927 he took Shanghai and made a lifelong political commitment. With the help of Big-Eared Du’s gangsters his army rounded up communists, trade unionists and their families and massacred some 5,000-10,000, according to the American journalist Edgar Snow who was there. Chou En-lai, Mao’s aristocratic future lieutenant, was lucky to get away alive. Shanghai 1927 made a decisive change in communist strategy, too. Following Moscow’s Marxist orthodoxy, the Chinese communists had seen the workers of the booming, part-westernised city as the seedbed of revolution. After Shanghai, the party turned increasingly to the peasant-born Mao, who identified China’s half-starved farmers as the real base for a new revolution. Mao saw future power; Chiang was interested in who held power then. In December 1927 he sealed his alliance with the powers that were by marrying Meiling Soong, one of the three clever daughters of the Methodist missionary Charlie Soong, one of whom married Dr Sun Yat-sen and the other the Shanghai banker H. H. Kung, future (and disastrous) Nationalist finance minister. The last survivor of those times, Meiling died the other day, aged 105, in her beloved Manhattan, leaving neither a vast fortune nor a trove of juicy secrets. [...]Fenby reminds us that the Nationalists’ Nanking decade, 1927-37, was one of great, if uneven material progress for China, the aim of all its revolutionaries. The once comical Ching emperors’ China began to be taken seriously; China’s combination of rice-growers’ diligence and Confucian respect for knowledge that had already transformed Japan was beginning to impress the modern world. In 1935 Mao’s communists, driven out of their coastal base, straggled into the remote Yenan caves after the legendary Long March of 6,000 miles, a hunted remnant of barely 5,000, not worth another of the Gimo’s innumerable ‘bandit suppression’ drives. Then in 1937 the Japanese invaded, determined to force all China into their ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’. To his eternal credit, as Fenby says, Chiang resisted, showing that he was, according to his lights, a revolutionary patriot and not the vile country- selling puppet his critics have depicted. Had Japan been able to add China’s resources to the Axis I might well be writing this in another language, mit some difficulty.
But for the gung-ho Vinegar Joe Stilwell (Gung Ho, ‘work together’, was the slogan of a Chinese farmers’ co-op picked up by US Marines) Chiang didn’t resist hard enough. ‘The Japanese are an affliction of China’s skin, the communists of her heart,’ said one of his followers. The inevitable showdown with Mao duly followed Japan’s defeat, and Fenby tells it well. But, as he says, post-Mao China looks much more like Chiang’s Nanking decade than Mao’s daft guerrilla economics. We see here the three stages of many a revolution, the French and the Russian being other examples. The first stage tries to tidy up the old order, the second sweeps everything away and starts again in the ruins — at terrible cost, we might add: Mao-made famines cost China some 20 million lives and endless agony. Sooner or later the revolution reverts to reality, but with a new cast.
Chiang's reputation seems mostly an undeserved casualty of the fellow travelers in the State Department and the hostility of Western intellectuals to every authoritarian anti-Communist leader.
MORE:
-OBIT: Madame Chiang Kai-shek dies in New York at 105 (Seth Faison, 10/25/03, NY Times)
-OBIT: Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Oct 30th 2003, The Economist)
-OBIT: Madame Chiang Kai-shek: The formidable wife of Nationalist China's leader, she fought her own corner as ruthlessly as she defended his (John Gittings, October 25, 2003, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: The sorceress: She was beautiful, bewitching and ambitious. Not content with ruling China with her husband she dreamt of ruling the world - even if it meant seducing a would-be American president. (Jonathan Fenby, November 5, 2003, The Guardian)
I'm not sure conservatives should be for Chiang just because "Western intellectuals" were agin him. Sometimes the "enemy of my enemy" is not the best guide. My fave conservative columnist John Derbyshire, who knows a good deal abouut China, doesn't have much good to say about Chiang in this article on his widow:
http://olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/SoongMayLing.htm
I will admit that Taiwan is a better monument to Chiang than the mainland is to Mao. I've wanted to visit Taiwan since I saw Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman.
Posted by: Joseph at November 9, 2003 1:42 PMI'm not sure conservatives should be for Chiang just because "Western intellectuals" were agin him. Sometimes the "enemy of my enemy" is not the best guide. My fave conservative columnist John Derbyshire, who knows a good deal abouut China, doesn't have much good to say about Chiang in this article on his widow:
http://olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/SoongMayLing.htm
I will admit that Taiwan is a better monument to Chiang than the mainland is to Mao. I've wanted to visit Taiwan since I saw Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman.
Posted by: Joseph at November 9, 2003 1:42 PMChiang Kai-Shek was one of the major reasons why China was lost to the Communists in the first place.
A corrupt despot who was too busy hurting his own people to deal with Mao effectively, until it was too late.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at November 9, 2003 2:35 PM"hurting his own people"?
Posted by: OJ at November 9, 2003 2:43 PMYes.
It is not easy to see what any mere human could have done with China at the time, even if Japan and Russia had not interfered, but Chiang managed to give his people pretty much the worst of all worlds.
As far as I know, the Sian Incident was unique in all history. Only in China, one is tempted to propose, could a genuine despot be manipulated by idealistic college students.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 11, 2003 2:46 AMBoth Chiang Kai Shek should be recognized as the first statesman of the world to understand the real totalitarian nature of communism as early as 1923, after a visit to Soviet Union. His efforts to hold the Japanese forces on the Chinese mainland helped Allied forces in WWII.
Some writers said Chiang did not do any fighting during WWII. If chiang did not, the Japanese would have joined forces with Hitler for wodld conquest. Other writers conjectured that had Chiang fought harder, the war would have a different outcome. These writers, along with Vinegar Joe, US State Department personnel and communist sympathisers, did not understand the true intentions of Mao and Chou. These sympathisers helped steer the course of American foreign policy in Asia and lead to the Korean War, Vietnamese War and others after the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949.
A clearer view of history is necesssary for the survival and well-being of nations.
The Chiangs lived simple, incorruptible and exemplary lives. An article in the Economist magazine (Nov 2003) said the Chiangs pocketed American aid and caused the loss of the mainland. This far-fetched lie was not even used in the 1940's for propaganda reasons by Mao and Chou because the American ambassador, the Chinese society and the State Department knew of the sterling qualities of the Chiangs. But the word "corruption" has been constantly used as a major cause of defeat of a nation. Let historians, not rumor-mongers, be our guides.
In "Decisive Encounter: China's Civil War, 1945-1950", Odd Arne Westad, university Reader in International History at London School of Economics and Political Science, pointed out that, contrary to lay opinion, corruption and inflation have nothing to do with regime survival. Many countries today are surviving with both. Moreover, carpetbaggery might have existed in post-WWII China, but it also existed in the US after its own civil war in 1865. Nationalist China after eight years of war was less corrupt than many countries today, including communist ones, about which the media choose to keep quiet.
What is the cause of the loss of China? Chiang was winning in 1946 when Truman stopped him and withheld aid for a democratic government with the communists, which is a nonsensical political proposition. In 1949 Truamn had his ambassador waitin Nanking to recognize the communists when he was kicked out. Mao then hurriedly visited Stalin at Moscow.
American historian, Freda Utley in her book "The China Story" determined that not enough aid and too much interference from the US government gave the victory to Mao in 1949. It was Chiang against the Chinese communists, Stalin, American detractors, North Korenas and captured Japanese soldiers goaded by their new masters. Also Freda argued that if the Nationalists were corrupt and inefficient, why did the US continue to aid them after 1950? What is the record of progress and efficiency on Taiwan under Chaing? It is the same leader.
Is Chiang a dictator? In 1911 the founding father of China, Dr. Sun planned on a slow three-step processd for democracy: Martial rule, Rule by tutelage and Democracy. Chiang ruled during the tutelage era, lengthened because of WWII, communist threat and Taiwan independence. The US leaders failed to understand Tutelage rule and forced democracy on China with the communists.
Ling Ho
Posted by: ling ho at January 21, 2004 5:58 PM