Chiang K'ai-shek
Despite a small shelf of biographies, Chiang K'ai-shek remains a personality above and behind the news, not in it. His former teacher and present publicity adviser, Hollington Tong, has written an authorized life, clear, detailed, and well expurgated. The celebrated Sven Hedin published a study of Chiang; virtues, but not specific personality stood forth. An able American newspaperman had recourse to his files, and some Chinese admirers sketched an incredibly soft, lovely picture: the background was clarified, but not Chiang. Two world-famous reporters, trained to epitomize a life or a nation in a double column or sharp review, failed to grasp Chiang. He eludes everyone.
Part of the trouble comes from the fact that he possesses virtues which, once lauded, are now suspected of being mythical, wheresoever they occur. Frederick the Great, George Washington, Julius Caesar in his careerist years—authentic in history, as contemporaries these leaders would strike the moderns as characters inflated or incredible. Sincerity has become consistency with one's source of income; persons who fail to fit into the accepted moral and intellectual types of Western industrialist society are labelled fakes. One is a gentleman-liberal, an intellectual-liberal, a capitalist, a picturesque native, a war-lord sinister, obscene, cruel, and criminal—one fits such a type, and if one doesn't, one does not exist. Yet Chiang exists, and is thereby suspect to a host of commentators. Sun Yat-sen as First President was an acceptable news figure; as Saint of the Great Revolution he became vulnerable. When Chiang seems neither a general nor a reactionary, he bewilders many Westerners.
Within China, Chiang is more readily grasped. In any other age, he would be the founder of a new dynasty. The establishers of Imperial houses have, as a group, combined intense vigor with a flair for the disreputably picturesque, in turn qualified by the highly respectable associates they sought out after success. Several have been bandits; one was an unfrocked Buddhist priest. For vigor and a timely libertarianism, they compare favorably with the Claudian line. Today the Dragon Throne is irrecoverably remote; the Manchoukuoan Emperor Kang Tê lacks elementary plausibility. Chiang is far too wise, far too modern in his own motivations, to wish or dare dream of Empire. Upon him has descended grace of a new kind, the charismatic halo of Sun Yat-sen. His reputation can be carved in the most enduring of materials: indefeasible history. With a son who is a Bolshevik, a little Eurasian grandchild, and an adopted son of no high merit, Chiang does not face the problem of power-bequeathal. He has power now; it matters little where power goes after his death; the value to him lies in immediate use.
Assuming even an abnormal egocentrism, Chiang—at the apex of state—is above ambition; he has no welfare but that of the state. In fact, Chiang is a man of almost naively insistent morality. Even Westerners act on the stage of today with posterity as an audience; Chinese, state-building, moral, Chiang moves under the glare of his perpetual reputation. As in the case of Sun, his sense of leadership would be maniacal if not grounded on fact; but what assumption would not? A peanut-vendor who thinks he is the King of Egypt is crazy; Farouk is not therefore crazy because King of Egypt. If Chiang were not the leader of China, he would be mad; but he, and he alone, is leader. His humility begins with the assumption of his power.
Twenty-one years the junior of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang was born in 1888 in Chekiang province.[12] His family was of a class intermediate between the truly eminent landlord-official or merchant families, and the farmers. They had been farmers, but also minor gentry, and had been connected with the salt-revenue system. His grandfather attained considerable renown as a scholar, but Chiang's own father died when Chiang was eight years of age. The child had few special advantages. His family background is one which is of common occurrence among political leaders; his widowed mother, mastering and managing for the family, inculcated a sharp morality, an unrelenting frugality, and a persistent drive of industriousness in her children. To such a person, who rises from poverty and hardship by his own efforts, the failure of others to do likewise becomes a personal problem. By his own case he has proved that opportunities are there. He is impatient with the poor, the stupid, or the shiftless; instead of re-arranging society to give them a chance, he expects them to improve themselves to meet existing realities. Chiang has not explicitly stated all these points; many of them are qualified by the fact that the status quo in modern China is the status quo of perpetual revolution.
Leftist commentators, dubbing Chiang a combined product of landlordism, compradore class, and criminal gangs, explain him through a mystagogic economic determinism. Actually, Western impress on Chiang is of a more special nature: Western religion, and Western warfare. The ideals which animate him, and determine—so far as these are visible—his own sense of values, are concepts and attitudes extraneous to the Chinese scene. Deduct the threaded recurrency of religion, and the sense of technique from military training, and Chiang could be paired with many other modern Chinese leaders—soldiers of turmoil, administrators of the ad interim, complacent leaders of hypothetical groups. He and Sun stand out because each had a Western technique so thoroughly mastered that it gave him a clear competence over other men: Sun, the physician; Chiang, the strategist. Each also had a Western moral drive which turned hungrily to the past and justified itself in Chinese antiquity: Sun, the all-around Christian, who professed and denied the churches alternately throughout life, and Chiang, the Bible-quoting Methodist, both cite the Confucian canons; both esteem the Chinese ethics; both discern the forcefulness of Western spirituality.
Leadership, plus technical power, plus alien moral reinforcement, spells preeminence. The Confucians have gone; the serene mandarins are dead. Methodist soldiers, Baptist bankers—such Chinese control China. Marxism, which by combining jargon and act of faith, is both religion and erudition, unites these ideocratic forces; Wang Ming can feel that he is a scientist analyzing society with peculiar objectivity, and he can feel morally gratified at the same time. Chiang and the Nationalist leaders keep such sustenance dual.
The special religious background came to him through his mother. Women have traditionally turned to Buddhism for piety in China, and Mrs. Chiang was one of the exceptional characters who combined intense hard work with great piety. The children grew with the infinite looming over them; every misstep meant thousands upon thousands of years of hopeless, damnable rebirth. Buddhism can match the Christian, "It is a fearefull thing to fall into the hands of the living God ...,"[13] with the even more fearful doom of life in a world which does not want to live. Buddhism, socially, goes about in circles; the Mahayana sect provides a qualified kind of salvation, but not the salvation which a determined man can wring bloody-handed out of circumstance itself. The discipline, the austerity, were ready; Christianity, when it came to him, fell on plowed and waiting ground. The other instinct of ascendancy was cultivated by his education: professionalism. His life falls into three stages after childhood: education; wasted years; and the mastery and use of power.
Chiang went to the Imperial Military Academy at Paotingfu. Aloof and ambitious, he was so successful that within a year he was sent to the Shinbo Gokyo (Preparatory Military Academy) in Tokyo; he remained in Japan four years. The Japanese under whom he studied retained no special impression of him, except that he eagerly accepted discipline. As a part of his study, he served with the 13th Field Artillery (Takada) Regiment of the Imperial Army. Chiang therewith acquired not merely military knowledge, but a working insight into Japanese language, mentality, and strength.
His military studies were terminated by the outbreak of the Republican Revolution in 1911. Chiang returned to Shanghai, and began a vigorous military career under the local military commander, pro-Sun in politics. Chiang himself had come into contact with the Republican-Nationalist group while in Japan. There was already no question of where his loyalties lay. He made rapid progress, and saw something of fighting. He took part in the abortive Second Revolution, of 1913, which was the military attempt by Sun Yat-sen and his first military coadjutant, Huang Hsing, to check Yüan Shih-k'ai and to save the newborn Republic by force. In this time, while the enthusiasm of his military studies had not yet worn off, Chiang wrote prodigiously. No Westerner has, so far as the present author knows, taken the trouble to go through Chiang's writings in order to study him. Chinese commentators praise them as full of military acumen, a sense of the novel and important forces in Chinese society, and a vigorous moralism—modern-military in form, but archaic in language—which animated Chiang's youthful desire to improve the world with good, technically apt gunfire. He was at this time twenty-three or twenty-four.
Between this early career and the later years of Chiang's life—the years in which his star rode incessantly ascendant—there is a gap of several years, 1913 to 1918. In this time Chiang lived a life primarily civilian, although he remained under the patronage of his first military leader, General Chen Ch'i-mei, murdered in 1915. Chiang went on a military intelligence trip for the Sun Yat-sen group, travelling through Manchuria in 1915. He opposed Yüan's moves, and stayed in close contact with the patriotic organization. Yet, the total picture of his life in these years lacks the connecting linkage which binds his childhood, his school days, and his mature career. His activity, while considerable, was diffuse.
He went down to Canton in 1918, and fought under the command of Sun Yat-sen, with the inferior troops and hopeless expeditions which the Leader, politically adept but strategically inexpert, kept throwing against the confusion of the tuchün wars, with the result that the war-lords, counting him as another element in their balance of power, did not even set up a united front against him. Chiang, a Central Chinese, was unsympathetic to the intense provincialism of the Cantonese, and was hopelessly tactless in criticizing old-type soldiers upon whom Sun then relied. Disillusioned but still loyal, he went back to Shanghai and wrote letters of advice to his friends in the South, including Dr. Sun. Throughout this time he was simply one more among the dozens of bright young military men who were, in the existing crudity of warfare, unneeded in China. (Chu Tê, Chiang's present colleague and rival who heads the Soviet Chinese military system, was at this time besotted in Yünnan—a petty war-lord of landlord family, trapped hopeless on his little island of power amidst ruin.)
The period in the Shanghai years was filled in with business activity. Chiang was acquainted with some of the most influential merchants of the city, among them the crippled Chang Ching-chiang, a Paris merchant whose personal wealth was an informal treasury of Sun's movement. Chiang entered brokerage, and is supposed to have made a great deal of money. He became acquainted with the modernized, Westernized young Chinese of the metropolis, and left many friends behind him among the Chinese business men and industrialists.
Speculative or unfriendly writers asseverate that Chiang joined the Green Gang, an association which combined the features of a protection racket and a benevolent society. (Such a society, common in China during periods of disturbance, is the archetype of the American-Chinese Tong [tang] in its more violent phases.) If so, membership gave Chiang the key to an underworld as well organized as François Villon's Paris, wherein beggars, thieves, pickpockets, kidnappers, labor contractors, burial societies, and legitimate associations merged under the extra-legal government of a Masonic-like hierarchy. (The author is acquainted with a Chinese League of Nations official who joined the Gang as a necessary implement of social research, and was afforded genuine courtesy in preparing a report, general but accurate as to prevailing conditions, through the assistance of his fellow-members.)
Chiang's marriage, which had been made Chinese-fashion in his late boyhood, had given him posterity—a son, now the pro-Communist, Soviet-trained Major-General Chiang Ching-kuo—but little companionship. His wife and son remained most of the time at his native home, whence he returned to see them and his mother, at Fenghua in Chekiang. Social contacts, acquaintance with capitalism, looseness of family connections, spasmodic work for the Revolution, and some military work—this, combined with the making and the losing of a fortune, fill the early maturity of Chiang.
He appeared upon the national and the world scene by his selection in 1923 to go to Moscow under the terms of the Nationalist-Soviet understanding, there to receive military training. He had definitely cast in his lot with Sun Yat-sen, making soldiery his vocation, and the selection implied that Sun began to see in him a military aide, to replace Huang Hsing of the first revolution. Chiang spent four months in the Soviet Union. The Communists, whom he was to fight six years later, showed him their combination of political and military warfare applied in Trotsky's Red Army. Chiang, already the beneficiary of Japanese training, had found Japanese military science dependent upon the framework of a stable constitutional system. In China his earlier training had been superior to its environment and did not have the practical utility of five years' banditry. Chiang, professional by spirit, restless under the drive of conscience and ambition, now found in Moscow the intermediate steps between modern warfare and government-building. He found that an army, from being the tool of pre-existing order, could become the spearhead of an accompanying order. Returning to China via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, he met General Galens (Vassili Bluecher), later his chief Soviet military aide at Canton.
In Canton, the first military creation on Soviet models was the Whampoa (Huangpu) Academy. Decreed by Sun Yat-sen, who made Chiang chief, the Academy had Soviet advisers, eager to instill revolutionary and civil-war techniques. Chiang began the development of a modern army, and the real accretion of his own power. Even before he commanded full armies, Chiang used his cadets to good purpose in actual combat.
From this point on, Chiang's career becomes a part of the military history of the revolution. In his earlier years of power, Chiang emerged to leadership by cooperating with various intra-Kuomintang groups. He stood with the Left and utilized the Communists, although he managed to provoke, suppress, and appease the Communists in a way which no one else managed. He led the victorious Northern Expedition in 1925-27, carrying his forces on the crest of the Great Revolution. He was little known, but seen to be ambitious, zealous, incalculable, and a political strategist of ruthless genius. He soon found himself one of the triumvirate of Sun Yat-sen's successors: Hu Han-min, the Right Kuomintang leader, editor of Sun's works; Chiang; and Wang Ch'ing-wei, the Left Kuomintang leader.
At Shanghai, in 1927, Chiang's troops turned suddenly against the Communists and Left groups, quenching the uprising which had taken the city under his flag. This coup was undertaken because Chiang felt that the Communists were outrunning their promises. The Soviet advisers, who had come to help the Nationalists, had professed their concern for China's national struggle, and for the desirability of a fight against imperialism. They had not told Sun himself that he was a mere precursor to the proletarian revolution, nor informed the Nationalists that they were being given the privilege of fighting a war to advance the historical necessity of Nationalist extinction, as the next step in China's dialectic progression. Trotsky talked openly in Moscow about overthrowing the Chinese revolutionaries, and hijacking the Chinese revolution with the Chinese Communists, while Stalin believed in appeasing the Nationalists longer before discarding them. Of this Chiang was fully aware, and he struck at the sources of Communist power, labor and peasant unions, using a ruthlessness comparable to theirs. He went further, establishing the National Government (in the five-power form) at Nanking, and leaving the Left Kuomintang uneasily in the company of the Communists at Hankow. When the Communists proceeded to debate the question of monopolizing the remnants, even the Left-Kuomintang had had enough. They suppressed the Communists, and dissolved, coming down river to Nanking and joining the new government, while Chiang stepped technically out of the picture to ease the healing of the schism. Chiang's legitimacy in the leadership of the Kuomintang and the Sun Yat-sen revolution is shown by the fact that within two years he had an overwhelming majority of the veteran Kuomintang leaders at his capital.
In the ensuing years Chiang dedicated himself to three tasks: the development of the National Government, the stabilization of his own power, and the modernization of the country, both moral and mechanical. In 1927 he had married Miss May-ling Soong, and brought himself into alliance with the influential Soong family. The success of his efforts is attested by the continued functioning of a National Government at Chungking, the resistance and unification of China, which Chiang has come to symbolize, and the stalemate of Japan. These things would have appeared in some form, even without Chiang, but they would probably not exist with their present clarity and strength. The ten years of armament, modernization, and Japan-appeasement built an area into a nation, changing one more government into an elementary national state.
The Generalissimo has changed in appearance and manner considerably in the past ten years; these changes seem to have immediate bearing on his political role. In 1931 he was unmistakably the first soldier of China—brusque, forthright, sharp-voiced, and dismayingly lacking in the devious but pleasant k'ê-ch'i (ceremonial politeness) which is carried to professional heights by Chinese officials. Even then he was a masterful and clear-willed sort of man, who upset political precedents by a directness which would have been naive were it not so obviously both self-conscious and sincere. He possessed a keen awareness of his own historical importance, and a consistent responsibility before history—which still animates him—was the result. When coupled with the regular exercise of authority, this trait may have the consequence of moderating arbitrariness and minimizing opportunism.
With Chiang's self-possession there went an impatience with opposing views, a carelessness of means in the face of ends, and a fanatical insistence on loyalty. He now seems little older in body, despite the injury to his back during the Sian episode, but the years have left a very clear impress on his moral character. To the sharp discipline and authority of the soldier he has added the characteristics of a teacher—reserved kindliness, a daily preoccupation with moral questions, an inclination to harangue his followers on the general meaning of their problems. Ten years ago it was very difficult to find out what Chiang really believed and wanted; his ambition and patriotism were both patent, but beyond them there was little detail to be filled in. He is beginning to have the relationship of, let us say, Lenin to Marx in his treatment of the San Min Chu I of Sun Yat-sen, and is beginning to stand forth as an interesting political theorist in his own right. He gives every indication of maturing in office, and of rising in stature in proportion to the responsibilities which are thrust upon him.