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.