The Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-Shek and the Battle for Modern China
By Jay Taylor, Belknap Harvard University Press, 722pp.
Reviewed: 1 August 2009
History is not kind to losers, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek is usually remembered in the West as the leader who “lost” China to the Communists. Generations of Western students have been taught that this defeat was inevitable because the KMT was incurably inept and chronically corrupt, whereas the CCP was incorruptible and efficient.
This new and monumental biography shows that things were far more complex. In particular, Western fumbling, arrogance and ignorance repeatedly undermined KMT attempts to develop and protect a more modern society that would permit the development of democracy in a non-Communist, Republican China.
The West broadly accepts the CCP myth that it was a spontaneous grass-roots movement of Chinese peasants, workers and patriotic intellectuals rising up against internal and foreign oppression. While that is part of the story, this book reminds of the extent to which the Soviet Union, under Stalin, provided direction, finance and military support that were absolutely decisive in the victory of Communism in China.
Chiang Kai-Shek was a polarizing figure during his lifetime and most historical treatments have been either hostile or adulatory. Jay Taylor is well-credentialled to seek a balance, with a background as a China specialist in the US State Department, as a Harvard academic, and with access to Chiang Kai-Shek’s revealing personal diaries, family papers, and important materials from Moscow, Washington and Peking.
The tale is a true epic, both in scope and in scale. Chiang rose uncertainly to leadership of Republican China through endless manoeuvering amongst up to 40 regional autonomous warlords, plus several rival Republican factions, all in the context of growing territorial incursion by Japan in the northeast. Even Shanghai gangsters had a role in his rise.
No Western powers showed any inclination to help China defend itself against Japan, despite China’s increasingly desperate pleas.
Once the United States entered the war against Japan after Pearl Harbour, China was recognized as an ally and military assistance began to flow. The relationship, however, was managed poorly by both sides. Chiang’s control over regional commanders required deft management, quite foreign to Western assumptions about disciplined lines of command.
One might think of contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan, but on a massively greater scale.
Chiang’s diaries confirm a complex personal morality that was fundamentally neo-Confucian, overtly Christian, and morbidly self-critical – but combining iron commitment to patriotic ends with infinite flexibility as to the means. Brutality, exemplary executions, and tolerance of corruption (as the price of loyalty), could be combined with personal frugality and scrupulous fiscal propriety on the part of Chiang himself and many of his closest colleagues.
The corollary to infinite pragmatism is chronic suspicion, even of close colleagues. Many lives and careers were sacrificed to his paranoia. In this, his life paralleled that of his Communist nemesis, Mao Zedong.
Richard Thwaites has been a student of China for 40 years, including five years living in China as an ABC correspondent
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