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Editorial: So long and good riddance

"Of the dead say nothing but good," Plutarch advises. The problem is that in the case of Soong Mayling (宋美齡), also fawningly known as "Madame Chiang Kai-shek," there isn't any good to be said. Many obiturists have remarked that she was the most famous Chinese woman of the 20th century. What hasn't been said is that she was also perhaps the most evil woman to wield any kind of power during that bleak 100 years and that her influence on almost anything she touched was corrupting and malign.

Soong learned to speak like a Western democrat during her years of schooling in the US, but her psychology was utterly feudal. Her hypocrisy and mendacity were astonishing, perhaps best represented by her convincing Henry Luce, the powerful boss of Life and Time magazines, that she and her husband Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), himself a protege of Shanghai's Green Gang and earning millions in the opium trade -- for which he used the Opium Suppression Agency's boats -- represented this religious crank's best hope for "bringing the Chinese to Jesus."

Like old-fashioned bandits holding a village for ransom in a martial-arts novel, the Soong-Chiang-Kung clique saw China as nothing more than an area of operation for their depredations. Soong Mayling's brother, T.V. Soong (宋子文), became the world's richest man while serving as China's finance minister by looting his charge. It is staggering to even imagine the scale on which the clique operated. For example, one enormously lucrative scheme was to force all Chinese to surrender their gold to underwrite a new currency. The gold never, of course, found its way to the Bank of China, but rather into the clique's voluminous pockets.

Soong Mayling was feted in the US during World War II as exemplifying the spirit of Chinese resistance. Actually Luce's power and T.V. Soong's bribery bought Soong Mayling her moment of fame before the US Congress in 1943. What has been portrayed as a triumph for Mayling's charm was in fact a triumph of money politics.

The 1943 speech was to encourage the US to throw more money into the cesspit that was the KMT's anti-Japanese war effort. Most of the materiel that the US supplied was sold by Chiang and his cronies to the very Japanese they were supposed to be fighting. After the war US president Harry Truman calculated that the Chiang clique had filched US$750 million (as a proportion of US GDP this would be US$35 billion today) from the aid that was sent to them as a result of Mayling's efforts. "They're all thieves," he said, "every damn one of them."

Eventually the people of China got sick of the banditry of the Soongs, Kungs and Chiangs, and threw their lot in with the communists to kick the bandits out of China.

To Taiwan's sorrow they fled here, establishing a colonial regime depriving Taiwanese of political power and suppressing dissent with great brutality. They also continued their robberies, albeit slightly more circumspectly.

Soong Mayling's particular money spinner was the military welfare tax (勞軍捐), a tariff on imported goods, the proceeds of which went to the Chinese Women's Anti-Aggression League (婦聯總會), of which Soong was the only one with the keys to the cashbox. Some eight years ago the Democratic Progressive Party's Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) tried to find out what happened to the NT$100 billion siphoned off, with little success. But the "information" from Soong Mayling's family that she only left US$120,000 in her will is the best joke heard in Taipei for a long time.

Soong valued only money and power, tried to secure Taiwan as a fiefdom for her awful family and left in a huff when she failed. The only good thing she ever did for Taiwan was to leave it. Now this evil and corrupt woman is where she belongs -- in Hell. The world is a cleaner, better place for that.
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