Until recently, there was a received, unkind wisdom about Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his wife, Soong Mayling (宋美齡), also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, which went something like this: After seizing control of China in 1927, the two of them dissipated popular goodwill over the next 20 years: strangling dissent, filling their Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) with fascist carpet-baggers, failing to attend to China’s most glaring socioeconomic problems. The Chiangs, this version of the story concludes, were 20th-century China’s also-rans: a gangster-warlord and his luxury-loving moll who lost it all to the Communists in 1949 through inhumanity, corruption and incompetence.
Hannah Pakula, however, in her fascinating but overlong biography of Madame Chiang, argues that — at the height of her influence during the 1940s — Soong was one of the most powerful and brilliant women in the world. “The real brains and boss” in the Chiang partnership, she was a political celebrity who mesmerized the American public with her diamond-encrusted cheongsams and charmed the US government out of billions
of US dollars of aid for China’s war effort.
The daughter of a self-made Methodist millionaire, Soong was packed off to get an American education aged only 10. A decade later she graduated at the top of her class and returned to China to launch herself into the best career open in the 1920s to a pampered daughter of the Shanghai business aristocracy: hunting down a rich and powerful husband. In 1927, Chiang — a successful career soldier who had just dragged China back together by purging the country’s left wing, and fighting or bribing separatist warlords into submission — was probably the best option around. And for the stiff, socially inept Chiang, Soong was a fine prize: beautiful, charming and invaluably Americanized — the ideal “mouth and ears” to win support in the west for his new KMT government.
Soong’s talents as an international propagandist for her husband’s regime shone through the dark years of World War II. In 1942, she took herself off on a triumphant 10-month publicity tour of the US, preaching the gospel of eternal friendship between China and America, pleading eloquently for “the moral support” (and dollars) “of democratic people everywhere.” She brought a cheering Congress to the verge of tears; she drew tens of thousands to her public lectures; Time named her and Chiang “Man and wife of the year.” At a rally held in her honor in the Hollywood bowl, dozens of cinema legends — Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth and so on — provided a warm-up parade before Soong appeared on stage to lecture her 30,000-strong audience on China’s war effort.
Through Pakula’s account, Chiang — a monomaniac with a filthy temper, who maintained to the end of his life that women should not wear trousers — emerges in almost every way as less appealing: less glamorous, less savvy, less eloquent. After an attempt to teach her husband English ended with him greeting a British ambassador “Kiss me, Lampson,” Soong spoke for Chiang not only in the US, but also at key negotiations with Western leaders. At the 1943 Cairo conference, Soong — the only woman in a room of Allied strongmen that included Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — frequently interrupted the official interpreter to complain that the Generalissimo’s meaning had not been fully expressed: “If you will allow me,” she purred, “I shall put before you his real thoughts.”
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