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.”
There was plenty of steel to her, of course. In the middle of one of her Washington charm offensives, Roosevelt asked her what she would do with troublesome striking laborers: “the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.” There was also a good deal of humbug about her patriotic sermons around the US. While famine stalked wartime China, she was dazzling the Americans with her gold-trimmed dresses and jade earrings, dancing from one champagne reception to another, and spending half a million US dollars on fur coats. She would, Pakula suggests, have dropped her humorless, puritanical husband (who refused to touch alcohol, coffee or even tea) like a hot potato had the right opportunity come along. On one visit to America, she allegedly propositioned — in a highly businesslike manner — a potential presidential candidate: if he were elected, she told the lucky man’s representative, “he and I would rule the world.”
Soong was never a woman short on a sense of self-worth. While Churchill was in Washington in 1943 — not a particularly slow year for World War II — she summoned him to an audience in New York. He explained that the pressures of work made a trip north impossible, and persuaded Roosevelt to invite her for lunch at the White House. “The invitation was refused with some hauteur. Madame was of the opinion that I should make the pilgrimage.” When Churchill offered to meet her halfway, his suggestion was dismissed as “facetious.”
Pakula’s story of Soong’s conquest of the US is extraordinary, but elsewhere the book drags more than it ought to. For a biographer supposedly dedicated to giving Soong top billing over her less photogenic husband (that “crabbed little bastard,” in the words of one of his American detractors), Pakula sidelines her prima donna with curious frequency. For chapters on end, we lose sight of the bejeweled Soong amid floods of slow, male-dominated detail about revolutions and wars. Somewhere among it all is a glittering cameo of an ambitious, over-indulged woman who — had she been born 50 years later — truly might have ruled the world.
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