Jay Taylor did an incredible amount of research to produce this biography of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). He presents a compelling account of the Generalissimo’s life and times, and adds many insights into events and developments, both during Chiang’s rise to power in the 1910s and 1920s, during the long civil war with the Communists, and during his repressive rule in Taiwan from the end of World War II until his death in 1975.
Taylor portrays Chiang as a more humane being, with both strong and weak points. He describes times when Chiang, as China’s president and top commander of its military forces, had keen insights in what was going to happen, and other times when he utterly failed to make the right decisions. Taylor also touches extensively on Chiang’s personal weaknesses, his womanizing, his failure to control the rampant corruption in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — which continues to this day — and most importantly, his total ruthlessness against anyone or any group that seemed to challenge his control of the political and military establishment.
Whether he succeeds in presenting a convincingly more benign portrait of Chiang remains to be seen. Certainly in the area of military strategy and tactics, Taylor presents evidence that Chiang saw matters more clearly than some of his US counterparts: In 1941 he counseled General Joseph Stilwell against an offensive against the Japanese forces in Burma and advocated a defensive approach. Stilwell, however, underestimated the size and strength of the Japanese, went on the offense and badly lost, prompting his well-documented escape march through the jungles of Burma.
Taylor describes in great detail the endless intrigues and maneuvering by Chiang and his wife Soong Mei-ling (宋美齡), in particular their quest to squeeze more financial and military assistance out of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the beleaguered KMT. He also describes in great detail the perpetual tug-of-war between Chiang and Stilwell over strategy and tactics in the war against Japan. Interestingly, based on documents, Taylor — more often than not — comes down on the side of Chiang, blaming much of the tension on Stilwell’s stubbornness.
Another interesting piece of information is that — according to records unearthed by Taylor — Chiang foresaw that Hitler would break his 1939 pact with Moscow and attack the Soviet Union. He warned Stalin, who did not pay heed. Similarly, Chiang predicted in early 1941 that Japan would attack the US (the Pearl Harbor attack which took place in December 1941). However, in other situations, he gravely miscalculated: for instance, the loss of Manchuria to Japan in the early 1930s, and the loss of China itself to the Communists between 1945 and 1949 were largely caused by petulant decision-making on Chiang’s part. To be fair, it must be noted that the 1948 loss of Manchuria was heavily influenced by the assistance provided to the Communist troops by Moscow.
Taylor also goes into significant detail in describing Chiang’s repressive rule in Taiwan after the end of World War II, including a fair account of the 228 Incident in 1947, when Chiang sent troops from China to Taiwan to put down protests by native Taiwanese against newly arrived Mainlanders and the corruption of the recently installed KMT government, leading to a massacre of some 28,000 people, many of them students, professionals and leading political members of the Taiwanese community. For the next four decades the Taiwanese were prohibited from even mentioning 228, and it wasn’t until the democratization of the late 1980s that it was possible to talk about it.
Where I strongly disagree with Taylor is his assertion that Chiang’s rule in Taiwan laid the foundation for Taiwan’s prosperity and “set the stage for Taiwan’s development of a vigorous democracy.” This is simply not the case. It can actually be argued that without the presence of the Chiang regime, Taiwan would have fared much better, both in terms of economic development as well as the transition to democracy. Following World War II, Taiwan possessed — because of the Japanese colonial period — a much better infrastructure than had ever existed in China, and would have prospered better if Chiang had not been there to perpetuate his wasteful “recover the mainland” line.
On the issue of democracy: Chiang gave only lip service to this idea to maintain his ties with the successive US governments, but in the meantime continued a repressive one-party dictatorship for several decades. In fact, Taiwan’s momentous transition to democracy in the 1980s was driven by the country’s grassroots democracy movement and came about in spite of vigorous opposition from the ruling KMT. Sadly, at the present time, the successors of this same KMT are — again — disregarding basic democratic principles and causing an erosion of Taiwan’s hard-won human rights, democracy and press freedoms in an apparent attempt to drive Taiwan closer to their old archenemies, the Chinese Communists.
Gerrit van der Wees is the editor of Taiwan Communique.
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