Chiang Kai-shek (1886–1975) remains one of the more colorful and notorious figures of twentieth-century history and the role he has played in modern Chinese history will remain controversial for a long time.
Chiang (in Mandarin: Jiang Jieshi) rose to power in the 1920s, largely through his influence with the notorious Green Gang of Shanghai, which controlled much of the city’s political and financial underworld. He became the leader of the famed Northern Expedition, a military expedition against China’s warlords to try to unite China under the control of the Nationalist Party (also known in English as the KMT, after its spelling at that time in history, the Kuomintang). At the same time, he organized a campaign to break ties with the Chinese Communist Party, his erstwhile allies, and staged a massacre of their cells in Shanghai in 1927.
By 1928, Chiang had succeeded in convincing the warlords to fly the flag of the new Chinese Republic and swear allegiance to him. He soon established the new capital in Nanjing. He also married the powerful and ambitious Soong Meiling, the American-educated daughter of wealthy Bible salesman Charlie Soong. (He abandoned, or at least conveniently forgot about, his first wife in order to do so.)
Generalissimo Chiang, as he now called himself, allowed the Japanese to invade and take over most of Manchuria, but when the Japanese staged a fight in July 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, Chiang ordered his troops to fight back, eventually attacking Japanese ships in Shanghai. Chiang hoped that by bringing the war to the West’s favorite port city, he would gain sympathy. Instead, the better-equipped Japanese Imperial Army marched inland to his capital and by December 1937, its soldiers had sacked the city in what would become known as the infamous Rape of Nanjing.
After the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, America allied itself with China. Unfortunately, Chiang did not get along with U.S. general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who spoke fluent Mandarin and loved the Chinese people, but couldn’t stand Chiang’s corrupt government. Chiang, Stilwell claimed, was more intent upon using his military resources to fight the Communists than the Japanese, and his wife’s family were reportedly lining their own bank accounts with American aid dollars. Stilwell took to
calling Chiang “the Peanut,” after the shape of the Generalissimo’s famously bald head, and Chiang finally prevailed upon President Roosevelt to remove Stilwell from his command overseeing the China-Burma-India theater in 1944.
After being kidnapped by General Zhang Xueliang and released only after vowing to stop his counterproductive civil war, Chiang did form another alliance, the so-called United Front, with the Communists (1937–45) to fight together against the advancing Japanese military.
After World War II ended, from 1945 to 1949 Chiang waged an open civil war with Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army. By 1949, President Truman was no longer willing to aid the Generalissimo, and it was clear Chiang had no chance of winning the civil war. He then fled with his troops to the island of Taiwan.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Chiang ruled over Taiwan under a state of martial law and vowed to “take back the mainland” from Mao. He died on April 5, 1975, without attaining his goal.
Today Chiang’s hometown of Fenghua in Zhejiang Province has been renovated as a tourist attraction. Before that, his cultural visibility in the mainland, besides vilification in textbooks, was limited to a sly visual reference in director Zhang Yimou’s 1995 mobster classic, Shanghai Triad, in which the gangland boss played by veteran actor Li Baotian was rumored to have been modeled, at least physically, on the Generalissimo.
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