China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice Read Online Free PDF Page A

mentioned in the memoirs of creditable witnesses and discussed in the serious biographies of Chiang, makes it a gauge of sorts to the dilemma facing American policymakers in China, a poor and divided country, during World War II and right after it, coping with an imperfect leader whom they counted on for more than he could deliver.
    It is worth noting in this connection that twenty or so years later, the United States was complicit in theassassination of a supposedly allied Asian leader—Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963—with more than a passing resemblance to Chiang. Diem was killed by local rivals who had gained the approval of the Kennedy administration because his erratic rule and growing unpopularity were deemed by senior officials to be increasingly problematic.
    Chiang was a sort of predecessor to Diem, in that he too was the leader of a corrupt rightist dictatorship, though he himself was rigorously honest in the financial sense. Chiang’s wife, American-educatedSoong Mei-ling, came across to foreigners as charming and imperious—“dragon lady” is the common, racially tinged pejorative; Diem was represented in this sense by his sister-in-law, the glamorous, charming, and vindictive Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, educated in France and assumed, like Madame Chiang before her, to exercise great influence behind the scenes. Ngo was a Catholic, Chiang a Methodist. Both faced Communist insurrections that rendered them helpless without American aid and goodwill.
    But Chiang was never a client ruler in the way that Diem was. He was a man who came to power on the basis of his own intelligence and charisma; he was not put in a gated presidential palace by a foreign intelligence agency. In the decades since World War II, it has become conventional wisdom to see Chiang as one of the great incompetents of twentieth-century history, but at the time, and even subsequently, there was reason to see him in a more sympathetic light, as an effective leader striving under tremendous disadvantages to push his country into a brighter future. Recent biographers, especially Jay Taylor, a former American diplomat, have emphasized Chiang’s good qualities rather than his deficiencies, and have portrayed him as laboring under almost impossible circumstances, especially after the ruinous Japanese invasion. Chiang was born in Zhejiang, the coastal province south of Shanghai, in 1887 and educated in part at a Japanese military academy. He became the chief protégé of Sun Yat-sen, the first republican leader of China, the man who led the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and established the Kuomintang, promising after a period of authoritarian tutelage to establish a western-style democracy. Chiang was slender, small, stiff, prideful, and patriotic, imbued with a sense of China’s humiliation at the hands of foreigners and determined to do something about it, though following the revolution of 1911, China, far from becoming a powerful democracy, had fallen into fragmentation and chaos, its territory divided up among a group of competing warlords and prone to Japanese aggression.
    Among Chiang’s great achievements was theNorthern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 when the army he led established a fragile sort of unity across the country. He was advised in that endeavor by members of the Communist International dispatched from Moscow, his armies trained by the German officers who had forged the kaiser’s forces in the years leading up to World War I. This was a great moment in Chinese history, even if it has taken on the appearance of a brief interlude, lost in the tumultuous events that followed it, great because Chiang, in eliminating many of the warlords and establishing a modern government, embodied the national and nationalist aspirations of a majority of his countrymen. His army was by far the best in China, and it made the heretofore scary private armies of the warlords seem almost quaintly archaic by