Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was born into a prosperous family in rural Chekiang. His father died when Chiang was young and he was raised by his mother, who sent him to excellent schools, where he got the classical Confucian education reserved for the children of the moderately wealthy.

Chiang seemed destined for a comfortable place in the civil government, but when the civil service examination system was suspended as part of the reforms of 1905, he enrolled instead in the Paoting Military Academy in northern China in 1906. The following year, he moved to Japan and the more prestigious Japanese Military Academy.

The corrupt and degenerate Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty was crumbling and revolution was in the air. Chiang first joined a revolutionary organization in 1908, but he did not return to China from Japan until he deserted from the Japanese army in 1911.

He reached Wuhan on the 11th October, the day after the revolution had begun that would finally topple the Ch'ing dynasty. On the 5th of November, Chiang led an uprising in Chekiang, but the revolutionary movement was badly fragmented, and Chiang found himself on the outside after another revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, joined forces with General Yuan Shikai, who had seized nominal control of the government.

From July 1912 until September 1913, he was part of a movement to overthrow the general whose regime had instantly become dictatorial. The movement failed and Chiang narrowly escaped arrest by fleeing to Japan. He did not return until late in 1915, when he took part in the so-called Third Revolution, which blocked Yuan's bid to make himself emperor.

From this point until 1918, Chiang lived quietly, even obscurely in Shanghai. He was active during 1916-17 in the scheming of the Green Gang (a secret society that manipulated the volatile Chinese currency during this turbulent period) hoping to make a substantial profit. In 1918, Chiang Kai-shek made amends with Sun Yat-sen, who had joined forces with Ch'en Chiung-ming before building up his own Kuomintang or KMT (the Chinese Nationalist party) with aid from Soviet Russia.

By 1923 Chiang had been promoted to the rank of major general in the KMT and the next year was made commandant of the party's Whampoa Military Academy. Chiang was now well positioned in the most powerful of the Chinese political parties. When Sun died in 1925, his prestige and power in the KMT rose rapidly. During 1923-25, he had successfully merged the party's influence in southern China.

From July 1926 through May 1927, he led the Northern Expedition, bringing province after province into the KMT fold. Chiang's genius was his ability to build on his military gains by securing backing and support from moneyed interests. He worked with the Shanghai business community to suppress the labor movement and, most importantly, embraced capitalism by breaking with the U.S.S.R. and purging the KMT of Communist influence. In place of Soviet advisers in his army, Chiang recruited many of the combative warlords, who had previously made post-revolutionary China a chaos. During August and September 1927, he defeated Communist forces at Nanking and Hunan.

Despite Chiang's successes, the KMT was continually torn by factionalism, and in 1927, he briefly stepped down from the party leadership, hoping to quell dissent. At the end of the year in December, he married Soong Mei-ling, who would herself prove a popular figure and a leader in her own right. As Madame Chiang Kai-shek, she would be especially popular with Americans and was instrumental in garnering U.S. support for Chiang's Nationalist regime.

Chiang returned to the KMT as military commander-in-chief and as chairman of the Central Executive Council on the 6th of January 1928. He resumed the Northern Campaign, advancing on and capturing Peking (Beijing) on June the 4th. It seemed a momentous occasion, at least in theory. The fall of Peking meant China was now unified under the Nationalist Party.

But China was a vast and diverse nation. It was one thing to proclaim a single government, but quite another to govern. Warlords and Communists continued to control many areas and from December 1930 to September 1934, Chiang led the KMT army in five so-called Bandit Suppression Campaigns in southern China. This was essentially a civil war against the Communists and all but the last of these campaigns were failures. The final push, which was aided by an increasingly aggressive Germany, made some inroads into Communist control. In 1931 Chiang's problems with the Communists were overshadowed by the Japanese who had invaded Manchuria, claiming that it was by rights a Japanese province.

Despite dissension, fragmentation and virtually continual internal warfare, Chiang as chairman of the KMT executive council from 1935 to 1945 was the closest thing China had to a single ruler during the post-revolutionary period. His position was highly undesirable. Always an impoverished nation, China was suffering in the great depression of the 1930s, an economic circumstance that was brewing revolution all over the world. He was compelled to tread a razor-thin line between two forces steadily gathering power over China: the Japanese on the one hand, and the Communists on the other.

Prior to 1937, Chiang favored the Japanese, believing the Communists to be the more serious threat. But in December 1936, he was kidnapped by Chang Hsueh-liang (in the so-called "Sian Incident") and was forced by him to declare a united front with the Communists against the Japanese. This may have moved Japan on the 7th of July 1937 to the full-scale invasion of China that began the Second Sino–Japanese War and raised the curtain on the Pacific theater of the approaching world war.

Chiang, as commander-in-chief of KMT forces, fought a doomed battle with his outdated army against invaders from a country that had transformed itself into a twentieth-century war machine. He was forced repeatedly to retreat to the southwest with his command post. All the while, morale among his forces deteriorated and corruption became rampant. Unable to rely on his own people, Chiang turned increasingly to the United States for aid. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II, Chiang refused to commit his forces wholly to a military alliance with America, believing that it was more important to save his resources to fight the Communists whom he assumed would be the only enemy after the war.

The exigencies of desperate warfare brought a brief appearance of unity to China and, in October 1943, the Executive Council appointed Chiang Kai-shek as president of the nation. But as he had predicted, on the heels of the Japanese surrender in 1945, all pretense of unity vanished. The end of the war had left two major contenders for dominance in China: the KMT and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Civil war erupted and Chiang found himself leader of a party and an army that was rotten with corruption and whose leaders had faded to gain the support of the people.

The KMT steadily lost ground until on December the 7th of 1949, where Chiang was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan with the tattered remnant of his party. Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the Communist government on the mainland, he set up a government in exile on the island, over which he presided until his death on April the 5th of 1975. He had suffered a heart attack and pneumonia in the foregoing months and died from renal failure aggravated with advanced cardiac malfunction.

Chiang Kai-shek was a controversial leader, largely because his temperament and philosophy united autocratic Confucianism with ideological pragmatism and a genuine desire for at least a degree of democracy. Enemies and friends alike saw him as crafty, and willing to make an alliance with whomever could be of aid at that moment.

Such moral nimbleness produced temporary gains and was often necessary for immediate survival, yet it fostered the climate of cynicism and corruption that dogged the KMT throughout its existence. Whatever else the Communists offered (or failed to offer) they presented a front of idealism and moral commitment.