THE GENERALISSIMO
Chiang Kai-Shek and the Battle for Modern China
By Jay Taylor, Belknap Harvard University Press, 722pp.
Reviewed: 1 August 2009

History is not kind to losers, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek is usually considered one of the great losers of the 20th Century. Chiang is remembered in the West as the leader who “lost” China to the Communists. The facts are plain: the Nationalist Party (KMT) coalition he led was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for control of the Chinese mainland in 1949, and ultimately for ownership of China’s global identity.

Generations of Western students have been taught that this defeat was inevitable because the KMT was incurably inept and chronically corrupt, whereas the CCP was incorruptible and efficient.

This new and monumental biography shows that things were far more complex. In particular, Western fumbling, arrogance and ignorance repeatedly undermined KMT attempts to develop and protect a more modern society that would permit the development of democracy in a non-Communist, Republican China.

The West broadly accepts the CCP myth that it was a spontaneous grass-roots movement of Chinese peasants, workers and patriotic intellectuals rising up against internal and foreign oppression. While that is part of the story, this book reminds of the extent to which the Soviet Union, under Stalin, provided direction, finance and military support that were absolutely decisive in the victory of Communism in China.

Chiang Kai-Shek was a polarizing figure during his lifetime and most historical treatments have been either hostile or adulatory. Jay Taylor is well-credentialled to seek a balance, with a background as a China specialist in the US State Department, as a Harvard academic, and now with unprecedented access to newly-released materials including Chiang Kai-Shek’s revealing personal diaries, family papers, and important materials from Moscow, Washington and Peking.

The tale is a true epic, both in scope and in scale. It follows Chiang’s education and early development as a young nationalist and anti-Imperialist through the period of the early Republic (1911) in all its chaos, and admiration for Japan as the first successful modern Asian power to resist European empires. The next decades saw Chiang rising uncertainly to leadership through endless struggles and manoeuvering amongst up to 40 regional autonomous warlords plus several rival Republican factions, all in the context of growing territorial incursion by Japan in the northeast. Even Shanghai gangsters had a role in his rise.

The astounding thing was that any degree of coherent government or coordination could be maintained in these circumstances. No Western powers showed any inclination to help China defend itself against Japan, despite China’s increasingly desperate pleas.

Once the United States entered the war against Japan after Pearl Harbour, China was recognized as an ally and military assistance began to flow. The relationship, however, was managed poorly by both sides. Chiang himself placed extravagant faith in political statements of support from President Roosevelt, but Roosevelt’s nominated military representative, “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell, demonstrated an insufferable arrogance towards the Chinese (freely referring to Chiang as “Peanut” in conversation and correspondence) that culminated in a demand that the entire Chinese military be placed under his personal command – a demand foolishly endorsed, then retracted, by Roosevelt himself.

Even at the height of the anti-Japanese resistance, Chiang’s control over regional commanders required deft management, quite foreign to Western assumptions about disciplined lines of command. After Japan’s surrender, direct Soviet intervention gave the CCP forces a secure and richly-supplied base in Manchuria. Chiang’s forces had borne the brunt of the resistance against Japan with stupendous losses of men and material. Many “Generals” were now more concerned to preserve their own post-war autonomy than to preserve national unity.

One might think of contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan, but on a massively greater scale.

Chiang’s decision to take on the Soviet-backed Communist armies in Manchuria proved fatal to his civil war with the CCP. With military losses and no effective foreign support, KMT forces began to disintegrate and defect. In stead of trying to defend the southern mainland against the Communists, Chiang opted to evacuate forces, bullion reserves, and even prized cultural relics to Taiwan.

Chiang never accepted that Taiwan was anything but a temporary redoubt for the Republic of China prior to “retaking the mainland”, but in reality it provided a relatively favourable environment for the development of a modern Chinese state on a manageable scale. Chiang continued to view the KMT as a Leninist-style, centralized, idealistic elite, providing “tutelage” to the masses. Over time, he was forced to recognize that popular democracy must come sooner rather than later. Democracy in Taiwan today, under an elected KMT government, compares favourably with that in either Singapore or Hong Kong, let alone the Peoples’ Republic.

Chiang’s personal story was also epic at the level of human drama. His diaries confirm a complex personal morality that was fundamentally neo-Confucian, overtly Christian, and morbidly self-critical – but combining iron commitment to patriotic ends with infinite flexibility as to the means. Brutality, exemplary executions, and tolerance of corruption (as the price of loyalty), could be combined with personal frugality and scrupulous fiscal propriety on the part of Chiang himself and many of his closest colleagues.

What many Westerners saw as duplicity or chronic vacillation may be attributed to Chiang’s saturation in the teachings of Sun Tzu – China’s classical writer on the Art of War. Sun Tzu’s over-riding message is supreme pragmatism. Chiang infuriated left-leaning Westerners, particularly some in the US State Department, with his ability to leverage American Cold War politics to ensure support for Taiwan when so-called “realists” in the West were seeking rapprochement with Beijing at any price.

Pragmatism seems to have been a more fundamental value to Chiang Kai-Shek than his espoused Confucian and Christian moralities, and it explains both his successes and his failures. During the mainland years, nothing else could have held together even a semblance of a national government among the maze of competing interests, national and foreign, on which survival of the Republic depended.

The corollary to infinite pragmatism is chronic suspicion, even of close colleagues. So Chiang could be wildly suspicious as well as foolishly loyal. Many lives and careers were sacrificed to his paranoia. In this, his life paralleled that of his Communist nemesis, Mao Zedong, also a keen student of Sun Tzu.

Pragmatism also enabled Chiang to maintain life-long contact with CCP supreme fixer Zhou Enlai. Zhou personally warned Chiang that President Nixon was preparing to switch diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic.

This book makes a substantial contribution to understanding the background of modern China, with many lessons for self-centred Westerners on how to lose friends and alienate peoples.

Richard Thwaites has been a student of China for 40 years, including five years living in China as an ABC correspondent