the generalissimo ګ The Generalissimo Chiang Kai- shek and the Struggle for Modern China Jay Taylor the belknap press of harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2009 .is Chiang Kai- shek’s surname ګ The character Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Taylor, Jay, 1931– The generalissimo : Chiang Kai- shek and the struggle for modern China / Jay Taylor.—1st. ed. â p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 03338- 2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Chiang, Kai- shek, 1887–1975. 2. Presidents—China— Biography. 3. Presidents—Taiwan—Biography. 4. China—History—Republic, 1912–1949. 5. Taiwan—History—1945– I. Title. II. Title: Chiang Kai- shek and the struggle for modern China. DS777.488.C5T39 2009 951.04′2092—dc22 [B]â 2008040492 To John Taylor, my son, editor, and best friend Contents List of Mapsâ ix Acknowledgmentsâ xi Note on Romanizationâ xiii Prologueâ 1 I Revolution 1. A Neo- Confucian Youthâ 7 2. The Northern Expedition and Civil Warâ 49 3. The Nanking Decadeâ 97 II War of Resistance 4. The Long War Beginsâ 141 5. Chiang and His American Alliesâ 194 6. The China Theaterâ 245 7. Yalta, Manchuria, and Postwar Strategyâ 296 III Civil War 8. Chimera of Victoryâ 339 9. The Great Failureâ 378 viii Contents IV The Island 10. Streams in the Desertâ 411 11. Managing the Protectorâ 454 12. Shifting Dynamicsâ 503 13. Nixon and the Last Yearsâ 547 Epilogueâ 589 Notesâ 597 Indexâ 699 Maps Republican China, 1928â 80–81 China, 1929â 87 Allied Retreat, First Burma Campaign, April–May 1942â 206 China, 1944â 293 Acknowledgments Extensive travel, interviews, and research in Taiwan and China over five years made this book possible. Among the many scholars with whom I consulted in Taiwan were Chang Ruide, Chen Cungong, Chen Liwen, Chen Pengren, Chen Yongfa, Huang Zejin, Liu Weikai, Qin Xiaoyi, Zhu Hongyuan, Shao Minghuang, Yu Minling, and Zhang Suya. Special mention must also be made of the contribution of Professor Yang Tianshi, former head of the Chi- nese Modern History Institute in Peking. I also relied heavily on the work of numerous American and other Western scholars who, drawing on archives in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere, have provided impressive new insights into various China issues, foreign and domestic, relevant to Chiang’s career. Until the middle of 2006, my primary source for Chiang’s extensive diaries was the twelve-volume collection put out by the Kuomingtang Party Histori- cal Office, Zong tong Jiang gong da shi chang pian chu gao (Preliminary Draft of President Chiang’s Chronological Biography), Taipei, 1978–2004. The editor of this extensive project, Qin Xiaoyi, in 2003 kindly presented me with a copy of this then hard- to- find collection. Beginning in 2006, the Chiang family began slowly to make available photocopies of the original di- aries for public access at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford Univer- sity. By the time I had finished the final draft, the diaries through 1954 were available. Checking the translations in the Qin Xiaoyi collection against the original diaries, we found no major discrepancies. Assisting in this five- year work were outstanding associates, most especially Lilian Chu, who, during more than four years, in addition to research and translation also expertly arranged and managed my visits to Taiwan. Doria Spichak turned up fascinating documents in Moscow and Jean Israel did the xii Acknowledgments same in Washington. Tong Xiaohua was an immensely valuable associate, travel companion, and assistant during my earlier visits to the mainland, and subsequently provided valuable research material. Outstanding graduate- student assistants at various times in the United States and Taiwan who suc- ceeded one another over the years were Ray Wang, Jian Zhang, Hui-min Ng, Wang Xiang, Cheng Hsin- syi, Lin Wei- yu, and Wang Jian- jiun. During the last year, May Miao provided exceptional work on the original Chiang Dia- ries in the Hoover Institution and many other matters, and Stefan Hahn played a valuable role in collecting the photos in Taipei. Funding for this wide- ranging travel and research came from an advance from Harvard University Press, along with generous grants not only from the Smith- Richardson Foundation administered by the Asia Society, but also from the Himalaya Foundation and the Chiang Ching- kuo Foundation. All of the foundations involved in the proj ect fully carried out their commitment to have nothing to do with the contents of the book or the judgments it might express. My principal editor was my son John Taylor, who did a Herculean job of carefully trimming tens of thousands of words and hundreds of pages and suggesting reor ga ni za tion here and there, thus making the original text much more cogent. Likewise, manuscript editor Julie Carlson’s fine- tuning, correc- tions, and suggestions were invaluable. Joyce Seltzer, my principal editor at Harvard University Press, was also a key adviser whose professional input and personal encouragement were essential. Among the readers who provided insightful and critical comments were Fredrick Chien, Alice Lyman Miller, David Dean, David Lampton, Charles Martin, and Robert Sutter, but as cus- tomary I bear full responsibility for the final work. Finally, my wife, Betsy, supported me with affection, care, endurance, and inspiration. Note on Romanization The two common ways to Romanize Chinese names into English are the Wade- Giles system used on Taiwan and the pinyin system employed on the mainland. Readers and editors strongly recommended that I switch to the pinyin system, which increasingly is being adopted on Taiwan. I have thus employed pinyin with some important exceptions, including the familiar names of the Chiang Kai-shek and Charles Soong families and Sun Yat- sen; idiosyncratic personal names such as Wellington Koo, H. H. Kung, C. K. Yen; and names of authors writing in En glish like Tang Tsou, Hung Mao- tien, Ray Huang, and many others, including my graduate-student assistants who have their own preferred spelling of their names. The En glish- language editions of books originally published in Chinese will show the names of the authors as they appear on these editions—for example, the Memoirs of Li Tsung- jen. Other exceptions are traditional well- known names in En glish of prominent places and features in China, including, of course, “China” as well as Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Harbin, Mukden, Port Arthur, Peking, Nan- king, Chungking, Quemoy, Matsu, Taipei, Amoy, Hong Kong, Macau, Can- ton, Tibet, Swatow, Gobi, Yangtze, and Yellow River. As I noted in a previous book, The Generalissimo’s Son, the Chinese have sensibly chosen not to change their traditional names for foreign places, like Jiujinshan (Old Gold Moun- tain) for San Francisco. Every duty is a charge, but the charge of oneself is the root of all others. ââââââââââ Mencius Prologue When Chiang Kai-shek died in April 1975 at the age of eighty-seven, I was China desk of fi cer in the U.S. State Department responsible for political af- fairs regarding the People’s Republic of China. I was traveling in China at the time, and since a separate of fice dealt with Taiwan, I did not pay much atten- tion to the passing of the old Kuomintang leader. I had shaken hands with him two or three times at receptions in the early 1960s when I was a young Foreign Service of fi cer stationed in Taipei. He had seemed small and frail, and I was surprised that he had such a weak handshake. At the time of his death, my view of Chiang was similar to that of many China specialists. He was best known as a brutal dictator who ruled for al- most fifty years and as a failed military leader who, in a grand reversal of for- tune, lost the mainland to Mao Zedong. As far as I knew he had no re- deeming qualities except for being considered personally honest; even so, he tolerated widespread corruption among his supporters. He seemed like a man who had possessed no authentic principles or ideals and had few if any achievements. Among the books that had in flu enced me in my view were Harold Isaacs’s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time, André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate, and Barbara Tuchman’s Sand against the Wind. When almost twenty years later I was writing The Generalissimo’s Son, a biography of Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching- kuo, I found that the elder man was not the cardboard figure often portrayed in the West and certainly not the icon described in the hagiographies that were so prevalent in Taiwan until the 1980s. But still, in my biography of his son, I portrayed the father by and large in the usual manner. When asked by Harvard University 1 2 the generalissimo Press to follow up my biography of Chiang Ching- kuo with a book on the Generalissimo, I thought long and hard about what promised to be a chal- lenging and lengthy proj ect. Although my view of Chiang was mostly nega- tive, as a moderate liberal and foreign policy pragmatist I thought I could bring an open mind to the subject. I was further encouraged by several scholars who confirmed my impres- sion that no comprehensive Western biography of Chiang had been written that took serious advantage of the mountains of new archival material gradu- ally becoming available not only in Taiwan and China, but also in Russia, Ja- pan, and the United States.