Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  But educated men understood the significance of the Twenty-one Demands and were much stirred up. Yet Yuan Shih-kai, the best informed of all, could not allow himself to indulge in emotional outbreaks. It would be useless to make a public show of resistance. Europe was in no position to respond to any appeal. He haggled, pointed out in diplomatically gentle language that the demands were really extreme.

  The implied acceptance of their terms pleased the Japanese, and Yuan was sure the matter would be straightened out in good time. The West would never let Japan get away with it.

  Educated China did not see his reasoning. Educated China cried, “He has surrendered us! He has betrayed us!” and the burden of their complaints was passed on to the illiterate masses. It is always easier to stir up the Chinese, or anyone else for that matter, against foreign interference than their own people.

  Watching these events closely from Japan, the republicans kept themselves busy. Chiang Kai-shek was on the revolutionary committee of which Soong was treasurer. He visited Shanghai in 1914, just before the European war, and made an attempt to start a revolt there on the lines of a capture of the city and a coup d’etat, but the conspiracy was discovered and Chiang slipped away just in time. He next turned his attention to the possibilities of Manchuria, that Chinese territory beyond the Great Wall. There were rumors that the Manchurians would take kindly to the suggestion of a rising, so Chiang was posted off to Harbin. Unfortunately he found no grounds for supposing that the people there cared a single cash whether Yuan governed China as a republic or a kingdom. Chiang was interested in his surroundings; Manchuria was like a foreign country to him, and he complained later that he was hampered by not knowing much Mandarin dialect. But there was no material there for revolution, and he returned to Tokyo.

  After that, he slipped into China and out of it several times, working among the southerners, interviewing cautious war lords, and organizing sporadic demonstrations. His major effort took place in November 1915 in Shanghai. With Chen Chi-mei, Chiang tried to arrange for the assassination of the city garrison commander. The plot involved a cruiser at anchor in the Whangpoo River, the crew of which was to attack just as Chiang and Chen, ashore, led small parties to capture key points of the city government. Everything fell through, and the French police nearly got the two leaders. Then Chiang fell ill and took to his bed, and his mother had to come up from Chekiang to nurse him.

  Yuan decided on the end of 1915 as the right time to take his final step and assume the Imperial yellow. To this end he organized a substitute for the disbanded National Assembly, called the People’s Representatives Convention. These stooges held a vote in December and declared, unanimously and dutifully, that the form of government should be changed to that of constitutional monarchy, with Yuan as Emperor.

  The President could not have picked a worse time to put his plan into action, while the nation was still in the throes of resentment against the Twenty-one Demands, but he had lost touch with public sentiment. Japan sent a warning; Yuan felt he could afford to ignore that; this was a domestic matter. He was a man of manners, a polished courtier, and like Caesar he very properly thrice refused the proffered crown. The fourth offer he accepted in a beautiful speech.

  The storm that followed staggered him. On January first, Yunnan Province in the Southwest declared its independence of the monarchy. Yunnan had always been refractory, and without hesitation Yuan sent troops to quell the rising, but other outbreaks followed in rapid succession. One of these, a minor disturbance, was led by Chiang Kai-shek in Kiangsu. It was defeated, but in the ensuing months Kiangsu and eleven other provinces seceded from the monarchy by proclamation and declared their readiness to fight against it. Yuan was forced to reconsider. His term as Emperor had not amounted to three months. On March 22, 1916, he abdicated, and three months later died.

  Yuan’s death made a difference to the revolutionaries, of course, but it didn’t automatically settle all their problems, for the Peking government remained. Vice-President Li Yuan-hung slipped into the presidency to finish out the term, and Sun gloomily told his young men that this was bad. He knew Li, a northern general of pre-revolutionary days, and he didn’t like him.

  However, the rebels could now live in China again, as long as they were prudent enough to avoid Peking. Their ranks were depleted. To Chiang’s grief they had lost Chen Chi-mei. It happened while Chen and Chiang were carrying out one of their conspiratorial missions in Shanghai. Chen had been invited to a meeting with Peking agents and, in spite of Chiang’s warning, insisted upon keeping the appointment and was assassinated.

  We couldn’t expect a man like Chiang not to point out, even to a corpse, that he had been right and the corpse had been wrong. He spared his own sorrow nothing. Why should Chen’s spirit escape? He had told Chen, he had warned Chen, and this is what came of ignoring his warnings! He mentioned these facts in his funeral oration.

  “I, your younger sworn brother, Chiang Kai-shek, offer this sacrifice to you, the spirit of the late Chen Chi-mei, with these words. Alas! From now on where can be found a man who knows me so well and loves me so profoundly as you did?

  “Now that you are gone forever, who is there besides myself to continue your work without changing the aim you had originally in your mind? How about those who tried to flatter you when you were influential and tried to get rid of and slander me?… I do not mind that you believed their lies about me when you were living. All I want is that I should have a clear conscience after you are dead.

  “Alas! I had no chance to open my mind to you. The treacherous found their opportunity and my good advice was overlooked.…

  “Your parents, with their gray hair, are still living, while your children are still young.… I shall look after the elderly people and support the young ones and shall always keep you in my thoughts.

  “Oh, you spirit! If you are here, do come and partake of my offerings.”

  There were other absences in Sun’s ranks. For one thing, disagreement as to party policy had driven Wang Ching-wei to France on leave of absence. The custom of sending men who are out of favor on long voyages is peculiarly Chinese. One tries above all to avoid open breaks or unseemly public quarrels. A refractory statesman or general need not be punished by imprisonment, but merely sent abroad “to study”; an official who doesn’t agree with what his leader is doing goes away on his own account. Time heals tempers, or brings about a change in conditions: the quarrel is resolved, and finally the wanderer returns. It is an economical system, conserving trained men who can be used again. It is a pleasing system, avoiding open clashes, which are always ugly. And it is a flexible system, because sooner or later almost every statesman gets his turn in office while the others are away improving their minds.

  The world war didn’t seem a pressing matter to Chiang: China had her own troubles. Her stresses and strains were divided into halves, with North China struggling around Peking and South China churned up by Sun’s Nationalists. But the dividing line was obscured by the private campaigns of war lords who were neither for North nor South, only for themselves. As there is still some confusion as to just what a war lord is—people often say Chiang was one—it seems best to quote Hollington Tong: “a warlord was the governor or the military commander of a province, or group of provinces. He throve when the authority of the Central Government was lax, or uncertain. He derived his power from his control of autonomous military forces and from his ability to appropriate to his own purposes the taxes of his province or area. His role was sometimes predatory … at other times benevolent … but his distinguishing characteristic was his refusal to recognize the complete authority of the Central Government.” Definitely, this doesn’t describe Chiang.

  Peking, on top of chronic trouble with war lords, was saddled willy-nilly with the responsibility for international affairs. On February 4 Wilson called upon all countries which were still neutral to join the struggle against Germany. Peking held no brief for Germany particularly, but the government could n
ot agree to take the plunge. Neither could the war lords, whose opinions had to be respected because their armies were needed to uphold governmental authority. Dissension tore parliamentary meetings for months, until the war lords had their way and Li Yuan-hung dissolved Parliament. The Kuomintang members who had been holding out against the war lords fled for their lives. Most of them turned up in Shanghai and reported to Sun Yat-sen.

  After a lot of switches, Li Yuan-hung got control again, and Peking declared war on Germany and Austria, but China’s part in World War I was never to amount to very much. Sun gathered round him the displaced M.P.s and took them to Canton. There he announced that the dissolution of Parliament in Peking had been illegal and that he was re-convening it. A military government was set up, with Sun as Generalissimo and dictator. In spite of his pretensions his domain was woefully small, comprising merely the twin provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. Even over this territory Sun had no real control; he was utterly dependent on the local war lords. His chief support was one of these, a Cantonese general named Chen Chiung-ming, who was now appointed commander of the Kwangtung army.

  Chiang Kai-shek was reasonably contented with the new setup, modest though it was. He was back in harness as a military man. Sun sent him North to reorganize an army that they still supported up there, a remnant of the old days. Chiang grimly observed the familiar faults of an old-style military body—lack of discipline, limited loyalties, maladministration—and recommended that the army simply be dissolved and forgotten. When this was done he moved on to Peking and remained there for a few months asking questions and taking notes. Later he sent to Sun an outline for a proposed northern expedition, complete with information on the Peking troops, and even a suggested route for the march.

  It seemed a fantastic hope. Peking was actually sending forces against Sun at this time; they had got as far as Hunan. But Chiang’s idea was sound enough. Someday when Sun’s government was stronger he would undoubtedly have to march against Peking, and one might as well be prepared.

  In March 1918 Sun recalled Chiang and gave him a post in the Kwangtung army. The Doctor was trying to consolidate his strength, but he wasn’t having much luck. As he grew old and crotchety he was less and less able to control the quarrelsome factions of his group. Soon his opponents managed to ease him out of his top position by replacing the military government with an administrative committee in which Sun was merely one man of seven. This affronted him, and in June he gave up altogether and retired to Shanghai. Though he insisted that he was through forever, his army still fought for him in Kwangtung, and certainly Chiang still considered him the leader. Nor could Sun refrain from meddling. Now and then he sent advice to Chiang or Chen Chiung-ming on military matters, and if they didn’t always follow it, they never argued with him.

  Instead, all their spare resentment was directed against each other. Chiang had been at outs with Chen Chiung-ming almost from the moment of his appointment. He was still a passionate, opinionated, jealous youth. His advice was always ignored, he said in aggrieved tones, yet it would have saved the day if it had been followed. According to his account—and there is no reason to doubt it—the Kwangtung army was being beaten back and back, until at the end of July it was near final defeat; only then would Chen hand over the problem to Chiang, and an improvement was the immediate result. “Chen Chiung-ming found his hands as good as tied, not knowing what to do,” said Chiang in 1931, recollecting. “I forced them not to retreat and altered the plan of operations … Luckily the battle brought us a decisive victory, but it also made the other officers jealous of me. When I reflect on it today, I still feel heartache.”

  National codes of honor are tricky things. An English or American officer would not be so eager to criticize his superiors. But Chiang was not completely typical of his class, either. He stands out because of a certain directness, bluntness, honesty—call it what you will; perhaps it is simplicity. Whatever it is, it can be exasperating even today, when his temper has mellowed, and in youth it must have been maddening to his colleagues, especially on the frequent occasions when he turned out, unforgivably, to have been right. He was like Macartney, the first British Ambassador to China, who “had great pride, and a good deal of conceit, but this arose rather from a contemptuous opinion of others than from a vain one of himself.”

  The stubborn man carried on as best he could, against enemy and ally alike, for the next few months. He achieved a number of local victories, and disagreed violently with Chen Chiung-ming when at the end of 1918 the C-in-C decided to call a halt for the winter. It was a mistake, argued Chiang, to cease fighting at that particular moment when he himself, for one, was deep inside the enemy lines with insufficient men. The letters do not expose Chen as an unreasonable fellow; as a matter of fact he shows up rather well, a patient man handling a difficult but talented officer with kid gloves. Historians on Chiang’s side claim that later developments prove Chen to have been planning treachery the whole time, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. He was certainly out for himself; all war lords were, but in 1918 he probably thought his best policy was to support the Nationalists. Chiang disliked him and suspected him of pulling his punches and distrusted him, but that doesn’t mean Chiang had second sight. Chiang didn’t trust anybody very much. It was an attitude that made for a quarrelsome life.

  The ins and outs of the sporadic war between the southern provinces brought out this side of Chiang’s character. Nineteen hundred and nineteen was full of impetuous resignations on his part, interspersed with returns to the front whenever he had made his point. By November the complicated situation in Kwangtung was pretty well cleaned up, with Kwangsi troops driven out and Sun’s army in control. Chiang felt it had been too long a struggle and too costly, and this also he blamed on the commander-in-chief, Chen. There was an open quarrel, and Chiang went away, again, to Shanghai. His temper was even more difficult than usual, for he had lost one of his good friends in the fighting and he was possessed by grief.

  Sun did his usual gentle best to patch up dissension in the ranks. He wrote from Shanghai:

  “To my dear Elder Brother Chiang Kai-shek,

  “When my elder brother Chen Chiung-ming fought back to Canton, he was using all his strength to serve our party and our country. We, on our part, are using all our strength to help him. With only one aim and of only one mind, our co-operation cannot be compared with any ordinary alliance …

  “The sudden and tragic death of Chu Ta-fu is a loss to me comparable to that of my right or left hand. When I look among the members of our party I find very few who are experts in war and also loyal. Only you, my elder brother, are with us, you, whose courage and sincerity are equal to those of Chu Ta-fu, and your knowledge of war is even better than his. But you have a very fiery temper, and your hatred of mediocrity is excessive. And so it often leads to quarreling and difficulty in co-operating. As you are shouldering the great and heavy responsibility of our party, you should sacrifice your high ideals a little and try to compromise. This is merely for the sake of our party and has nothing to do with your personal principles. Would you, my elder brother, agree with this?”

  Chinese are always pointing out to each other just where human nature falls short of the ideal. Their official correspondence is full of artless self-examination, self-condemnation, and—especially when a man like young Chiang is writing the letter—self-justification. But Sun’s appeal to his turbulent officer’s softer feelings, his evocation of well-loved names and his reminder of the cause, did not suffice. Not pride, Chiang said, but his contemptuous opinion of Chen Chiung-ming made reconciliation impossible. He wrote to Chen:

  “You, my Commander-in-Chief, are an expert in strategy and also full of experience; if you had not been ill-advised you would never have done this; if you trusted me, you would never have done this. Even if those who were marching forward with their men at the front had a little common sense, they would not have done this.… I cannot bear those whose minds are full of jealousy and prejudic
e and those who have no regard for the co-ordination of the whole plan, nor any concern about the success or failure of the entire campaign. I am straightforward and would rather die fighting. I dare not act contrary to my conscience.”

  No one would have argued with the biographer who said: “Chiang is by nature obdurate. Not infrequently … he would fly into storms of temper before which few human beings can stand. Above all, he was self-opinionated, highly so.” He added, “No one could endure him, and by degrees he became more and more disagreeable to his associates.”

  The coast was clear, the enemy defeated: Sun went back to Canton. He appointed Chen Chiung-ming Governor of Kwangtung Province, and Chiang resented this, but it was really none of his business any more. Chiang was definitely on his own, out of the Army, facing the necessity of making a living as a civilian.

  In Shanghai he found himself among the busiest talkers in the world. The European war was over. Shanghai swarmed with foreign businessmen, and there was something else in the picture—the dispossessed, the White Russians. They flocked across Siberia to Harbin and Vladivostok, and thence down the coast to Shanghai in flight from the Bolsheviks. A lot of people talked about Russia and its revolution.

  Chiang did not: he was a military man and no intellectual. His friends were businessmen who made their money abroad: he was trying to break into the stock-market world of Shanghai. The ferment in Peking that was intoxicating a librarian’s assistant from Hunan, a young countryman named Mao Tse-tung, did not excite Chiang Kai-shek. He was broke and simply trying to make a living. He had been pleased, however, a year before, when the former rebels in Russia, now firmly in the saddle, sent a fraternal message to China’s revolutionists. These Bolsheviks seemed to have drunk of the same waters as Sun Yat-sen. They wanted what he wanted, and they had got it, which could not be said for Sun, and in their triumph they did not forget their brothers in other lands. They seemed to wish to help.