Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  “We shall not merely aid the workers, but also wish to aid the people of China,” said the Karakhan Manifesto. “Every nation whether large or small should have complete autonomy. We proclaim that all secret treaties made before the revolution with China, Japan, or the allies are hereby abrogated.… We hereby renounce all territory obtained through aggressive means by the former Russian imperial government in China, Manchuria and elsewhere.… In short, we hereby renounce all special privileges formerly obtained by Russia in China.… If the Chinese people as a result of our proposals wish to become a free people and escape the evil fate of becoming a second India or Korea as has been planned for her at the Paris Peace Conference, we fervently hope that the Chinese people will make common cause with the peasants, workers, and Red soldiers of the Soviet Union and fight for their freedom!”

  It was gratifying and astonishing that Europeans should voluntarily give up something in China which they already possessed. However … as long as the northern government was the official one, these international decisions were Peking’s job to cope with, not Canton’s. So Chiang applied himself to the matter in hand: stockbrokerage.

  The time Chiang Kai-shek spent in the wilderness of the Shanghai Stock Exchange was incongruous. Spiteful comment makes it more conspicuous than it perhaps deserves. Shanghai gossips were later to tell the story over and over, with relish—how Chiang Kai-shek was so poor he had to eat in the cheapest foodshops and buy his hot water by the copper’s worth, like any other down-and-outer. The writer has been told by hangers-on around the exchange that Chiang was “no better than a porter, a janitor. He used to sweep out my father’s office.”

  The tale is exaggerated. Chiang did have a thin time of it; outside the Army he had no regular job. He was for a time without the patron a portionless man had to have in China, but this bad luck was not to last for long. The city was full of friends of the revolution. One of these especially, Chang Ching-kiang, did not allow him to languish.

  Chang Ching-kiang, a wealthy merchant with important business connections in Paris, had for years been one of the financial supports of Sun Yat-sen’s enterprises. He took an interest in the stiff-necked, bright young officer. The city was enjoying a postwar boom, and fortunes were won and lost every day on the market. Chiang Kai-shek was not exactly a tyro in this world; he came of merchant stock. The gossips say he was staked by his friend and promptly won a fortune; some add that he immediately lost it again and was protected still by Chang. It would not be surprising if both tales are true, as such adventures were commonplace in 1920 Shanghai.

  But Chiang’s sojourn in the world of finance didn’t last long. Sun wanted him back in Canton, and Chang Ching-kiang urged him to go. There was still the enmity, however, between himself and Chen Chiung-ming, and he hesitated. He held long conversations with friends on the subject, especially with a brother officer who like Chiang had walked out of Canton in a huff with Chen Chiung-ming. There are published letters between these two. Chiang apologizes to his friend for having lost his temper: “The other day when the trouble started, you … seemed to me to be very stern both in your voice and color: I could not get a word in edgeways, and so felt it unbearable.… I have a bad temper and am usually lacking in good manners. When I think that I am overpatient with you, my elder brother, after having had enough of your anger, I become unconsciously rude, bursting out all at once.… I feel most ashamed of myself after careful reflection. I know myself that I have been ridiculous.”

  The friend replied: “You, my elder brother, are extremely self-willed to an almost incorrigible extent. Whenever you are disappointed at some trifle, you let your anger go unchecked. In dealing with people in that way, you run the grave danger of courting calamity; or at least you will find it most damaging to your career.”

  “The trouble with me in society is that I go to extremes,” wrote Chiang. “I have lifelong sworn fast friends but no ordinary boon companions or social acquaintances.”

  In February 1921 the introspective soldier was coaxed back to Canton. He went with a bad grace, telling Chang Ching-kiang, “It is clearly known that the place is not suitable for me to stay long, that the work is utterly impossible for our party to carry out, yet I am unreasonably made to follow them.” Chen was stalling, he was convinced of it. Chiang would go to see Sun merely on a friendly visit. He would definitely not accept an official commission under Chen Chiung-ming.

  There are various American newspaper descriptions of Chiang Kai-shek. We would expect these portraits to be slapdash, but their effect is not only sketchy but often definitely misleading. From the war-lord period of 1916–25 the picture that emerged was of a tough, mysterious military man without principle, an unlettered opportunist, self-hewn from hard rock. Later other traits were added to this awe-striking character; it was discovered that Chiang was devious and cunning.

  No one who reads his letters can continue to believe it. There is hard common sense as well as naïveté, but the outstanding characteristic of Chiang at thirty-four is earnest innocence. Even his suspicions partake of this quality.

  An election, he warned Sun, would be a bad move. (Sun had proposed one.) People wouldn’t understand or accept it. “Today the time is not yet ripe, and our foundation is far from solid. The Kwangsi enemy is still at large and the Southwest unconquered.” There were people in the Kwangtung army, he hinted in an elephantine way, who would oppose it. In any case, what good would an election do? What difference did one’s diplomatic standing make? Japan hadn’t helped them as she was expected to do after recognizing them; neither had England or America. On the contrary. For that matter, look at the new Soviet Russia. That state had had no diplomatic standing, and the European powers and America had gone out of their way to hold her down, but Soviet Russia had not failed because she was strongly united. The lesson was obvious. An election would disunite South China even more than it was already divided and Peking would no doubt leap at the chance to denounce Sun Yat-sen.

  “You, my Master, can only hope for Chen Chiung-ming not to do things which are outside his authority, and to pursue the same aim as you do yourself.” With this hidden—but not very subtly hidden—barb, Chiang signed off.

  His words carried no weight: Sun had himself elected.

  Chiang’s mother died and he went to Fenghua for the conventional days of mourning. Who would be crass enough to criticize a man for showing his natural filial sorrow in this manner? Nevertheless, some of his friends claimed that the mourning period stretched out inordinately; Chiang stayed in Fenghua for months, coming out now and then in response to an urgent summons from Sun, but always diving back again into Chekiang. In the meantime the scheduled Kwangsi campaign went ahead and Chen Chiung-ming scored successes without Chiang’s assistance.

  No one could be sure why Sun Yat-sen should have decided on a “Northern Punitive Expedition” early in 1922; certainly not because he felt secure in Canton, for things there couldn’t have been in more of a mess. Chen Chiung-ming was feeling his oats and all the officers were squabbling. But Sun was aware that Peking, too, was in a mess, and the time must have seemed propitious for an attack. Impetuously he started off, leaving Chen Chiung-ming in command as Minister for War.

  The Army was hardly on its way when Chiang Kai-shek, watching balefully from Chekiang, perceived signs of treachery in Chen’s behavior. He sent warning telegrams madly to all his colleagues, and they telegraphed back in an equally reckless manner. The expedition soon slowed down—because money and supplies were held back by Chen, according to Chiang’s accusation, but it was probably doomed from the start anyway. The Army had not yet reached the provincial border when Chen’s supply arrangements broke down and Sun’s troops were stranded. In the interim before the commanders admitted this, Kai-shek’s telegraphic correspondence was lively. Liao Chung-kai, one of the officers accompanying Sun, no piker on the wire himself, retorted:

  “Your telegram received and understood. Unless rebellion actually broke out in Canton, to call bac
k our forces from the front would never be allowed in any circumstances.… There are the Navy and three divisions in the provincial capital; the wretches surely would not dare to rise rashly. You, my elder brother, ought to come soon and go to the front immediately to help.… How can you bear to leave … the rest of us to suffer all the hardship? How could you?”

  I have not been able to discover who paid for military telegrams.

  Then Chen moved his forces into Canton and Sun came rushing back to prevent any dirty work, and sacked his deputy governor. Chiang’s Cassandra behavior was justified.

  Nobody liked to say openly that the Northern Punitive Expedition was fizzling out, but that was the fact. Sun stayed in Canton to do his own governing and left the management of the campaign to two generals. With Chen out, he might reasonably look forward to the addition to the staff of Chiang, still stubbornly mourning in Chekiang. In the meantime there came something unusual from Peking—a friendly message.

  There, the endemic civil war was quiet for the moment. Li Yuan-hung, who had been out and in several times, was again in the presidential chair. An alliance was apparently pending with the new Soviet Union of Russia; at any rate, an agent had arrived from Moscow. The leaders claimed that the Peking government was constitutional. This being so, said the northerners, what was the use of that separate Parliament down in Canton? Let Sun Yat-sen come to Peking and talk over a merger.

  Sun refused the invitation. He still didn’t like Li Yuan-hung, and he did not trust the party in power. There was a buzz of criticism among some of his followers at this decision: they felt that the Master was letting personal prejudice sway him. The loudest critic was Chen Chiung-ming, still smarting from his demotion and primed for his part. Sun should resign, he said. He wasn’t needed any more.

  Chen had sympathizers among the Canton merchants, who were liking Sun less and less. At first they had accepted his socialist sentiments with indulgence, assuming that they were demagogic trappings. But the man evidently meant what he said. Taxes were being levied on the wealthy, and valuable slum property had been confiscated in the name of the public good. The merchants were aggrieved. Enthusiastically they agreed with Chen; it was time to get rid of Sun.

  Thus encouraged, Chen struck. On the night of June 15, 1922, he brought his troops into the city walls again and made straight for the residency. In their usual lighthearted fashion the soldiers fired and looted as they went, and gangs from the town joined in, until a great horde of shouting, excited people bore down on Sun’s house.

  No conspiracy ever went completely unheralded in those circles, and Sun was given warning a few hours in advance. He made his way alone through the streets, without interference, to navy headquarters. The residency, with all his books and manuscripts, was burned down.

  The admiral in command at the navy yard found his distinguished refugee’s presence embarrassing. Pointing out that the place was not built to withstand a siege, he bundled the President aboard the cruiser Yung Feng and sent him out into the river off Whampoa. There the cruiser mingled with the foreign craft that rode at anchor, and there it stayed. Chen did not dare to fire anywhere near the European ships.

  After one or two days Sun got a telegram out to Chiang Kai-shek calling for help. Chiang was his only recourse: the other generals, who had been at the front, fled into Fukien, and the Navy had turned its back.

  Chiang started out immediately. By the twenty-seventh he was aboard the Yung Feng with Sun, and he stayed aboard until the end, for nearly two months. He had never shown up so well. He did his job without fuss, looking after his leader like an orderly. He helped the ratings of the undermanned ship. His notorious temper remained cheerful and even, though quarters were cramped aboard and the midsummer weather was cruelly hot. Most Chinese generals would have been too lofty to behave in this manner, waiting personally on Sun, carrying meals, sweeping out the cabin: tradition forbade such sacrifice of dignity, but Chiang’s training in the Japanese Army canceled out that foolishness.

  They could easily have got away, but they hung on, hoping Chen would lose ground after his initial push. When at last, early in August, it became clear that the war lord had the support of all the Cantonese who counted, Sun and Chiang pulled out and made their way by British gunboat to Shanghai. A number of displaced M.P.s sadly greeted them at the dock. Sun retired to his house in the French Concession, and Chiang went back to Fenghua and that so often interrupted mourning.

  In the eyes of the Western world, China still meant Peking. Revolts might come and rebels might go, but in our experience trouble in China always ended with somebody or other running things from the northern capital. Soviet Russia shared this idea at first, and so Communism was brought in by way of Peking, through the intellectuals at the universities.

  Europeans and Americans are often puzzled by the student strikes and demonstrations of the East. We too have turbulent scenes in our universities, and look on unruly behavior as a natural part of youth, but we would be outraged if the youngsters attempted seriously to change the law. We have no awe of the educated because we have nearly all been students ourselves. It is different in the crowded East. There, students are the elite; progress and civilization depend upon them. And they know it. From our point of view, they know it far too well.

  Students in China have always been the ones who fostered revolt. Most of the revolutionary societies that abounded in China before 1911 were based at universities. Eling Soong’s husband, H. H. Kung, was a charter member of one of these as a student in Peking. He is now abused by the Left as a reactionary of reactionaries, but as a boy he plotted the assassination of Imperial tyrants at secret meetings in classrooms in the dead of night.

  So, though at first the theory of the Russian Revolution didn’t interest the Peking government clique, it sent a ripple through lecture halls and dormitories. It filled a need of the day; faculties and undergraduates were thirsty for reform. A sign of their restlessness was the demand, started by Hu Shih, for the use of everyday language in literature. Chinese writing until then had been confined to the stilted style of the ancients, which after many centuries had become incomprehensible to ordinary people; its only usefulness was that it gave a feeling of superiority to the privileged scholars who could read and use it. Hu Shih’s movement stirred up tremendous excitement. Hundreds of students rushed to his support. The classicists were horrified and defended the old ways stoutly, but progress won out, and after 1918 there appeared the first books—fiction, poetry, history—written in the language of every day. Hu Shih’s challenge was the beginning of literacy among the people, and that later tied up in its own way with Communism. Much of world importance grew out of that lecture-hall quarrel.

  The leading spirits of Chinese Marxism were two men at Peking National University, Li Ta-chao the librarian, who later became a professor of history, and Ch’ên Tu-hsiu, dean of the Department of Literature. They were strongly attracted by the novel concept of a scientific approach to government. Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism had failed, and the nation, where it was not standing still, was sinking into chaos and poverty. Marx seemed to hold the answer. As early as 1918 Li founded a Society for the Study of Marxism, and one of the keenest members was his assistant in the library, Mao Tse-tung, the peasant of Hunan.

  At first neither Ch’ên nor Li appreciated the amount of self-sacrifice demanded of a true Marxist. They behaved as Chinese scholars always did when studying philosophy; they picked and chose and considered themselves free to reject what they did not approve. But by 1920 they were fully fledged, dedicated Communists who showed only the most occasional tendency to argue with the sacred word. That year the Chinese Communist Party was founded. Few people outside Ch’ên’s direct circle even noticed it.

  The members rode happily on the wave of enthusiasm that everywhere met the Karakhan Manifesto of 1919. Lenin’s plan for revolution gratified Ch’ên Tu-hsiu because it stipulated leadership (in the early stages) by the intelligentsia, and he saw himself as the chos
en intellectual, the great man of China. Li Ta-chao declared that all theories of history before Marx were mere tools of the ruling class, used to stupefy the people. The new language had caught on.

  The Russian who assisted at the birth of the Chinese Communist Party—which hereafter I’ll call the C.C.P. for short—came from Moscow to Peking on purpose for the occasion. Moscow still thought of the Peking leaders as the moving force of China, and intended to make an alliance with them. But they flirted with Sun, too, and he responded eagerly. He had sent a telegram of congratulation to Lenin when the Russian Revolution succeeded. No doubt he felt even more interest in the matter because he had known Tchitcherin in earlier days in Paris. He was gratified when Tchitcherin wrote to him—“Your country advances now resolutely, your people enter consciously the path of struggle against the world-suppressing yoke of Imperialism”—though the date of this letter was 1920, the same year the Kremlin was making up to Peking.

  Whatever hard-and-fast agreements Sun made with Soviet Russia are obscured, like those with Japan, by his secrecy and the loss of so many papers in the Canton fire. But some points are well known, and have often been cited by Communists to buttress their claims to him and all his works. He was already imitating some of the Soviet methods when he instituted his reform of the Canton government. Moscow’s indifference to him vanished in 1922, when a “Russian” calling himself Maring (he was a Dutchman named Sneevliet) came to Canton early in the year to inspect the setup. Maring was so favorably impressed that after reading his report the Kremlin focused its interest on South China, although it continued to play both ends against the middle and did not drop Peking. Clearly, Sun Yat-sen was the best bet.

  Sun is often called a blind idealist, but he must have been shrewd, or at least cautious. He was still making up his mind, still hoping for support from someone besides Russia. Nineteen hundred and twenty-two was a time of great anxiety for the foreign powers who had investments in the East—the imperialists, as the Chinese had recently learned from the Russians to call them. In Hongkong a seamen’s strike cost the British millions of dollars. Foreigners asked each other worriedly if Russia was behind it with her world revolution. Was this it? It looked very much as if it might be, especially when Adolf Joffe came to Peking as envoy from Moscow. For Joffe was one of Russia’s best-known diplomats, and the choice gratified the Chinese and frightened the commercial foreign residents. Joffe made a public speech in which he openly pledged Russian aid as soon as China felt the time had come to rid herself of the now infamous foreign imperialism. He was the talk of the country.