Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

Chingling went to Shanghai for a little, while she thought it over; then she too moved on to Moscow. On leaving, she declared that this was what her husband would have wished. In any case, she said, she was not safe in China. Her decision was hastened by the news that Mayling had finally decided to marry Chiang Kai-shek. It was very depressing. Sun was being forgotten, superseded, outshone. Where did that leave Sun’s widow?

  And her younger sister, too!

  6 MARRIAGE 1927

  Chiang’s blow at the C.C.P. had repercussions in the North, land of its birth. Chang Tso-lin didn’t love either the Reds or the Kuomintang; in fact, he classed them together. Soon after the Shanghai uproar, his police, alerted to dig out sympathizers of both bodies in Peking, reported that they found thousands of Kuomintang members and at least a thousand Communists in the universities. The Old Marshal pounced. Arrests were made; twenty Communists, including Li Ta-chao, were hanged; and Li duly became a sainted martyr in the hearts of people who would certainly have pilloried him, ultimately, if he had survived.

  In Hunan his former assistant, Mao Tse-tung, was organizing peasants and coming to the conclusions that would one day save the Chinese Party. He had just published an article holding the seeds of his new idea, “Report on an Investigation of the Agrarian Movement in Hunan,” a departure from the accepted revolutionary formula. Marx laid it down as a fundamental rule that the urban workers, or “proletariat,” of a country should be the dynamic force. His theory was based on his own experience of highly industrialized European countries; he had never envisaged the predominantly agricultural civilization of China. But Mao, who knew nothing else, believed that the revolutionary strength of China must depend primarily on her peasants.

  His writing rose to poetic heights. “The force of the peasantry is like that of the raging winds and driving rain. It is rapidly increasing in violence. No force can stand in its way. The peasantry will tear apart all nets which bind it and hasten along the road to liberalism. They will bury beneath them all forces of imperialism, militarism, corrupt officialdom, village bosses and evil gentry.… The democratic forces in the village have arisen to overthrow the feudal forces in the village. The overthrow of feudal forces is, after all, the aim of the national revolution.”

  A few weeks later the C.C.P. was plunged into chaos by Chiang’s attack. There was no time to argue the point of strategy with Mao’s masters, but he did have a stormy encounter before he got permission to continue organizing in Hunan. The abortive Autumn Crop Uprising was the result, and Mao was left with the sore conviction that he could have proved the worth of his peasants amply if only the effort hadn’t been sabotaged by Hankow. He himself was taken prisoner, but managed to make his escape from the soldiery, and was severely rebuked by the C.E.C. for his pains.

  Other survivors of the purge, pro-Communist generals, broke away with their troops and made a successful attempt to capture, and an unsuccessful effort to hold, Nanchang. After being driven from the city they dispersed in Kiangsi, but later they found each other again and formed the first guerrilla bands that operated in the Red region. Some forces under Tang Sheng-chih advanced straight toward Nanking. As far as they were concerned, the drive for Peking could wait. They were the Eastern Expedition, intent on defeating Chiang.

  The way should now have been clear for the reconciliation of Nanking and the Hankow Kuomintang rump Parliament, but there was too much bitterness floating about to be forgotten so easily. Chiang returned to the expeditionary front, and in his absence from Hankow enemies worked busily against him. Military reverses gave them fresh cause to complain. The Nationalists, continuing to make good time, marched into Shantung. Peking was not far away, and Chang Tso-lin was beginning to think seriously of suggesting a compromise and making peace when two new troubles halted the Army. One was the defection of Feng Yu-hsiang, who was based on Chenchow: the unreliable Christian general welshed on his earlier promise to create a diversion by attacking Chang Tso-lin. The other setback was unexpected.

  There were Japanese troops stationed at Tsingtao, near Tsinan, who had been moved in there when Japan took over the former German territory of China. As Chiang approached Tsinan a large number of these soldiers were suddenly sent to garrison the capital. Apparently Japan didn’t want to see China united.

  Chiang could not possibly afford to embroil himself in another war at this juncture, and he realized that the Japanese were more than willing to force the issue. He had no choice; he had to submit to the loss of face entailed by his action and withdraw to Hsuchow.

  Upon this, Feng Yu-hsiang, of all people, approached him in the unfitting role of peace dove and suggested that Chiang meet the Wuhan group and talk things over. By this time nobody was quite sure whom to fight or what to fight about, but Feng could not drum up any eagerness on the part of the disputants to make friends. Wuhan wanted Chiang out, that was the heart of the matter, and at last they had their way.

  Chiang would have continued to hang on politically, but another military push from the north dislodged him from Hsuchow and he had to fall back to the Yangtze, almost as far as Nanking itself. This was no light affair, and his stock hit rock bottom. Now, even his hitherto loyal generals, Li Tsung-jen, Pai Chung-hsi, and Li Chen-sen, were in favor of easing him out. On August 12 the Military Council held a meeting in Nanking which Chiang attended. Somebody opened proceedings by stating that it was all-important to reunite the Nationalists. This being agreed, somebody else pointed out that unity could not be achieved as long as Chiang Kai-shek was commander-in-chief. This too was agreed, and when it was suggested that Chiang voluntarily submit to demotion, he promptly resigned altogether. He turned and walked out of the meeting, and the Military Council immediately appointed a Cantonese general in his place.

  Afterward there was outcry enough to bring considerable comfort to his angry heart. Hardly had he left for Shanghai for the inevitable consultation with Chang Ching-kiang than Hu Han-min, too, resigned, as did a majority of the Nanking Kuomintang officials, with Chang Ching-kiang himself included. There were indignant mass meetings and telegrams of protest. Chiang announced his resignation and made a declaration on the subject in the press the day after the meeting: the declaration was long, like all his utterances, but pithy nonetheless.

  “For several years I have been credited with advocating the policy of seeking Russia’s friendship and co-operating with the Communists. When I returned from a tour of inspection through Russia, I had very clear-cut views as to the essential differences between the two policies. This was known to both Liao Chung-kai and Wang Ching-wei.

  “I was unable to convert the learned Doctor [Sun Yat-sen] to my views, but I learned his. He said, ‘China has no room for the coexistence of Communism and the Kuomintang. We must admit the Communists and convert them, and the Three People’s Principles will serve as a melting pot.’

  “This is more than enough to indicate that in admitting the Communists into the Kuomintang’s fold, Dr. Sun had no intention of doing so at the expense of the Party.”

  Chiang always goes back to the mountains, preferably his own mountains, when he wants to get away from everything, and this time was no exception. There was a difference, however, between this return to Fenghua and the last one, when he had spent his time alternately mourning for his mother and popping out to extricate Sun Yat-sen from difficulties. Then he had been a bright young hopeful, one general among many. Now he came as a leader—a leader resigned if not deposed, but nevertheless a strong man with a past and a future. He brought his two hundred-strong bodyguard with him, and though he took up quarters in a Buddhist monastery on a high mountain he did not, after all, get away from everything, or indeed from anything at all. The world followed him. Friends, advisers, reporters, telegrams …

  Speaking of telegrams, five pro-Chiang men took the greatest pleasure in sending an elaborate one to the elusive Feng Yu-hsiang, now himself eluded and left with the bottom dropped out of his proposed press conference.

  “To Commander-in-Ch
ief Feng, Chengchow:

  “When we received your telegram dated August 11, asking us to meet in Anking, we agreed gladly. When we sent you the reply on the evening of the twelfth, our elder brother Kai-shek was getting into his train for Shanghai. We showed him the draft of the reply and he smiled and signed his name at once. Who would have thought that the news of our elder brother Kai-shek’s resignation would be announced on the morning of the thirteenth? We went to Shanghai to get him back; but when we reached there, he had gone to Ningpo. In the spring of last year Li Shih-tsang and Wu Chih-hui went to the North to get you back and you had left for Mongolia. They missed you only by a few hours. The sun moves exactly as fast as it always does. In a moment it has disappeared. We are unhappy now, exactly as we were last year.…”

  “The Chinese people turned from the conservative friendship of America and accepted offers from Russia,” said Chiang Kai-shek, in an interview with some gentlemen of the press who climbed up the mountain to see him ensconced in his temple. “There were reasons, of course, which you all know. But Russia has now betrayed us, and we must look to America as our only real friend among the nations.”

  It must have reminded the journalists of Sun Yat-sen’s statement in Canton not many years before.

  Chiang stayed in his mountain eyrie only a month; late in September he went to Japan. He had various vague plans to call on old acquaintances in Tokyo and refresh his contacts, but they were secondary; a more important errand filled his mind. The Soongs too were in Japan, and Mayling was reputed to have said for publication, in a version the accuracy of which this writer takes liberty to doubt, “I sincerely love the great general.”

  Her mother must now be persuaded and placated. For a long time Mrs. Soong had opposed the idea of this match. Chiang had corresponded with Mayling five years. The fact that Chingling had never liked him did not matter very much, for Eling Kung, the eldest of Charles Soong’s children, was on his side, and her word counted most with her mother. No one was crass enough to admit it, but the result of the interview was practically settled in advance; otherwise Chiang would never have been exposed to the ordeal of asking for his lady’s hand. He would not have got to see Mrs. Soong at all.

  As it was, he had some difficulty in cornering her. The Soongs had taken a house in Kobe, but when Mrs. Soong heard that General Chiang was on his way, she fled. With Eling Kung and Mayling she went all the way to Kamakura on the other side of the island. There at last Eling persuaded her to receive him and let him state his case.

  It was not mere mother-in-law skittishness that sent her on this impetuous journey; Mrs. Soong was not a skittish person. She was simply afraid of not liking Chiang after all. Mrs. Soong, for all her modern ideas and her Christianity, was no longer young. In her day people hadn’t approved of the soldierly caste. There was also the fact that Chiang was older than Mayling by a dozen years. There was his boyhood marriage. What had he done about that? There was—perhaps—his reputation as a womanizer, but it is doubtful if Mrs. Soong listened to such gossip. Her gravest doubts had to do with his religion.

  When the General succeeded in getting his interview, they discussed two of these matters. The others it was no use discussing. After all, if he was a soldier, that was that; times had changed. The same could be said of the discrepancy in age; it was not so very important. But what of the earlier marriage and his state of grace?

  Forewarned, Chiang had brought with him a paper proving that his first wife and he were as divorced as they could possibly be according to Chinese custom. Chinese divorces are beautifully easy to get. A printed announcement in a newspaper that the couple agree to call it off will serve, but he had provided himself with a legal document in order that the Soongs could make quite sure.

  There now remained one thing—the matter of religion. Mrs. Soong said that she understood Chiang was not a Christian; was he willing to become one? At that point the aspiring son-in-law won her heart. Instead of protesting hastily that of course he would be a Christian, or anything else that pleased her, he replied slowly that he would look into the matter. He would read the Bible and see what there was in it. He was perfectly willing to have a try.

  Chiang’s mother had been a very pious Buddhist, but she herself would probably have made a similar reply, for Chinese of the old school were completely free from religious intolerance. This cheerful catholicity has often been the bane of earnest missionaries from the West, who cannot see eye to eye with a convert who reconciles Confucianism and Christianity without the slightest difficulty, nor sees why he must give up one merely because he accepts the other. After all, Confucianism is not so much a religion as a code of ethics, and Buddhism and Christianity are not incompatible.

  Mrs. Soong was impressed by the General’s honesty. She gave her consent with more warmth than she had intended to do, and the engagement was official. Chiang announced it as soon as he stepped off the boat at Shanghai in November.

  There were other matters involving him—the Northern Expedition was not going well, and things were getting messed up in Canton and Nanking—but the newspapermen who crowded around the General at the pier were more interested for the moment in his private life. At least some of them were surprised by the news, for though Chiang’s long courtship of Miss Soong was well known among his intimates, foreigners had not been informed. Journalists acquainted with the gossip of Canton had heard other stories, however; they knew of the pretty singsong girl who had until recently called herself Chiang’s wife; they were titillated by the current tale that the General had given her a magnificent farewell dinner and then shipped her off to the States for a nice long trip.

  Another point was the matter of Chiang’s genuine wife, the mother of his child. They asked him about her outright, for American newspapermen, as Chiang already knew, are strange creatures with no courtesy. You wouldn’t find a Chinese so unmannerly. Still, he replied politely. He and his wife, he said, had long been divorced. As for the other lady, she too was now detached.… Foreigners didn’t understand Chinese customs, he added. And though there was ribald comment among the boys on this remark, I am bound to say that in my opinion Chiang was in the right of it. In 1927 he wasn’t even pretending to live up to an alien moral code.

  “I am at present married to no one,” he said firmly, “and am free to marry in accordance with the most monogamist practices. Miss Soong would not consent to marriage under any other circumstances and I should not dare to ask a lady of her character to marry me in any other circumstances.”

  One story is that the bride wanted to be married in the Allen Memorial Church, but that the pastor, an old friend of the family, refused to marry the couple because he was not satisfied about Chiang’s divorce. This hardly seems likely. Had the General’s first marriage been a Christian one there might be some point in demanding a foreign-style divorce, but what has not been tied, as it were, cannot be untied: surely the reverend gentleman was not so unreasonable. Instead, a new sort of marriage was worked out, not so much a compromise between foreign and Chinese ceremonies as a combination of the two. On the first of December, 1927, Miss Soong and General Chiang were married in a private religious ceremony in the Soong house in Seymour Road, Dr. David Yui (general secretary of the Y.M.C.A.) officiating. Afterward they moved on to the public part of the double event, a Chinese-style wedding in the ballroom of the Majestic Hotel in Bubbling Well Road.

  This was the show occasion, to which thirteen hundred guests had been invited. Another thousand people crowded the streets outside, craning their necks for a glimpse of the proceedings. The bride was given away by her brother T.V.; the best man was Chiang’s chief secretary, Liu Chi-wen. Except for a few foreign trimmings—the playing of “Here Comes the Bride” by the orchestra, and so on—the wedding was like all Chinese weddings, a civil ceremony consisting for the most part of bows. Tsai Yuan-pei, Minister of Education, presided. Bride and groom bowed three times to Sun Yat-sen’s portrait, which hung over the platform in the center of the room, draped
with national and Kuomintang flags. The marriage certificate was read aloud and then sealed. Bride and bridegroom bowed to each other once, once to the official witnesses, and once to the guests. A lavish tea party followed.

  They made an attractive couple: both were good-looking people. Kai-shek has regular, refined features and the posture of a soldier, and though he may have been ill at ease in the unfamiliar trappings of tail coat and stiff collar, he showed no sign of discomfort. May-ling, too, had eschewed the national bridal costume, which is always red or pink, in favor of conventional foreign-style white satin, lace, and an immense bouquet. After the wedding party they went on their honeymoon to Chiang’s beloved Chekiang—Hangchow and Mokanshan.

  No wedding of such political interest in China would have been complete without a published statement from the groom, and Chiang did not disappoint his public. However, he said nothing particularly definite. He expressed the proper emotions about his and his bride’s determination to further the people’s welfare and work for the cause of the revolution, but there was no specific reference to plans for the future. One would almost have thought he had none in mind, but that did not matter: as the world already knew, the Kuomintang had plenty of plans for him. The most determined of his enemies in the Party admitted that Nationalist affairs had not gone well since his resignation.

  On the expeditionary front the retreat for which he had been blamed by his generals continued at the same pace without him, until the foremost part of the Army found itself in Pukow. At this critical point, however, two other portions, or “armies”—each general had his own in the amalgamation—headed by Ho Ying-chin and Li Tsung-jen, diverted the attention of the northerners, gave them stiff battle, and drove them well back. That particular danger to Nanking was hardly over when in Hankow the leftist General Tang Sheng-chih, whose Eastern Expedition against the city had been one of the chief reasons Chiang was forced to resign, gave trouble of a different sort. He quarreled with another general on his own side. Nanking backed the other man and Tang had to give up and run for his life while the Nanking forces occupied Hankow. But Tang Sheng-chih, when he wasn’t making war on his own superiors, had been an able and valuable general, and his loss was felt. All this may not make sense from our point of view, but it is the way things went in China during the war-lord era. In political life around the Yangtze, few men felt they could afford to cherish grudges or attach themselves too fondly to consistency.