Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  Chiang Kai-shek represented the good will of the moneyed classes. With his resignation the bankers abruptly lost interest in Nanking and went back to their Shanghai occupations. The government coffers were soon empty. How was the government to pay the Army? Nobody knew, but every war lord in Nanking was well aware of what happens when you don’t pay your generals; they had been there before. Already there were rumors of unrest.…

  Chiang and Mayling, in the chilly wind-swept hills of Chekiang, had only begun to dig in for the winter when the summons came. Once again Achilles was implored to come out of his tent. Chiang held off until he was assured that Wang Ching-wei would also go back. The two rivals agreed to return together, on condition Hu Han-min would come into it as well. Together they went to the capital, and there was a general meeting on the twenty-third of January.

  Immediately they quarreled with the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Eugene Chen. He wanted to break off diplomatic relations with Japan, but neither Chiang nor Wang Ching-wei saw it his way. Eugene went to Shanghai and resigned from there, and told his grievances to the press. Sun Fo followed, and Likewise resigned. Wang was appointed to his post in his place. Thus on the eve of the Shanghai trouble Wang Ching-wei held the presidency of the Executive Yuan, or premiership of China, than which he could hardly have wanted anything better, whereas Chiang still held only his honorary post on the C.E.C. special committee. He was not yet back in the saddle as Generalissimo, and the situation was to have its effect in the near future.

  Japan had discovered a new incident at Lunghua, close to Shanghai. A Japanese seaman was coshed and murdered there, and the Japanese vowed it was part of a deliberate political attack. On January 28, a week after the Chiangs went back to Nanking, the Japanese attacked Shanghai in force. Two days later the Nanking government moved inland to Loyang, in Honan. The Nineteenth Route Army, still stationed back of the city as a bodyguard de luxe for the short-lived southern government, found themselves bearing the brunt of a very different kind of war than they had expected.

  The story of their brave month-long resistance against great odds is well known, far better known than a vast number of even more stirring stories about China’s other soldiers. The reason is easy to understand; they were fighting around Shanghai, defending not only their own territory but a number of treaty-port foreigners.

  In the post-mortem that inevitably followed the engagement, Chiang was assailed on all sides for having failed to send any support to the Cantonese army. He was accused of holding back his own men. Foreigners as well as Chinese were furious with him, but the criticism was unfair. Chiang had no authority to send a single soldier into battle. He was now only a civilian member of the C.E.C. He offered to help, but he wasn’t allowed to do so; the officers were jealous. What Chiang could do, he did; kept in touch with the commanders of the Nineteenth Route Army by telegraph.

  Eyewitnesses of the fighting agreed that Japanese military talent had until then been vastly overrated. Everyone was surprised. The invaders were well equipped, but their command was inept. But the Chinese too had their faults. Chiang warned the Nineteenth Route General to guard Liuho, a village across the Yangtze behind the Chinese, for if the Japanese should land there they would be able to cut off the enemy. General Tsai neglected to keep a guard on duty. When the Japanese at last made the landing, the game was up, and the Nineteenth Route Army quietly moved out. The siege had lasted forty days.

  Afterward the affair was sorted out by the powers, who were interested in it because of Shanghai. The Japanese kept control of a part of the city, and limits of influence were agreed on. In time the government was to come back to Nanking. But, more than ever, the Chinese people angrily looked forward to revenge. All their minds were fixed on the Japanese encroachment. It was a sentiment Soviet Russia approved, for good reasons; the Russians didn’t like the Japanese advance into what they meant to be their territory, but it did distract Nanking’s attention from what the Chinese Reds were doing.

  But even Shanghai’s plight could not forever mask the fact that the Communists continued to consolidate their positions and were now menacing Hankow. Chiang resolved to put a spoke in their wheel, and his preparations were bitterly criticized. “There he goes again,” said the patriots, “making war on his own people instead of attending to the real threat, Japan.”

  “It is useless for China to talk of resisting Japan,” said Chiang, “when it has not yet stamped out the enemy in its midst. If China ventures to fight the Japanese, the Communists will attack from the rear and chaos will quickly overtake the whole country.”

  The critics were not convinced.

  Authority after exile, and the setbacks of the past year, stimulated the Generalissimo and gave him new ideas. It had taken him a long time to outgrow his tendency to personal resentments. He was forty-five, and that is late in the day to relinquish prima-donna behavior, but for Chiang with his background, among his companions, it is remarkable that he should ever have achieved a more adult attitude. Many other big men in China have never done so. The passionate young officer who caused Sun Yat-sen so many hours of uneasiness, of writing and writing to soothe his feelings, had developed into a good moderator on his own account.

  Official life in China is a tempestuous affair. The grave young secretaries on guard at the Generalissimo’s office doors, the quiet, dignified gentlemen with their brief cases and their high-buttoned Kuomintang uniforms going in and out, the military officers standing at attention when he made his public appearances seemed calm and inscrutable to foreign onlookers, but the reality was very different. Within those cold, high-ceilinged, dingy rooms there were rage and confession, self-betrayals, reconciliations, promises, often tears. It was life as it is lived in China, and Chiang was learning how to surmount it. He became better at managing men than Sun had ever been because he was harder, and thus hardened the men who worked for him. But he still lacked the streak of humanity, however facile and pseudo, that was Feng’s chief stock in trade.

  To some extent Madame made up for this deficiency. She was hard too, in her way, like all efficient social-service workers, but she was beautiful and vivid, and she had the knack of letting go with people. The wives who met her on committees and who slaved away over officers’ orphanages or comforts-supply clubs would come home dazzled by her warm energy. For a little while they could even forget their distrust of a woman who had no children. But her real appeal was to the poor women who weren’t familiar with great ladies. Mayling provided them with a short cut to a vast number of new ideas: that child labor was not the inevitable way of life was the most surprising.

  For all that, the Chiangs observed, the Communists made better headway wherever they had the chance to dig in and work on the people. Military conquest alone would never be enough. However, conquest must be the start of it, and so, driven by impatience with his commanding officer and with the poor results that showed up again and again in this endless war, Chiang himself took over the command of the anti-Red forces. In the confusing manner of all dealings that have to do with Moscow, preparations for a reconciliation between China and Russia—on the diplomatic level—got under way at the same time.

  Chiang’s onset was marked by a new vigor and organization, and he made progress. The Reds were driven back, first from the Hankow area and then from surrounding provinces. But there was still a long way for the Chinese forces to go, and Chiang, of course, was distracted by political considerations.

  He had begun to feel a genuine fondness for the Young Marshal, coupled with a sense of responsibility for this boy who had come to his rescue at a bad time and then lost everything of his own. Chang Hsueh-liang had been appointed deputy commander of the Kuomintang forces in North China, partly because he was at loose ends but also because it was his native terrain and he was really useful there. Within a few months of the appointment, however, Wang Ching-wei found fault with it. Wang was predisposed to resist Japan; the period of patient preparation advocated by Chiang was not to his mind.
As early as June he made a trip of his own to see how things were going in Peking, and what he saw alarmed him. At least he said it alarmed him. The Japanese had consolidated their position in Manchuria and were now making threatening gestures at China itself.

  Wang stormed back to Loyang and reported that Chang Hsueh-liang was not putting up any sort of defense, and that before they knew it, North China would be lost by default. They must have a stronger character as commander up there. The Young Marshal retorted that he couldn’t do any better than he was doing without more backing. He had no up-to-date equipment and it was hard to pay the soldiers. The quarrel mounted in warmth until in August, Wang Ching-wei sent out one of those circular telegrams and resigned as President of the Executive Yuan. This was disturbing. Chiang knew what power Wang wielded over a large part of the Kuomintang. He hurried to Loyang from the front and tried to persuade his difficult Premier to stay in office.

  But the Young Marshal was also aroused. Three days after Wang’s telegram had made the rounds, the Kuomintang had another one to read: Chang Hsueh-liang, too, had resigned. Agitated conferences followed, and the day after the second telegram, on August 9, the whole government resigned. Poor Chiang did the best he could. He accepted the Young Marshal’s resignation and gave him the same job over again, under another name. He would not release Wang permanently, but he did let him go abroad for three months on his favorite gambit of sick leave.

  December 1932 was a busy month. For one thing, the government moved back to Nanking, and for another, the arrangements for resumed diplomatic recognition between Russia and China were completed. Without mentioning the incongruity of these proceedings, Chiang at the same time made his report to the nation on the anti-Communist campaign. To a sulky, bored assembly he said that it had been definitely successful. Not only had the Army been driven out of the central provinces, but the Nationalists had got to work rehabilitating the formerly occupied territory. They had reformed the local governments, instituted schools, started counter-propaganda.… His audience did not listen. All eyes were turned northward, toward the Great Wall and the Japanese crowded behind it.

  8 CONSOLIDATION 1932–36

  Few Chinese had entertained hopes of satisfaction from the League of Nations decision on Japan in Manchuria. They were disgusted and impatient when the Generalissimo referred the matter to Geneva, and the ultimate outcome of this reference was as futile as they had feared. The League passed a resolution “condemning” Japan, and the angry Japanese delegates walked out of the meeting; later, the country itself retired from the League. But it was all words, said the angry Chinese. What good were mere resolutions? There the Japanese were, rooted in Manchuria and all around Shanghai; all the fine talk in Geneva didn’t change that. Once more students gathered together and tried to stage a mass demonstration in Nanking. That the government was ready for them and dispersed them in their thousands at the city limits did nothing to calm public resentment.

  Chiang found little sympathy. Many of his best men agreed with the public and talked as wildly as the students. A majority were in favor of forgetting the Communist campaign altogether and turning concentrated attention on Japan. As a sign of the national feelings, they said, the government should at least sponsor a boycott against Japanese goods, which would certainly have been an effective way of registering protest, for Japan’s economics depended on her healthy trade with China. But the Generalissimo opposed the idea. A boycott would hasten the inevitable, and what he wanted was more time, not less.

  His colleagues could not, or would not, see his point of view. He was a coward, they cried bitterly: worse, he was pro-Japanese. He must have made a secret treaty with the enemy. In a country where Feng Yu-hsiang’s caperings and intrigues did not seem particularly outrageous, the accusation was believed by large numbers of people. Without government sponsorship the aggrieved patriots went ahead with their boycott and organized a number of associations to spread the gospel. As Chiang had feared, it was all too successful. On New Year’s Day, 1933, the Japanese stationed just across the Wall in Jehol Province started off new hostilities with an air raid. The implied truth—that Chiang had no treaty with them, after all—was forgotten in this disaster. The Japanese claimed that the Chinese garrison had fired first, but this was a mere routine comment and fooled no one. By January 3, in spite of a spirited defense, the Chinese garrison was overpowered and the Japanese occupied the city.

  Jehol lies between Manchuria and China, geographically speaking, a buffer state except for one corner of the border where the other two meet. The Japanese, to fulfill their program, were bound to occupy it sooner or later, and now they made short work of the campaign, bombing all the chief towns and cities regardless of military objectives. There would not have been much of a defense anyway; the useless General Tang Yu-lin ran away as soon as he realized what was happening, and so did all his officers. Jehol fell.

  The turbulent South rallied as usual, yapping at Nanking’s heels; they sent the customary denunciation by wireless, saying that the Generalissimo had betrayed them; they grew specific and accused him point-blank of selling out to Japan. Wang Ching-wei’s followers in Nanking, though not so outspoken, rebuked Chiang. This, they said, was what came of having ignored Wang’s warnings. If the Young Marshal had been on his toes, or better, had been replaced by somebody more capable … It was useless to argue that no one could have kept the Japanese from attacking unless he had been far better armed for war than was Chang Hsueh-liang. China simply couldn’t fight back. She didn’t have the material and she wasn’t ready in any case, but the Kuomintang would not take Chiang’s word for that.

  When the miserable affair was finished and Japan had moved into Jehol with her customary smooth efficiency, the Generalissimo went up North and talked it over with the Young Marshal. The younger man, reasonable as always, agreed for the good of all concerned that he had better go away. It seems surprising that any of Chiang’s stable of egocentrics was capable of such disinterested judgment, and we must give the credit for it to the Australian, William Henry Donald.

  Donald had been in China or its vicinity, drifting about in close contact with Chinese, for nearly three decades. From Hongkong to Canton, where he worked as a newspaperman, he moved north by degrees: he knew, and was not much impressed by, Sun Yat-sen, and he had long been acquainted with the Soong family and Chiang Kai-shek, and most other Nationalist officials. For a while he was stationed at Peking; during those days he got acquainted with the Young Marshal and slipped little by little into the very special job of adviser to him. Donald had faith in Chang Hsueh-liang, and a fondness for him. Notional, cross-grained, sternly honest, bossy—there have not been many advisers in the adviser-ridden East of Donald’s caliber. He was no superman; he had his vanities. He knew he was a character and he lived up to the part, boasting that he had never taken a drink, had never learned to speak a word of Chinese, and detested Chinese food. Yet he was seldom out of reach of his Chinese acquaintances, though this was necessarily confined to English speakers. China was his life.

  He observed with much displeasure a friendship that sprang up among the legations, between his “young fellow,” as he called Chang, and the Cianos. Count Ciano was head of the Italian legation. Peking society was notoriously gay, and Edda Ciano was the gayest and maddest of its leaders. The political implications of her interest in Chang Hsueh-liang (Italy was eager to trade with China) and his in her (he had an intense admiration for Mussolini and the Fascist idea) didn’t worry Donald. What he didn’t trust was social life, not for his Young Marshal. He himself never went to parties but he knew what happened at such affairs. Drink! And the young fellow already had more vice than was good for him. Donald glowered at the Countess Ciano and heaved a sigh of relief when the Italians sailed home on leave. He sighed too soon. When Chiang Kai-shek suggested the customary nice long trip abroad for Hsueh-liang and the Young Marshal enthusiastically agreed, the crusty newspaperman groaned aloud. He knew what was going on in that smooth head—
Edda had made her admirer promise to look her up if ever he came over to Europe.

  “Italy!” said the young fellow. “We’ll go to Italy.”

  There was no dissuading him, but at least Donald had his own way about another matter before they sailed. He dragged his apprehensive charge to Dr. Miller of Shanghai. Miller had a long record in China, and plenty of experience with narcotic addiction. He put the Young Marshal to bed, withdrew the drug, kept him otherwise doped during the first agonizing days, and with the help of Donald’s alternate bellowings and coaxings, actually succeeded in disintoxicating the patient. It was a shaky but reconstituted Young Marshal who sailed at last for Italy, and he was lively enough on the Continent to give his adviser a considerable chase. Once he slipped the leash and went A.W.O.L. for two anxious weeks.

  The outgoing holiday party passed an ingoing one en route: for a few uneasy days, both Chang Hsueh-liang and Wang Ching-wei were in Shanghai. But there was no conflict: Wang had his mind on a fresh battle. He was back at his post in April, just in time for another circular telegram from the South, carrying the usual compliments of the season to Chiang and the Nanking government—a denunciation. The primary cause of this one was a well-founded rumor that Chiang intended to come to some sort of agreement with the Japanese, accepting their recent inroads. They had grabbed control of several passes on the Wall and were advancing on Luanchow, but they hinted that they would be willing to retreat if the Chinese would promise to maintain a neutral area south of the border. Chiang agreed. He was canny enough not to publish the news, but word got around anyway. Once again students went on the warpath.