Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  On the credit side of the ledger was the Kweichow affair. There were still some Communists there, enough to kick up a fuss in 1935, and the Generalissimo found the circumstance advantageous rather than otherwise. His journey to the Northwest had given him an appetite for personal appearances, and Kweichow offered an excellent excuse to see more of the way the other half lives. Chiang went west in person to deal with the revolt, and when he got there he put the place through the same treatment he had given Sian and Kalgan. He traveled from one town to another making speeches, getting acquainted with the local officials, and telling everybody to be good and work hard. It was timely advice, for the province was backward and there was much oppression and overtaxation, as there always was in these semi-autonomous outlying districts—a hard life for the peasants, and a heaven-sent chance for the Communists to dig in.

  Szechuan, far to the west, was next on the list, for the Reds were there too, and found an even richer field for conversion. In Szechuan the staple industry and chief occupation was opium. The turbaned populace was yellow-complexioned, anemic and languid from underfeeding and oversmoking. The war lords of Szechuan were accustomed to absolute power: no Manchu Emperor in Peking had ever taken an interest in their far-off country. There actually were genuine bandits, lawbreakers who were not Communists, living among the Szechuan and Yunnan hills and plundering the villagers whenever they needed food or cash, but whether the villagers feared them more than they did the tax collectors is a moot point: it was not an easy life in either case. The Communists who split off from the Long March and settled in these Szechuanese hills found disciples by the hundred ready to their hand.

  Chiang Kai-shek brought his forces in and operated from the few cities of the province, in a long drawn out, rather easygoing campaign. The Reds were not as well entrenched as they had been in Central China; they had had less time to take root. More important than his few encounters with guerrilla bands were the acquaintances Chiang made among the ruling families. He sniffed out a few facts about the deplorable administration and applied his angriest energy to the job of reform. He assailed the Governor for the corruption and extortion that made the province the most notorious in the nation. Then he did a courageous thing that endeared him to hundreds of missionaries; again he tackled the question of opium. Little by little, he said firmly, it must be abolished.

  This was a task most people declared impossible. It meant stamping on the only really flourishing industry of the province; it meant recasting the economy of Szechuan. There were rich men there whose entire fortunes depended on the opium crop; there were peasants of whose poor living the same could be said. Yet more formidable was the proposal to cure the great number of Szechuan addicts. There has been a lot of nonsense talked about opium since its use was first observed, and in those days people were convinced that an addict simply could not give up his addiction without losing his life. It could be done, said Chiang, and it must be. Laws were passed, time limits set, clinics founded for the treatment of addicts, and a deadline set after which there was to be no more opium grown, extracted, or smoked in Szechuan. The missionaries admired Chiang immensely for this, but he made a lot of enemies, too.

  In the early summer of 1935 a Chinese magazine, published in Shanghai, brought out an insulting article, or an article deemed insulting by the Japanese, about their Emperor. They made angry representations to Nanking, and the results of these should have gratified them. Chiang could not, it seemed, do enough to humiliate his own country and placate the bullies, and his people were furious about it. The editor, author, and publisher were thrown into prison, and press censorship was tightened up. Again the students boiled and bubbled. Everyone was angry—angrier with Chiang, probably, even than with the Japanese Emperor.

  In Shanghai, where the concentration of foreigners was large and the city’s nearness to Nanking made people feel proprietary about the capital, Chiang Kai-shek was becoming a kind of legend. Since he had taken to traveling through the far provinces by plane, a paradoxical situation had been created: the treaty port where he had got his first chance in the Army and made his first fortune, by way of the stock exchange, now saw almost nothing of him. He rarely made personal appearances even in Nanking. Yet the people of Szechuan and Shansi could claim to have heard and seen their leader pretty lavishly.

  The paradox was not Madame’s creation, or Donald’s. They tried to spread the publicity a bit more evenly, but they weren’t successful. It has never been easy to push the Generalissimo when he doesn’t want to do something, and he didn’t like publicity at home, or near home; he preferred privacy. His days were too full to give up to official banquets or unnecessary interviews. As for Shanghai—well, he didn’t like Shanghai; it represented a lot of things about China’s position in the world that he didn’t approve of. Chiang was not thoroughly anti-foreign. He had begun to see a good deal, comparatively, of the missionary friends Mayling brought home. But his ambition was to place China on a new footing with the Western world, and he felt the resentment most Chinese nationalists did for Europeans. He wasn’t fond of extraterritoriality, or of the placidly smug businessmen from the other side of the world, who lived in Shanghai as if Nanking simply did not exist.

  Some of the businessmen who knew that Nanking was there, especially bankers and brokers, realized his attitude and resented it. Chiang had two sets of opponents who were diametrically opposed to each other as well: the business element, including some important Japanese members of the international colony, who didn’t want to see him or his nation become too strong, and the Communist sympathizers who had the same idea. These groups coincided in their criticisms of the Generalissimo, and their complaints swelled in unison until the outside world heard them.

  One of their grievances was the old charge that Chiang was aiming at dictatorship. The pious accusation sounded strange coming from people like Chen Chi-tang or Feng Yu-hsiang. It carried weight, however, when Hu Han-min said it, and he often did. Chiang’s advisers urged him to ignore the attacks and take on more trappings of power. He did not do quite all they asked; he still hesitated to assume the presidency of the government. But there is no doubt that power was being centralized by the Kuomintang, taken away little by little from the provinces. This in itself, he could have argued, was not necessarily a sign of sinister intention, but Hu pointed out angrily that truly democratic leaders don’t use secret police.

  The only reply Chiang could have made to that—and if he made it, he knew better than to do so publicly—was that conditions outside and inside China simply rendered democracy impossible. Premature self-government would have meant undermining by some war lord or other, most probably Chen Chi-tang, followed by an all-out attack by Japan and inevitable collapse. However, such things could not be said in the open. So the complaints continued, most durable on the pettiest plane, as complaints usually are.

  You never get to see him alone, frustrated people would say angrily after unsatisfactory interviews. That woman was always there. Mayling was blamed for all the Generalissimo’s unpopular decisions, and when Mayling alone did not seem a reasonable scapegoat for quite everything that went wrong for the petitioners, they enlarged the blame. It was the family, they said, the whole Soong family. The old joke “The Soong Dynasty” did not now seem quite so funny.

  The public demand for resistance to Japan grew louder and louder; no amount of press censorship could contain it. One of the by-products of this sentiment was a comitragedy, and Wang Ching-wei, of all people, who had more than once taken advantage of just this sort of clamor to embarrass Chiang and pull him out of office, was its victim. Somehow word got round that he was pro-Japanese—there is never any reasonableness when a nation gets into a hysterical state—and he was nearly assassinated while coming out of a C.E.C. meeting one November afternoon. The assassin had hidden a revolver in a tripod camera; it was the easiest thing in the world to shoot the Premier at close quarters, and only a very nervous man could have failed to kill. He did fail, though. Wang
was badly hurt, and carried the bullet near his spine for the rest of his life, but he survived.

  He had to give up his post and go abroad, and Chiang Kai-shek was appointed Premier in his place. To allay the inevitable wrath of Hu Han-min at this considerable accession of power, Chiang saw to it that Hu was appointed chairman of the C.E.C. standing committee at the same time, but Hu was too angry to be appeased by this. He stayed in Europe and wouldn’t accept the job. Other criticisms, from the usual quarters, were forestalled: Chiang had invited Feng Yu-hsiang to come to Nanking and see for himself how very, very democratically everything was being run. Feng seemed convinced, and Chiang told him to carry the good word to Canton.

  “We will fight the Japanese when they go too far,” the Generalissimo insisted. This was becoming a platitude; every time he said it, extremists and middle-roaders grew angrier. Just when was Chiang going to admit that so far was too far? Japan was pressing harder and harder for what she called “co-operation” with Manchukuo; in other words, recognition of that stolen country. Toward the end of the year she moved again in her gradual taking over of North China, inciting the wild Mongols of the North to overrun that part of Chahar that adjoins Jehol. The Chinese garrison was forbidden by the terms of the Tatan treaty to prevent the Mongols’ occupying this district; everyone had foreseen what would happen, but that didn’t make it any pleasanter when it actually came to pass. In January 1936 the Mongols expanded their area and seized Kalgan, straddling the Peking-Suiyuan Railway. In their arrogant footsteps came the little Japanese, quietly jubilant and, as always, efficient in taking over control.

  “We will strike when they go too far,” repeated Chiang, and the young men groaned and muttered and talked of taking matters into their own hands. Anyone would have thought the country on the verge of revolt, but he would have been wrong.

  Hu Han-min came back at last from Europe and listened in stately disapproval, but at least at closer quarters, to Chaing’s representations that his proper place was in Nanking. Hu did not agree. If he deigned to come, he said—and he would not promise to do so—there would have to be some very searching changes made in the government setup. Those secret police, for one thing … Chiang let him talk, and kept his temper and persisted. Hu was still one of the big three, and he counted in the Party. The suggestion was even made, quite seriously, that Chiang give up his post as Premier to the older man. Hu was tempted and nearly disarmed. As Premier he would be in a good position to play watchdog for the nation’s liberties. He would probably have accepted, but then something happened that took the minds of both men off such questions as appointments in a peaceful government. It was the South again, the ever-restless South.

  In June 1936 the trio—Chen Chi-tang, Li Tsung-jen, and Pai Chung-hsi—sent a telegram demanding that Chiang go to war against Japan. Almost immediately they followed it up with the expedition that was de rigueur in these cases, Kwangsi soldiers into Hunan and Kwangtung men aiming for Fukien and Kiangsi. Chiang dispatched troops to meet them and turned, as he had done on former occasions, to the Governor of Hunan, requesting him to refuse permission to the Kwangsi troops to cross the province.

  This time there was a new Governor; Ho Chien, who had fought with Chiang in the anti-Communist campaign. His name was well known to Chinese Reds because of his ruthless methods. Mao Tse-tung, especially, had reason to know him: Ho Chien’s men had killed Mao’s wife. Before the Nanking troops had time to reach contact with the Kwangsi vanguard, Ho Chien had sent his own men to block the frontier at Hengchow.

  It takes war lords a long time to change their minds and methods. Li, Pai, and Chen, remembering old times, seem to have thought they were still playing the same game, and that there would soon be one of those thundering telegrams from Feng Yu-hsiang announcing that his People’s Army were waiting and raring to go at Japan. Wang Ching-wei would be heard from, and Hu Han-min would be glad to join in. Then when all the boys were together, they could start making demands on Chiang Kai-shek.

  Suddenly the telegrams began to arrive. They arrived by the hundred, and none of them was from Feng Yu-hsiang offering his heart and hands to help resist Japan. None of them was approving at all. From Singapore and San Francisco and Paris, from Nanking and the Northwest, from Chinatown in London and Liverpool the wires flooded in, telling the southern war lords to give it all up and go home. Now was not the time, said the Chinese of the world, for that old foolishness.

  Then at the beginning of July the nation was electrified by another piece of news. Every single one of Chen’s fighting airplanes, forty of them altogether, had been flown from Canton to join Chiang Kai-shek in open rebellion of their leader. Chen was still staggering from the effects of this blow when his second-in-command, General Yu Han-mou, quietly took off by plane from the airfield, and the next thing they knew was in Nanking offering his services to the Generalissimo. His defection set off a chain reaction in the Kwangtung army; generals started jumping out like popping corn. A few days later Yu Han-mou set out on the homeward march as commander-in-chief of Kwangtung’s troops, specially appointed by Chiang Kai-shek. They didn’t have to fight with their provincial brothers; nobody tried to resist them. Chen Chi-tang ran away to Hongkong. Nanking felt as if an old, long-aching tooth had been pulled. Joyfully the C.E.C. met and voted the autonomous committee of Canton out of existence.

  But Kwangsi was quite another matter. Li and Pai were toothaches just as bad as Chen had been, but they weren’t so accessible; they lived in a natural fortress of provincial mountains. The nation expected Chiang to follow up his Canton triumph with an attack on Kwangsi, but it was disappointed. He did try rattling his saber; no results. In the end they all moved a little way in toward common ground; Li and Pai consented to announce that their troops were now a part of the National Army and accepted posts in the Nanking government, whereas Chiang gave up all insistence on a more practical sign of co-operation such as actual central control over Kwangsi military affairs. These affairs remained as they had been, in the hands of their own masters. There were glad outcries from Nanking about unity and co-operation, and all the rest of it. And anyway, Kwangtung had been settled.

  Something else was settled, too. Chiang Kai-shek at last announced that China would resist if “any nation” should try to force upon her the recognition of Manchukuo. He knew that his army and its equipment were by this time in excellent shape. Also, Abyssinia had just been overrun and occupied by Italy. Abyssinia’s fate was a fascinating study to the Chinese. Here was an independent country of non-Europeans suddenly overwhelmed and turned into a colony by a country that was breaking all the laws which, as the Chinese had been piously assured by the League of Nations, could never, never be smashed. And what were the other Western countries doing about it? Nothing at all. The lesson was obvious.

  For a while the eager resist-Japan party was chastened and quiet.

  Up in Sian, someone else felt chastened, though not necessarily quiet. The Young Marshal was thinking bitterly about Italy, and doing a lot of reorientating. When Italy raised her legation to an embassy, Chang Hsueh-liang’s transports were a little moderated by the knowledge that his government had already been well and truly bilked by the Italians. Plane dealers had then rushed in on the good will of Italy’s friendly action and sold several shipments of their merchandise to Nanking. Business was excellent for munitions makers at that time, when Chiang was quietly building up an air arm that was meant to be at least as good as Japan’s, but the Italians got the cream of the orders—until the crates started arriving.

  At first when they were unpacked everything looked more or less all right, though the young Chinese pilots who had been trained abroad wrinkled their noses a little: the models, they pointed out, were lamentably old-fashioned. But China wasn’t a wealthy nation; she couldn’t expect to buy the latest thing, and no doubt these were as good as anything Japan could show. Soon, however, their moderate judgment had to be altered. The planes quite simply were no good at all, and there had been worse
cheating still—cases of alleged spare parts were full of junk that had nothing whatever to do with the planes. All buying from Italy stopped sharply; the Generalissimo did most of his ordering after that from the United States and Britain. The Young Marshal’s friends had let him down. The Young Marshal had lost face.

  Abyssinia’s fate soon after this gave him more food for thought. He was stuck up there in Sian, working with Yang Hu-cheng, a Shensi general who was supposed to be helping him in the anti-Communist drive, but who really wasn’t very keen on his work. Yang had a lot of political theories. They discussed things—Fascism and democracy and the rights of man—and Chang Hsueh-liang, always eager for new ideas, was impressed. They talked about Japan and the great wrong she had done him, and the further wrong she was doing everybody else. Clearly Japan and Italy were tarred with the same brush, just as clearly as that he had been wrong about Mussolini and the gay young Edda.

  The Young Marshal’s men seemed to be getting more and more unhappy. There was a good deal of talk about the uselessness of what they were doing—fighting in this tiresome, desultory fashion against people who were, when all was said and done, their own Chinese brothers, whereas over there in Manchuria the real enemy had it all his own way.

  On top of everything else came the news that Japan and Italy, with Germany, had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. Japan had promised to recognize Abyssinia’s status as Italian property, and in return Italy—oh, betrayal of all Hsueh-liang’s friendliest feelings!—was recognizing Manchukuo. Well, there you were; that was Fascism, naked and shameless. And here was he, the Young Marshal, wasting the best years of his life, and the lives of his devoted followers, in a footling war against Communists, who seemed to have the right ideas. He was betraying his own men; he had promised to take them back to “Tungpei,” the Northeast, but all that happened was that they steadily drifted farther and farther away from home. Surely something was wrong somewhere; surely Chiang Kai-shek didn’t realize the great mistake he was making.