Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  For two days the Chinese were in mourning; they were sure the Generalissimo had really been killed, and that the reassurances from Sian to the contrary were lies. In Nanking the reaction became more complex as the days went by. Chiang’s enemies grew confident enough to stop pretending. A slow, dignified dance of politics began; the boys were circling for position. Pro-Chiangites, however, denounced the conspiracy with a vigor and unity that startled the men who had the Generalissimo in their power. Chang Hsueh-liang in his usual emotional mood had convinced himself that his new Communist friends were correct in saying the country would undergo an immense upsurge and fly to his support. It is always a shock to find that you have fallen under the spell of your own side’s propaganda, and he was shocked. Even Yang Hu-cheng, who had been the mainstay of the whole affair, was taken aback. What on earth were they to do next? Chiang was no help at all: he had gone to bed, testily repelling all overtures. He would have no truck with rebels. The only thing they could do with him, he said over and over, was kill him.

  One heart especially was consumed with anxiety. What on earth, thought Donald, was his young fellow up to? He took plane immediately to Sian on December 14 and was enthusiastically greeted by the villain of the piece. If anybody could resolve the puzzle, the Young Marshal said, it would be Donald. The Australian was permitted to see Chiang and telegraph to Madame that her husband was alive and kicking. But he couldn’t talk directly to the prisoner. The best interpreter, he insisted, would be the Young Marshal himself. Until now Chiang had refused to talk with Chang Hsueh-liang at all. Donald’s presence gave him a tactful way out of the impasse, and soon the three men were earnestly conversing.

  The worst was over; the worst had indeed been over ever since the first moment of capture. The real danger, as Madame soon discovered in Nanking, was from Chiang’s enemies in the capital; they were exploiting to the utmost their chances of doing away with him through too much zeal. The Central Political Council nominated Ho Ying-chin commander-in-chief of a “punitive expedition.” A number of the Generalissimo’s birthday planes bombed a town in the Loyang–Sian Railway, where Tungpei troops were encamped. The next place to be bombed, it was announced, would be Sian itself.

  This was bad news. Chiang was now engaged in long conferences with the Young Marshal, and in a wry way enjoying the obvious fact that he had regained his ascendancy over the emotional general’s loyalties. He was not yet master of the situation: Yang Hu-cheng—it still amazed Chiang to realize it—was stubbornly inimical. Still it was clear that nobody in Sian meant to kill him. Things might yet be arranged in the manner Chiang preferred to clumsy force, if only the meddlers in Nanking could be held off. Three days after Donald’s arrival, on the seventeenth, a man from Chiang’s party was released and sent down to Loyang with a letter for the Kuomintang that said, in effect, “Lay off.” Chiang added that in all probability he would return to Nanking within two days. He enclosed a reassuring word for Madame.

  The government grudgingly ordered bombing to cease until the evening of the nineteenth. In actual fact hostilities weren’t resumed then. Instead, T. V. Soong flew off that afternoon on what was carefully announced as an unofficial journey to Sian while Mayling fought the authorities fiercely, with all the strength and steadiness at her command, to keep the Army’s planes at home. The Kungs and other pro-Chiangites stood at her side. The opposing party hesitated, considered wistfully their chances of getting by with outright defiance, and at last submitted: no more planes, they agreed, until further notice. After all, one could not be sure, even with all-out bombing, of hitting the Generalissimo fair and square, and say what you will it would not look well if one failed.…

  What sort of horse trade was accomplished during the thirty-six hours of T.V.’s visit nobody would say, but he reappeared in Nanking with Donald, bright and well, after the week end. The situation, though still under control, was not exactly settled. Quantities of Reds had moved openly into Sian and with the all-out support of Yang Hu-cheng’s troops joyfully set up a new government. As far as they were concerned, Der Tag had arrived. Chang Hsueh-liang was by this time past the middle of his indecision, woefully conscious of his wrongdoing and altogether a Chiang man once more. But it was going to be a ticklish business, said T.V., to handle Yang Hu-cheng. He brought a special message for Madame from her husband; on no account was she to put herself in danger.

  Mayling was not sure about that. Donald was positive she would be able to help a lot if she were to go to Sian. He had limitless faith in her courage and brains; all the fervor of his gnarled, hard-boiled, fundamentally sentimental nature went out to Mayling, always, and he felt there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do when she tried. The young fellow was attached to her, he argued. That would help. Her journey would give reassurance to the nation. She was the only person in the world who could handle “the old man” in his stubborn fits, and he was certainly being subject to stubborn fits at the moment there in Sian, lying in bed with no teeth and a wrenched back.

  Mayling liked the danger of the idea, and the drama. She was Chingling’s sister; Chingling, who had insisted on risking her life with the mob when Sun Yat-sen was in danger in Canton. Courage was considered a very good thing in the Soong clan. On the other hand, if she were to leave the beleaguered fort in Nanking, could she depend on those she left behind to hold back the dogs of war? It was tricky. But she would go: of course she would go. She packed a few clothes and a small revolver and Chiang Kai-shek’s spare dental plate, and said that she was ready.

  In bare outline the kidnaping story sounds fantastic enough to Westerners, but we do not really enter cloud-cuckooland until we study the fascinating little details that fill in the picture. There is, for instance, the diary. Everyone in the Kuomintang was aware that Chiang kept a diary; it was as much a part of his daily routine as his morning exercises or his prayers, and in its way it had become quite famous. Sometimes he gave diaries to his high officers, printed in the manner he preferred for his own. Chang Hsing-hai says that they “have a page at the end of each week where the keeper of the diary is supposed to make a strict moral analysis of himself. This is followed by another page where he is supposed to set down a plan of his activities for the next week. There is also a sheet at the end of each month where the owner of the diary is supposed to make a final examination of himself for that period.”

  If this sounds stuffy to my unregenerate readers, they can console themselves with the reflection that Confucius said, “I examine myself daily on three points: whether in transacting business for others I may not have been faithful, whether, in relationships with friends I may not have been sincere, and whether I may not have thoroughly assimilated and put into practice the instructions of my teacher.” On top of all that, there were Chiang’s daily prayers. On the whole, the diary made very edifying reading for Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hu-cheng. At least they said it did. Whether Yang really did undergo amazed shock, as he claimed to have done when he saw the Generalissimo’s irreproachable sentiments set down in ink on the page, I am not sure. He said he had not been convinced until that moment that Chiang really did dislike the Japanese as much as he himself did. He said he had not believed, until he read the diary, that it was Chiang’s ultimate aim to fight the invaders. He said his heart melted in surprised admiration. Maybe.

  At any rate, the diary gave the insurgents a dramatic and heroic reason to back water and let the Generalissimo alone rather than strike him down for the vicious tyrant the Reds said he was.

  Madame, T.V., Donald, and the man who had brought out the message arrived at Sian late in the afternoon of December 22. For all Donald’s persistently offhand manner, Mayling felt tense as the plane circled for a landing, and the men were probably nervous as well. She handed her revolver to Donald and gave him directions to shoot her if anyone showed signs of seizing her; he gravely agreed to do so. But when they landed, everything was quiet and courteous. The Young Marshal looked subdued, but he was easy in his manners. Donald pocketed
the revolver.

  The Generalissimo writes that when he saw his wife, “I was very much moved and almost wanted to cry.” He declared that he had read in the Bible only that morning, “Jehovah will now do a new thing, and that is: He will make a woman protect a man.”

  Conferences resumed and much more progress resulted. A number of tacit agreements were made which will probably never be admitted by the Chiangs in detail. Chang Hsueh-liang claimed to Mayling, excitedly and in injured tones, that they weren’t trying to make the Generalissimo sign anything. All they wanted, he insisted, was to talk with him, and he wouldn’t even do that. Now, however, with his trusted interpreter to back up Donald and T.V., Chiang Kai-shek was more forthcoming. Somehow, in what roundabout words it is impossible to know, certain conclusions were arrived at. Chiang promised at last to believe that the Reds meant to hold to their new program of co-operation in return for open defiance of Japan. He would sign no treaty to this effect, but his captors decided to trust him.

  Not without a struggle, however. Yang Hu-cheng was disturbed on two counts. He didn’t have the implicit faith in Chiang that the Young Marshal had (which was never, incidentally, betrayed). Nor was he certain of his own fate now that the mutiny was collapsing. Chang Hsueh-liang would be all right, he pointed out, because he was among friends, but what of himself? Until the last minute, Yang wasn’t quite sure whether he should not, after all, hang on to Chiang Kai-shek.

  However, he did not, and Christmas Day marked the end of the kidnaping episode. Chiang and his wife returned to Nanking, accompanied by the remorseful Young Marshal. Firecrackers popped unceasingly for hours on end. Young men marched and sang in the streets. Up in Sian, the new government sorrowfully struck tents and melted away. In Nanking the Generalissimo went to bed. In the midst of the rejoicing, people asked each other what it all really meant: what had Chiang promised?

  Nobody was able to say, but events were soon to spell it out for them.

  During Chang Hsueh-liang’s one interview with the press, which was fated to be his last appearance as a free agent, he explained that he had done wrong and was ready to stand his trial. He had come to Nanking because it wouldn’t have been safe to stay in Sian after his championship of the Generalissimo. He was not particularly safe in Nanking, either, during those angry, revengeful days, but the Chiangs had promised they would use their influence to get lenient treatment for him.

  “I am by nature rustic, surly, and unpolished,” he wrote in his apology, “due to which I have created an incident at once impudent and illegal.”

  Awaiting trial, he was held “in soft detention” in T.V.’s house.

  Chiang Kai-shek was busy with some breast-beating of his own. Within three days of the return he submitted to the C.E.C. his resignation from his posts on the ground that he was unworthy to hold them. He castigated himself severely. He had allowed the Army to get out of hand, and so the responsibility for all the fuss was his alone. He had been guilty of overconfidence and rash behavior. (His error of judgment genuinely bothered Chiang: he scolded himself in his diary over and over for having been careless.) As far as the C.E.C. was concerned, of course, the resignation was purely a gesture, and it was indignantly spurned. Again the Generalissimo resigned: again the resignation was rejected. Everyone behaved very nicely.

  Finally Chang Hsueh-liang was tried at a special tribunal and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and five years’ loss of his civil rights. The imprisonment was not arduous. The young fellow’s movements were regulated, but within a permitted orbit he was free to live as he had done in the pre-Japanese days, with his concubines accompanying him. Justice had been served, but the Kuomintang was slightly apprehensive for some months; how would the fierce Tungpei men take the loss of their leader?

  They accepted it. The majority of them had already been weaned from their feudal allegiance, and though they still loved the memory of the Young Marshal, they now had the Red Star. Besides, their Marshal was a long way off. The years went by and memory faded. Nobody went out of his way to remind the Tungpei army of Chang Hsueh-liang’s name. The Kuomintang takes care of him. He went to Changsha when they evacuated Nanking, and to Chungking after that; he went through all the vicissitudes of the government during the war. He is a free man, technically speaking, for the ten-year term has long since run out. But he remains silent and untroublesome in a Taiwan retreat. He plays tennis: he plays golf. When you come to think of it, he is one of the most dramatic of China’s tragedies, but you don’t often think of it.

  The government would no doubt like to be free of him, as he would like to be free of them, but he has nowhere to go.

  Nationalist troops occupied Sian in February, three days after Yang moved his men and the Young Marshal’s out of town. The Communist government had long since melted away, and foreign journalists were left to mourn the cause they so wistfully admired. All they had left was the immunity conferred on them by their third-power nationalities and a sympathetic public waiting in the West. A good deal more than their Chinese Communist friends had, at that.

  Yang Hu-cheng finally submitted to Chiang and went abroad. The Tungpei army was moved to Honan and Anhwei. Everybody who co-operated with the Communists, in short, was now cleared off the scene, leaving the stage uncluttered for the Reds themselves.

  Though Chiang’s health called for immediate rest and the C.E.C. had already commanded him to take sick leave, he postponed the day of reckoning as long as possible. There was simply no time to go to bed. He hadn’t signed any agreements in Sian, but there were agreements in the air nevertheless, and it was an urgent matter to get them down in some sort of shape. Early 1937 saw a dignified procession of gestures between Nanking and the Reds, all presumably impromptu, yet most certainly agreed upon in advance. First the Kuomintang was told that the eight-point program must, of course, be rejected, and then everybody in Nanking set about accepting its outstanding principles in other words. Chou En-lai made two visits to Nanking, without advertisement, to discuss matters.

  The Reds continued to hold fast to the new line laid down in Moscow. They were no longer interested, they reiterated, in accomplishing the downfall of Chiang and the Kuomintang. On the contrary, they said Chiang wasn’t bad after all. They accepted without demur the conditions stipulated by the Kuomintang; the Red Army was to be disbanded and the members thereof were to join the Nationalists; the soviet republic in the Northwest was to be dissolved; there would be no more Communist propaganda and no more class struggle—for the time being. Mao Tse-tung, even during the time when the wildest claims were being made in the West as to the purity of his intentions, did not himself utter a lie on the subject. In his protestations of amity more than once he included the phrase, “for the present.”

  For the present, then, the Chinese Communists declared themselves Communists no longer. Thus without breaking his pledge to uproot Communism from China the Generalissimo was technically correct in accepting the reconverted converts into Nanking’s good graces. Later a “People’s Political Council” was set up as a national Parliament to permit the Reds a hand in governmental decisions without being a part of the Kuomintang inner sanctum.

  The capitulation of Nanking stimulated newspaper commentators abroad to produce millions of words of commendation. China was united at last—she was maturing—everything was going to be absolutely all right. How handsomely Mao Tse-tung had behaved!

  Chiang paid little attention to all the comment; he was beginning to be just a wee bit disillusioned about foreigners’ brain power. As soon as the situation was fairly well sewed up, he went into a Shanghai hospital for an X-ray examination. His back had not mended as it should and he was growing thin and weak. The doctors commanded complete rest and relaxation, so Chiang went back to the hills of Chekiang.

  The Communists knew there was not much time left. So did the Japanese. So, of course, did Chiang Kai-shek, and he grudged the time spent in convalescence. At last, however, he regained his health, and though under Mayling
’s anxious eye he didn’t dare to overwork quite so outrageously, he was soon back in his old routine. Hoping that the Japanese would still wait a little longer, he agreed with the Reds to hold a general meeting, a “National Salvation Conference,” in the autumn of 1937.

  It was one of the consistent policies followed by the Reds, whether Russian or Chinese, that they never admitted the close connection between their parties, but Nanking’s relations with Moscow on the diplomatic level now began to improve, in a manner parallel with those between Nanking and Mao Tse-tung. Only a year before, in March 1936, Russia had concluded a defensive alliance with Outer Mongolia which directly contradicted her earlier agreement of 1924 that China held sovereignty over Mongolia. Nanking was not pleased. Now everything was friendly. Moscow seemed determined to back up the pledges made by Mao.

  Japan observed the honeymoon with misgiving. The moment had come for another stroke, the Tokyo militarists decided, and on July 7, 1937, it took place.

  Lukouchiao, or Marco Polo Bridge, is near the village of Wan-ping, just southwest of Peking. At that time it was occupied by a number of men from the Chinese Twenty-ninth Army under Sung Cheh-yuan, the general who had been dislodged by the Japanese from his command in Chahar. Wanping was one of the numerous places along the uneasy northern front at which you would have expected something to happen, with Japanese troops living close by. Later the Japanese said that one of their men went astray in the village during maneuvers, and when they tried to find him they were wantonly attacked by the Chinese. Japanese troops in Peking were quickly mobilized, and reinforcements were sent from Japan.