by Emily Hahn
The Generalissimo had become famous in an incredibly short time. In America and Europe he was discussed everywhere; the conservatives called him China’s Strong Man, and the others considered him a dictator. As Madame Chiang said somewhat bitterly, in later years, “If a man changes with every wind he is called weak and spineless. If he is firm, he is called a dictator.”
He had need of all his firmness, for he was now faced with a bewildering number of problems compared to which the Northern Expedition had been simple and easy. Victory, as he was to find out, is often more arduous than the contributory struggle. With Mayling at his side, acting as his secretary and interpreter,, he had to deal with the generals who had aided him in his campaign; many of them, chiefly Feng and Yen, were demanding the rich rewards which the traditional spoils system led them to expect. There was also the matter of the army; now that the war was over, the obvious thing to do was to disband a large part of it and relieve the nation of the expense of keeping all these men. But this program, though it sounds simple, was almost impossible to carry out. China had been torn by civil wars for many years. Each leader had built up his army, which he had later contributed, still under his own leadership, to the general cause of Chiang Kai-shek, in the hopes of having his reward after victory. Now from the point of view of the leader the Generalissimo was trying to double-cross him. Not only was he trying to hog all the power, but he wanted each general to give up his personal army, the only weapon he had with which to maintain his threatened rights! The country seethed with suspicion, and months went by while the soldiers in their millions continued to be kept and idle, eating and sleeping and waiting for the civil war that Chiang was trying to avert. The quarrel reached such proportions that Chiang resigned, but everyone became frightened at this and urged him to come back. In the end the generals reached a temporary compromise.
The same problem arose in regard to political control. Chiang wanted to centralize the government, now that China was unified, and he tried to do away with the outlying “representatives” of the central body, who because of the nature of China, geographically and psychologically, too often were rather free in their interpretation of central governmental orders. Immediately, as was natural, the leaders of these outlying centers accused him of arbitrary methods. He was, they said, betraying the original idea of the Republic. He was trying to become a dictator. The first openly to revolt were Pai Chung-hsi and Li Tsung-jen in Kwangsi, two generals who had greatly helped Chiang when he first moved against the North. There was a quarrel about their manner of managing Kwangsi, particularly over the governor of Hunan, who was loyal to Nanking and who had because of this been discharged from his post by Li and Pai.
The Generalissimo started a punitive expedition against the Kwangsi leaders, sailing up the Yangtze toward Hankow. In a short time he had routed the troops from that city. The commanders quickly capitulated to Chiang, and Pai ran away. The clique attempted more resistance, first in Canton and then in Kwangsi itself, but the Generalissimo followed them and at last the province was quiet.
Immediately thereafter, Feng Yu-hsiang, who had in all probability been helping the Kwangsi leaders secretly, came out into the open and rebelled. The Government announced his expulsion from the Party and demanded his arrest, but Yen Hsi-shan was on his side, and Feng, though he was defeated because many of his people went over to Nanking, was not punished.
According to one story, Madame Sun first heard of her little sister’s marriage when she was in Moscow, and the news was such a shock to her that she took to her bed. As we have seen, this is not true, but the marriage, if not a shock, was still most distasteful to her, and no doubt she felt it keenly at the time. Chiang Kai-shek had been, in her opinion, directly responsible for the downfall of the Leftist government in Hankow, though Sun Yat-sen had trusted him and singled him out as a favorite, by not carrying out the Doctor’s wishes and cutting himself off from Russia and the Soviet advisers. Now this man was to be her brother-in-law. Chingling, after her visit to Moscow, had no desire to return home to see the triumph of Nanking: she journeyed to Berlin and stayed there for months.
Meantime the little sister was developing into a hard worker, and many of her duties were similar to those of Chingling’s herself when she was a bride. Everybody who interviewed the Generalissimo found her with him, interpreting if need be; she and her husband discussed everything, from the foreign policy to the Bible, and she began to teach him English. A girl who had known her before her marriage said that in those earlier days she had always had the impression that Mayling’s life in Shanghai, the ordinary social routine of a girl of her class, did not satisfy her. She had her other interests, the clubs and the Child Welfare Association, but all of that was extra-curricular; it did not fulfill her need for action. Her superabundant energy and intelligence made her seem impatient and unconventional at times: during the interminable sessions of mah-jongg, for example, with which many of the Shanghai women kill great quantities of time, Mayling after a few hours of it would stand up and take her leave abruptly, though custom decreed that a player must not go away until she had gauged the exactly polite moment for departure according to the score, or until the entire party broke up. It was as if she was overcome, all of a sudden, with a sense of the futility of what she was doing.
Now there was no more boredom and no sense of futility. She had not yet begun to take an active part in the work of administration, but she was very busy as her husband’s helpmeet. Then too the house was often overrun with Eling’s children. Dr Kung was Minister of Industry, Labor and Commerce, and kept two houses, one in Nanking and one in Shanghai, in which city he had to spend a good deal of his time. The children attended school in Shanghai, but there was a good deal of visiting back and forth, and their aunt was very fond of them. Although Eling was concentrating all her efforts upon raising them in the way they should go, the children’s characters were developing at an alarming rate, and sometimes both mother and aunt found themselves baffled by the diversity of problems that were offered by these young personalities. One afternoon in Nanking when the Generalissimo was holding an important meeting with some of his staff, a furious row broke out from the sun porch above his study. He hurried upstairs to find Jeannette and Louis squabbling loudly; Louis, alleged Jeannette, had struck her, and she wanted revenge. She talked about it so much and so indignantly that her uncle reprimanded her, saying that it could not have been so bad, after all, since she was the elder and bigger. He then turned to go out, satisfied that he had settled the matter: at the door he happened to glance back over his shoulder, and saw Louis in the act of striking Jeannette again for being a tattletale, while Jeannette, too frightened to complain again, meekly accepted her fate.
Madame Kung at the beginning of her children’s lives made a resolution not to be so strict with them as her mother had been with herself and her brothers and sisters. She had not forgotten the Spartan regime that had governed the little Soongs. Her children should be strong and self-reliant without suffering quite so much during their tender years. In one respect she failed to invest Louis, at least, with complete courage, but she hopes that this early influence will be forgotten. It happens that Madame Kung is one of those people who fear dogs. She is afraid of cats, too; in fact, she is afraid of “anything furry,” and the family pets were kept out of her way. One day when Louis was a baby she left him alone on the veranda for a moment, and was indoors when she heard him shriek with terror. She rushed out and found a large dog poking its nose inquisitively into his pen. Mother love triumphed over her fear, and she seized her child and confronted the dog until he trotted off the veranda. It was, she thinks, the bravest deed of her life. She was quite willing to face the Japanese in 1937; their army had no terrors for her, but she has never forgotten that dog. It is to be hoped that Louis has, but a later development makes this doubtful.
One afternoon Madame Kung was taking him to see his grandmother, and in preparation for the visit, as was her usual custom, she telephoned
before starting out and told her mother’s servant to tie up the big watchdog, Carrie, before they should arrive. Louis scorned her for her cowardice.
“Let Carrie alone,” he protested. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in a dog. I’m not afraid of the dog, and she’s bigger than I am. You’re bigger than she is; why should you be afraid?”
Shamed by this logic, Madame Kung revoked the order, and when they arrived at the Soongs’ house Carrie came to meet them. Louis promptly shrank back behind his mother’s skirts.
“Why, Louis,” she said, “I thought you weren’t afraid of dogs. Why don’t you go and pet her?”
“It’s not Carrie I’m afraid of,” said Louis; “I’m not afraid of anything about Carrie except only just her mouth.”
It was Louis, too, who boasted to David one day that he knew a lot of English. “I can say anything in English,” he said proudly. “I know it all. Ask me something.”
“All right,” said David. “Louis, how would you like to be a bachelor all your life?”
The word “bachelor” stumped Louis. He hesitated, then decided on a safe course. “Not very much,” he faltered.
On the day Jeannette was to go to kindergarten for the first time she objected strenuously and kicked the servant who carried her out of the house. She was still upset and frightened when she arrived at McTyeire, though Rosamonde was there. The teacher asked her name.
“Mei-mei [Little Sister],” she replied.
“That’s what they call you at home,” said the teacher, “but you have another name, haven’t you?”
Jeannette hesitated, then remembered a name she had heard somewhere: “Ling-yi,” she suggested.
“That’s my name,” cried Rosamonde. “Yours is ‘Ling-wei’.” (There are ten characters in the Kung family, one to be used for each generation in the names of all the children until the last has been used up, when it begins over again. The Empress Dowager bestowed this right upon the Kungs in honor of Confucius. Dr Kung’s generation were all “Hsiang,” and his children are all “Ling.”)
It was too much for Jeannette, who burst into tears. “Can’t I even borrow a name?” she sobbed.
The young Kungs, as it turned out, needed a certain amount of discipline, and Eling found herself developing a strong if belated sympathy for her mother’s methods. One of the family rules that had to be brought into existence, for example, dealt with the matter of after-dinner fruit. The dish was piled high with apples, pears, oranges or whatever was in season, and passed around the table; to avoid a general grab for the best piece, Madame Kung decreed that each child should take the fruit that happened to be on top, no matter how big or small it might be. One day the top fruit was a pear with a bad spot on it; the dish was placed first before David.
“I don’t think I’ll have any fruit today, thanks,” said that young man indifferently.
The dish passed on to Rosamonde, who obeyed the family rule and took the spotted pear without a word of complaint. The fruit dish traveled farther, made the rounds, and was placed again in the center of the table with a nice unspotted pear reposing on top . . . . David glanced at it and said, “I think I’ll have some fruit, after all.” Calmly he reached out, appropriated the pear, and began peeling it. The other children clamored shrilly; unfair, unfair, David had cheated!
David lifted his eyebrows as he peeled his pear. “Fruit politics,” he explained.
Nanking was growing. Among the many foreign advisers whom Chiang Kai-shek had invited to the capital, military and financial and aeronautical, was the American architect Henry Killam Murphy, who designed the government buildings. These were planned as a blend of modern comfort and the ancient spirit of Peking; one traveled along straight wide streets between the tiled roofs of noble buildings, and out of the city toward the carefully restored Ming tombs. Most elaborate of all was the mausoleum built on the Purple Mountain for the body of Sun Yat-sen, which was removed from its temporary grave in the Western Hills near Peking and brought down to Nanking for an impressive ceremony and burial. The Purple Mountain’s side, covered with pine trees and flowering gardens, looked down on Nanking in the valley; a long triple flight of glittering white steps led up to the crypt.
It happened that this same year Sun’s old friends the Russians fell out with the Young Marshal’s government in Harbin over the Chinese Eastern Railway. The Manchurians had seized the management of the line, which had always been administered by Russians, in June; Russia immediately issued an ultimatum. If the offices were not returned to Russian control in three days, she would start to make war. Chang Hsueh-liang, who had pledged his allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek, turned the matter over to the Nanking government, to Foreign Minister C. T. Wang. Nanking through Wang stood by the Young Marshal, and Russia moved on Manchuria.
Chiang offered to help Chang and his generals, but they were suspicious of his motives and preferred to carry on their own fight — to their cost, because the Russians were winning all along the line. There was possible danger, also, from the Japanese, who had spoken before of their desire to “maintain order” in Manchuria. C. T. Wang was appealing to the League of Nations, but this procedure got no more quick action than usual, and the Young Marshal could not afford to wait. On the advice of Wellington Koo, he agreed to the proposals made by the Russians at the beginning of the quarrel, and restored control of the railway to the original arrangement.
In the meantime Madame Sun had come back to China, to attend the services for her husband when his remains were transferred to the crypt at Nanking. She had announced in Berlin, on May Sixth, “I am proceeding to China for the purpose of attending to the removal of the remains of Dr Sun Yat-sen to the Purple Mountain where he desired to be buried.
“In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I have to state that I emphatically adhere to my declaration made in Hankow on July fourteenth, 1937, in which I announced my withdrawal from active participation in the work of the Kuomintang, on account of counter-revolutionary policy and activities of the Central Executive Committee . . . .
“It must therefore be abundantly clear that my attendance at the burial will not mean and is not to be interpreted as in any sense implying a modification or reversal of my decision to abstain from any direct or indirect work of the Kuomintang so long as its leadership is opposed to the fundamental policies of Dr Sun; namely, the policy of effective anti-imperialism, the policies of cooperation with Soviet Russia and the Workers and Peasant policy . . . . ”
When she arrived in Harbin she made several statements to the same effect. There was to be no misunderstanding whatever as to Chingling’s attitude toward her brother-in-law’s government . . . . Yet she remained on the best of terms with Mayling.
Randall Gould, in “Madame Sun Keeps Faith,” an article in the Nation, January twenty-second, 1930, wrote:
Upon her arrival in Peiping to start the long funeral journey from the Western Hills to the new mausoleum just outside the city walls of Nanking, Madame Sun made it abundantly clear that she had no intention of lending her name and reputation to the government or party. Keeping herself apart even from members of her family, she went through with the long and trying ceremonials, saw the casket safely deposited in its million-dollar resting place, and returned to her house in the Rue Molière in Shanghai. For some time she maintained silence. Then, on August 1, she fired a shot which would have echoed throughout the country had not suppression intervened.
It was a telegram to the Anti-Imperialist League in Berlin on an International Anti-War Day. An excerpt:
While the oppressed nationalities today form a solid front against imperialist war and militarism, the reactionary Nanking Government is combining forces with the Imperialists in brutal repressions against the Chinese masses. Never has the treacherous character of the counter-revolutionary Kuomintang leaders been so shamelessly exposed to the world as today. Having betrayed the Nationalist revolution, they have inevitably degenerated into imperialist tools and attempted to provoke wa
r with Russia. But the Chinese masses, undaunted by repression and undeceived by lying propaganda, will fight only on the side of revolution. . . .
This message was at first ignored in China. At last one British paper in Shanghai printed a distorted translation from the Japanese, though the editor ignored a proper version when it was sent to him in correction. The Chinese press simply avoided all mention of it, though Government officials heard of it and were furious. One man who tried to distribute leaflets containing a Chinese version was arrested in Shanghai, but somebody threw handbills with the same message from the roof of the Sincere Company in Nanking Road, in the heart of the city.
Madame Sun’s house was kept under observation, and the sound of her typewriter gave rise to rumors that she was sending secret messages by wireless to Moscow. Her own comment was:
“I feel good inside since I sent that telegram. It was necessary to express myself. What happens to me personally as a result is not important.”
Nothing happened to her, however, as a result of this message. She stayed on in Rue Molière, though there were many reports of her departure — for Moscow, for Berlin, for many places. Rumor ran wild about Madame Sun, but she stayed where she was, in quiet seclusion.
CHAPTER XVI
Rebels and Reds
In October, on the 1929 “Double Tenth” anniversary, a number of generals in the Northwest, members of the People’s Army, rebelled against Nanking by denouncing the Government and the Generalissimo. This development was the outcome of Feng Yu-hsiang’s plotting. At the same time there was trouble in Hupeh, fomented by General Hu. Chiang drove back the People’s Army from Loyang, Honan, but two generals who had been Feng’s men before rebelled and looted Pukow, across the river from Nanking, while he was busy at this. He attempted to bring Yen Hsi-shan over to his side without signal success, though Yen did not quite come into the open and refuse. However, when Chiang tried to follow the two generals who had looted Pukow, sending troops after them along the Tientsin-Pukow railway in February, 1930, Yen objected and begged the Generalissimo to give up his command. This meant that the Shansi governor had declared for Feng.