Malraux said to me that there was “something of the sorcerer” in Mao, a man “inhabited by a vision, possessed by it.” Mao envisioned a Chinese society that would resemble a large family. When he was told that his son had been killed in the Korean War, Mao responded placidly: “Without sacrifices there will not be victory. To sacrifice my son or other people’s sons is just the same.” But if the monkey in Mao was possessed by this vision, the tiger in him convulsed China in trying to realize it. Mao wanted spontaneity among the people. But he would tolerate it only as long as it conformed to his vision. When they diverged, he tried to reach his goal through the use of legal restraints and brutal police power of the state. To the last, Mao never seemed to comprehend that such coercion created a hierarchy, stifled initiative, and crushed spontaneity.
As the Marx, the Lenin, and the Stalin of the Chinese Revolution, Mao made his mark on history through strategic insight, tactical agility, and staggeringly cruel violence. He revised Marxism by making the peasantry the revolutionary class instead of the industrial workers. He revised Leninism by waging revolution with soldiers organized into an army instead of insurrectionaries grouped into conspiratorial cliques. He mocked those who compared his rule with the bloody reign of Chin Shih-huang, whose tyranny went unequaled among the emperors: “You think you insult us by saying that we are like Chin Shih-huang, but you make a mistake—we have passed him a hundred times!”
Mao could not have succeeded with insight and callousness alone. A charisma that attracted fanatical followers and a power of will that disdained large odds were also necessary. With Mao his strength of will produced his charisma. When I met him I had the sense that his will-power was somehow a physical characteristic. His most vivid poetry was written during and after the battles of the Long March. When he wrote of the exhilaration of struggle, especially violent struggle, he seemed to refer to the exercise of will in the manner that others speak of the exercise of their muscles. With this quality he could inspire his comrades to such epic tasks as the Long March because it made him, and thus them, seem unconquerable.
• • •
In 1972, with a sweeping gesture that might have encompassed either our meeting or all of China, Mao told me, “Our common old friend Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek doesn’t approve of this.” Moments later he added, “The history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.” In 1953, during my first meeting with Chiang, the Generalissimo made a similar sweeping gesture when speaking of China that made it clear that his statements pertained to the mainland as well as his redoubt on Formosa.
I detected something of the Emperor in the way both spoke of their country. Their gestures and statements seemed to suggest that each man had come to identify his country’s fate with his own. When two such leaders meet in history, they do not compromise, they collide. One becomes the victor, one the vanquished.
Oddly, perhaps, the two men were similar in many ways. Both were men of the East. Mao left China only twice, to meet with Soviet leaders in Moscow in 1949 and 1957; Chiang traveled outside of Asia only twice, once to go on a mission to Moscow in 1923 and once to meet as one of the Big Four in Cairo in 1943. Both often withdrew for long periods of solitude. Mao took this time to write poetry; Chiang spent it reciting classical poetry as he walked in the mountains. Both were revolutionaries. Mao rebelled against the tyranny of his father and the social system as a whole; Chiang revolted against the domestic corruption and international weakness of the Manchu dynasty and, incidentally, cut off his queue—the symbolic gesture of rebellion—seven years before Mao did.
Their differences were both superficial and profound. Mao slouched in his chair as if he were a sack of potatoes carelessly thrown there; Chiang sat up ramrod-straight as if his backbone were made of steel. Mao had a relaxed, uninhibited sense of humor; Chiang, in my meetings with him, never attempted humor of any kind. Mao’s calligraphy was chaotic, its irregular characters falling into undisciplined rows; Chiang’s was rigid, its square characters all falling perfectly into line.
More profoundly, they revered China differently. They both loved the land, but Mao sought to erase the past while Chiang sought to build upon it. In victory Mao simplified the characters of the written Chinese language, not only to facilitate his literacy campaign, but also to destroy the history that each of the complex characters encapsulated. In defeat Chiang made room in the refugee flotilla for nearly 400,000 pieces of ancient Chinese art, even as many loyal aides and soldiers remained on the mainland.
In my first meeting with Mao he mentioned that in a recent speech Chiang had called the Communist leadership “bandits.” I asked him what he called Chiang. Mao laughed, and Zhou replied, “Generally speaking, we call them ‘Chiang Kai-shek’s clique.’ In the newspapers sometimes we call him a bandit; he calls us bandits in turn. Anyway, we abuse each other.” The relationship between Zhou and Chiang had been like a roller-coaster ride. Zhou had worked as Chiang’s subordinate at the Chinese military academy in the early 1920s, and Chiang reportedly said that Zhou was a “reasonable Communist.” A few years later Chiang would put out an $80,000 bounty on Zhou’s life. On the whole, however, I was surprised to find that Zhou and several other officials who asked about Chiang were curiously ambivalent in their attitude toward him. As Communists, they hated him; as Chinese, they respected and even admired him. In all my discussions with Chiang he never expressed any reciprocal respect.
I first met with Chiang Kai-shek, the third great leader of China’s twentieth century, in 1953. I stayed in touch with him as Vice President and as a private citizen, and we formed a personal friendship that I valued greatly. That is why the rapprochement with Peking was such a profoundly wrenching personal experience for me.
Chiang and his wife often welcomed me to their magnificent residence in Taipei. His wife served as our interpreter, though she would occasionally participate in the discussion as well. It would have been impossible to find a better interpreter than the Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang. In addition to her easy eloquence in both Chinese and English, she knew her husband’s thinking so thoroughly that she could interpolate accurately when an expression or term in one language had no precisely corresponding form in the other.
Madame Chiang was much more than her husband’s translator, however. It is often fashionable to put down the wives of leaders as historically and personally insignificant because their prominence resulted wholly from their marriage. This view not only ignores the behind-the-scenes role the wives of leaders often play, but also it denigrates the qualities and character that they often possess. I believe Madame Chiang’s intelligence, persuasiveness, and moral force could have made her an important leader in her own right.
The contrast between Madame Chiang and Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, was even more striking than that between Chiang and Mao. Madame Chiang was civilized, beautifully groomed, very feminine, yet very strong. Jiang Qing was tough, humorless, totally unfeminine, the ideal prototype of the sexless, fanatical Communist woman. Whittaker Chambers once told me, “When you meet a Communist couple, you will usually find that the wife is the red hot of the two.” This was certainly true as far as Jiang Qing was concerned. I have never met a more cold, graceless person. As we sat together at a propaganda cultural program she had arranged for my visit, she showed none of Mao’s warmth or Zhou’s grace. She was so intense that beads of perspiration appeared on her hands and forehead. Her first comment was typical of her abrasive, belligerent attitude: “Why did you not come to China before now?”
Zhou’s wife, Deng Yingchao, was quite different. I met with her in 1972 and in 1976, shortly after Zhou’s death. She displayed much of the same charm and sophistication I had seen in him. Apart from her relationship to Zhou, she was and is a dedicated Communist playing her own independent role in the party. But unlike Mao’s wife, she had not allowed her Communist ideology to destroy her femininity. It is interesting to note that while Zhou had only one wife in his l
ifetime, Mao had four.
The sad end to which Madame Chiang’s family came captures in a nutshell the divisiveness that China’s civil war wrought. Charles Soong, who had become wealthy as a manufacturer and distributor of Bibles, had three daughters, Ai-ling, Mei-ling, and Ch’ing-ling. Ai-ling married the director of the Bank of China and fled to the United States after the fall of China. Mei-ling married Chiang, fought with him against the Communists, shared his exile on Formosa until his death, and now lives in the United States. Ch’ing-ling married the founder of China’s revolutionary movement, Sun Yat-sen, and joined the Communists during the civil war. She became a revered symbol of the revolution in later years and received a state funeral in Peking when she died in 1981.
When Chiang proposed marriage to Mei-ling, there was opposition within the Soong family because Chiang was not a Christian. If he wanted to marry Mei-ling, her family insisted, he would have to become one. Chiang, not a man who took his religion lightly, said that he would be a poor Christian if his faith were not freely chosen. He promised to undertake a serious study of the Bible after he married Mei-ling, and the Soong family consented. Chiang was converted three years later. From then on Chiang and his wife would often pray together for an hour in the morning. Chiang was not naturally trusting or affectionate, but he was won over completely by Mei-ling and grew very close to her. She was his closest confidante in matters of state and traveled repeatedly to the United States as his personal emissary during and after World War II. Her charm and gracious manner made her an international celebrity and tended to soften Chiang’s more harsh image.
Chiang’s immaculately kept black cape and his shaven skull complemented an austere and reticent manner in private meetings. His habit of uttering a quick “Hao, hao”—meaning “Good, good”—after my statements made him seem slightly nervous. But his eyes radiated self-confidence and tenacity. They were black but would occasionally flash with light. Their gaze would dart about the room until our discussion began. Then his eyes would fix themselves on mine for the duration of our talk.
In their personal habits Chiang and Mao were a study in contrasts. Everything about Chiang was orderly—his dress, his office, his home. He was a disciplined, organized individual in every way. The adjectives tidy and neat do not overstate the impression he gave. Mao was the exact opposite. His study was littered with books and papers. If the test of a good executive is the cleanliness of his desk, he flunked. Mao was as disorganized as Chiang was organized and as undisciplined as Chiang was disciplined. The adjectives unkempt and sloppy would not overstate his appearance.
• • •
Chiang was an example of that rarest of political animals: the conservative revolutionary. The American Revolution succeeded in founding an orderly and free society because its leaders were essentially conservatives. They fought for freedoms that they had once possessed, but which had been taken away. The French Revolution foundered as it did partly because its leaders sought to achieve a purely intellectual and abstract vision that had no foundations in their national history.
Chiang’s intentions resembled those of the Americans more than those of the French. He wanted to revivify Chinese tradition. He rejected its corruption by the old order. He fought against pervasive opium addiction and the still-common practice of foot binding. But he was not a democrat, even though he did introduce constitutional government. The problem, as he saw it, was not too little freedom but too much. China needed discipline, for as Sun Yat-sen had stated, “We have become a heap of sand.” The discipline Chiang sought, however, would release the creative and productive abilities of the Chinese people.
When implemented on Taiwan, his ideas produced an economic miracle. Though he received American economic aid through 1965, the amounts were so small that they cannot account for the country’s explosive economic growth. Economic statistics can never capture the tragedy that the Communist victory was for the Chinese people, but they do make some important points. The Communists collectivized agricultural production, and today the mainland produces less rice per capita than it did before the revolution. Chiang paid the landlords for their land and distributed it to the peasantry. The former landlords invested much of their money in industry while the government encouraged foreign investment. Today, Taiwan has a per capita income five times as great as that of the mainland. And the eighteen million Chinese on Formosa export about fifty percent more than the one billion on the mainland.
Chiang was a man of action who had been right so many times in his turbulent career that he developed an absolute faith in his own judgment. He was fond of reading the Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming, who stated that “to know and yet not to do is in fact not to know.”
Not even the debacle of 1949 could shake Chiang’s self-confidence. It was only another temporary setback to him. Every time I saw him, he talked of reconquering the mainland. And even when some of his associates had given up hope, he never lost faith.
The name he chose for himself, Kai-shek, translates as “immovable stone,” and in light of his temperament it was a most appropriate choice. I greatly admired his resolution. He never believed in bowing to the “inevitable” simply because it seemed inevitable. There are always those who will tell a public figure that his goals are impossible to achieve. They lack creative vision. Too often they consider something to be impossible just because it has never been done before. Chiang understood this. As he once wrote, “I have always been surrounded and sometimes overpowered by enemies. But I know how to endure.”
Notwithstanding his tenacity, Chiang had his faults, but a tragedy like the fall of China is never one man’s fault. Chiang was a brilliant political and military tactician, but his “by the book” rigidity made him a mediocre strategist. Chiang’s mind was quick and decisive when operating within a given set of strategic assumptions. He played by the rules as he found them. If these assumptions remained stable, few were his match. He was less able to step outside of these assumptions and innovate a new strategy that challenged the old one. Many historical figures have challenged the assumptions of their era. History is filled with footnotes on those whose innovations were inappropriate to their times; history is made by those whose innovations exploited the opportunities of their moment. It was Chiang’s misfortune that Mao Zedong was among the latter.
When Chiang’s army set out on the Northern Expedition to attempt to unite China militarily, some parts of the country were in the hands of foreigners, some in the grip of warlords, some in the throes of anarchy. As he progressed, Chiang slowly amassed the most powerful army in China and after several years was proclaimed the ruler of a united China.
The unification was more verbal than actual, however. Chiang subdued his rivals but did not subjugate them. He allowed his enemies to follow the traditional Chinese strategy of yielding to superior force and to save face by becoming his allies. This was perhaps his greatest error. Machiavelli would have admonished Chiang that by allowing the war-lords to remain in power and in command of their armies, Chiang would never be sure of his conquests, for certain loyalty comes only through dependency.
Here, Machiavelli would have been right. Chiang never succeeded in gaining full control of China. His forces were pinned down just maintaining national unity. If he had to commit additional forces to one part of the country, the regional warlord in another part would threaten to go his separate way. As a result Chiang repeatedly had to put down challenges from various warlords. He could never demobilize his armed forces and devote adequate attention and resources to economic modernization and reform. Still worse, he could never deploy the full strength of his army against the Communists. His strategy, in a word, saved face but lost China.
• • •
The lesson was not lost on Mao, who followed through on his own victory, establishing Communist party control at every level of society in every region of the mainland. In fact history will probably rank this accomplishment as Mao’s greatest.
Zhou’s historical
accomplishments are much more difficult to pin down. He contributed greatly to the Communist victory in the civil war. But after 1949 Zhou was only one of several lieutenants vying for Mao’s ear. Zhou wanted to temper ideology with pragmatism by following a policy of gradual economic modernization. But Mao’s quixotic swings in policy continually frustrated Zhou’s efforts. Zhou also stood almost alone in trying to soften the harshness of life in Communist China, to allow a small degree of free discussion, to infuse Chinese society with what Burke called the “unbought grace of life.” But again, his efforts failed.
Zhou will earn high marks for his diplomacy. He steered a nation whose potential power was far greater than its real power, but nevertheless made a mark on history by exploiting the opportunities that were presented to him. When I met with Zhou’s widow shortly after his death in 1976, I told her there was no need to build a monument to his memory because historians would regard his actions in preserving the global balance of power as testament to his greatness. I then tried to sum up Zhou’s remarkable career by saying, “What you cannot see is often more meaningful than what you can see.”
In my conversations with Zhou and Mao, both spoke almost fatalistically about the large amount of work that remained for them to do and the small amount of time in which they had to do it. They kept returning to the question of age, and I sensed that they knew that the end was near.
In his last year Zhou received a poem from Mao that captured the distress they both felt:
Loyal parents who sacrificed so much
for the nation never feared the
ultimate fate.
Now that the country has become Red,
Leaders Page 33