The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  That was, however, not the end of Sun’s attempt to marry one of the daughters of Charlie Soong.

  6

  For the Chinese it is not only honourable, but also admirable for a girl to worship the hero of a great cause and to want to marry him.

  —JUNG CHANG

  IF SUN Yat-sen’s uncommon ability to believe what he wanted to believe had enabled him to pursue his revolution to the brink of success, it is obvious that it often blinded him in both personal and political relationships. This was nowhere more clear than in his dealings with his successor as president of the new Chinese Republic, Yuan Shih-kai.

  Fifty-two years old when he became president, Yuan had started his life in the military, modernizing and building up the North China Army before entering the civil administration. There, his “upward mobility,” which China scholar John Fairbank termed “phenomenal,” had propelled him into a number of important posts before he was ousted by the Manchus. Known as a can-do operator with a knack for organization, Yuan was always “the shortest man in any group.” He was also overweight and preferred the comfort of Western shirts to mandarin collars, which cut into his fat little neck. A wily gentleman of the mandarin class, he was a skillful manipulator of situations and men.

  But even an experienced leader like Yuan could not change the Chinese political psyche overnight. In spite of the success of the revolution, there remained a wide gulf between the upper class and the peasants. The former—educated, wealthy, used to centuries of privilege—expected to run the country while the latter farmed the land, hauled heavy equipment, and carried their betters around in sedan chairs. The highest goal of a civilized Chinese society was then—and still is—not compromise worked out through differing points of view representing divergent interests but harmony achieved through unquestioning acceptance of authority. The so-called loyal opposition that existed in Western parliamentary systems was, to the Chinese mind—and to Yuan—a contradiction in terms.*

  One of the people determined to change this was a young follower of Sun Yat-sen named Sung Chiao-jen. Having drafted the first constitution for the republic, Sung set himself the task of making multiparty parliamentary government into a reality, organizing a merger between Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance and four small political factions to form the famous (some would say infamous) Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist Party of China. In elections held in February of 1913, the KMT had roundly defeated the other parties, winning a majority of seats in the National Assembly. This, of course, meant that the prime minister would be chosen from within its ranks, i.e., Sung himself. A week later, a triumphant Sung, age thirty, was at the Shanghai Station preparing to board the train for Peking. Before he could leave, he was gunned down by an assassin.

  Along with democratic activists like Sung, Yuan had inherited an economic problem endemic to fledgling governments: the inability to raise the funds necessary to jump-start the engine of a new administration. It will be remembered that the first thing Sun Yat-sen did upon hearing of the success of the revolution was to go to Washington and London, where he tried unsuccessfully to secure loans for the new Chinese Republic. While in London, Sun also contacted the head of the International Banking Consortium, which had been handling loans to the Imperial Chinese government, in an effort to reroute the money into the coffers of the revolutionaries; not surprisingly, his request was refused. But as soon as Sun resigned in favor of Yuan, negotiations began with the consortium for a huge “reorganization loan,” which the consortium advanced for the immediate needs of the republic. As Fairbank put it, “The imperialist powers knew how their bread was buttered in China. They could work with Yuan. He would not rock the boat or mobilize Boxer-type risings against foreign privilege.”

  China’s credit line with the West had originally been established through the customs service, run by Britisher Robert Hart. This arrangement had worked nicely until the Boxer Rebellion, when the Chinese government ran out of money. The consortium then announced that China’s national salt tax would be sufficient security for further loans—but only as long as these taxes were collected, like customs service duties, by foreigners. Sun Yat-sen and his cohorts in the Kuomintang spoke out against accepting these terms. His position was strengthened when President Woodrow Wilson announced the withdrawal of the United States from the consortium on the grounds that conditions like these cast aspersions on Chinese independence.

  Embarrassed by the terms of the loan and ever-increasing proof that he had ordered the murder of Sung, Yuan now faced charges by the Kuomin-tang that the money was a personal loan, made to Yuan himself. When the money disappeared without contributing to the promised “reorganization” of the new government, rebellion again broke out in the South. It was quickly suppressed by Yuan, who also dismissed three provincial governors, all members of the KMT. At that point, Sun sent Yuan a wire demanding his resignation and offering peace in the South in return. Yuan refused; Nanking declared its independence; and the KMT organized a “punitive expedition” against Yuan. Yuan fired Sun from his post as director of railway development, charging that the funds he had been given to build railways had been used to pay for what was now being called the “second revolution.” When Yuan sent his northern army to repress the southern revolutionaries, Sun once again fled to Japan.

  Two months later, on October 10,* the anniversary of the revolution, Yuan held a magnificent inauguration for himself, attended by the diplomatic corps, whose appearance signified the formal recognition of the fledgling republic. Less than a month later, he formally outlawed the Kuomintang, unseated more than three hundred KMT members of Parliament, and arrested eight others. One enterprising KMT leader, the vice president of the Senate, escaped the gunmen surrounding his house by disguising himself as an old woman and pretending to be led by his servants to his carriage.

  At the beginning of 1914, the year World War I broke out, Yuan declared himself president for life and, as the war progressed, made moves toward becoming emperor. In preparation for his new royal position, Yuan is said to have held a dress rehearsal for the ceremony, at which he had intended to invest his favorite ladies with royal rank until two of them got into a clawing catfight, leaving their elaborate gowns in shreds. Yuan had even chosen an imperial name for himself and set the date for his enthronement. This was, according to Jonathan Spence, the result of unbridled personal ambition coupled with a sincere conviction that as a monarchy, China would be in a better position to continue to attract foreign loans.†

  Certainly, the first and most disastrous effect of the European war on China was the drying up of funds from the members of the consortium, now engaged in their own expensive battles for survival. The Japanese government stepped quickly into the vacuum, trading loans for concessions, and by May of 1915 felt sufficiently entrenched to issue—under threat of attack—what came to be known as the Twenty-one Demands. These included the extension of Japanese rights in Manchuria and Mongolia; the takeover by Japan of German concessions in the province of Shantung; joint operation with China of her largest iron and steel company; and an obligation on China’s part to employ Japanese advisers in the political, financial, and military spheres—a provision that would have given the Japanese partial control, among other things, of the Chinese police. Although Yuan was able to eschew this last provision, he had to accept the others. The following year, in an effort to unseat Yuan and destabilize China, the Japanese persuaded the group that administered China’s salt tax to withhold the monies left after they had deducted payments for loans and indemnities, thus starving Yuan of the wherewithal to control his civil and military administrations. Forced to abandon his imperial ambitions in March of 1916, Yuan died three months later, a defeated man. His death opened the way for Sun Yat-sen to return to China.

  FROM 1913 TO 1916, Sun had been living in exile in Japan, slipping into China occasionally to further his republican aims. Although many of his fellow revolutionaries had deserted him for Yuan, others had followed him, either by choice or
necessity. Among those who felt it was healthier to leave China was Charlie Soong, who closed the Soong house on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession, gathered the members of his family then living with him,* took the household servants, and left for Kobe under an assumed name. The family later moved to Tokyo and finally settled in Yokohama in a house overlooking Tokyo Bay, where they lived for nearly two years.

  Among the emigrants was the Soong’s second daughter, Ching-ling, who had graduated from Wesleyan and arrived in China in time to accompany her father and Sun on one of their last railway trips. Back in 1911, when Charlie Soong had sent his middle daughter the flag of the new Chinese Republic with its twelve-pointed white sun, her roommates reported that she had climbed on a chair, pulled the old yellow-and-blue imperial dragon flag off the wall, and stomped on it. The following year, she wrote an article about the Chinese Revolution for the college magazine entitled “The Greatest Event of the Twentieth Century”; in it she described “the emancipation of four hundred million souls” from the Manchu Dynasty as “a most glorious achievement… the greatest event since Waterloo.” A passionate patriot and idealist, Charlie’s second daughter had been invited by her father to accompany the party when he realized that he could no longer trust Sun with his eldest daughter, Ai-ling. In any case, Ai-ling, now in her midtwenties, was a practical, business-oriented young woman, less interested in romance than in money and position. And it did not take long after the family arrived in Japan for her to find the man of her dreams.

  In Tokyo, Charlie was introduced to a young man named Kung Hsiang hsi, known as H. H. Kung, who was working with the Chinese YMCA. Kung was a member of an old family from Shansi, a province in the interior of China, southwest of Peking. Generations of successful bankers and store operators had made the Kungs very rich. Or, as one journalist phrased it, “They owned chain stores in North China, Mongolia, and Canton before Woolworth and Walgreen bore surnames—centuries before.” Sickly as a child, H. H. Kung had been taken to a number of Chinese doctors before landing in a mission hospital. There he had been operated on by a doctor who had not only restored him to health but converted him to Christianity.

  During the Boxer Rebellion, Kung had tried but failed to help a family of missionaries escape from the marauders. After it was over, he sailed for the United States with letters from them to their families explaining their fate. Once he had fulfilled his promise and delivered the letters, he enrolled in Oberlin College, from which he graduated, going on to get a master’s degree in economics at Yale. A budding revolutionary, Kung returned to China, where he served as commander of the Revolutionary Forces in Shansi. Asked to be governor of the province, he refused in favor of starting a school, explaining, “You can’t carry out a revolution overnight. The military turnover, yes; that can be done all at once. But where are you going to get the men for the government afterwards? It needs training to govern a country, and education is the first and most important step in a revolution.” The death of his young wife of tuberculosis and the rise of Yuan convinced him that he too ought to leave China, which is how he happened to be in Tokyo at the same time as the Soongs. When Kung told Charlie that he had met Ai-ling at a party in New York, Charlie invited him home for dinner.

  An unprepossessing, chubby young man with round glasses on his nose, whose life had been far more interesting than his looks would indicate, Kung was delighted to see Ai-ling again, and she saw in him the family, the money, and the future power she was seeking. On her return to China from the United States, she had realized that she would have to adjust to the inferior position of her sex and fulfill her ambitions through a husband. Kung, called by one reporter “the Greatest Living Aristocrat,” was, in fact, the seventy-fifth-generation direct descendant of Confucius (Kung Fu-tzu). When he announced this to the Soongs, Ching-ling started referring to him as “The Sage.” A rich man into the bargain, Kung was an ideal choice for the “intelligent, suave, utterly charming, most devastatingly shrewd” eldest daughter of the Soongs. But, according to her fiancé, “This was really love!” They married in September 1914. It was an excellent match from the standpoints of all concerned.

  A year after their marriage, the Kungs were able to visit his family home of Taiku. At the time, there were no roads to the family seat. Kung and Ai-ling traveled as far as they could by train; he rode horseback the rest of the way, while she was carried in a sedan chair by sixteen bearers. Having prepared herself for the worst of primitive conditions, Ai-ling was thrilled to find that her husband’s family home was a veritable palace and that there were five hundred people in her new household. As in all great Chinese families, the Kung family home would have been a series of courts, each surrounded by rooms opening onto galleries and terraces sheltered by wide eaves. Some of the larger courts held gardens with walks, fish ponds, fountains, and flowering trees.

  Kung had started his school—called Oberlin in China after his American alma mater—with nine male students. When one of the professors wrote at the last minute to say he could not come, Ai-ling agreed to substitute for him. It was a brave thing to do, since women were still considered chattel in the provinces and all of her students were men, most of them older than she. Although Ai-ling convinced her husband that Oberlin in China could play a role in his future political career by using American dollars to train young men as his followers, none of the graduates ever became powerful players on the political scene.

  Ai-ling had another idea, however, that did help Kung’s political image. When Yuan announced that he would become the next emperor of China, she apparently outlined an essay for her husband to write and sign, which he did, presenting a written argument against Yuan’s imperial ambitions. The essay, published both in China and abroad, marked Kung as a political thinker. During their time in the north, Ai-ling also encouraged her husband’s efforts to establish relationships with local warlords so that he could become a bridge between the North and the South, where all of Dr. Sun’s revolutionary contacts and power were concentrated.

  BEFORE HER MARRIAGE, Ai-ling—called by one of the Luces a “perennial fixer”—had suggested that Ching-ling take over her job as secretary to Sun Yat-sen. Whether or not she knew what she was doing, it was nearly inevitable that the young and idealistic Ching-ling, enamored of the revolution, would also fall for its creator. As she wrote May-ling in November 1914, “I can help China and I can also help Dr. Sun. He needs me.” Sun taught Ching-ling to decode secret letters and write in invisible ink, both tools of the political underground. He also taught her to be precise, punctual, and spot government spies.

  It is reasonably clear that during their initial time together, Sun was going through something of an emotional breakdown. His defeat by Yuan had severely undermined his belief in himself. His damaged ego got the upper hand; he lost his remarkable selflessness and belief in his fellow men; and, for the first time in his life, he gave in to bitterness. Ousted from the ruling group, he became petty, angry, and resentful. He blamed the consortium for his defeat by Yuan: “Not our own people, not our own mistakes, drove us from China, but foreign money power, deliberately employed for the breakup of our country,” he claimed. “The foreign bankers of the five Power group held the balance of power between the North and the South for three years. When we were in power they starved us of the credit, except on the most humiliating terms.… Last year’s personal loan.… to Yuan Shih-kai… simply put a club in the hands of the North with which they straightway smashed our cause. That huge bribe and that alone, is the reason why we are here today.”

  Just as it is easy to see how Ching-ling’s love for Sun’s ideals slipped over into infatuation with the man himself, it is not hard to imagine her appeal for Sun. His marriage had been one of convenience, and he had spent a minimum of time with the uneducated woman his family had chosen for him when he was still in school.* Moreover, his attempt to marry Ai-ling had been rebuffed in such a way as to wound his pride. Now, nearing fifty, he was thrown into daily contact with a pretty, wel
l-educated girl, barely twenty years old, bursting with worshipful love both for his cause and for himself. Where else could a man who had been dropped from the heights of glory find such delicious solace?

  There are many variations in the story of the wedding and marriage of Sun Yat-sen and Ching-ling. Taken all together, it seems to be as follows:

  Ching-ling went to her parents while they were living in Japan to announce that she wanted to marry Sun. They were horrified. Not only was there nearly thirty years’ difference in their ages, but both the Soongs and the Suns were Christians, who believed, unlike the Chinese, in strict monogamy. But even if they had been unconverted Chinese, the union would have had to be proposed by the elders, not the principals, and it would have been necessary to get the permission of both families for the man to take a second wife.

  Marriages in China had nothing to do with love or infatuation. The joining of men and women was a contract between two families for the benefit of both, and the children who followed were there to add continuity to the power of the family and tend its ancestors’ graves. The mere idea of a child choosing his or her own mate was anathema to the traditional Chinese way of life, and, although Charlie Soong had raised his daughters to be thoughtful, educated women, there were certain lines that could not be crossed. In China, the welfare and reputation of the family superseded those of its members, and, as one author put it, “the bigger and more powerful the Chinese family, the more its individual member was its well-beloved prisoner.” At the core of this belief was the concept of filial piety. Like the emperor in his palace, the father in his home was the ultimate authority, not to be crossed or even disturbed with unpleasant truths.*