The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  17

  Subordination and deference to male leadership was the lot of most women in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century China, regardless of their station in society.

  —THOMAS L. KENNEDY

  THERE ARE several stories told about the early days of the Chiang marriage. They may well be apocryphal, but all are grounded in reality. The first concerns a marital fight that occurred a few weeks after the wedding. According to Chiang’s diary, the newlyweds had spent Christmas Eve, which Chiang called “the most cheerful day of the past ten years of my life,” at her mother’s home. Five days later, however, came this entry: “I have been extremely unhappy and lonely since third sister left, because she was puffed up, and also because I was not sufficiently aware of my rudeness, which was generated by her stubbornness and hot temper.… That very night… I could not wait to go see her. She felt that her illness had been caused by a lack of personal freedom. She advised me to improve my temper, which I promised her I would.”

  May-ling’s stated determination to remain an individual, not just an adjunct to her husband, seems a likely cause for a flare-up between an ultra-traditional Confucian and an atypical Chinese bride. A month later, she wrote Emma that she did “not think that marriage should erase or absorb one’s individuality. For this reason I want to be myself, and not as the General’s wife. I have been May-ling Soong all these years, and I believe I stand for something, and I intend to continue to develop my individuality, and to keep my identity. Naturally my husband does not agree with me. He wants me to be identified as his wife; but I say nothing, and I am going to stand for something myself.… I… want to be recognized as a factor because I am I and not because I happen to be his wife.”

  The second story revolves around an entry in Chiang’s diary saying that May-ling suffered a miscarriage on August, 25, 1928, eight months after their marriage. Chiang was very worried about her, writing that “her pain and suffering was in the extreme, so much so that it could not be described.” But with no corroboration of the pregnancy from a doctor* or anyone in the family, with Chiang’s history of venereal disease, and with May-ling’s penchant for illnesses—real and imagined, gynecological and otherwise—it is hard to believe the incident was anything other than wishful thinking. Moreover, Chiang’s second wife, Jennie, claimed that Chiang’s doctor had told him after their marriage that he was sterile—something he would never have admitted to May-ling, who might not have married him had she known.

  As it happened, the so-called miscarriage was blamed on May-ling’s fright over an attempt to assassinate Chiang—a story that ties into May-ling’s belief in spiritual experiences, occasions when she “believed that she received guidance from Almighty God… sometimes while she was awake and sometimes in dreams.” As she told the story to a friend,* she had left her husband in Nanking and flown down to Shanghai, where her mother was in a sanitorium. She took a room next door, and a few days later, when Chiang came to Shanghai, he took the room next to hers. The night Chiang arrived, May-ling dreamed that she was walking in the hallway outside her door but could still see herself inside all dressed in white. A man with an evil face stood outside her room and was about to open the door to attack her when (now inside the room) she locked the door. Nevertheless, she could still see him. He raised his hands, in each of which he held a revolver. She screamed, and her screams roused Chiang, who came into her room and woke her.

  The next morning Madame Soong told her daughter and son-in-law to go home. That night May-ling had a second dream. She was standing with her mother in the garden at the rear of their home, holding a bag of flour and sprinkling a circle of white dust on the grass. In the middle of the circle, the form of a woman dressed in white arose; although the form resembled the goddess of mercy, her face was evil. “I know everything and will tell you anything,” she said. Catching her mother’s glance of warning, May-ling demanded to know if the apparition was God or the Devil, at which point the figure melted away screaming and May-ling screamed along with her. When she awoke, she heard Chiang groaning in his sleep. He woke up, they chatted for a moment, and, stepping out of their room, he clapped his hands to call for his guard. Two men instead of one appeared. He thought it strange but said nothing.

  The following night May-ling dreamed that there were two men creeping toward the bedroom door, intent on murder. She screamed and woke up but found Chiang’s bed empty. She ran into the corridor, where she found her husband with a group of police officers. They had rung the bell at 4:00 A.M. and had arrived just in time to prevent the assassination of both husband and wife. Two men, now in handcuffs—two of Chiang’s trusted guards—had come to the house to murder them. They had been trying to kill the couple for three nights. The first night they had been about to reach Chiang’s door in the hospital when May-ling’s screams had woken him. The second night they had come to the bedroom door, had been frightened off by the generalissimo’s groan, but had answered his call for his guard. On the third night one of the guards had worn a hat and raincoat over his uniform and arrived in a taxi to join the other conspirator, but the taxi driver had been suspicious and called his garage, which had notified the police. May-ling believed that the Almighty, through her strange dreams, had saved the lives of her husband and herself.

  The third story about the newlyweds was not life-changing, although it might have been. A month or so after their wedding, the Chiangs arrived in Shanghai. May-ling had evidently persuaded Chiang that since he was the most important man in China, he need not, unlike other government officials, pay the usual protection money to Big-Eared Du. Two hours after their arrival, Chiang went out on business. A limousine arrived to take May-ling “to her sister.” Chiang’s wife left the house with her maid but never arrived at Ai-ling’s home.

  When Chiang came back several hours later and found her gone, he was very frightened. Knowing, however, that “propriety would not permit of personal inquiry” he called his brother-in-law T.V. T.V. telephoned Big-Eared Du, who informed him that Madame Chiang was “safe and in perfect health; that she had been found motoring alone with only a maid accompanying her through the streets of Shanghai, a very imprudent thing to do; that she had been escorted to a comfortable villa, and surrounded with the respect due a lady in her elevated position, but that, notwithstanding all this, she showed signs of displeasure and refused to take any nourishment, solid or liquid.” Du, as the story goes, “deplored the fact that the Generalissimo had found no time to arrange for suitable protection for himself and Madame— a very dangerous omission in a big city like Shanghai.” He suggested that T.V. come to his house, where he could “arrange jointly with him the customary formalities required to assure the safety of his charming sister, and would he then escort her back to her husband, who was probably full of anxiety?”

  T.V. hurried over to pay Du his protection money. Only then was he allowed to take May-ling back to Chiang.

  CHIANG’S “RETIREMENT” FROM office, which had culminated in his marriage to May-ling, did not, as we have seen, last very long. It was only a little over three months, from mid-August to December, before the members of the Kuomintang realized that whatever his faults and misdeeds, he was the only man strong enough to hold the party together. On December 3, 1927, just two days after his wedding, the Central Executive Committee of the KMT nominated Chiang in absentia as supreme head of China’s military forces.

  In the first week of 1928, Chiang took a train to Nanking, where he was to resume his former position as commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army. During the trip north, there were two separate attempts to derail the train, both of which were discovered barely in time to save his life. Promising to resign at the end of the military campaign, he assumed the position of a temporary military commander who would serve until the meeting of the next KMT Congress, due to take place the following August. It was hoped and assumed that by this time, the Northern Expedition would be successfully completed and his military services would no longer be
needed.

  On January 14, Chiang announced that he had agreed to resume leadership of the KMT “in face of persistent demands from the various Party organs and all ranks of the Army and repeated requests from the government and the people for me to emerge from my retirement in order to help shoulder the heavy responsibility… etc., etc.” Apologizing for having “not yet fulfilled my duty” and promising to “make amends for my evasion of duty last year” by tendering his resignation as soon as the Northern Expedition was completed, Chiang noted that since he had left the government, the authority of the KMT had “broken down and the political atmosphere is charged with uncertainty.” It was a typical Chiang statement—an apology where none was appropriate and an attempt to appear indispensable, which, at the moment, he seemed to be.

  May-ling, who was ill, remained in Shanghai. But when Chiang let her know how much he missed her, she came to Nanking, arriving the day after he reassumed control of the party. “She is not yet recovered, and I felt bad when I saw how weak she was. I shouldn’t have ‘obliged’ her to come,” he wrote in his diary. This, however, did not prevent him from calling her again in the middle of February to register his loneliness. May-ling said that she was still sick and could not travel. Having confided to his diary how “extremely unhappy” he was, Chiang wrote that he remained “in a bad mood” until he got word that she would, in fact, join him again in Nanking. She arrived on February 21. “I had a rest today,” he wrote. “I spent the whole day with May-ling, and I was so happy. I have not been so happy for a long time.”

  Shortly after his reinstatement, Chiang met with General Feng to draw up plans for the resumption of the Northern Expedition. Chiang was to lead the First Army; Feng was slotted to lead the Second; the Third Army was to go to General Yen Hsi-shan, the governor of the province of Shansi; and a Fourth Army, kept in reserve, was to be put under General Li Tsung-jen, an old comrade of Chiang’s who later became acting president of the Republic. The Nationalist Army would be fighting an army led by the son of the Old Marshal, Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, along with six other generals. The offensive was to start in three months time, at the beginning of April. Having made these plans, Chiang returned to Shanghai.

  No one understood the lure of Shanghai better than Chiang Kai-shek. Even the rather prudish American general Joseph W. Stillwell, who would one day play a large role in the life of the Chiangs, agreed with him about the dangers of the city. “This town would ruin anybody in no time,” Stillwell had commented when he first visited in 1922. “The babes that twitch around the hotels need attention so badly that it is hard not to give it to them.” Reviewing the troops, Chiang issued a stern warning to the officers to keep their soldiers out of trouble—as regarded both “babes” and politics. A few days later, when he discovered that about fifty of them had taken part in antiforeign riots started by the Communists the year before, he had them all executed on the spot. These extreme measures were aimed not only at increasing military discipline but at the Western powers, whom Chiang could not afford to antagonize at the beginning of his drive north, since he planned to ask them to stop supporting the warlords with money and armaments. “During past years China’s civil warfare has continued without cessation because the militarists have received much support from the imperialists,” he claimed, echoing Sun’s complaints. “Arms and ammunition have been imported into this country in a steady stream. Huge sums of money have been secretly lent to our enemies.… The militarists… oppose the power of the Revolution and thus prolong civil war in this most unhappy country.”

  Chiang needed additional funds to support the National Revolutionary Army during the Northern Expedition. Putting pressure on the bankers and businessmen of Shanghai, he and T.V., who was once again serving as finance minister, raised some $15 million.* “We are throwing money and men into the fight with almost heart-breaking extravagance,” said T.V., “because we want to make this a fight to the finish.” But, according to The North-China Herald, “One may well suspect that Mr. Soong is sick of the part he has had to play for the past few months as a machine to extract money from the business community without any control over the spending of it. And certainly the business world is equally weary of it.” In retrospect, however, Parks Coble, an expert on the subject, would probably disagree, contending that “Soong replaced coercion with persuasion and in the process effected a genuine alliance between the bankers and the regime.”

  WHILE HER HUSBAND was juggling his various duties, May-ling was getting used to a very different life from the one she had known. Although her surroundings had always been, as she herself put it, “easy and comfortable,” she did the unexpected by moving to Nanking, headquarters of the National Revolutionary Army and the KMT. The only one of the official wives to follow their husbands—the rest stayed in Shanghai—May-ling was the token woman at dinners and receptions given by civil and military leaders. “I think the officials themselves were… very conscious of me… but later on I forgot about myself… and they also began to regard me not as a woman but as one of themselves.” She also traveled with her husband. “Up to the time I was married I never really lived in the interior under circumstances and in [an] environment so pure[ly] Chinese as I did after my marriage when I accompanied the Generalissimo on all his campaigns and lived in any thatched hut, railroad station or whatever quarters we could find.”

  “Nanking,” she said, “was then nothing but a little village with one so-called broad street.… Even then the street was so narrow that if two motor cars were coming in opposite directions one of them had to back off on a side street until the other passed. The houses were all very primitive, cold and uncomfortable.” May-ling’s assessment of the city is seconded by James M. McHugh, the assistant naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy, a man who later became head of Far East secret intelligence. “There was no city water or sewage system,” McHugh said. “The fastidious Minister of Portugal… complained that the only way he could get a bath in Nanking was to use bottled mineral water.”

  From Shanghai’s steam-heated splendor to chilly government housing, May-ling seems to have reveled in the discomfort of her current life. Taking on the role of the leader’s wife, she developed an adjunct of what had been known at the Whampoa Military Academy as the Officers’ Moral Endeavor Association, originally a club at which young officers were given a political education. May-ling established a meeting place in Nanking as a sort of Chinese canteen—a place where officers who had nothing to do after work could go to relax, listen to music, learn to draw, and, at the same time, help the party by making posters for propaganda. They were, however, not allowed to drink or smoke there. To run it, May-ling brought in J. L. Huang, a worker from the YMCA.

  “It was just a little low shack at first, in the middle of a lot of other shacks,” Huang said. “Near by was the Y.M.C.A. building, a fine new house. I admit it was a temptation to stay with the ‘Y’… but… I agreed to take it on… A lot of the cadets were prejudiced against us, feeling that the O.M.E.A. was a new method of foreign propaganda and a hidden way of forcing them to become Christian even if they didn’t want to. They used to throw things at me when I was out walking in the streets.… But little by little they began to like coming up and using the place. Now all the officers belong.”

  The soldiers were not wrong; the OMEA was definitely a new form of propaganda—not foreign but homegrown, an attempt to carry the revolution into the hearts and minds of the officers. In seeking out a wife with money and power behind her, Chiang had found a woman with ideas and energy as well.

  ON MARCH 31, having completed his arrangements for the Northern Expedition, Chiang wrote his new wife, “I see you in my dreams, and I feel so bad when I find you are not in my bed when I wake up. Oh, soldiers cannot enjoy the happiness of family. How pitiful they are!” The final phase of the Northern Expedition started on April 7, 1928. A week later, he wired, “I miss you so much. Our current battle is expected to be a success, but there will probably be a very large numb
er of wounded soldiers. Another thousand came in today. There are not enough sheets or gowns in the hospital. It is a terribly shocking scene. Please send medicine as soon as possible, and please try to hire as many good doctors as you can.”

  By the end of April, Chiang and his soldiers had reached Tsinan, the capital of Shantung province, where they ran into trouble. Ever since the peace treaty of Versailles, which China had refused to sign, the Japanese had continued to pursue their commercial interests in Shantung. They had even invoked the treaty as an excuse to send a large number of Japanese troops into the capital. Since the city had already been evacuated, there was no need for Chiang or his soldiers to enter, and he gave his officers orders to stay out—instructions that were either misunderstood or ignored. Because of this, Chiang found his men facing the Japanese in a clash he had tried to avoid. What followed can only be called an atrocity.

  The first thing the Japanese did was to surround the office of the Chinese diplomatic official who represented the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nanking; they cut off his nose and his ears, as well as those of the sixteen members of his staff, and then murdered the official, his wife, and all the others. When Chiang sent his foreign minister to negotiate with them, they arrested him on the spot and forced him to sign a statement in which the Chinese took the blame for starting what came to be known as the “Tsinan Incident.” For several days, the Japanese continued to refuse to parley with Chiang, while at the same time bombarding the city. Hallett Abend, an American reporter, followed the Japanese soldiers into Tsinan.

  “The streets… were entirely deserted,” he wrote. “No Chinese were to be seen—that is, no live Chinese.… On the sidewalks, in the doorways, and often in the middle of the thoroughfares, lay Chinese dead, in uniforms and civilian clothes, of all ages and both sexes. Most of the corpses were already bloated and discolored. And there were many dead horses, their legs sticking up stiffly at grotesque and pathetic angles.… Nearly all the shops had been broken open, and showed the disorder left by hasty looters.” Abend wandered around the city until after dinner. “At the hotel there was no water, and no light—not even a candle… so I went to bed, but not to sleep. Never before had I seen death from violence in the mass. As a newspaper reporter… I had often arrived with the police.… Morgues had become commonplace to me. But Tsinan, on that hot May afternoon, had shown me wholesale massacre in new and shocking forms.… I had been surprised at myself, and rather proud, because during the afternoon I had not felt squeamish about the revolting sights I had seen. But lying there… I suddenly was seized by a violent attack of retching.”