The Japan Times claimed that China’s reponse to Japanese “efforts at conciliation and moderation” was “to loot Japanese homes and barbarously to murder defenceless Japanese.” Chiang responded, saying that the “malice and oppression” of the Japanese troops was “beyond description,” and wired the Government Council, “In a true Revolutionary spirit I cannot bow to such bullying. I propose to expose such Japanese deliberate brutality to the world so as to hasten our own awakening and enlist more support to others and then proceed with the Expedition.” But Chiang, worried about endangering the entire Northern Expedition, ordered his men to evacuate Tsinan and shifted the thrust of his march west to Honan.
Early in May, an obviously concerned May-ling wired Chiang, “I just heard that a Red Cross doctor who practices Western medicine was imprisoned in Hsuchou and thrown into boiling oil. This kind of story will certainly take a huge toll on our ability to help the wounded. Please investigate and deal with this immediately. Moreover, please try your best to protect Red Cross doctors from now on.… I will try to get together some famous doctors to save our soldiers.… I plan to go with you next time to manage hospital affairs.” To which Chiang replied that the imprisonment and death of the doctor were “absolutely a rumor.” He then asked his wife to speak to T.V., who, he had heard, was planning to resign his role in funding the Northern Expedition.* “Please persuade him to change his mind, so that I have nothing else to worry about besides military matters.” He also wanted her to join him but worried that “she may get sick because of the bad conditions and her weakness.” Nevertheless, he asked her to come, which she did in the middle of May. She arrived at the Hsuchou railway station, and he picked her up. “We haven’t been together for forty-six days,” he wrote in his diary that night. “How happy I am with today’s reunion!”
Although the Tsinan Incident had delayed Chiang’s northward advance by a week, he had, by the end of May, overcome two of the three warlords who had stood between him and Peking. “Please send disinfection liquid enough for 50,000 people,” Chiang wired May-ling after she returned to Nanking. And on the same day came a second requisition: “Please buy 10,000 cans of meat, bamboo shoots and sugar, and send them as soon as possible to the front lines along with 10,000 towels and liquid medicine. Please be quick,” he added as he set out to conquer the only warlord left in his path, the Manchurian Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin.
For hundreds of years, Manchuria—the land beyond the Great Wall— had been considered part of China, and ever since the collapse of the Manchus, Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin, who was supported by Japan, had controlled it. Called by Snow the “uncrowned Emperor of Manchuria,” Chang had begun his life as a bandit—“ruthless, uncompromising, and faithless”—gradually extending his conquests to over 350,000 square miles, an area larger than France and Germany combined. Manchuria is fertile land, rich in waterpower, coal deposits, and iron ore. On June 3, the Old Marshal, who was occupying the capital of Peking at the time, sent out a circular telegram announcing that he and his army were withdrawing from Peking to the Manchurian capital of Mukden. This may have been due to latent patriotism—he always said that he was happy to be financed by the Japanese but refused to deal with them—or the fact that the National Revolutionary Army had already triumphed over two other warlords and he foresaw defeat for himself. Whatever his reasoning, in publicly announcing his plans Chang signed his own death warrant.
The Japanese, particularly a group of lesser officers, had wanted for some time to dispose of Old Marshal Chang. (It was said that from 1915 to 1928, some three thousand men had been employed to assassinate him.) His removal, the Japanese thought, would expedite their control of Manchuria, and in any case, they assumed he would prefer working with Chiang Kai-shek than with them. Acting without permission from their superiors, the officers planted a mine on the tracks of Chang’s twenty-car private train that was taking him and his possessions home. It went off at 5:30 A.M. while the train was running at full speed. Although it could never be traced to the Japanese officers, the assassination occurred within an area controlled by the Japanese and was set off by a detonator whose wires led past the Japanese guards. Moreover, the Japanese must have had a spy on the train itself, since the Old Marshal was not in his private blue car but the one next to it when the bomb, timed to blow up that particular car, exploded.* He died four hours later in a Japanese hospital.
Old Marshal Chang died a very rich man. The Manchurian branch of an American bank had devoted itself exclusively to managing his private investments, even though he was known to keep a great deal of his fortune in gold, and he seems to have left a legacy of around 50 million Chinese dollars,† mostly to his son. Young Marshal Chang hid the fact of his father’s death— everyone knew about the explosion but not its outcome—for a full week while he gathered his forces and weighed his options. The Japanese offered him a deal similar to the one they had given his father, informing him that his father was in their debt. “I know nothing of my father’s debts,” the Young Marshal answered. “I only know my responsibility to preserve our territorial integrity.… If the debts are real, you must ask the National Government to pay them. I am a Chinese. I love China, as the Japanese love Japan. I believe that Chinese should not fight Chinese.” Many years later, when he was an old man, the Young Marshal elaborated on this theme: “I would have been the Emperor of Northeast China if I had cooperated with the Japanese,” he said, explaining that his father had died because he had refused to be Japan’s figurehead. “…You had to be the puppet of the Japanese if you wanted to be the Emperor of Northeast China.”
Raised and educated like a prince of a royal family, thirty-year-old Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang was an unusual combination of political savvy and physical infirmity. His frame was slight, his cheeks hollow, and, in spite of his twinkling eyes and what Snow called “an air of determination about the set of his shoulders,” his body shook convulsively whenever he needed an opium fix. He had become addicted in the summer of 1926 while leading his father’s soldiers in the fight against Feng. At the time he had fallen ill with the flu but refused to leave his men while they were fighting. His father had always smoked opium and when the son was advised that opium was his only alternative to entering a hospital, he put opium in a jade pipe and became addicted.
Chang had met May-ling at a party in 1925. A year younger than she, he was crazy about her and said that he would have done everything possible to marry her if he had not already been attached. Two years after she married Chiang Kai-shek, he joined the couple for dinner at the Peking Hotel. “How do you know each other?” Chiang Kai-shek asked when he saw them in close conversation. “We became good friends several years ago,” the Young Marshal answered, clearly pleased to have known May-ling before her husband. He said that Chiang didn’t kill him on the spot because May-ling guaranteed that he was a gentleman. The Young Marshal said that May-ling was responsible for his conversion to Christianity and that she later convinced him to divorce his first wife and marry another woman. He also claimed that it was their friendship that saved his life later, when he came into conflict with Chiang Kai-shek.
Meanwhile, following on the heels of his Third Army, Chiang Kai-shek made a triumphal entry into Peking in early July, well within the timetable set earlier that year. All the warlords had been overcome, and almost all of China, except for certain remote areas, had been brought under the umbrella of the KMT. Peking, which means “Northern Capital,” was renamed Peiping, which means “Northern Peace,” since Chiang planned to establish his capital in Nanking. The walls of Peiping, previously a “glorious red,” were painted blue.
From his capital at Mukden, the Young Marshal sent emissaries to negotiate with Chiang, but they were unable to come to a satisfactory settlement. Chiang then sent a team of his own to Manchuria; it included a journalist known for his skill in the Young Marshal’s favorite pastimes of dancing, drinking, and golf. After weeks spent at these occupations, the journalist reported back to Chiang
that Young Marshal Chang had agreed to support the National Revolutionary Army in exchange for being allowed to keep his own troops in Manchuria. During their negotiations, Chiang had offered Chang the title of deputy commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army, which the Young Marshal accepted, raising the Nationalist flag over his headquarters in Mukden. As one member of the diplomatic community put it, “Thirty-year-old Chang Hsueh-liang, the Young Marshal, heir to a lusty army and a fabulous fortune, became uncrowned king of Manchuria.”
In spite of Chiang’s concerns that May-ling could not “stand the muggy weather” in Peiping, the first thing he did after his formal entry into the capital was return to Nanking to get her, and she joined him in a pilgrimage to the grave of Sun Yat-sen, holding her parasol over him as they walked away. Two days later, flanked by his three commanding generals, Chiang stood with uncovered and bowed head before the coffin. General Feng described Chiang’s behavior: “When he prayed before the altar of Tsangli, he wept so bitterly that he could not even hold up his head… at last, like someone who goes up to a filial son and begs him to stop weeping after a parent’s death, I went up to him and begged him to cease. But it was a long time before he stopped weeping.” Chiang then read out a speech, aimed at those who remained rather than the leader who had died. In it, he spoke of adhering to Sun’s Three Principles and putting an end to “widespread heresies”—a reference to both the Communists and those he considered troublemakers within his own party. He spoke of reconstructing the city of Nanking as the national capital and announced that the army must now be reduced in size.
While the Chiangs were still in Peiping, the wives of the staff of the Medical College who had graduated from Wellesley invited members of the foreign community to a reception honoring the new Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Both May-ling and Chiang stood in the receiving line. “She was charm itself,” said McHugh, “… beautiful, vivacious, gracious and speaking flawless English. She wore a gaily printed Chinese cheongsam with the skirt slit to the knee, displaying a very shapely leg. And she was wearing lipstick, too—new in those days. She was lovely looking, and she knew it!” The American naval attaché was not as impressed with Chiang, who stood next to his wife grunting “How how”* as the guests were introduced. The best thing about the general, said McHugh, who had never met either of them before, was that “he looked you squarely in the eye and his gaze was compelling. His eyes, dark and small, were exceptionally bright and piercing, but he smiled pleasantly when he greeted you. You felt he was genuinely friendly. It was plainly evident that he was in love with his wife. He glanced at her from time to time with obvious pride and affection, and occasionally furtively held her hand.”
This happy picture was disturbed, however, by what McHugh called an “ugly rumor” spread around Peiping before the departure of the Chiangs. It seems that someone had recently rifled the tomb of the dowager empress, stealing pieces of jade and other objets d’art. The gossips said that they had been taken by T. V. Soong as a gift for his mother, Madame Soong, in Shanghai. “The public justification for the charade,” according to McHugh, “was that Soong’s mother, through the marriage of her daughter to China’s new head of government, had thereby attained equal status with the old empress, and, since objets d’art were state property, Mrs. Soong was entitled to possess them.” It was a nasty story, carefully calculated to cast dark shadows on the newly powerful Chiangs and May-ling’s family, the Soongs.
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Wherever she [Madame Chiang] went, whatever she saw strengthened her desire to clean it up.… The more she saw of her country the more energetic she became.
—EMILY HAHN
WHILE CHIANG was celebrating his victory, the so-called “widespread heresies” to which he had referred in his memorial speech were being enacted some two thousand miles to the south. Back in September 1927, while he was busy pursuing his marriage to May-ling, members of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung had begun a series of rebellions in the province of Hunan, known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising. “In September we had succeeded in organizing widespread uprisings,” Mao said, “… recruits drawn from the peasantry, the miners, and insurrectionist troops which revolted against the Wuhan government when it surrendered to Chiang Kai-shek.” What Mao did not say was that he and his peasant army had been roundly defeated by the Nationalists and he himself had lost face.
One of the places chosen for rebellion was the city of Changsha, but Mao, realizing that such an attack was doomed to failure, had canceled the order. For this, he was stripped of his positions in the Chinese Communist Party. But due to the poor communication system in China, Mao did not get word of his demotions until the following spring. Meanwhile, he had marched his men to the Ridge of Wells, a mountain range between the provinces of Hunan and Kiangsi, where he was joined by the future commander of the Communist armies, Chu Teh, with several thousand soldiers. The amalgamated army was called “The Fourth Red Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Army”—a name carefully chosen to convince the Nationalists that the Communists were stronger than they really were. It was here with these men, according to Crozier, that Mao “created the political instrument for his future conquest of all China.” He did this by integrating the soldiers and peasants, who were then encouraged to round up and kill local landlords.
A second Communist uprising erupted in Canton on December 11, just ten days after the Chiangs’ marriage. The radicals disarmed the police and issued orders, per instructions from Stalin, for the confiscation of land, redistribution of wealth, cancellation of debts, and nationalization of industry. Chiang’s government launched a counterattack the next day, and thousands of Communists were summarily executed. Turning against the demonstrators, the citizens of Canton were also responsible for killing hundreds of innocents. According to the U.S. vice consul, “One picked one’s way carefully around the corpses, skirted pools of blood, dodged overhanging electric wires, stepped over scattered bricks and passed trucks into which the police were directing coolies to throw the bodies of the executed. Some of the victims in the truck were still quivering.” During the crackdown, papers were found in the Russian Consulate and various commercial establishments that proved that the buildings had been used as centers for espionage. When Chiang returned to service, he closed the consulate and broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviets.
The following summer, Chiang’s army again attacked the Communists, now embedded at the Ridge of Wells. This time, however, the Nationalists only lost around 1,000 soldiers, through either capture or desertion; on July 22, an entire Nationalist regiment defected to the Communists, joined with local peasants, and styled itself the Fifth Red Army. Six months later, Mao and his followers moved east to a much larger base on the border of the provinces of Kiangsi and Fukien. Mao, who believed that the power in China lay with the peasants, had not yet overcome his failures of the previous autumn and had been superseded in party politics by Li Li-san. Li, an intellectual who followed the Marxist-Leninist theory that rebellions must be started with workers in urban centers, ordered Mao to seize Wuhan and other big cities. Although the Reds were able to occupy Changsha briefly during the summer of 1930, they were driven out after ten days. As to Wuhan, they could not even get near it. Having failed, Li was ousted from the Politburo and sent to Moscow in disgrace,* while Mao, who had been proved right, was elected president of the Chinese Soviet Republic, which was proclaimed on November 27, 1931. Chou En-lai, whose expertise in military affairs had previously earned him a place in the Politburo of the CCP, was named vice chairman under Mao.
THE OTHER PROPONENTS of what Chiang called heresy were men within the party itself. As soon as the Northern Expedition was completed, the members of the KMT began quarreling among themselves—conservatives versus liberals, pro-Chiang versus anti-Chiang. At a meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the party in the summer of 1928, Chiang had tendered his promised resignation but was immediately asked to resume his duties. Two months later he was
named chairman of a new State Council, a group of eighteen that included General Feng as minister of war and Young Marshal Chang. Chiang alone, however, had the power to receive foreign envoys. The president of China in all but name, he was now the acting head of his country, writing in his diary that “within two years of our marriage, the Northern Expedition was completed, and the northwestern rebels had retreated.… Half of these achievements were due to the assistance of my wife.”
It is strange that the party was willing to turn over so much power to Chiang, for he had begun to exhibit in public the traits that up until now seem to have disturbed only his intimates. He was, in the words of one colleague who dared not write under his own name, “arrogant and conceited, uninhibitedly practising dictatorship,” and it is not surprising that other leaders found it difficult to accept his conviction that he was the legitimate inheritor of the mild-mannered, trusting Dr. Sun. By the time the party meeting closed in the middle of August, the rightists had walked out in disgust, and there was no quorum to continue work.
The Last Empress Page 26