has come mostly through observation of how students should not be taught… book knowledge alone was emphasized and no attempt was made to point out the necessity of assimilating learning with practical living or to prepare the students for their future by teaching them how to live as citizens of a community. In the Schools for the Children of the Revolution, my children were taught to… reason out why such and such a thing should be done in a certain way. In so far as possible, I tried to get away from the idea of regimentation by emphasis upon the necessity of developing initiative… in self-discipline. Also, I organized rural service clubs in the schools so that the students could help the farmers in the community, and, at the same time, put into practice the theory of learning by doing.
In a letter to a Wellesley classmate written in August 1928, May-ling proudly reported that her students raised “some very good watermelons and had a good showing in bees and silkworms.”
Called by one of her assistants “the last word in modern college architecture, airy, spacious, well-furnished,” May-ling’s schools had classrooms, playgrounds, a gymnasium, dormitories, a covered court for bad weather, and a swimming pool. Determined to make these model schools for the nation, May-ling located them in the most beautiful part of the area, at the foot of the Purple Mountain. “The children who are privileged to study in the Institute,” she said, “will certainly enjoy the esthetic influence of nature, which, coupled with the guidance of their teachers, will tend favorably to the development of their talents and characters.”
In choosing teachers for her schools, May-ling caused surprise and resentment by rejecting a number of candidates recommended by the KMT, explaining that she was “opposed to mixing up education with politics.” The teachers, she declared, were to be judged solely on their qualifications for the job. Along with book work, there was training in agriculture and dairy farming for the boys, sewing, embroidery, and weaving for the girls. “Hygiene, discipline and physical training were unequaled anywhere else,” said the assistant, Ilona Ralf Sues, who also noted that only healthy children were enrolled and that students were not allowed to go home except for the funeral of an elder relative.
But Sues worried about “unmistakable resemblances to Mussolini’s Fascist Youth, and to the Hitler Jugend—severing the children from their families and grouping them round one leader. On the other hand,” she speculated, “charity was not a part of Fascist or Nazi doctrine. Madame might consider it a Christian virtue; but… charity is neither a Chinese virtue nor a Chinese vice, it is essentially un-Chinese… poor relatives can come to the house of the better-off members of the family, eat there, live there, and get help… those who have no family… are given the same hospitality by strangers who are natives of their province.… It is not charity but the deep-rooted feeling of common decency, so common that no Chinese would ever think of playing it up as a virtue.”
THE CHIANGS THEMSELVES had started life in their new capital in a small red-brick and gray cement house in the midst of the barracks of the Huangpu Military Academy, a large campus enclosed by a high wall where several thousand officers were always in training. The only women permitted inside the walls were Madame, her personal maid, and a nurse. A visiting female reporter recalled having to sign her name for the sentries with a Chinese brush in a guest book kept in the guardhouse before being escorted to May-ling’s door. Chiang’s wife, who had recently given up Western clothes, wore a wine-colored gown of leaf-patterned cut velvet with real pearl buttons for the interview. She had a diamond-and-platinum wedding band with a circle of jade on the fourth finger of her left hand and on the third finger of her right, a large jade and diamond ring. “As she sat before a window,” the reporter wrote in the New York Sun, “I could see the bright yellow light piercing the long carved pendants of her transparent, priceless jade earrings.” But a male reporter, initially impressed by the Chiangs’ “rather modest” home, told Madame Chiang that “she had an opportunity to be a modern-day Joan of Arc,” providing she “take off those rubies and those emeralds… and… get out in the fields. You’ve got to take off that silk and put on padded clothes. That’s the only way you’re going to save China.” Madame’s response? She got up from her chair and walked to the door of the room. “Mr. Rounds,” she said à la Marie Antoinette, “will you have another piece of cake?”
The Madame was not fond of her residence in the military compound, and in 1931, the Chiangs built a weekend home outside the city. It featured a large conference room with appropriate wall maps on the second floor and a meeting room on the third (family) floor for religious worship. This floor also contained the Chiangs’ bedroom, which opened onto his study and their bathrooms. Symbols of temporal success found on these upper floors included two huge carved wooden dragons playing with a jade ball—a symbol of power—and more than one thousand phoenixes—symbols of renewed life—on the roof and carved on the white marble railings of a large second-floor terrace. Designed in the Chinese style with an elaborate roof of shaped green tiles supported by several rows of flat, multicolored (yellow, red, blue, and green) decorative tiles, the house still bears indisputable signs of newly acquired power. Perhaps the most notable of these are the green tile sculptures on the four corners of the roof: the head of a bull, a lion, a seahorse, and a man riding a hen—the latter meant to call to mind the Chinese proverb “If a man becomes a god, his hen goes to Heaven.” It can be no coincidence that these same symbols appear on the roofs of various pavilions of the Forbidden City, the home of the emperors of China.
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He [Chiang Kai-shek] read the Bible every day and frowned on sin with the intensity of one who has sampled it and found it less rewarding than piety.
—THEODORE WHITE AND ANNALEE JACOBY
ONE FACTOR that had delayed a military clash between Chiang and Feng was the official state funeral of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, which took place on June 1, 1929. Located high on the slope of the Purple Mountain and three years in the planning and building, Sun’s tomb became the most prominent landmark outside the city of Nanking. Ching-ling, who was in Berlin at the time, had agreed to attend the ceremony but insisted that her presence not be misinterpreted, as had happened a few years earlier when left-wing American journalist Agnes Smedley visited the site with one of Chiang’s closest aides, Colonel Huang. When they came to a small house under construction, Huang explained to Smedley that it was “being built for Madame Sun Yat-sen” and that “she will live here near the tomb.”
“Do you think Madame Sun will live here?” Smedley asked.
“Oh, certainly! She is a member of the Central Committee of the party!”
“I thought she was in exile,” Smedley said, at which point Huang’s “manner and voice became offensively sarcastic” as he asked her if Ching-ling was still in Moscow and inquired as to the whereabouts of Borodin.
Having been misrepresented by Chiang before, Ching-ling was taking no chances this time. “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,” she announced. “In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding… my attendance at the burial 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.”
Two weeks before the ceremony, a train painted gold, white, and blue, bearing Sun Yat-sen’s coffin, arrived in Nanking. Embalmed in what one observer called “the life-like, decay-proof manner that the Russians had employed for Lenin’s body” and dressed in a blue satin gown with a black silk jacket, the body had been placed in a new coffin covered with glass. In the train were Chiang Kai-shek, standing at attention beside the coffin, and Ching-ling, busy avoiding her brother-in-law. When the train arrived in Nanking, Sun’s body was taken to the headquarters of the KMT, where Chiang put a wreath on the coffin, which lay in state until the ceremony.
The funeral cortege, led by four armored cars, left the center of Nanking at 4:00 A.M. Traveling with the body were Chiang, May-ling, Sun Fo, and Ching-ling, who was dressed in black rather than the usual white for mourning and observed to be crying.* It took six hours for the procession to cover the ten-mile route, which was lined with thousands of spectators, soldiers, government workers, representatives of provincial governments, and students, held back by a “thin line” of police with fingers firmly on the triggers of their Mausers.
Set across the lotus marshes from Nanking above the ruins of an old Ming temple, the mausoleum faces south and commands a glorious view. Passing through a triple archway along a long, pine-bordered walk, the visitor comes to a gate bearing the inscription “The world belongs to the people.” At this point in the pilgrimage, he or she begins to climb one mile of white stone steps—392 stairs with ten platforms—leading to another three arches, flanked by two Western-style bronze lions and two oversized urns for the burning of incense. On the way up there is a pagodalike pavilion, which holds a statue of Sun under a bright red ceiling emblazoned with the flag of the Kuomintang. The walls of the pavilions are white granite, and the roofs are tile, glazed in a luminous shade of blue. Still ascending, the pilgrim finally reaches the last pavilion, where a large, deep white marble circle has been cut into the floor. At the bottom of the circle is the sarcophagus holding the body of Dr. Sun.
Working in relays of sixteen men at a time, the casket bearers for the ceremony marched to the beat of a foreman who marked time by banging on a hollow bamboo pole. According to the reporter for The North-China Herald, “the men showed signs of strain”—so much so that “several of the mourners bent their weight to the ropes they held and assisted in dragging the massive structure upwards.” Located at different points on the steps were bands—all playing the same dirge, but not in unison and at different speeds.
Although May-ling and the rest of the Soongs were present at the dedication, Ching-ling refused to mount the steps with them, forming a procession of one. She also issued several more statements making it “abundantly clear that she had no intention of lending her name and reputation to the government or party” of her brother-in-law.
THIS GRAND STATE burial, with which “Chiang sanctified his capital,” served only as an interlude between battles. A few months later, Wang Ching-wei sent out a circular wire saying that Chiang was treating China as if it belonged exclusively to him and that he had placed his friends and relatives in all the important positions. Chief spokesman for yet another faction of the KMT, the Reorganizationists, Wang announced that the time had come to “raise arms to wipe away this rebel,” thus leaving room for Wang himself to be installed in Chiang’s place. Toward this end, two of Wang’s supporters started separate military campaigns against Chiang, but both were beaten. Seeing his chance, Feng jumped into the fray but was also defeated. All in all, during 1929, Chiang managed to put down four separate rebellions.
Although 1930 dawned in an atmosphere of comparative peace, foreigners in China began to anticipate what they snidely referred to as the “annual spring revolts”—the outbreaks of the Chinese warlords as they tried to increase their power. The first challenge came in February from General Yen of Shanxi, the foxy governor-warlord who had recently teamed up with Feng. Yen suddenly disarmed all the government troops in his area and seized Nanking’s local assets, while Feng (now minus 100,000 soldiers) was reduced to serving as Yen’s deputy commander. The year, which had started semi-auspiciously, degenerated into six months of horrendous warfare in which it was estimated that 150,000 of Yen’s troops were killed or wounded, while 30,000 government soldiers lost their lives and double that number were injured. After Chiang’s final victory, Feng was forcibly retired from all his positions, while Yen, now “one of Chiang’s stable of tamed warlords,” was allowed to return to run the province of Shanxi.
Civil war continued throughout 1930. During the summer, Wang had himself inaugurated as head of a State Council, meant to take the place of the council headed by Chiang Kai-shek. The date for Wang’s investiture had been planned around the lucky number nine, the Chinese character that also means “long-lasting.” It was to take place at 9:00 A.M. on the ninth day of the ninth month in the nineteenth year of the Chinese Republic. Both Wang and Chiang had sent lobbyists to Mukden to gain the allegiance of the Young Marshal, who announced his support of Chiang, allowing Nationalist soldiers to take over what was now called Peiping without a fight and negating Wang’s new government. In the words of one of Chiang’s biographers, Robert Payne, 1930 turned out to be “a year of shame, of vast expenditure of effort and human lives, with nothing gained. The spectacle of the Chinese destroying themselves was vastly amusing to the Japanese Imperial General Staff.”
When he was not fending off rebellious warlords, Chiang was worrying about the Communists. In October 1930, he addressed a meeting at the Central Party Headquarters of the KMT:
It is highly deplorable that in almost all the places to which I have of late repaired, Party members have left extremely unfavourable impressions in the minds of the people… all are stigmatized for the most reprehensible practices, such as corruption, bribery and scrambling for power. The Manchus were overthrown because they constituted a special caste. But now, we who staged the Revolution… have ourselves come to be regarded by the people as a privileged caste. They are now cherishing toward us the same hatred and repugnance with which they looked upon the Manchus.… Unless we quickly correct our faults, the Party will meet with rapid downfall.… It is all of us Party members who are responsible for the virulence of the Communist menace in the country… if we carry out proper duties with vigour, the Communists will never be able to disturb the country.
THROUGHOUT HIS BATTLES with warlords and Communists, May-ling continued to help Chiang. “My wife is very happy to see that I put national affairs before everything else,” he wrote. “… She is concerned with my safety. I know that she is always thinking about me. I believe that she understands me.” Chiang worried about May-ling’s frequent illnesses and even broke an appointment with an important KMT statesman to stay home with her one day in the spring of 1931. “The deeper the worries, the deeper our love seems to be,” he confided to his diary that day. And in August three years later, when he himself was sick, she remained with him. “I felt so exhausted after the injection,” he wrote. “My wife was sick too, but she seemed to forget her illness in order to take care of me. When I saw her tired face, it was very painful.”
It is clear from both her words and actions that May-ling had finally found the raison d’être for which she had been searching in the responsibilities that her marriage to Chiang implied. She was almost touchingly proud of her recently discovered abilities to withstand hardship, find useful work, and immerse herself in a cause. Like her elder sister, Ching-ling, she too had found a man to love, follow, and serve—albeit at the other end of the political spectrum.
At the same time that Chiang Kai-shek was giving his wife a cause to work for, she was indoctrinating him with the Methodist faith of her family. Acting on his promise to her mother to read the Bible in order to decide if he could embrace Christianity, May-ling began inviting missionaries to their home shortly after their wedding; she also got out her old textbooks from a Wellesley Bible class and began daily 6:30 A.M. sessions of devotional readings and discussions with her husband. By February of 1930, Chiang was clearly feeling pressure to convert: “Rev. Jing Chiang-chuan came to Nanking from Shanghai,” he wrote in his diary on February 21. “My mother-in-law and my wife were both urging me to be baptized. As I am still not very clear about the true spirit of Christianity, Rev. Jiang persuaded me by explaining that one could only truly understand Christianity after being baptized. I then asked for three months to study Christianity.”
During that summer, May-ling remained at the front with Chiang, and in the fall he expressed a desire to be accepted into the Methodist Church. There were many who thought his conversion h
ad more to do with political convenience than belief, but Chiang claimed that it had occurred one day on a battlefield when he was worried about being cut off from his soldiers. He had prayed to the Christian God, promising that he would convert if he were saved from the danger. A sudden storm had conveniently stopped the enemy from advancing and given his reinforcements time to arrive for the battle.
The baptism was performed by the pastor of the Young Allen Memorial Church, one of the ministers who had refused to perform the Chiang marriage. When he asked the general whether he sincerely wanted to become a Christian, Chiang, replied, “I feel the need of a God such as Jesus Christ.” The minister then sprinkled water on his head and admitted him to the Church. All three of Madame Soong’s sons-in-law, it was noted, now belonged to the Christian Church. May-ling said that she stood by her husband’s side throughout the ceremony, repeating the relevant answers and thus rededicating herself as well.
Only relatives and a few intimate friends were present for the ceremony, which took place at May-ling’s mother’s home. Afterward, the Chiangs received officials at T.V.’s home and the next day left for Chiang’s birthplace for a visit to the tombs of his ancestors and a ten-day rest. The conversion had been kept secret and, according to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,“startled all Shanghai and Nanking.” Another American paper said that Chiang had “embraced the Christian faith against the wish of the majority of his people,” that his baptism was “a direct blow at everything that was sacred and traditional in China,” and that it was “purely political.” Still others, claiming that he was looking for American support in the inevitable fight against Japan, cited the current political bon mot: “There’s Methodism in his madness.” It would seem that the only people truly rejoicing were the missionaries, those evangelists of Western religion for whom this important conversion was a sign that their work had not been in vain. Certainly, the Chiangs were, as author Karen Leong observed, “not shy about publicizing their cooperation with various mission organizations.” Their dedication, according to Leong, had a point: “Soong [May-ling] perceived that Christianity and nationalism could coexist to their mutual benefit in improving China’s international status.”
The Last Empress Page 28