Whatever the motivation for Chiang’s conversion, he remained a Confucian in the depths of his soul. He believed in the Mandate of Heaven and continued to apply a rigorous if unenlightened examination to personal morality. His code was a simplistic one, and the application of a Christian veneer did not seem to deepen in him any comprehension of self. Nonetheless, after 1930, the year of his conversion, he considered himself a Christian, and in 1938 amended the law that had forbidden the compulsory teaching of religion in Christian schools in China—a decision that May-ling described as “the greatest testimony in the history of China of our appreciation of the value of the real, vital contributions that Christianity has made to the spiritual well-being and the livelihood of our people.”
Chiang’s adoption of Christianity was not received favorably by the Chinese, who blamed it on politics and his Methodist wife. May-ling claimed that it was not she but her mother who had brought it about and who died ten months after his baptism, in July of 1931. With her mother, May-ling wrote some years later,
religion was not a one-way traffic. She often emphasized to me that we should not ask God to do anything if the request hurts someone else. I can see her now, quite ill, a few months before her death. She had an unusually active mind and was vitally concerned about the country. At that time, the Japanese were beginning their aggressive program against China, and, one day while talking to her, a thought which I considered quite bright occurred to me: “Mother, you are so powerful in prayer, why don’t you pray to God to destroy Japan in an earthquake so that she can no longer harm China?”
She turned her face away from me, and then replied: “Don’t ask me to pray to God to do anything that is unworthy even of you, a mortal. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord. It certainly isn’t yours.”
May-ling was apparently with her mother when she died. “We Chinese believed that in times of crisis for their children, a parent might choose to die in the place of their child; and I just knew that if such a thing were possible, Mother would have done it for my brother,” May-ling later told a young member of the family. “Of course, there is no way to know if that is what really happened, but Mother did, in fact, die at that moment.”
May-ling could often believe what she wanted to be true—even when it was not. “SHOTS FIRED AT MINISTER” read a headline in The New York Times of July 23, 1931: “Three men attempted to assassinate T. V. Soong, Finance Minister, on his arrival here at 7 o’clock this morning from Nanking.” The attempt to assassinate T.V. had indeed taken place early that morning, but it was four hours later that Madame Soong died. In any case, July 23, 1931, was a terrible day for the Soongs. Instead of rushing off his train with the crowd anxious to get into the city, T.V., dressed in what another newspaper described as “foreign garb” with a white helmet, was easily spotted as he made his way through Shanghai’s North Station, followed by his young secretary and bodyguards. Suddenly voices were heard yelling “Down with the Soong Dynasty!” At the same time, shots were fired from all four corners of the station, and two bombs were detonated. T.V. removed his helmet and stepped behind a pillar while pulling out his revolver. His bodyguards were of little use, but a member of the railway police told him to throw down his hat and follow him to the safety of a boardroom upstairs in the station. Seeing T.V. escaping, the would-be assassins ran after him; failing to catch him, they left the station unapprehended. T.V. himself, according to an account in the papers, “was remarkably composed and able to give an account of every little detail” of the attack before leaving for his mother’s home.
Known as “The Mother-in-Law of the Country” and eulogized by the North-China Herald as “one of the most remarkable women in modern China,” Madame Soong had been ill for some time before she died. Three days after her death, a wire arrived from Chiang: “Oh, my heart is aching,” he wrote his wife. “… I have lost another good mother.… You, my love,* and your elder sisters must be heart-broken, but please take care of yourselves.” Ching-ling had to come from Germany for the funeral, which was not held until more than three weeks later.
Led by a Sikh trooper, twelve motorcycles, 180 troopers, 200 sailors and marines, and a naval band, a hundred cars lined up for the funeral cortege. The three Soong sisters sat in one car, while their three brothers occupied an armored Buick. T.V. was protected by six bodyguards, guns drawn, while Chiang Kai-shek, accompanied by H. H. Kung, was surrounded by twenty-five graduates of Whampoa, twelve on each side of the car in which he was driven. The procession led to the International Cemetery, where Madame Soong was buried.
May-ling seems to have been going through a religious crisis at the time of her husband’s conversion—a fact that explains her repetition of his vows—and the death of her mother. She characterized the early years of her married life as falling into three phases. “First,” she said, “there was a tremendous enthusiasm and patriotism—a passionate desire to do something for my country.” But even in her dedication, she said, she realized that “something was lacking. There was no staying power. I was depending on self.” During the second phase, she described herself as being “plunged into dark despair. A terrible depression settled on me—spiritual despair, bleakness, desolation. At the time of my mother’s death, the blackness was greatest. A foreign foe was on our soil in the north. A discontented political faction in the south. Famine in the northwest. Floods… And my beloved mother taken from me.… As long as Mother lived I had a feeling that whatever I did, or failed to do, Mother would pray me through,” May-ling explained.
Though she insisted that she was not our intercessor, that we must pray ourselves, yet I know for a certainty that many of her long hours of prayer were spent interceding for us.… I realized that spiritually I was failing my husband.… I began to see that what I was doing to help, for the sake of the country, was only a substitute for what he needed.… Out of… the feeling of human inadequacy, I was driven back to my mother’s God. I knew there was a power greater than myself.… But Mother was no longer there to do my interceding for me. It seemed to be up to me to help the General spiritually, and in helping him I grew spiritually myself. Thus I entered into the third period where I wanted to do, not my will, but God’s.
IT IS SURELY no coincidence that May-ling’s personal crisis came at a time when her husband’s political stature was at a low ebb. During the summer and fall of 1931, when Chiang and the Kuomintang appeared to have reached the nadir of popularity and efficacy, a thirty-year-old member of the party, Liu Chien-chun, wrote an essay in which he declared that the KMT “seems to have dissipated the hopes of the masses! Not only has it become remote from the masses, but in many places it is simply hated by the masses!” The blame, he said, rested with the party itself, which had ceased to be a revolutionary organization, and the members, who had stopped working for China or its people. According to Liu, the problems did not lie simply in the corruption of its functionaries. “We firmly believe that the turmoil of the party, the impotence of the party, the decadence of the party, are problems not of individuals, but problems of poor methods, an imperfect system, and of insubstantial content.” To solve these problems Liu advocated “preserving the old shell of the party, but in addition organizing within the party a corps devoted to the common people of the nation that will give substance… and create the party’s soul.”
This corps was formally and secretly founded by Chiang in the spring of 1932. Calling together a group of young army officers to form an elite organization like the one Liu suggested, Chiang said that he would serve as the permanent head and that graduates of Whampoa should take positions of leadership. Named the Blue Shirts by the Japanese, who tried to equate it with Mussolini’s Black Shirts, the group adopted many of the tenets of fascism, currently in vogue in Italy and Germany. In explaining this phenomenon, Eastman refers to “the depths of desperation and humiliation” felt by thinking Chinese in the 1930s as a result of the failure of the republic to engage the common people. He also explains the attitude of the intel
lectual elite towards Fascism:
“To many Chinese in the 1930s, fascism did not appear as a pernicious or retrogressive doctrine. On the contrary, it appeared to be at the very fore-front of historical progress. Parliamentary government had been attempted in China since 1912, and with obviously tragic consequences. And, throughout the world, democracy and laissez-faireism were being rejected in favor of one-man or one-party dictatorships. To the Blue Shirts… it seemed idiotic to reject a system that had proven to be effective in Italy and Germany in favor of a governmental system that had manifestly outlived its historical utility.” According to Chiang Kai-shek, “In the last several decades we have in vain become drunk with democracy and the advocacy of free thought. And what has been the result? We have fallen into a chaotic and irretrievable situation.”
Moreover, ever since 1928, when Chiang broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviets and replaced Russian military advisers with officers from Germany, Chinese officers had been, in Eastman’s words, “richly exposed” to the fascistic principles the Germans carried east with them. Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Kriebel, who took over as head of the German Military Mission in China in 1929, had marched in the front of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 with Hitler and had, in fact, shared a cell with the Führer during their subsequent imprisonment. It was not unusual for Chinese officers to go abroad to study. Just as Chiang himself had gone to Japan in 1906 for military training, by 1930 the majority were going to Germany. In 1932, Chiang sent two officers to study the Nazi organization and consult with high-ranking Nazi leaders. Shortly thereafter, he spoke to a meeting of the Blue Shirts: “What China needs today is not an ism that discusses what kind of ideal future China will have, but a method that will save China at the present moment.… Fascism is a stimulant for a declining society.… Can fascism save China? We answer: yes. Fascism is what China now most needs.… At the present stage of China’s critical situation, fascism is a wonderful medicine exactly suited to China, and the only spirit that can save it.”
The Blue Shirts lasted about six years. At their height—at the end of 1935—they probably numbered no more than 10,000. Although the group never succeeded in its original aim of inserting a “soul” into the Kuomin-tang, its members dominated political training within the army and controlled many of Chiang’s security organizations: the military police, the Public Security Office, and the Department of Special Services (i.e., secret police). This last entity was run by a Blue Shirt named Tai Li, a onetime student at Whampoa who began his career by gathering information about the Communists in his class. Although he never completed the course at Whampoa, Tai was given special dispensation and became chief of China’s secret police. “Cold, hard, crafty and brutal,” he was a slender, good-looking man with ramrod posture and small, beautiful hands who came to be known as “the Himmler of Nationalist China.” He built a spy organization that, by the end of World War II, numbered 40,000 to 50,000 men.
Two of the major tenets of the Blue Shirts were (1) exaltation of the nation, implying as it did, subjugation of the individual, and (2) blind obedience to the leader. This last, of course, was enormously attractive to Chiang, particularly when an editorial in a distinguished Blue Shirt publication concluded that China needed “the establishment of a central idol” as “the important condition of a unified Kuomintang and the first step toward resurrecting China. We must not disguise that we demand China’s Mussolini, demand China’s Hitler, demand China’s Stalin! said the author.” After all his fights with rebellious factions of the KMT, Chiang certainly agreed. “The most important point of fascism is absolute trust in a sagely, able leader,” he said. “…I believe that, unless everyone has absolute trust in one man, we cannot reconstruct the nation and we cannot complete the revolution.” Although Chiang denied publicly that he aspired to be that person, he was the man whose portrait the would-be Blue Shirter faced when he vowed to obey the leader and keep the secrets of the group on penalty of death.
In sponsoring the creation of the Blue Shirts, Chiang was apparently trying to seize on a philosophical movement strong enough to counter both the rebels within the party and the Communists without. Unable to develop an administration that answered the needs of the Chinese people or give the people themselves a sense of national responsibility, Chiang reverted to the kind of militarism he had discovered when he was a student— an unquestioning, self-abnegating, blind obedience to authority. The irony is, of course, that the Blue Shirts, while they lasted, were not all that different from the Communists whom Chiang had sworn to destroy—those dedicated followers of Mao who were working just as hard to lure ordinary Chinese to the other end of the political spectrum.
But even the Blue Shirts, called by historian Lloyd Eastman “one of the most influential and feared political movements in China,” were powerless to help their leader when it came to fighting the Japanese, greedy for more land, more natural resources, and supreme power in Asia.
20
It is becoming increasingly evident that the plans of Japanese militarists in the Far East are more or less limitless.
—ROY HOWARD
EVERYONE WHO should have known was aware that Japan had been preparing to invade China for quite some time. Edgar Snow, who had arrived in the country only in 1928 and was on his first assignment writing tourist pamphlets, told readers of the China Weekly Review that the Japanese were anxious to provoke an incident that they could escalate into war. A brief review of recent Japanese history explains why.
From the time the Chinese began to fight incursions from the west, Japan, observing the defeats and humiliation of its neighbor, had decided to pursue a different course. By 1853, the year Commodore Perry arrived in Japan, China had already been forced to cede Hong Kong to Great Britain, open five treaty ports, and pay a huge indemnity—all as a result of the First Opium War, the second not yet having even begun. It was clear to Japan that with its feudal society crumbling, it would be wise to comply with Occidental demands and open itself to trade with the West.
During the period of the Meiji emperor (1868–1912), the remnants of the old Japanese feudalism and military rule gave way to a strong, centralized government patterned on those of the Western nations. Great changes took place in the fields of education, science, and art, and, in an effort to speed up its industrial revolution, Japan moved its peasants into factories like those of Victorian England. By the end of the century, after engaging China in a war from which it emerged victorious, Japan was able to extract large enough indemnities to fund the next stage of its industrial development. Another big victory—this one over the Russian navy in 1905— whetted the Japanese appetite for domination over Asia. But to accomplish this, the small island nation needed huge supplies of men and raw materials, all of which were tantalizingly available in China. Meanwhile, the West continued “gorging on China’s inexhaustible capacity for producing wealth for others.” As early as 1898, one Japanese statesman had already begun to worry. “The vampires are feasting,” he noted, “we may be too late.”
In the mid-1920s, the Great Depression that would devastate the Western world started earlier in Japan, and the military rose to prominence. In April of 1927, Japanese hawks forced out the moderates, and the militaristic Baron Giichi Tanaka took over as Japanese prime minister. One of Tanaka’s early acts was to send the emperor a memorial* urging Japan’s colonization of Asia. “In order to conquer China,” the baron wrote, “we must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia.” After that, he said, Japan could set about taking over the rest of the continent. “The way to gain actual rights in Manchuria and Mongolia is to use the region as a base and under the pretence of trade and commerce penetrate the rest of China.… Armed by the rights already secured we shall seize the resources all over the country. Having China’s entire resources at our disposal we shall proceed to conquer India, the Archipelago, Asia Minor, Central Asia and even Europe.”
IT CERTAINLY LOOKED as if the fall of 1931 was an excellent time for the Japanese to make the
ir move. It had been a terrible year for the Chinese. Aside from the usual uprisings, there were disastrous spring floods over the valley of the Yangtze River. Whole villages had been swept away, something like 2 million people had drowned, and 50 million peasants had lost their farms. At one point, the streets of Hankow itself were under water. The flood, which lasted for two months, was followed by famine, cholera, and dysentery. The effects of the disaster were felt as far as Shanghai, whose factory workers and rickshaw drivers were normally recruited from the flooded areas, and Peiping, where one writer described her horror at finding dead babies on the sidewalks, wrapped in newspapers like parcels.† The Western powers, who might have helped the Chinese with military and/or economic aid, were now totally occupied coping with the Great Depression.
Like the murder of the Old Marshal, the conquest of Manchuria was masterminded by lesser Japanese military officers, none with a rank above colonel. To do this, they had to invent reasons for invading their neighbors. Pointing to an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway, they said that Manchuria was in a state of lawlessness, and when the Chinese arrested and executed four Japanese spies caught in an off-limits area of Manchuria, they claimed malfeasance. These were only excuses, as the plans for the Japanese invasion had been in the works for some time. But the conspiring officers had not dared inform Tokyo of their intentions. Once the government leaders heard what was happening, they tried to stop it but were unable to do so. Or, as Australian journalist William Henry Donald put it, “The military party of Japan found it vitally necessary to reassert their dominance… and they had to seek an outside adventure in order to secure the backing of the nation as against the non-military party then in power.”
The Last Empress Page 29