By the end of 1938, the Japanese had stopped advancing, the Chinese army was cut off from access to the sea, and there were 1 million Japanese soldiers in China. Chiang’s government, which had moved to Chungking, was now isolated except for supplies shipped from Russia overland through Central Asia and the illegal traffic in smuggling and bribery carried on with the Japanese. Although there had been and still were many critics of the generalissimo’s strategy of baiting the enemy and then withdrawing, the Japanese themselves seemed to have recognized its efficacy. According to Masanori Ito, a military historian,
the great headache for the Japanese army was the Chinese army’s strategy of “retreating instead of advancing.”… China’s territory was “wide and deep,” and the Chinese troops moved very fast. The weary Japanese forces had no way of catching up with them, especially since the supply lines were often cut. Therefore no devastating blow had ever been dealt on the main force of the Chinese army.… As far as the Japanese army was concerned, this was a defeat. From the angle of the Chinese army, this was certainly not a victory; but on the other hand, it was not a defeat either.… When the Pacific War broke out, the Japanese army had already paid the huge sacrifice of 1,150,000 lives, including the victims of war illness.
On December 22, 1938, the Japanese premier gave a speech in which he offered peace and said that China was ready for a “rebirth,” providing it would agree to recognize Manchukuo, sign a mutual anti-Communist pact with Inner Mongolia, cooperate economically with the Japanese in northern China, abolish foreign concessions and consular jurisdiction, and refrain from asking for reparations. In return for China’s agreeing to these terms, the Japanese promised to withdraw their armed forces within two years. Four days later, Chiang Kai-shek delivered his refusal: “We must understand that the rebirth of China is taken by the Japanese to mean destruction of an independent China and creation of an enslaved China. The so-called new order is to be created after China has been reduced to a slave nation and linked up with made-in-Japan Manchukuo.”
One of the more intriguing sidelines to this abortive exchange was the position of Wang Ching-wei, who had urged Chiang to accept the peace terms. Wang’s wife had left China in early December 1938 with their family, a quantity of luggage, and some furniture, and on December 20, two days before the premier’s speech, Wang and his entourage had left as well. They were headed, they said, for Kunming, a city in the western province of Yunnan, but they actually flew to Hanoi in French Indo-China. According to Crozier, it was impossible at that time to fly out of Chungking without permission of the Military Bureau of Investigation and Statistics and, in the case of high officials, that of Chiang Kai-shek himself. Under these circumstances, one can only conclude that the generalissimo knew his deputy was dealing with the Japanese and was not displeased to get rid of the untrustworthy Wang once and for all.
EARLIER THAT YEAR, an extraordinary congress in Hankow had modified the Chinese constitution in order to elect Chiang Kai-shek Tsung-ts’ai (leader) of the Kuomintang. According to Crozier, the “position gave him virtually unlimited power to dictate to the Executive Yuan, bully the Legislative Yuan, and by-pass the Judicial Yuan,” but in the words of Edgar Snow, it was “merely recognizing with a title the dictatorial authority which he has long exercised over the party, the government and the army.” In his role as virtual dictator, Chiang divided his office staff into three areas: military, political, and administrative. Although he was regarded as very tight when it came to paying his subordinates, anyone who went to work for him was referred to as a “phoenix” for his sudden rise in social status. Chiang himself, however, relied primarily on three men—Chen Li-fu, Ho Ying-chin, and H. H. Kung*—each of whom had a clique of supporters in back of him. He manipulated them in ways that forced them to compete with one another for power, thus recalling the traditional politics of warlordism. It was an ineffectual system at best, and James McHugh said that Madame Chiang and Donald wore “themselves out trying to get Chiang to take drastic action against the inefficiency” around him.
The most famous and important of the factions was the CC Clique, run by the two Chen brothers, nephews of Chen Chi-mei, the man who had befriended Chiang Kai-shek when he was young and whose death had caused Chiang to suffer a near emotional breakdown. The Chens came from a family of landowners. Chen Kuo-fu, eight years older than his brother, was a sickly man, subject to bouts of tuberculosis, who had served as governor of the east coast province of Kiangsu, where he had made great strides in education, public health, and conservation. In 1939, after the government was moved from Hankow to Chungking, he took over the department that selected its personnel, thus wielding influence “that could hardly be matched by any other official in the wartime capital.”
Chen Kuo-fu’s younger brother, Chen Li-fu, had earned his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Pittsburgh before giving up a promising career in engineering to work as a revolutionary. Li-fu believed that China must learn about science and technology from the West, but at the same time he clung to an unwavering belief in the old Confucian values. Starting as Chiang Kai-shek’s confidential secretary in 1926, he moved in with Chiang, ate his meals there, and noticed, then remarked on Chiang’s “bad temper.… ‘If anyone lost his temper with me, I would resign at once,’ ” he told his employer. Chiang promised to hold his tongue, and the younger man remained with the generalissimo throughout the Northern Expedition. In 1928, he became director of the investigative division of the Kuomintang, responsible for ferreting out Communists from the party, the military, and the government. One American ambassador to China said that although Li-fu had an “obsession about the Communists… he has advanced social ideas. He is personally honest, he lives very simply, and he never has indulged in graft or squeeze.”
Known as narrow conservatives and great supporters of Chiang, the Chen brothers—aristocratic, inflexible, and incorruptible—formed the center of the CC Clique, which was highly influential in KMT affairs. They arranged all the generalissimo’s appointments and set up his daily schedule. As White put it, “Two silent and mysterious brothers… practically control the thought of the nation through a combination of patronage, secret police, espionage and administrative authority.”
The head of the military clique was General Ho Ying-chin, a thickset man with a round face who served as the generalissimo’s war minister from 1930 to 1944. Called by Edgar Snow “one of the worst degenerates in China,” General Ho “came to symbolise the gross corruption and inefficiency” of the Chinese army under Chiang. A general in the bandit suppression campaign, Ho was the top military commander during the abduction crisis, and it was he who had suggested bombing Sian—a plan ultimately prevented by May-ling, T.V., Donald, and H. H. Kung. An angry man, unused to the niceties of diplomacy, General Ho gave a banquet shortly after the outbreak of World War II to honor the ambassadors of China’s new allies. “Let us drink to the day when every damned foreigner has been run out of China,” he said, raising his cup of rice wine. An embarrassed secretary was forced to explain to the group that “The minister is drinking to the defeat of the Japanese.”
28
Madame Kung is the practical one of the three [sisters], Madame Sun the extreme idealist, Madame Chiang is both, and in this sense, the greatest of them all.
—PEARL BUCK
THE CHIANGS arrived in their wartime capital of Chungking in October 1938. Theodore White, then a fledgling journalist, followed six months later. “The runway was a sandbar paved with stone,” he wrote, “and on both sides of the sandbar the river rushed by.… The airstrip was usable only from winter through spring… in summer and early fall, swollen with the melting snows of Tibet, the river flooded the airport.” The airport buildings, made of straw matting on bamboo poles, were taken down one at a time as the river rose.
Located 400 miles behind Japanese lines and 1,400 miles from the ocean, the city itself lay 600 feet above the runway, perched on a rocky plateau beyond the cliffs and surrounded by what was left o
f a five-hundred-year-old wall. It was reached by steep steps zigzagging up the mountain from the river, a climb usually negotiated by Chinese coolies carrying their betters in sedan chairs. “Every drop of water,” according to journalist Sheean, had to be “carried up the towering hills on human shoulders; every object we use has been borne painfully at some time or other up from the life-giving river.”
Chungking is located in the southeast of the province of Szechuan. Known in May-ling’s day as “the Heavenly-endowed province,” it is blessed with some of the richest land in China. The area harvested four crops annually, but its semitropical climate guaranteed that winters were wet and chilly, summers hot and humid. “Shanghai,” according to May-ling, “was a summer resort compared to the damp, oppressive atmosphere of this place.” The old city of Chungking had been built at the confluence of the Yangtze and Chialing Rivers. Terraced rice paddies rose on both sides of the rivers, while the peasants planted vegetables near the riverbanks, hoping to harvest them before the annual floods. White was amazed by the abundance of flowers and said that there were more flower stalls within the walls of Chungking than in the entire city of his native Boston.
If Szechuan was the richest province in China, the richest residents were the ex-warlords turned landowners and the merchants who dealt in its produce. “The city,” according to White, “repaid the countryside by returning all its bowel movements; collectors emptied the thunder boxes of every home each morning, and padded barefoot down the alley stairs to the riverside, two buckets of liquid mush jiggling from their bamboo staves, until they reached what foreigners delicately styled the ‘honey barges.’” Sewage ran in the gutters of Chungking, and its alleys were narrow—so narrow that White said a man walking with an open umbrella caught drippings from eaves on both sides of the street at the same time. According to another American, there was “no escape from the stink that attacked our nostrils at every turn.” Even worse were the Chungking rats, “numerous… large and… ferocious.” They were particularly active at night, when sleepers “were woken by rats pulling their hair. Even in the hotels there were rats nesting in the bathrooms. Cats were imported to deal with the situation, but the cats fled with fright!”
There had been no wheeled vehicles in Chungking before 1928; by 1939, even after the government set up its wartime headquarters, sedan chairs outnumbered rickshaws. Although the Kuomintang changed the names of streets to patriotic inanities such as Road of the People’s Republic and Road of the People’s Livelihood, White said that when he received an invitation to go somewhere, he had to translate the name for his rickshaw puller back to the Cliff of the Merciful Buddha, the Slope of Seven Stars, or White Elephant Street. The generalissimo, of course, traveled in a procession of black cars, and the citizens of Chungking soon learned to take their umbrellas from over their heads and hold them down to protect their feet and ankles from the filth sprayed out by the cars in his cavalcade.
Once a town of 300,000 people, the arrival of the Nationalist government nearly doubled Chungking’s population to 550,000.* In an attempt to use wartime exigencies to revive the New Life Movement, the generalissimo banned opium in the city immediately upon arrival. Two months later, he closed the local brothels, where businessmen were accustomed to dining and slipping out between courses to relax in steaming tubs, to be washed, massaged, and otherwise serviced by local prostitutes. Spitting in the streets— one of Chiang’s pet peeves—was also forbidden.†
Upon its arrival, the government took over all the hotels, office buildings, and schools. The four most important banks were moved from Shang-hai, as was Fudan University. But the government employees and students who came in 1938 were used to the trappings of modern life like electricity and flush toilets. It was, White said, “as if the ablest and most devoted executives of New York, Boston and Washington had been driven from home to set up resistance to an enemy from the hills of Appalachia.”
What bothered White most, however, was the Americanization of senior Chinese officials, most of whom had been educated in the United States and, in his view, had little or no understanding of their own people. The exception, of course, was Chiang himself, who spoke no English, controlled the army, made deals with the warlords, and never allowed a capable man to rise too far lest he become a rival for power. He and May-ling lived in a two-story, ten-room house surrounded by a stone wall. Two heavily armed soldiers guarded their driveway, and the grounds were patrolled by soldiers, personal guards, and plainclothesmen. Invited guests entered the premises, passed under a gigantic rubber tree, and climbed a series of steps interwoven with roots into a beautiful garden, terraced in the Chinese style, with bamboo and azaleas. Except for the dining room, the rooms were small. It was, in the words of Chiang’s personal physician, “not a very luxurious frame house,” but it had been given to them by General Chen Cheng, second in command to Chiang himself, and had come completely furnished. The living room, according to one guest, was “a solemn Victorian room… simple and gray,” the furniture placed “in neat rigidity” with lace doilies on the backs of the chairs. “If I only had my own silverware and linen, I would be completely happy here,” May-ling told a reporter, pointing out two silver frames with colored photographs of her husband as practically the only things in the house that she could call her own. Later on, an autographed picture of President Roosevelt was added to a table in the living room facing a photograph of Chiang. The generalissimo’s explanation to visitors for this peculiar arrangement was that these were pictures of two friends.*
Chiang’s doctor tells us that husband and wife shared a bedroom—two beds side by side, covered with a huge mosquito curtain. Adjoining the bedroom was a large room divided into two offices—one for him and one for her. The G-mo, who rose between 5:00 and 6:00 A.M., still did his exercises before breakfast, when May-ling, who got up at 6:30, joined him. From 7:00 to 7:30 they read a short passage from the Bible in Chinese, discussed it, and knelt to say prayers. Chiang was healthy, except for his ill-fitting false teeth, which gave him canker sores. He neither drank nor smoked and disapproved of those who did; the only person besides May-ling who was allowed to smoke in his presence was H. H. Kung. After a spartan breakfast and a visit from his doctors, Chiang read reports from the front and sent instructions to his commanders in the field. On Monday mornings he held a meeting for ministers and department chairmen. The gathering began with the assembled gentlemen bowing three times to a portrait of Sun, after which Chiang read the doctor’s will. The third part of the program consisted of a lecture on whatever subject the G-mo chose. In spite of the fact that it could run as long as two hours, his audience, forbidden to wear coats even on the coldest winter days, had to stand at attention during the entire procedure. Only when he had finished speaking would he “grunt” the Chinese words for “That’s all” and leave the room.
The Chiangs usually lunched alone or with Donald and a friend from the U.S. Embassy, James McHugh,* who spoke fluent Chinese. “With the Generalissimo and his wife lunch was strictly a family occasion,” said McHugh. “… I was acceptable to Chiang Kai-shek for one main reason—I was a pipeline to the American Government.” Guests were more often invited for dinner, which was served at 7:30. Meals were never fancy, and Chiang amused himself by offering important people what he called his New Life dinner, which cost 40 cents (Chinese) per person.† Liquor was barred from the house, and the inevitable toasts were drunk with tea. Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Labour Party leader and future chancellor of the Exchequer, who visited Chungking in early 1940, was impressed with the atmosphere, pronouncing the Chiangs “perfect dears, so kind and simple and natural.” Like most Westerners, he was particularly affected by May-ling, whom he found “extraordinarily intelligent and superbly kind to everyone and full of courage and initiative often in the most difficult circumstances.”
After lunch, the generalissimo read the newspapers, including the local Communist publication, underlining words and phrases as he went along. After an afternoon
of work, he usually called for his tea and then took a walk, sometimes with his wife, peering around corners and into dark places, looking for something wrong. One journalist found him in the middle of a road haranguing a policeman for the way he was handling traffic. In another instance, he returned from a drive through town only to dash to the phone to call the mayor of Chungking. “I just saw a beggar on the corner of Rice Flour and Pottery streets. Looks like he has leprosy or something. Why don’t you take care of your city?”
It was a different story, however, when someone wanted to sound him out on a particular subject or obtain an interview. It had never been easy to get to see the generalissimo, and the older he got, the harder it became. “His niggardly, grudging use of the spoken word is the despair of visiting journalists who may be granted an audience of ten or 15 minutes with the great man,” White wrote in 1942. “They usually spend two or three minutes outlining long involved questions to which Chiang listens in quiet patience. When the question is over and translated Chiang usually murmurs softly, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘very difficult.’ ” Even Donald, who was virtually part of the Chiang family, had trouble conversing with Chiang, who was comfortable only when giving orders and/or expounding on his limited point of view.
While the generalissimo rested comfortably on old principles, May-ling was out doing various kinds of war work or making flying visits to Changsha or Nanchang. For diversion, he practiced his calligraphy while she read or listened to music and news reports on the radio. Although May-ling had been asked to visit the United States, she had thus far refused all invitations. According to a friend, she was simply too energized to give up her war work. Tillman Durdin of The New York Times used the phrase “intense nervous energy” to describe Madame Chiang when he interviewed her. There is, he wrote, “very little repose in her. She leans forward in her chair and speaks rapidly and in a low tone. Her manner is a combination of American directness and the self-effacing modesty of the Chinese woman, with a touch of… restlessness.”
The Last Empress Page 41