The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  One Chinese tried to explain Chiang’s attitude to Lapham: “You must understand that the Generalissimo looks upon himself as the father of a huge family… in the family, the sons took precedence.… Chiang Kai-shek regarded his Whampoa schoolmates as his sons. If a son was a black sheep or utterly incompetent, he had, nevertheless, to be taken care of.… That explained why the Generalissimo had kept so many incompetent generals in authority. His first loyalty was to his Whampoa ‘sons’; and he could count on their loyalty to him in return—the son’s duty to the father, whether the father be right or wrong.” But, as we have seen, that loyalty was, to say the least, questionable.

  According to Eastman, it was during the summer of 1948 that “the economic situation worsened, and the nation seemed to be plunging toward utter collapse.… Rice riots… spread rapidly across the country. Prices of other goods rose so fast that shopkeepers changed price tags several times a day.” Although economists like T. V. Soong had warned against simplistic solutions and advocated reducing military expenditures to balance the budget, on August 19, 1948. the generalissimo established a new currency called the gold yuan, convertible to the U.S. dollar at 4 to 1. The Chinese were required to turn in their paper money along with all their gold, silver, and foreign currency, against which they would be given new gold yuan notes. To effect the transition, called “Beating the Tiger,” the G-mo appointed economic supervisors in major coastal cities, only one of whom took his job seriously. This was Chiang’s son Ching-kuo, dubbed by the English press “the general-in-charge of economic war in Shanghai.”

  A general needs an army, and Ching-kuo ordered a force known as the Sixth Suppression and Reconstruction Brigade to come to the city, designating different squads to watch everyone from the Shanghai police to the garrison commander. Notices were posted saying that informants who denounced noncompliers would be given anonymity plus 30 percent of the value of the confiscated gold and currency. These noncompliers were subjected to trials, fines, and prison, while corrupt officials could be (and were) sentenced to death. Shanghai, “the nation’s financial, commercial, and industrial center, where hoarding and speculation had become a way of life among the most wealthy and influential entrepreneurs,” was suddenly subject to unexpected, unforgiving, and relentless reform that stopped at nothing and nobody. Although Big-Eared Du invited Ching-kuo to dinner on his arrival in the city, Chiang’s son sent his regrets, then arrested Du’s son for speculating, hoarding, and making illegal stock transactions. Du himself left for Hong Kong, and shortly thereafter, his son made a “substantial payment” to the government, closed his company, and joined his father.

  “For over four weeks,” the Italian ambassador said, “Shanghai was practically terror-stricken into good behaviour.” After the first month of house-cleaning, three thousand lawbreakers had been arrested; the wholesale index had risen by only 6 percent; and prices had stabilized far more than anyone expected. Even the most cynical citizens were impressed. On September 11, the North-China Daily News announced that “The experience of the past three weeks… has aroused a very considerable amount of hope.” The next day Ching-kuo delivered a speech reflecting his early Communist training: “Stabilizing prices is only technical work,” he declared; “our objective is to put an end to the unequal distribution of wealth. To be more specific, we should prevent the rich from getting richer while the poor are becoming poorer.”

  The very rich, of course, included his stepmother and her family. May-ling received a telephone call from Shanghai informing her that Ching-kuo had confiscated large quantities of goods, apparently on their way to the black market, from the Yangtze Development Corporation, which had been started by David Kung. Madame was further informed that Ching-kuo had charged the corporation with economic crimes, had already arrested some of its employees, and was planning to arrest David, its general manager. The G-mo told her to deal with the situation, and she took off by special plane for Shanghai. When she arrived, she met with the two young men, admonishing them that they were “brothers” and had “no reason to fight each other.” While Madame, according to the U.S. Embassy, threatened to leave China if “her favorite nephew”* was attacked, David apparently intimated that if Ching-kuo did not drop the charges against him, he would tell things that would embarrass the Chiang family and the KMT government. Along with this threat, however, he agreed to pay the government a huge settlement—$6 million† was the sum reported—before leaving for Hong Kong and New York.

  But what had originally looked like a triumph for Ching-kuo ended in economic disaster. In an effort to reduce the deficit, the government raised taxes on tobacco, liquor, tin foil, and joss paper, allowing merchants to adjust their prices accordingly. When the price of cigarettes suddenly shot up by 100 to 120 percent, the public, assuming that similar taxes and prices on more essential items would follow, went on a giant shopping spree, cleaning out the stocks of goods in the city within three weeks. The poor were hardest hit: there was no food to buy; medicine was unavailable; and there was no powdered milk for infants or coffins for the dead. In late October, the government’s top administrators—minus the G-mo, who was elsewhere on military inspections—met in Nanking to oppose the emergency measures. They assigned the blame to Chiang Ching-kuo and revoked the price controls. Citizens stopped turning in their currency, and the gold yuan became worthless. But by then, the rich had fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan and Ching-kuo had resigned, issuing the following mea culpa, reminiscent of similar statements by his father: “After [the] past seventy days of my work I feel that I have failed to accomplish the duties which I should have accomplished. Not only did I not consummate my plan and mission but in certain respects I have rather deepened the sufferings of the people.… Today aside from petitioning… for punishment so as to clarify my responsibility I wish to take this opportunity of offering my deepest apology to citizens of Shanghai.”

  A LITTLE OVER a month before this financial debacle, Chiang Kai-shek, finally admitting that the Nationalists could no longer hold Mukden, had ordered the commander of the area, General Wei Li-huang, to evacuate his soldiers from the city. Wei procrastinated for ten days—with the result that his army was overcome by the Communists. The general escaped by air, was court-martialed, and eventually joined the CCP. Other commanders began to change sides as well. The capital of Chungchun was evacuated, and Mukden fell at the beginning of November. According to a report from the CIA, “The orderly and efficient Communist take-over of Mukden… favorably impressed diplomatic officials there and… won the Communists wholehearted support from the populace.”

  A week later, the generalissimo, whose foray into Manchuria had cost his country seven armies and more than 400,000 men,* sent a “direct and urgent appeal” to President Truman. Saying that the Communist soldiers were “within striking distance” of Shanghai and Nanking, Chiang asked for “speedy and increased military assistance” along with “a firm statement of American policy in support of the cause for which my Government is fighting. Such a statement,” Chiang contended, “would serve to bolster up the morale of the armed forces and the civilian population and would strengthen the Government’s position.” But, according to a memorandum prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the secretary of defense, “There is now obviously grave doubt as to whether the arrival in China of any further military equipment for the Chinese national Government will buy any time at all. It might, in fact, have the opposite result in that such equipment might pass into the hands of victorious Communist forces.”

  By now, morale was disastrously low in the Nationalist army, whose regular soldiers felt little loyalty toward the government that had dragooned them. The Communists also made it easy for Nationalist soldiers to defect, incorporating them into their army and often sending them home to their own provinces, where they would be more effective in fighting the government. Hu Lin, the journalist who had once tried to explain Communist goals to General Marshall, said that the fall of Manchuria was due to Chiang’s refusal to re
lease the Young Marshal, his arbitrary divisions of the area, his choice of southerners as northern governors, and the disbanding of 300,000 Chinese soldiers from Wang’s puppet regime.† In sum, Chiang had made the Manchurians feel that they had merely gone from one occupation (the Japanese) to another (the by now famously corrupt officials of the Kuomintang). Even that bulwark of Chiang champions Time magazine wondered what the generalissimo would do next, noting that the “Communists were overrunning China like lava,” and in the big cities, “the prestige of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had sunk lower than the Yangtze.” According to Shanghai Post journalist Randall Gould, Chiang “couldn’t be elected dog-catcher even in his native village.”

  It was at this point that May-ling decided to go to the United States to beg for more aid. Although her husband was “quite dubious about the adventure,” she called Ambassador Stuart on Thanksgiving Day 1948 to ask him to come to see her “at once,” explaining that she had just been talking long distance with Marshall about a visit to the States. “I was sorely tempted to advise her against making a trip which was almost certain to prove fruitless,” the ambassador said, “but I confined myself to assisting her in the practical arrangements.” In the United States, publisher and friend Roy Howard saw an announcement of her intended visit and warned the Chinese News Service that since her success or failure in the United States would depend largely on the ability of those handling her public relations, he hoped that “this task… will not be trusted to the unskilled hands of the young gentleman [David Kung] who balled things up so badly for her and for the cause of American good will on her last visit to the U.S.” And Wellington Koo thought May-ling had embarked on this trip “on what he considered to be a girlish whim,” placing him, as Chinese ambassador to the United States, “in a very embarrassing position.” Nevertheless, on November 28, 1948, the generalissimo’s wife and her party left China. Two days later, the American staff began to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in the KMT’s capital city of Nanking.

  48

  They wanted me to send in about five million Americans to rescue him [Chiang], but I wouldn’t do it… he was as corrupt as they come. I wasn’t going to waste one single American life to save him.… They hooted and hollered and carried on and said I was soft on Communism.… But… I never changed my mind about Chiang and his gang. Every damn one of them ought to be in jail, and I’d like to live to see the day they are.

  —HARRY S. TRUMAN

  MAY-LING, WHO had asked the United States to send a plane for her, arrived in Washington bearing what one chronicler called “demands of a magnitude to match the scale of her country’s disasters”—i.e., $3 billion over three years in economic and military aid. In exchange, she was prepared to offer the United States military bases on Formosa. Her trip was, in the words of columnist Drew Pearson, “a frantic, hopeless mission to woo back the Chinese supply line,” and she was forced to wait nine days before being invited to tea with the president, who referred privately to her husband as “Cash My-check.” “She came to the United States for some more handouts,” Truman said. “… I wouldn’t let her stay at the White House like Roosevelt did. I don’t think she liked it very much, but I didn’t care one way or the other about what she liked and what she didn’t like.”

  In his biography of the postwar president, composed of conversations with his subject, Merle Miller quoted the following: “I discovered after some time,” Truman told Miller, “that Chiang Kai-shek and the Madame and their families, the Soong family and the Kungs, were all thieves, every last one of them, the Madame and him included. And they stole seven hundred and fifty million dollars out of the thirty-five billion that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it’s invested in real estate down in São Paolo and some right here in New York [this conversation was held in Manhattan]. And that’s the money that was used and is still being used for the so-called China Lobby. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. And I don’t want anything to do with people like that.”

  The week after May-ling’s arrival, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes noted her presence in the country and said that there had been “a change in feeling toward her husband and the precious gang of corruptionists surrounding him, who have made a tragic mockery of both American and Chinese hopes for a free and democratic China.” If Madame Chiang “should persist in her belief that the sentiment of the American people can still be swung back to the pouring out of more billions of tax money in the wake of the more than three billions that have gone already down the sink of Chiang’s graft-smeared and bloody-handed regime,” Ickes told the press, he would offer the lady a famous quote from Omar Khayyam:

  The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

  Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

  Aware of her recent bad publicity, May-ling had brought one instead of the many fur coats that had engendered criticism on her previous trip to the United States, and she traveled with only two suitcases and a cosmetic case. “Her traveling costume was a dark brown silk gown, ankle length,” said one reporter. “Her nutria coat, with out-moded tuxedo collar, turned-back cuffs and padded shoulders showed wear.” Hearing that General Marshall was in Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he had had a kidney removed, she immediately went to see him. He told her that he was not feeling well enough to discuss “official affairs,” but promised to “arrange another meeting as soon as he felt better.” Marshall’s wife, Katherine, who was at the hospital, invited May-ling to come stay at Dodona Manor, the Marshalls’ farmhouse in Leesburg, Virginia. The two ladies spent the next few days working in the kitchen garden, and Katherine told May-ling that when her husband was a boy, he had been nicknamed Flicker for the lock of hair on his forehead. Before leaving Washington, May-ling sent Marshall a letter, written in the form of a military report and headed:

  TOP SECRET, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

  REPORT FOR GENERAL FLICKER.

  A diary of the heavy work she had been doing while Marshall was “lolling in silken sheets” in the hospital, May-ling described her “back-breaking efforts” in “planting giant-caliber daffodils of the Holland type,” “raking leaves to keep off enemy frost” and, afterward in the kitchen, “peeling spuds, boiling bully beef,” and inventing a “wonderful new salad,” full of garlic, that “tastes like mud—but [was] sure to faze the enemy in close contact in combat.” The report ended:

  Repeated requests to Deputy Commander [Katherine Marshall] for payment have fallen on deaf ears, who countercharges that since billeting in the present bivouac the undersigned has browner cheeks, better color, and there is a noticeable increase in girth. Any claims of a financial nature are therefore invalid and illegal.… Undersigned calls upon high heavens to witness this un-Chinalike treatment.… I am awaiting prompt and immediate Congressional attention… due to one who is on the soil of the Pilgrim Mothers—down with slave labor.

  Respectfully submitted,

  Mei-ling Soong.

  Marshall, who, according to his biographer, “roared with laughter,” promised never to show the letter to anyone else, lest he ruin Madame’s reputation as the Dragon Empress of China. Nonetheless, he proved no more receptive to her request than the president.

  Unfortunately for Chiang’s wife, less than three weeks before her arrival in the United States, General David Barr of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in China had reported that “no battle has been lost… due to lack of ammunition or equipment. Their [the Chinese] military debacles in my opinion can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that lead to a complete loss of will to fight.” Shortly after meeting Madame Chiang for tea at the White House, the president sent Paul G. Hoffman, head of the Economic Cooperation Authority, to Shanghai; when Hoffman returned, he also advised Truman against loaning the Chinese any more money.

  Calling Madame Chiang “an unpredictable mixture of a Ch
inese lady tyrant and an American girl sophomore from Wellesley,” Edgar A. Mowrer, a columnist for the St. Louis Star-Times, cast her appearance in the United States as an oblique, utterly Chinese way of saying that the generalissimo was prepared to consider reforming the Kuomintang and the country. Nevertheless, the United States canceled its reconstruction aid program for China, signaling the failure of May-ling’s mission.

  “I hope my beloved wife can come back soon,” Chiang cabled ten days after her arrival. A week later, he sent her a message to be given to Truman. In it he claimed that he was being “pressed” by members of his government “to make peace with the Communists through Russia,” since “it has been proved hopeless to expect any further American support. Please ask for definite reply from highest source if any support moral or material forthcoming from American Government as otherwise I will step aside to make way for negotiation so as to prevent useless suffering of the people in the fight against communistic world domination.” The G-mo concluded his message by assuring the president that he was “thinking not only of our 450 million people but also of the principles of world freedom.” A standard piece of self-righteous cant, it could not have done much to improve Truman’s opinion of the generalissimo, if, in fact, it ever reached the president’s desk

  Most people assumed that Madame Chiang, having failed to get U.S. support, would turn around and go home, but she had another plan, involving settling down in the United States and strengthening the China Lobby, which she apparently believed to be at least partially responsible for the abrupt end to the country’s generosity.* Claiming that her husband “urgently needs assurance… that Americans understand that he is fighting Soviet communism in China just as the Americans are fighting Soviet communism in Berlin,” she radically reduced her requests to “an expression by the United States that it is backing Chiang in spirit.” Such a statement, she said, would be “more valuable at this time than military and financial aid.”