The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  On April 25, Chiang left for Shanghai, where he spent eleven days in what Stewart Alsop† called “the thick, heavy atmosphere of a frightened city.” Chinese-American journalist Stella Dong was more specific: “Chiang Kai-shek’s henchmen made Shanghai’s last weeks under Nationalist rule a nightmare of disorder and brutality,” she wrote, and she was right. Martial law was declared; businesses and homes were requisitioned for the billeting of Nationalist soldiers, who “lost no opportunity to rob and loot” the premises of their hosts. “But worst of all was the wave of political terror” as Communists and anyone else who could be blamed for the Nationalist loss were executed without benefit of trial on street corners and other public places. One American was appalled by “the street execution of half a dozen captive students. Bound and kneeling, they had their brains blown out by Chiang’s warriors before a great crowd of people… while shouting gendarmes beat back the crowd with long bamboo whips, their customary weapon.”

  While Chiang was still in Shanghai, acting president Li wrote President Truman stating that America’s generosity in “moral and material assistance” had been “rendered fruitless by the lack of sincerity on the part of both the then Government and the Chinese Communists.… It is regrettable that, owing to the failure of our then Government to make judicious use of this aid and to bring about appropriate political, economic and military reforms, your assistance has not produced the desired effect. To this failure is attributable the present predicament in which our country finds itself.”

  Chiang, the master of sanctimony, left Shanghai about three weeks before it fell to the Communists. He flew to Canton, where he told the Central Executive Committee of the KMT that he was “ashamed to be back in Canton in the present circumstances of retreat and failure. I cannot but admit that I must share a great part of the defeat,” he added before delivering an irrelevant and hypocritical swipe at his surroundings: “I am appalled at the existence of gambling and opium smuggling in Canton under the very nose of the government.” Although he told his audience that he was “ready to perish with the city,” he left five days after his arrival to look for another place in which to make a last stand.

  From America May-ling wired her husband that the “CCP in the United States is putting a lot of propaganda out against you. Most of our American friends suggest that we establish a propaganda organization to attack them back.” And two days later: “The foreign powers are all disappointed in us. I have been busy contacting everyone and telling them our side of the story according to your orders. I hope that what I am doing is helpful.” To which Chiang responded, “Please remember the following three points. (1) The United Kingdom will try hard to persuade the United States to recognize the government of the CCP in order to guarantee their position in Hong Kong. So you should remind the U.S. government not to betray their war-time ally China.… (2) You should tell them that if I do not take the leadership and continue the anti-CCP campaigns, China will be split into four or five parts.… The Americans must know that the only power that insists on fighting the Communists is the one under my leadership.… (3) You should recommend that the nations of the Pacific form an anti-Communist alliance, and I should be named as the only Chinese leader in the organization.”

  Although Madame, subjected to stories of imminent defeat of the Nationalists in the American press, tried to get her husband to hold a full-scale press conference—even going to the extent of wiring likely questions and appropriate answers—she was not successful. He did, however, grant an interview to two American journalists, one from Scripps Howard and the other from the International News Service. Following his wife’s directives, Chiang made several points: “If communism is not checked in China, it will spread over the whole of Asia. Should that occur, another world war would be inevitable.” All the Chinese asked of the United States at the moment was “moral support,” he stated, claiming that the “erroneous impression that the present situation” was “beyond repair” had been “created by Communist propaganda in disseminating defeatism.” Not only the ideas but the language clearly came from May-ling.

  In the middle of September, May-ling cabled her stepson that she had heard the Communists planned to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. “I’m so worried,” she wrote, “… please reply as soon as possible.” Having succeeded in getting Chiang to talk to the press during the summer, May-ling tried to get him to resume his position as head of the government in the fall. “You are blamed for interfering with political affairs,” she wrote in October, “so it would be better for you to return to the political stage as soon as possible. It is your duty to assume your responsibilities and lead the anti-Communist campaign.”

  WHEN SHE WAS not cabling advice to Chiang, May-ling spent quite a lot of her time in the United States with Emma, enjoying lunches, dinners, and outings with old Wellesley friends. Explaining that there were “too many people and interruptions here in Riverdale [where she was living with the Kungs],” she used Emma’s apartment whenever she needed to concentrate on her writing. One weekend, she stayed in her friend’s home along with her secretary-companion, Dorothy Garvey. “These stocks [i.e., flowers] are here to greet you & as an expression of the lovely week-end appreciation of your two perfect guests to a perfect hostess,” May-ling scrawled on a large sheet of paper. “The leaves are broken, but not our memories! We’ve dusted and cleaned everything in sight. Heavens aren’t we good?” And in another note: “You should never leave the dish spray on the stone. The heat will melt the rubber. Also shake it well after using, other wise the water collects in the compartment for the detergent. Signed, The Neat Housemother.” According to DeLong, Emma discovered that May-ling had replaced her window drapes and bedspread.

  The reason for May-ling’s working into the early morning hours and her extended stay in the United States was explained in a cable she had sent Chiang back in January. “Since I first arrived in the U.S.… the attitude of the American Administration has changed,” she reported. “They have now adopted a policy of wait and see instead of abandoning China.… Now our American friends and our friends in the Congress have suggested to me that we establish an organization that will make good connections for us here and implement effective propaganda which will help me gain support in seeking American aid.”

  The Madame had, in fact, already started holding weekly meetings with important Chinese living in America, men who were qualified by position or economic clout to help pressure the U.S. government into reviving its support for the KMT. In its series on the China Lobby, Reporter magazine divided them geographically into men of wealth operating out of New York and those in official positions based in the nation’s capital. What they had in common was Madame herself, who took on the responsibility of developing an overall “strategy to mesh the Nationalist cause with the interests of the most effective among the power-hungry American politicians.” According to one author, these human targets belonged to the Republican Party, the military establishment, and the Christian missions—all of whom had good reasons to back the Lobby. The Republicans took on the fight against the Communists as a moral cause; the military men were concerned about a future conflict with the USSR; and the churchmen embraced it as a struggle against the Antichrist in Asia.

  Chief among the group of important New Yorkers was H. H. Kung, who had been sent away from China in the summer of 1944, and T.V., who did not leave until May of 1949 and moved into the Kung home along with May-ling. T.V. set about making new friends to add to his wartime roster, even lowering himself to consort with Alfred Kohlberg, who was not his usual style. From his former days in Washington, he had a number of friends in Congress: Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, and William Knowland from California in the Senate; Walter Judd of Minnesota and Richard Nixon from California in the House—all men who had seemingly bought into the pro-Nationalist propaganda. But, according to informants quoted in FBI files, T.V. was even more “concern[ed] with speculation than with politics… speculating with ‘f
oreign funds’… imported… from Hong Kong” and converting his profits back into bonds sold on the Hong Kong market, thus avoiding U.S. income taxes.*

  One objective of the China Lobby, according to Reporter, was to remove Dean Acheson, who had succeeded Marshall as secretary of state in 1949. Acheson had done nothing detrimental to the Lobby, but the members of the group had misread his intentions and informed Chiang that the United States would continue to supply China with unlimited military aid. Since the lobbyists were wrong and needed a scapegoat, they settled on the new secretary of state, who, they said, was surrounded by Communists and fellow travelers in the State Department. Having gone this far down the slippery slope of accusation, it was an easy step to blaming the U.S. State Department for the CCP’s victories in China.

  “The persistent hope of these merry gentlemen,” said Luce’s biographer,† referring to the China Lobby, “was that America would go to war against Russia and Mao so that the Chiang people could ride comfortably back to power on the thermonuclear wings of World War III.” To back this up, the author cited a Chinese cable that read, “Our hope of a world war so as to rehabilitate our country is unpalatable to the [American] people.” He also described a formal dinner held at the Chinese Embassy, attended by Senators McCarthy, Bridges, and Knowland, all of whom rose and joined in a shouted toast: “Back to the mainland!”

  According to Reporter, however, money was “the most important and fascinating of the many fascinating characters in the China Lobby—a character capable of endless disguises.” During Madame Chiang’s sojourn in the United States, she arranged for more than $1 million‡ to be placed under the control of an entity called the National Resources Commission and dispensed to members of the Lobby. The National Resources Commission, which was meant to concern itself with the industrialization of Nationalist China, tended to veer off quite regularly into other areas. In 1948, it had hired William J. Goodwin, a man with prewar connections to men like Gerald L. K. Smith, who had been quoted in 1941 declaring his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Goodwin’s work was aided and abetted by the Luce magazines and the Calvinist Reader’s Digest. Goodwin had been put on an annual salary of $30,000* to handle public relations for the commission. He gave dinners for congressmen, estimating at one point that he had entertained something like a hundred senators and representatives a year, converting at least half of them into supporting aid for China. He also claimed that he “helped materially” to lay the groundwork for McCarthy’s attacks on the State Department, which started in February of 1950.

  The National Resources Commission apparently became involved in the case of the United Tanker Corporation, a company that had begun by chartering vessels to Soviet agencies for oil shipments. According to the Congressional Quarterly, a firm set up by the commission called the China Trading and Industrial Development Company, a “subsidiary” of the Nationalist government, had invested $2.5 million in United Tanker. During the Korean War, according to Reporter, “the C.T.I.D. itself… chartered ships to handle twenty-six cargoes to Red China.” Which led Reporter to the conclusion that the “same Nationalist government agency that was supplying funds to… attack Americans for the slightest contact with the Communist elements was itself carrying on a very profitable trade with Red China.”†

  As for the Bank of China, allegedly controlled by Kung, its New York branch hired a public relations firm, Allied Syndicates, founded by a man named David B. Charnay. Paid an annual retainer of $60,000, the firm was supposed to help prevent the United States from recognizing the Chinese Communist government and keep it from freezing the assets of the bank held in the United States, estimated to be “between one and three hundred million” dollars. Wedemeyer placed the amounts much higher: “Privately held foreign exchange assets [of the Chinese] are at least $600 million, and may total $1500 million.”‡ During 1949, the year that Madame Chiang was in the United States, a great deal of Nationalist money was said to have been stashed away in private, numbered accounts in case the worst should befall the Nationalist government.

  A sidebar to the story of the China Lobby involves May-ling’s nephew Louis Kung. Known as “the Major” or “the little fellow,” the Kungs’ second son had served as technical adviser to the office of the Chinese air force in Washington until he was appointed to the Chinese delegation to the United Nations. Meanwhile, according to Reporter, Kung worked primarily as “a courier or paymaster” for the Lobby. Said to be “a very good friend” of Charnay, he was apparently in and out of the offices of Allied Syndicates a great deal, particularly during the congressional campaign of 1950, when the Lobby had helped elect Nixon in his run against Helen Gahagan Douglas in California. Personally, Kung was known to spend money freely, “usually in the form of bills of a hundred dollars or larger,” and had homes in both New York and Washington. In 1955, Louis Kung went into the oil business in Texas, apparently made a lot of money and moved to Houston, where, according to an article about him in Texas Monthly, he lived “in the style of a Texas oil millionaire.” He married a movie actress, Debra Paget, had a son by her, and built a fabulous compound at a cost of $18 million. Located outside the city, Kung’s home consisted of a combined office-residence surrounded by an electric fence with an underground bomb shelter. Larger than Hitler’s bunker, it could accommodate a thousand people. Outside were two pagodas with typical Chinese blue tile roofs and concealed gun ports. After the death of the G-mo, Auntie May paid him and his wife a lengthy visit.

  BACK IN CHINA, Chiang and his right-wing supporters in the KMT continued to follow what the CIA explained as “the line that China is the outpost of the Third World War, and the Chinese civil war is not merely the suppression of an internal revolt but a national war against the forces of Soviet Communism.” The Legislative Yuan went even further, claiming that the United States was “largely responsible for China’s plight” because of the agreements made at Yalta, U.S. efforts to mediate between the KMT and CCP, and insufficient supplies of money and armaments. Therefore, U.S. military aid to the Nationalists was “an obligation.”

  The Nationalists offered Wedemeyer $5 million for his services as an adviser, but he refused, explaining that he “could get by financially,” and if the Chinese government had “such a large sum of money, private or public,” he suggested using it “for the welfare of the people in order to enhance the force against the Communists.” It was said that the idea of hiring Wedemeyer came from T.V., who, along with Ambassador Koo, was frantically searching for a way to counteract the information in a book formally titled United States Relations with China but known as the “White Paper,” which came out during the summer of 1949, while Madame Chiang was in the United States.* A 1,054-page tome issued by the State Department, the White Paper attempted to explain why the United States would not be responsible when China fell to the Communists. In doing this, it effectively countered Madame’s requests for more money by detailing how the generalissimo’s government had wasted $3 billion in U.S. aid between the end of World War II and the middle of 1948, and it explained the success of the Communists in terms of the incompetence and unpopularity of Chiang and his regime. In a prepared statement after the release of the document, Secretary of State Acheson said that the KMT “has been unable to rally its people and has been driven out of extensive and important portions of the country, despite very extensive assistance from the United States and advice from eminent American representatives which subsequent events proved to be sound,” thus contradicting the China Lobby, which claimed that Chiang Kai-shek was “more the victim of State Department ‘subversives’ than of his own weaknesses.” According to Truman, the conclusion was obvious: “We picked a bad horse,” he said.

  ON OCTOBER 1, 1949, Mao proclaimed the new Republic of China at a celebration in Peking† attended by Ching-ling. May-ling’s older sister had originally refused the invitation, saying that Peking was a sad place for her since the death of Dr. Sun, but her biographer Chang Jung explains that “the Chinese would never
accept an invitation [the] first time out of almost ritualistic politeness,” and that Ching-ling was “readily convinced” to change her mind by Madame Chou En-lai, who delivered a second invitation by hand. Met at the train station by Mao, Chou, Madame Chou, and other high officials, Ching-ling stood on the platform at Tiananmen Square with them for the inauguration. “It was a solemn, awe-inspiring ceremony,” she said. “… Today, Sun Yat-sen’s efforts at last bore fruit.”

  The day after the inauguation, the Soviet Union recognized Mao’s new Republic of China, and the day after that, the Nationalist government broke off diplomatic relations with Moscow. On October 4, Chiang flew to Taiwan. He did not stay long, and in the middle of November returned to Chungking—the newest temporary capital of his government. What he found there did not please him.

  General Li had left the day before, claiming that an old abdominal disorder had resurfaced. After ordering the release of some thousand Communists and Communist sympathizers, Li wrote Chiang saying he needed a checkup and maybe an operation. “Meanwhile,” he said, “I shall sound out the attitude of the U.S. Government towards China. In view of the grave situation, I shall come back in a short time to take up my responsibilities.” The acting president had left for Hong Kong on November 20, 1949. The generalissimo sent a delegation of four men to convince him to return with a doctor and any medical equipment he needed. But Li did not return. The Central Executive Committee of the KMT sent the delegation back for a second time, but Li said he was on his way to the United States, where he would request financial support for the government and would return to China in one month’s time. He left on December 5 and did not return to China until 1965, fifteen years later, when he was said to be suffering from cancer and wanted to come home to die. His return to Peking, according to FBI files at the time, “could be regarded as [a] propaganda coup for communists and Chinese communist authorities lost no time in quoting his denunciation of the United States.… Li is a rank opportunist, and it is believed he will disappear from sight after his ‘defection’ has been milked by the Chinese communists.”