The move to Taiwan had not changed Chiang’s favorite kind of work-day. Rising at daybreak, he finished exercising and dressing by 7:00 A.M., while May-ling, according to the family doctor, often stayed in bed until 11:00 A.M. “Chiang and Madame Chiang,” he said, “had entirely different lifestyles. He went to bed at nine or ten and got up at six, while Madame never went to sleep before one or two in the morning.… Both of them moved quietly in order not to disturb the other.” Chiang breakfasted on rice, pickled vegetables, and cold water and read his reports until noon. With General Li still absent in the United States, the generalissimo had taken over his responsibilities, and the two or three aides with whom he had started his exile soon increased to around twenty. They prepared folders containing information they thought he should have and deposited them on his desk at precisely 9:00 A.M. Around 11:00, officials began arriving for conferences. Some stayed for a simple lunch, which Madame attended if she was interested in the subject or the people.
The afternoon schedule, a virtual repetition of the morning, started for Chiang with a short nap and proceeded to the reading of newspapers, dispatches and more conferences. He usually took a fast walk with his wife or an aide at 4:30, which was followed by tea and more work until 7:00 P.M., prayers, and dinner. When she returned, May-ling ordered one foreign meal each day “because,” she explained, “he eats too fast.” Non-Chinese meals, served one course at a time, forced the G-mo to slow down, and according to his wife, who was interviewed the month after her arrival, “his health is much improved.” Evenings were spent working or watching movies, and the generalissimo’s day ended with a hot sulfur-spring bath and a daily entry in his diary.
May-ling’s return, however, made a significant difference in Chiang’s mode of life. Whether it was the fact that she had been in the United States for more than a year, subject to the slurs cast on her husband, or whether she realized just how aloof and distant he kept himself vis-à-vis the islanders, she set him firmly on a course of consultation and reform almost from the moment she arrived. A week after her return, The New York Times noted that “Mme. Chiang Kai-shek appealed today to the United States to send military and technical advisers to Formosa to aid the Nationalists’ fight against communism,” adding that she had emphasized that the Taiwanese were not asking for armed troops. “I know the American people do not want to go to war. Nobody wants American troops here. China does not want American soldiers.… We have enough manpower.” Having “made that clear,” May-ling told American reporters at a press conference, “Your Government says it is fighting communism. So are we. So why don’t they send somebody to help us do it?… a United States military mission could give needed help in technical advice such as communications, transportation and radio development.… It should not be necessary to have to ask someone who is a real friend for help. If they are your friends that would be unnecessary.”
May-ling then tackled reform. On January 22, United Press reported that “Mme. Chiang Kai-shek ordered an immediate investigation of army payrolls today after hearing that soldiers wounded in battle were not being paid.” The article went on to explain that after touring two military hospitals and speaking with some four hundred men, May-ling discovered that they were no longer receiving their pay. One soldier, blinded in battle, said that he had received no money for two months. The G-mo’s wife took the number of his unit and told an aide to investigate. “I’ll see that you get paid,” she promised him. But in spite of her efforts, there was notable unrest among Taiwanese conscripts, as well as hunger strikes. The government ordered an investigation into charges of bad food, clothing, housing, and sanitation, but at the same time did not hesitate to arrest some of the demonstrators.
Ten days later Madame visited the island of Quemoy, where Chiang had stationed Nationalist troops. “Quemoy” means “Golden Gate,” according to a reporter from The New York Times, who could not resist noting that it would be a “golden gate for the Communist invasion of Formosa.” May-ling flew there with cigarettes, food, and New Testaments to “offer aid and encouragement” to the soldiers. She arrived in one of two planes, the second of which carried sixteen newsmen. The islanders asked for more and better food, modern communications equipment, and books to read. The generalissimo, she told them, was “acutely conscious” of their supply problems and worried about them, so much so that he was having trouble sleeping. She said that her stay in the United States had been “the most painful experience of her life” because it was being said everywhere that the Nationalist soldiers would not fight. “You have fought. You have fought superlatively well,” she told them. As expected, her question “Will you fight again?” was met with a roaring “Yes!”
Moreover, according to a New York Times journalist based in Hong Kong, it seemed “pretty well established that… more frequent and effective Nationalist air raids on coastal cities didn’t coincide accidentally with Mme. Chiang Kai-shek’s return from the United States.” These raids, which started in March of 1950, partially crippled “every important city” by bombing its utilities, while the Nationalist navy choked off a good bit of trade by blocking the sea-lanes near Shanghai.
Nevertheless, the arrival of their former leader and his wife had not thrilled the Taiwanese, who expected nothing from them and would have preferred being left alone rather than thrown into the center of conflict. The generalissimo still seemed distant to the man on the street, and wherever he went, he was accompanied by a fleet of black Cadillac limousines with guards posted on the roads. The number of these guards increased during his first few years in Taiwan, “not so much because the danger of assassination… increased,” according to Hahn, “as because most of the guards who served him on the mainland now have sons and nephews who need jobs.”
At this point, the population of Taiwan ranged between 10 and 11 million people. The G-mo’s military strength added up to around 800,000 well-trained soldiers, not quite 1,000 tanks, around 600 airplanes (some obsolete), and about 70 ships. Officials at the Pentagon predicted that Chiang and his followers would not last on the island for more than a year. But having learned his lesson in Manchuria, Chiang soon gave up all his other territory except the Pescadores and the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of Fukien. Four months after his withdrawal to Taiwan, Chiang ordered an evacuation of his troops from the island of Hainan as well.
On March 1, 1950, six weeks after May-ling’s return, Chiang formally reassumed the leadership of the national government. Having replaced the last governor of the island with the American-educated K. C. Wu, Chiang named George Yeh, another graduate of an American college (Amherst) his new foreign minister. Five of the top posts under Chiang were now held by men educated in the United States. The Madame was said to be her husband’s chief adviser on matters of diplomacy and Taiwan’s relationship with the United States, and she strongly supported men with this kind of background.
The following month May-ling established what she called the Chinese Women’s Anti-Communist Aggression League. Eventually known simply as the Women’s League, the group was, according to Hahn, “a volunteer organization, but there are few wives of Nationalist officials who would dare not volunteer.” Originally organized to help Nationalist soldiers by building housing for them and their families, the league enlisted wives of local business leaders, who prevailed upon their husbands to donate what was needed. In setting up her group, the G-mo’s wife succeeded in establishing an organization that far outlasted its original purpose, eventually becoming a major factor in many areas of charitable work on the island.
In her current position as executive secretary of the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, Emma Mills visited Taiwan in April of 1950 for a two-week inspection tour of medical and health care facilities on the island. While she was there, she spent time with May-ling, who was “very tired” and “going around in circles.” May-ling asked her old friend to stay on for an extra week to help.
Mills, who had once trained as a nurse, was clearly pleas
ed with what she found on the island. “When I left Peking 26 years ago,” she said on her return, “there was to all intents and purposes no Chinese medical profesion.… The Chinese soldier was a scarecrow, the camps a mess. This time… everything was neat and orderly.… The soldiers seemed to be in good physical condition, their uniforms fitted and they walked with their heads up and seemed to have a pride in their profession.”
Meanwhile, Premier Chen had started a “land rent reduction programme,” in which absentee landowners were required to sell their property to the state, which then sold it back to the landowners’ tenants with ten-year mortgages repayable in installments of 25 percent crop yield.* Landlords who lived on their farms were permitted to keep only two hectares of irrigated land or four of dry land. They were compensated in cash, land bonds, or stocks in publicly owned industry, thus transferring their financial base from agriculture to industry. The program was completed in two years, and by that time, nearly 80 percent of the arable land was owned by the tillers themselves. As one historian put it, “No blood was shed, in striking contrast to the land reform programme initiated in June 1950 by the Communist regime, which involved the physical liquidation of the landed gentry as a class.”
Governor Wu worked at liberalizing the administration, a daunting task pitting him against Chiang’s son Ching-kuo, who, in spite of his folksy appearance—he usually wore a baseball cap and turtleneck jacket—had launched what Kerr called a “policy of terror,” sprinkling secret police and security agents throughout the government. Their unannounced house searches and brutal interrogations, aimed at ferreting out Communist agents who had entered Taiwan with the Nationalist loyalists, naturally frightened the locals. But Ching-kuo’s biographer Jay Taylor explains that “the Gimo and his son were now focusing every possible resource” on preparing for a mass invasion from the mainland and that the “secret police thus began to concentrate almost entirely on uncovering CCP agents who had come to Taiwan during the chaotic influx of the previous year. In the first half of 1950 the security network broke 300 alleged Communist spy cases, involving more than 3,000 people.” Taylor says that CIA reports “indicated that Mao’s intelligence units were in fact concentrating heavily on infiltrating the Nationalist military,” and as examples of CCP plants, he cites the vice minister of national defense and the chief of army supply services. As in most dictatorial states, Taiwan soon became riddled with informers.†
For Communists who escaped prison and execution, Ching-kuo set up a reeducation school on Green Island off the east coast of Taiwan. With no fixed terms, the “students” were freed as their minds were cleansed and their thinking reformed—a process “often encouraged by torture.” Ching-kuo, who claimed that 95 percent were eventually repatriated to Taiwan, was asked what happened to the others. “Oh, we don’t hurt them,” he answered. “We give them a boat, food supplies and a radio, and send them back to the Chinese mainland. After three or four days, we start sending radio messages to them asking: ‘When are you going to report?’ And the Communists take care of them.”
On March 1, 1950, the day Chiang Kai-shek reassumed his leadership of the government, the Communist commander-in-chief, General Chu Teh, had told members of the Taiwan Liberation League in Peking that the “elimination of the Chiang Kai-shek regime from Taiwan has become the most pressing task of the whole country.” Chu said that he and the other Communist leaders were putting together a great army for the invasion. Certainly, there would have been nothing that Chiang could have done to survive a major assault. Fortunately for him, however, Mao’s outspoken hostility to the United States, plus the advent of the Korean War, combined to save his regime.
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Even Chiang Kai-shek is opposed to the so-called two Chinas, and he is also opposed to the one China and an independent entity of Taiwan… on this question we share a common point of view. There can be only one China. That is a fact, and a way can be found.
—CHOU EN-LAI, 1971
AS IT had during World War II, Chiang’s security still depended on the Americans, who, after years of supporting him, his family, and his government, had finally become disillusioned. Moreover, the day after Truman announced that the United States would steer clear of involvement in Taiwanese affairs, the British, worried about Hong Kong and anxious to restart trade with the mainland, recognized the Chinese Communist government— a move that led the generalissimo’s wife to brand them “moral weaklings” for “forsaking us.” But Crozier tells us that “the Americans were in a mood” to do the same thing, and according to James Chace,* Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted to drop Chiang, recognize Communist China, and wean it “away from a Soviet alliance.” Fortunately for the G-mo, the Chinese Communists had made some major blunders that forstalled the secretary’s plan.
Not only had Mao issued a statement in July of 1949 saying that China would look with friendly eyes on the Soviet Union, but during the occupation of Nanking, ten or twelve soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army had barged into the home of U.S. Ambassador Stuart. It was a little before 6:30 A.M., and Stuart was still in bed (he was reportedly ill at the time). “I shouted at them, asking what they were doing, and they withdrew, one or two muttering angrily,” he related. “I jumped out of bed to see what it was all about, when the whole group… returned, and the spokesman quite politely explained that they were only looking around for fun and meant no harm… finding me none too cordial [he] led the others out.”
According to Stuart, “the incident had a very simple explanation”: these were “country boys,” who knew nothing about diplomatic immunity, roaming the capital. “They had been dosed with unassimilated notions as shown in the comment one of them made to a servant to the effect that all of this belonged to the people of China anyhow.… But the State Department took it very seriously and instructed me to make an emphatic protest both in Peiping and in Nanking.” Word later reached Stuart that Communist officials in both cities were “mortified”—a comment “borne out by the lack of any reference to it in their publicity which as a rule unscrupulously denounces the other side as the best defense.” Nevertheless, the CCP never bothered to apologize for the diplomatic gaffe. Worse, on January 13, 1950, Chinese Communists took over the American consular office in the capital and, in another incident on the same day, arrested the American consul general in Mukden, Angus Ward, jailing him for four weeks on specious charges. Word of these events set off a wave of concern in the United States, and the day after Ward was arrested, the State Department recalled 135 consular officers and their families from Peking, Tientsin, Nanking, Shanghai, and Tsingtao.
News like this cheered the China Lobby, and, urged on by his fellow lobbyists, Senator Knowland convinced Acheson of the need for continued economic aid to Taiwan—a program that was nearly derailed by an article in the New York Journal-American questioning “whether the American taxpayer should dig deeper into his pockets when high-ranking Nationalists, who have escaped from China and now are in the United States, could help the cause themselves. It is reported in reliable quarters that T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung, wealthy former Chinese finance ministers… have more than a billion dollars on deposit in this country… in various banks on the East and West coasts, either in the form of cash or gilt-edged securities.”
If so, where was the money? Truman had asked the FBI for information about Soong’s and Kung’s holdings almost exactly a year earlier, and Director Hoover had sent out a memo to be given “preferred and expeditious attention… to immediately determine extent of domestic bank accounts of captioned individuals as well as industries, corporations or enterprises under their control.… Every possible lead to secure the information should be pursued.” Inquiries had been sent out to banks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, even Seattle and New Orleans—with no results—and Senator Knowland had read letters into the Congressional Record from both Soong and Kung, giving their permission to allow an investigation into their holdin
gs in the United States, thus killing the story. Still, as May-ling had discovered on her last trip to the United States, Truman did not intend to continue his predecessor’s support of the Chiang regime. This came about only when North Korea crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel to invade South Korea, thus starting a war that Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times called “the biggest piece of luck Chiang Kai-shek… had in his 30-year losing streak.”
POSTWAR ATTEMPTS TO establish a unified government in Korea, which had been placed under U.S. and Soviet occupation during the Potsdam Conference in 1945, had failed, and the country was still divided into the agricultural South, occupied by American troops, and the industrial North, occupied by the USSR, when the North Korean army, trained and equipped for battle by the Russians, invaded the South on June 25, 1950. Two days later, Truman ordered the U.S. military to help the South Koreans. Taiwan, he said, should remain neutral during the conflict, and he ordered the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait, thus preventing the generalissimo from launching operations against the mainland and vice versa. This saved Chiang from 15,000 Communist troops readying themselves on the opposite shore to invade his island—an assault that had so worried the G-mo’s family that Ching-kuo had already made provisional asylum arrangements for his father in the Philippines.
Three days after Truman named him commander in chief of the U.N. forces in Korea, General MacArthur took it upon himself to fly to Taipei to demonstrate the importance of Taiwan in the war. As Time put it, neither the president, the State Department, nor the Pentagon knew anything about the trip until “they looked in their newspapers and read of diplomatic gallantries between MacArthur and Mme. Chiang [he kissed her hand in greeting] and fervid comrades-in-arms exchanges between MacArthur and the Generalissimo.” (In a “historic blunder,” MacArthur had first grabbed hold of Premier Chen Cheng, whom he kissed on both cheeks, saying “I have been waiting all my life for this moment,” while Chiang Kai-shek, clearly miffed by not being recognized, looked on.) While MacArthur was there, the G-mo, prompted by his foreign minister, George Yeh, proposed sending 33,000 Chinese soldiers to augment the U.N. force, and, although MacArthur advised his government to accept Chiang’s offer, it was refused.* Washington did, however, recommend that the United States resume military aid to the Nationalists on the grounds that Taiwan was now strategically important and its defenses must be improved. But Truman, who was “most anxious that Chiang Kai-shek not become involved with us,” sent Harriman to warn MacArthur to keep his distance from the G-mo in future and not get the United States into a war with mainland China.
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