The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  After his new appointment, Ching-kuo had moved his family into a larger home, cut down on his drinking, and, some say, even stopped his affairs with other women. There was still nothing in his mode of living to suggest luxury or grandeur. The fruit in his home was almost always rotten, because Ching-kuo ate the old fruit first, leaving the fresh produce to spoil. He had a cook who was forced to take a second part-time job because he received so little salary. A diabetic, Chiang’s son ignored all the rules against eating sweets and getting checkups. To avoid the appearance of impropriety or profiteering from his position, he did not allow his sons to enter private business—an obvious reaction to the accusations that continued to dog his father’s relatives by marriage.* At both Thanksgiving and Christmas May-ling continued to entertain the family, its offspring, and the Young Marshal with his longtime mistress, whom he had married after converting to Christianity.

  Madame Chiang had never lost her fondness for children—nor her unhappiness at not having produced any of her own. “She was devastated,” according to her nephew Leo Soong. “She said she had had some problem. She was always talking about a doctor in Nanking or Chungking who ‘essentially sterilized her’ in an operation. She loved children, and I know she wanted to have children.” Faced with reality, however, May-ling managed to find solace in her nieces and nephews—whether it was the older Kung offspring, who provided her with assistance in daily life, or the younger children of her brother T.A., who spent summers with their aunt and to whom she wrote delightful letters, sprinkled with drawings substituted for words. “She was very playful, we had a very good time with her,” Leo said.

  Not all May-ling’s family relationships were so easy. K. C. Wu claimed that Madame and her stepson Ching-kuo were “continually at loggerheads with each other.” Dr. Wu said that Madame Chiang had always been “very nice to me and my wife personally. But I think the real reason that she supported me… was that she knew that I did not agree with Ching-kuo in the matter of political policies.” In a letter to T.V., May-ling complained that on one of Ching-kuo’s early trips to the United States, he had neglected to toast President Kennedy or even stand up to speak, thus preventing his host from offering any toasts and Dean Rusk from giving the speech he had prepared for the evening. “Such a breach of protocol is really unheard of,” she claimed. Although Chiang Kai-shek had continued to try to bring his wife and son together, his efforts were offset by Jeanette Kung, who had enormous influence over Auntie May and never agreed with Ching-kuo about anything. A noticable improvement, however, had taken place in the stepmother-son relationship in 1949, when they were both worried about Chiang Kai-shek’s surviving the victory of the Communists. At the time, May-ling was in the United States looking for support, and through frequent cables back and forth, some sort of understanding had been established between them.

  Although Chiang’s adopted son, Ching Wei-kuo, attended family functions with his second wife, he had virtually disappeared from the political scene. Wei-kuo’s first wife had died after a miscarriage, and in 1957 he married Ellen Cui, who was half Chinese and half German. Named to the operations bureau in the Ministry of Defense, Wei-kuo worked there briefly before being sent to the United States to attend the U.S. Army Air Defense School. He was given little or no responsibility on his return, and his career came to a sudden, dramatic halt with the appointment of General Chao Chih-hua as his successor as commander of the 1st Armored Division. General Chao, a former prisoner of the Communists whose loyalty Wei-kuo had guaranteed, scuttled Wei-kuo’s chances for military or political advancement by assembling the troops of the armored division and announcing that they were to drive their tanks to Taipei and take over the government. The G-mo, Chao claimed, was not working vigorously enough against the Chinese Communists. The soldiers—there were several thousand of them—were apparently shocked into inaction, but a senior political officer climbed up on the platform, grabbed hold of Chao, and threw him to the floor, thus ending his “two-minute coup.” Chao’s action led to nothing but the destruction of Wei-kuo’s position with his stepfather and the hierarchy of the KMT.

  Oddly enough, Wei-kuo had better rapport with the Taiwanese than Ching-kuo did, partially because he was “a conventional military officer,” a joiner (the Elks, the Rotary Club, the Masons), and an “effective public speaker.” Wei-kuo’s wife also got along better with Madame Chiang than the wife of Ching-kuo. She liked fashion as much as May-ling, who was proud of her figure—“Look, Dr. Xiong,” she told Chiang’s personal physician, “I can wear my clothes from thirty years ago!”—and the two ladies continued to discuss clothing and hairstyles well after May-ling reached her seventies and eighties.

  While Wei-kuo’s political star eclipsed, Ching-kuo’s rose. In the spring of 1965, President Johnson sent the first American fighting troops into combat in Vietnam.* While Madame Chiang was quoted praising the American president for taking “such a firm stand,” and Chiang was insisting yet again that the time to attack the mainland was “now or never,” Ching-kuo remained attached to reality. “While the Nationalist Government must nourish the hope of returning to the mainland in order to sustain morale on the island of Taiwan,” he said, “the key men of my generation realize that it may be a long time before a non-Communist regime can be re-established in Mainland China—perhaps not in their lifetimes… the young generation of leaders… feel their primary aim… and strategy should be to maintain an intimate and cooperative understanding with the United States and to support U.S. policy in East Asia.”

  On March 22, 1966, Seymour Topping of The New York Times wrote from Taipei that Chiang had not only won a fourth term in office but had been given the power to bypass the Legislative Yuan and rule by executive decree. The rationale for this was that the generalissimo needed new powers to suppress “the Communist rebellion.” Since these powers had been granted to him nearly twenty years earlier, the real reason behind the vote was an attempt to control the succession after his death. To guarantee Chiang’s wishes, C. K. Yen, the sixty-one-year-old premier, who had played a large role in Taiwan’s economic success, was elected vice president because Ching-kuo, Chiang’s chosen successor, was only fifty-six at the time, too young by Chinese standards to take over if his father died during his six-year term. C. K. Yen notwithstanding, there were now just two men who counted in Taiwan: Chiang Kai-shek, because he employed the actors, and Chiang Ching-kuo, because he controlled the arm of the government that ferreted out and negated anyone whom the government even suspected of disagreeing with its policy or methods.

  The Chinese Nationalist government also began buying U.S. naval vessels and airplanes to increase its forces. Up until then, the Taiwanese navy was estimated to be capable of transporting little more than one division of soldiers across the strait, but with the new vessels it could get two battalions and an airborne regiment over the one hundred miles of ocean. Chiang had convinced himself that a combination of the Cultural Revolution, which started in April 1966, and the escalation of the Vietnam War (there were currently some 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground) would yield new opportunities for an assault, and he was currently spending $2.00 on the Nationalist military for every $1.00 received from the United States.

  By late 1966, when May-ling returned to Taiwan from the United States, the infamous Red Guards were on the rampage on the mainland. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution initially encouraged the G-mo, who announced that the Nationalist government would respond to a request for assistance from mainlanders within six hours. There were reports that sister Ching-ling’s home had been vandalized by the Guards, who had also desecrated a shrine dedicated to Sun Yat-sen and the graves of the “bourgeois” Soong parents.* Up until this point, it seems, Ching-ling had been insulated from the common privations of life behind the Iron Curtain. With two security men detailed to her house at all times, she had been free to do her social and charity work and supervise the hospital in Shanghai named after her. Now the Red Guards entered her home and t
hreatened to cut her hair down to the Communist-favored short bob. “If they cut my hair, I’ll cut theirs off,” she responded, referring to their heads. (She had promised her mother never to change her traditional style of a bun in the back.) In spite of this, May-ling’s sister remained remarkably tolerant of the Cultural Revolution until the day Mao sent his wife, Chiang Ching, to explain it to her. The leader of the Gang of Four “took a didactic tone” with Ching-ling, “praised the Red Guards to the skies,” and “turned sullen when Soong said there should be some check on their harming innocent people.” Later, in writing to a friend, the Soong family Communist referred to Chiang Ching as “that shameless slut.” Meanwhile, the Red Guards burned down the British Embassy in Peking and, claiming that Soviet “social imperialism” was as bad as “American imperialism,” began to harass diplomats from Russia.

  There was another aspect to this Sino-Soviet break, which had started some years earlier over border disputes and wound up in an all-out competition for the leadership of the Communist world. What worried the Taiwanese was an obvious and growing interest in Washington in establishing a relationship with Peking now that it was no longer allied to Moscow. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had begun talking about “containment without isolation” for China, saying that the goal of the United States should be to include it in the community of nations. The CIA decreased the size of its Taiwanese station, cut back on its support of Ching-kuo’s covert operations, and canceled several sorties aimed at the mainland. Even though the U-2 overflights continued, it was “apparent,” according to one observer, that the Amerian and Taiwanese secret services “began to watch each other as much as they cooperated.”

  It fell to Madame Chiang to make one last-ditch effort to rope the Americans into supporting the Nationalists’ plans for invading the mainland. Early in April, Senator Harry F. Byrd came to Taiwan and met with the G-mo, his wife, and his son. According to a report from the U.S. Embassy in Taipei, during their conversation Madame Chiang “made a major plea for U.S. supporting the GRC [Government of the Republic of China]’s return to the mainland. She said only U.S. logistic support was needed for the GRC to upset the Communist regime. She claimed that now is the moment to move.… She claimed that no American lives would be lost and only a moderate amount of logistic support was required since the populace on the mainland would turn on their Communist rulers when GRC support was at hand.” But Senator Byrd “strongly discouraged” Madame, explaining that “the American people were not prepared for the risks of such an undertaking. He said that the American people already had in Vietnam a deeper involvement in combat than they had anticipated and that they would be unwilling to make additional large scale military commitments, which he was convinced would be required.” In conclusion, he “complimented the Madame on her persuasive presentation,” saying that the United States would certainly support its defense treaty commitments but no more.

  Nevertheless, when former Vice President Nixon arrived in Taipei at the end of April 1967, he said he too got “something of a pitch concerning the mainland” from Chiang. The G-mo told Nixon he thought the United States “should carefully consider the case” for a Nationalist attack, to which Nixon replied that “it was unthinkable that the U.S. could underwrite” such a venture and that the United States “cannot possibly under present circumstances provide the needed support.” The future president—he would be elected the following year—pointed to the danger of the United States becoming involved in a “long and inconclusive war on the mainland” that the American people would never support, adding that such actions “might cause Peiping and Moscow to close ranks” against Taiwan and the United States. Nixon said he found the G-mo “in a cordial and animated mood” when they met over a three-hour lunch, at which they were joined by Madame Chiang, who interpreted and “occasionally” participated in the discussion. “It would have been impossible to find a better interpreter than the Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang,” Nixon commented. “In addition to her easy eloquence… she knew her husband’s thinking so thoroughly that she could interpolate accurately when an expression or term in one language had no precisely corresponding form in the other.… I believe Madame’s Chiang’s intelligence, persuasiveness, and moral force could have made her an important leader in her own right.”

  When Nixon took office in January 1969, he was known as a supporter of the Nationalist government, as well as a personal friend of the Chiangs and Madame’s nephew Louis Kung.* Nevertheless, the Chiangs were painfully aware that the new president of the United States had written an article two years earlier for Foreign Affairs magazine saying that other countries, especially the United States, must not allow mainland China to remain a pariah in the community of nations. According to Nixon, the time had come for the United States to look beyond the war in Vietnam. “Asia, not Europe or Latin America,” he said, “will pose the greatest danger of a confrontation which could escalate into World War III.… we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.… The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim… should be to induce change.… For the short run… this means a policy of firm restraint.… For the long run, it means pulling China back into the world community.”

  During his first year in office President Nixon outlined the Guam Doctrine (later called the Nixon Doctrine), in which it was stated that although the United States would continue to provide material and economic support to its friends and allies who were fighting the Communists, those friends and allies must assume the primary responsibility for their own defense. Shortly thereafter, he and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, began making small moves to ease tensions with the Chinese Communists, both for the reasons stated above and as one step toward ending the Vietnam War. By the end of the year, U.S. companies were allowed to trade “nonstrategic” goods with the People’s Republic of China, and the U.S. Seventh Fleet was no longer patrolling the strait between Taiwan and the mainland.

  Washington’s new, conciliatory attitude toward Communist China and a noticable breach between the United States and its Chinese Nationalist allies—the slippage was widening by the month—resulted in an official trip made by Ching-kuo in the spring of 1970 to determine what Nixon was planning vis-à-vis Peking. Described by the U.S. Embassy in Taipei as “a rather enigmatic figure” with a “quick grasp of economic problems” and “a vague egalitarianism and populist concern for the common man,” the G-mo’s son, recently named deputy premier by his father and now de facto leader of the Taiwanese, arrived in Washington. Unlike his stepmother-in-law, Ching-kuo received royal treatment: a room at Blair House, the official White House guest residence; an hour and a half with Nixon in the Oval Office; a private half hour with Kissinger, who was said to have walked across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House for that purpose; and meetings with the secretaries of state and defense. All these men assured Ching-kuo that their “exploratory” talks with the Chinese Communists would not affect U.S. friendship for Taiwan.

  But a few months later, in the fall of 1970, Washington proposed setting up a hotline with Peking, and for the first time President Nixon used the official name “People’s Republic of China” in referring to the government on the mainland. Responding to U.S. overtures, Mao informed delegates to the Central Committee meeting of the PRC that China’s most dangerous enemy was now the USSR and that his government and the United States had begun negotiations to reestablish relations between their two countries. Topping explained Peking’s enthusiasm for rapprochement this way: “Since the mid-sixties the Chinese Communists had been plagued by a nightmare of encirclement by the Soviet Union, India, Japan and the United States. In the months before the Nixon visit, the anxieties in Peking sharpened, and there was more preoccupation with the dangers, real or imagined, of the encirclement and dismemberment of China than with the quarrel over Taiwan.” Moreover, according to Chang and Halliday, Mao wanted an excuse “to re-launch himself on the international stage.”

/>   On April 6, 1971, in a happening that came to be known as Ping-Pong diplomacy, a young American Ping-Pong player walked over to speak with the Chinese team at a tournament in Japan. What was meant as an apolitical gesture of friendship was taken by the ever-subtle Chinese as an official indication of a desire for rapprochement. They reacted by inviting the American team to China, and four days later, nine players, two spouses, four officials, and ten reporters became the first Americans to officially set foot on the mainland since 1949. The trip included an exhibition match (the Americans lost), a visit to the Great Wall, a performance by the Canton Ballet, and a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, hosted by Premier Chou En-lai, who told his guests that they had “opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people.”

  In spite of this warming trend, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger kept their ongoing negotiations with the Chinese Communists under wraps. The president, who had first visited Taipei in 1953 and established a rapport with the Chiangs, was still concerned about the effect of his future trip on them, and during the first week in July he sent Don Kendall, the chairman of Pepsi-Cola, to Taiwan with an oral message for the G-mo: “Whatever the future may hold, I’ll never forget my old friend.”* Days later, on July 9, 1971, Kissinger made his secret trip to Peking to confer with Chou, performing what one Nixon biographer called “a verbal conjuring trick of consummate skill.” They agreed that the United States would acknowledge that Taiwan was a part of China and would begin to withdraw its military forces from Taiwan “as the tension in the area diminishes,” i.e., as the Chinese reduced their support for the North Vietnamese. Kissinger offered to support Communist China’s admission to the United Nations but said the United States would also support Taiwan’s effort to keep its seat in the organization. Half an hour before Kissinger’s secret departure from the mainland capital, Nixon went on the air to apprise the world of this astonishing rapprochement—news the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry received via the American ambassador. The next day the KMT and independent newspapers on the island complained that the Nationalists could no longer trust the United States, and the National Assembly accused President Nixon of “betrayal.” According to the China News Service, “This country is angry and justifiably so. President Nixon has treated us shabbily without cause. He has been less than frank with an ally. He is consorting with the enemy at a time when our United Nations seat is seriously challenged.”