Having It Both Ways

...In an equally tendentious manner, he argues that Mao agreed to a united front with the Kuomintang in the '30s only on orders from the Comintern, and suggests the Communist resistance to Japan was largely a matter of show...

...Chiang emerged from the ranks of Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and the shadowy Shanghai underworld almost simultaneously...

...Crozier's subtitle notwithstanding, the first full biography of this depressing figure remains to be written...

...obstructiveness...

...He concludes that the Generalissimo was "oblivious to the tragic realities of China...

...He palls because he lingered so long after his defeat, stubbornly denying it until his name became a synonym for transparent fraud...

...No serious historian today accepts that view...

...As it was, 50,000 U.S...

...Crozier glosses over these facts, writing instead of U.S...

...Having it both ways is Crozier's stock in trade...

...Henry Wallace is sent to Yenan, a place he never visited...

...And although capable of describing in a paragraph or two the well-known defects of the Generalissimo and his regime, Crozier gets more mileage out of the old China Lobby theme that the United States abandoned Chiang...

...In describing Chiang's visit to Moscow and his subsequent relations with the Kuomintang's Communist advisors, for instance, Crozier accepts at face value Chiang's assertion, made years after the fact, that his brief exposure to the Soviet system instantly turned him into a passionate anti-Communist...

...In addition, to augment the mounds of Lend Lease equipment Chiang had been careful not to waste against the Japanese, the Nationalists received nearly $1 billion worth of American military surplus after V-J Day...

...Relying on existing research, he does not know enough, finally, about Chiang or Chiang s China to weave an illuminating pattern...

...It is not only the occasional factual errors that shake the reader's confidence...

...Instead, though, nearly two years after Chiang's death and three decades after his debacle, we still recognize his rump regime as "the Republic of China" but the Generalissimo strikes us as less a figure of history than a subject for an exorcism...

...A former writer for the Economist and a biographer of Franco and de Gaulle, he obviously is drawn toward national father figures in military garb...

...But his essential weaknesses show here, too, and the narrative rapidly degenerates into an opinionated and sometimes incompetent rehashing of old issues that are by now the subject of a mountainous scholarly literature...

...One would like to report that Brian Crozier has written that book, especially since years will undoubtedly pass before we get another life of Chiang...

...Had the plane that carried him to Taiwan from Szechuan in 1949 crashed, we might by now have worked up a little curiosity about him...

...A truly good biography of Chiang Kai-shek would be an extraordinary tale of intrigue, recreating prewar China in all its decadence, misery and turbulent hope...

...That failure is still with us...

...Had they been as wrongheaded as Crozier thinks they should have been?and as he continues to be—Chiang would still have lost...

...He traveled to Moscow in 1923, a quarter of a century before Mao Tse-tung ever did, and was favorably enough impressed to send his eldest son there for higher education and indoctrination...

...Yet even as a despot he was unsatisfactory: He could be ruthless and brutal, but he was hardly one of the great tyrants of his era...

...Crozier attempts to make up for his admitted lack of scholarly preparation and his inability to examine primary Chinese sources in two ways...

...The single American effort that might conceivably have saved Chiang was a full-scale commitment of forces...

...American diplomats are castigated with the virulence of a McCarthy-era witch hunter, but the reporting of the same diplomats is termed "realistic and prescient...

...Having it both ways to the last, Crozier does not vindicate Chiang...

...The first is nothing more than curious...

...In China, he allied himself by marriage to the wealthy Soongs...

...It has become merely embarrassing to recall his beatification during World War II as the stalwart leader of "Free Asia," and his artificial installation after the War as one of the "Big Four...

...It would be Man's Fate viewed from the top of the whole rickety structure...

...The Man Who Lost China neglects to answer—and often does not raise—the questions any reasonably informed person might bring to a biography of Chiang Kai-shek...

...He was concerned with his own power and with those who could enhance it...

...It involves his "collaboration" with a Chinese journalist, Eric Chou, who appears to have provided a number of remarkably pointless anecdotes, some old interview notes of dubious relevance, and much ancient gossip that is no better for age...

...Crozier completely fails to discern the obvious and instructive parallels between Chiang's early dealings with the Soviets and his subsequent links with the U.S...

...Crozier does not lack interesting material...

...Perhaps because we know so well what Chiang was not, it takes an act of will to recognize what he was, to begin to understand his ability to sustain his fictions as long as he did...

...Chiang fails to entice neither because he lost nor because his loss now appears to have been inevitable...

...The truth Crozier cannot accept is that, as well as being more far-seeing than Chiang, Mao was a more genuine and passionate Nationalist...

...For Chiang was always less than he both pretended and seemed to be...

...Historians can be as easily seduced by success as other scribblers can, and Chiang was certainly one of the century's great losers, but that is no adequate explanation—after all, Trotsky and Robert E. Lee will never want for biographers...

...It is Crozier's slipshod, frequently mindless handling of the literature that leaves the impression his interpretation has been shaped at every turn by the last book he held in his hands...

...Tom Mann, an early British Communist, becomes, amusingly, "the German Thomas Mann...

...It was Soviet help," he declares, "that was decisive in tipping the scales on Mao's side, while Chiang was deprived of corresponding assistance...

...State Department to propagate the idea that "Chinese Communists were not really Communists at all, but agrarian reformers...

...Crozier's second way of compensating is less innocuous and raises doubts about his judgment and seriousness of purpose, because it consists of extensive uncritical use of hagiographic Nationalist writings he knows to be unreliable...

...There is a certain quaintness in the reappearance of these old slogans in a book published in 1976...

...Chiang's failure to resist the Japanese in Manchuria is said at one point to have been his "greatest error" and "a decision which in the end sealed his own fate," yet 22 pages later it is proof of his "self-discipline and determination...

...Reviewed by Joseph Lelyveld Washington correspondent, New York Times It is worth a moment's reflection as to why it has taken so long for someone not directly in the pay of the Chinese Nationalists to undertake a biography of that foolish, sad, pasteboard hero, Chiang Kai-shek...

...He found relief from warlord politics by dabbing in fascism, Christianity, and Confucianism...

...But that should have been his point of departure...

...On at least two occasions he accepts from Kuomintang sources versions of Communist documents that are almost certainly forgeries...

...The American diplomats realized this was not necessarily the case, and we have since learned that they were right...

...Marines did land in China to execute the surrender of Japanese forces—turning over their weapons to the Kuomintang—while, at the same time, American planes and ships rushed a half-million Nationalist troops to Northern cities the Japanese had occupied...

...But Crozier simply dangles them...

...The issue was never whether Mao was a Communist...

...Any study of Chiang must be an examination of the difference between appearance and reality...

...Using Nationalist sources, Crozier also writes offhandedly of "supporters of the Soviet Union in Washington...

...Unfortunately, he has not...

...The failure of the Americans in China was not their inability to shape the outcome of the Civil War, but their unwillingness to let go of the prideful illusion that they could do so...

...the real issue was whether, as a Communist, he was subservient to Stalin...

...There is little evidence, however, that the Nationalist was ever seriously interested in ideology of any kind...

...The reader waits with anticipation to see what will be made of these mostly familiar threads of Chiang's life...

...In Crozier's crude and schematic view, an essential element of Mao's victory was the ability of the Comintern's "conscious or unconscious allies" in the U.S...

...In this case, he has diligently perused most of the relevant works in English, augmenting his reading with interviews of senescent Nationalists...

...Understandably, Crozier's account of the Chinese Civil War ultimately overwhelms his intention to write a complete biography...