Generalissimo

...That is why the thirteen days in December 1936 constituted a crucial moment of the twentieth century...

...The military campaign would succeed in unifying much of the country under the Kuomintang...

...The son of a wealthy salt merchant who died when he was nine, Chiang was attracted to the nationalistic teachings of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese republic that emerged in the wake of the demise of the last dynasty...

...Fenby also emphasizes the role played by Chiang's wife in ensuring that relations with Washington continued throughout the war...

...Whampoa was the training ground for the National Revolutionary Army, and it was here that Chiang developed a base of power, creating personal loyalty among those who would become his future commanders...

...When Soong Meiling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, died last October in New York at the age of 105, her obituaries barely acknowledged her husband, concentrating instead on her role in maintaining American support for China during World War II...

...It is a story rich with warlords, budding nationalism, frequently shifting military alliances, palace intrigue, corruption, betrayal, and, above all, death and destruction on a massive scale...

...Kung would both play pivotal roles in the Nationalist regime, primarily as financiers and conduits to international financial centers...

...It is not only in Taiwan that Chiang Kai-shek's memory has been obscured by the passage of time...

...Meiling's older brother T.V...

...In reality, although both sides were committed for purely pragmatic reasons to the country's unity during a time of great peril, "each side was still determined to eliminate the other in the long term...

...Chiang's personal sense of discipline and ability to focus on military imperatives kept him for the most part above the fray of palace politics, but the greed and corruption that accompanied them would weaken his ability to cope with the perpetual crises he faced...

...It also owed much to Chiang's control over China's largest city, the cosmopolitan and freewheeling Shanghai, where Chiang crushed a workers' insurrection in a bloody 1927 purge...

...For this first biography of the generalissimo in over a quarter century, the author has decided that the best way to understand Chiang is by concentrating on his pivotal role in the history of China from the fall of the last emperor to the ascendancy of Mao...

...But you'll find hardly any mention there of the man who dominated the party during the most critical half century in the history of modern China...

...The only explanation he gives for ending the book when he does is that the last quarter century of Chiang's life was markedly different from the previous one...

...It was there that Chiang developed his lifelong hostility to Communists, particularly after the Comintern spurned his mentor's request for direct assistance...

...BY DAVID LOWE On the website of the Kuo-mintang, Taiwan's leading opposition party,there's an entry labeled "A Brief History...

...The story of Chiang's constant bickering with his American chief of staff, Joseph Stillwell, is one many will find familiar, though Fen-by's placement of much of the blame for the Communist victory on Vinegar Joe himself contrasts with the popular historical accounts of Theodore White and Barbara Tuchman...

...Meiling had become Chiang's third wife toward the end of 1927 following his early Northern Expedition victories, when he realized that marrying into one of the wealthiest families of China and furthering his political ambitions was worth the relatively minor inconvenience of jettisoning his second wife...

...In a bizarre but successful effort to force the generalissimo (as he was known by then) to focus more attention on the invaders from the east, one of his own generals kidnapped Chiang in 1936 in what would come to be known as the "Xi'an incident...

...But survival, in each instance, was but a temporary achievement, with a new crisis always looming somewhere just over the horizon...

...For this, Fenby was able to call upon a wealth of sources, including archival materials unavailable to previous historians...

...That bold act earned him the gratitude of the city's business class, who would become a critical source of funding for his military campaigns...

...Fenby deftly presents the tangled relationships within the family, including the hostility to both Chiang and Meiling of her sister Qingling, Sun Yat-sen's leftist widow, who would eventually throw in her lot with the Communists...

...Fenby's major failing is his decision to end his narrative with the move to Taiwan following the Communists' victory...

...Five years earlier, Sun had sent his young protege to Moscow to develop links and to raise funds...

...But Communists were not the only threat to Chiang's regime...

...The success of the Northern Expedition owed much to deals Chiang cut with organized criminal gangs and with local warlords: unforgettable characters such as the Dogmeat General and Big-eared Du, Shanghai's drug boss, whose business interests would prosper through his longtime close alliance with Chiang...

...According to Fenby, David Lowe is the vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowmentfor Democracy...

...Weakened by the war as well as by corruption, hyperinflation, and internal division, Chiang's forces were little match for Mao's fanatical and well-disciplined cadres by the time the war was over...

...Chiang's relationship with Chinese Communists, who were then in an early stage of development under Mao, would dominate much of the next twenty years of his life...

...Surely that deserves discussion and remembering...

...Drawn to military training at an early age, Chiang was made commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou in 1924...

...Sun had founded the Kuom-intang on the principles of "Nationalism, Democracy, and the People's Livelihood...

...His failures to overcome his warlord foes—scattered across China's anarchic and highly fragmented provinces after the 1911 revolution—demonstrated the need for the nationalists to rely on military means to unite and modernize the country...

...policy resulted in the "loss" of China, but this overlooks such important factors as the impact of the Japanese invasion, Chiang's incompetence, and his inability to consolidate power even at the height of the Nationalists' success...

...Fenby allows this episode, which he recounts in dramatic detail, to serve as his prologue, not so much because it pitted China's leading military and political figure against a drug-addicted playboy he had once dismissed, but rather because its result— Chiang's agreement to form a united front with the Communists—resulted in one of history's great what-ifs: "Had the Xi'an incident not occurred, Mao might well not have survived to become Chiang's successor as ruler of China...

...In Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost, the British journalist and former South China Morning Post editor Jonathan Fenby attempts a new account of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic figures...

...A highly manipulative woman of immense personal charm who spoke English with the southern accent she acquired at a small Georgia college she attended before moving on to Wellesley, Meil-ing became a celebrity in the United States in the 1940s when she traveled the country in search of support for her husband's regime...

...Fenby devotes much attention to the war against Japan and the uneasy relationship it created with the United States...

...Succeeding Sun as leader of the party in 1925 following a power struggle, Chiang launched the Northern Expedition the next year, with the help of Soviet advisers provided by Stalin...

...Chiang was a unique kind of revolutionary whose republicanism was trumped by a Confucian authoritarianism that permeated his thinking...

...In 1949, his military fully collapsed, forcing Chiang to retreat to Taiwan, where he would spend the rest of his life...

...She addressed a joint session of Congress and was asked by President Roosevelt to join her husband at the Allied summit in Cairo in November 1943...

...Many Americans insisted that U.S...

...And perhaps it should be no surprise that a foreign leader who spoke no English and encouraged his American-educated wife to carry on international diplomacy with his most important ally remains a distant figure in the United States today...

...During the "Nanking Decade"—beginning in 1928, when much of China was unified under a Kuomintang government led by Chiang—he vowed to wipe out the nascent rural soviets and red armies...

...His Kuom-intang regime in Taiwan pulled off the difficult feat of a peaceful transition to liberalism, first economically under his rule and later politically under his son Chiang Ching-kuo—thereby helping set the stage for the first Chinese democracy...

...That Chiang himself was not a penetrating thinker is evident from the platitudes Fenby quotes from his personal diaries...

...World War II proved to be a highly destructive interlude in this war for China...

...Still, Jonathan Fenby's biography should help rescue the generalissimo from an undeserved obscurity...

...That the one time authoritarian ruler of Taiwan should be so delicately ignored by a party struggling to regain power in Taiwan's democratic presidential election this week is understandable...

...With all of his faults, Chiang Kai-shek helped forge a certain unity in a country previously weakened by banditry and foreign domination...

...Soong and her brother-in-law H.H...

...Was Chiang's twenty-five years of rule over the island not worth a single chapter...

...Throughout it all, Chiang managed to survive through a ruthless opportunism that exploited the factional divisions of his enemies and potential rivals...

...His efforts succeeded in forcing the Communists into their "long March" which, as Fenby points out, was largely a failure for Mao and his followers...

...In the early 1930s, Japan had begun to make inroads into northern China, occupying Manchuria and attacking Shanghai...

...You cannot trust a Communist," he wrote to his second wife Jennie, warning that the Soviets' purpose in sending military advisers to China was to gain a foothold over China's northern territory...