Chiang
Kai-shek, the son of a wine merchant, was born in Fenghua, China,
on 31st October 1887. His father died when he was a child leaving
the family in extreme poverty. He was sent to live with relatives
but he ran away and joined the provincial army.
Chiang was a good soldier
and he was eventually sent to the military academy in Paoting. In
1907 he attended the Military State College in Tokyo. During this
period he became a supporter of Sun Yat-sen,
the leader of the Kuomintang (Nationalist
Party). During the 1911 revolution Chiang led a regiment that captured
Shanghai. After the counter-revolution that followed, Chiang returned
to Japan.
With the help of advisers
from the Soviet Union the Kuomintang gradually
increased its power in China. In 1924 Chiang became head of the Whampoa
Military Academy.
Sun
Yat-sen died on 12th March 1925. After a struggle with Wang Ching-Wei,
Chiang eventually emerged as the leader of the Kuomintang. He now
carried out a purge that eliminated the communists from the organization.
In 1926 Chiang commanded
the army which aimed to unify China. He
defeated the communist army and forced the survivors to make the famous
Long March to Shensi in North West China.
Chiang eventually established a government in Nanjing. Major financial
reforms were carried out and the education system and the road transport
were both improved. Chiang also established the New Life Movement
in 1934 which reasserted traditional Confucian values to combat communist
ideas.
When the Japanese
Army invaded the heartland of China in 1937, Chiang was
forced to move his capital from Nanking to Chungking. He lost control
of the coastal regions and most of the major cities to Japan. In an
effort to beat the Japanese he agreed to collaborate with Mao
Zedong and
his communist army.
After the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, Chiang and his government received considerable financial
support from the United States. General
Joseph Stilwell, head of
American Army Forces in China, Burma and India (CBI), disagreed
with this policy, arguing that Chiang was an inept leader and was
ignorant of the fundamentals of modern warfare. Stilwell was accused
of being pro-communist and in October 1944 Stilwell was recalled to
the United States and was replaced by General Albert
Wedemeyer.
During the Second
World War the communist guerrilla forces were well led by
Zhu De and Lin Biao.
As soon as the Japanese
surrendered, Communist forces began a war against the Nationalists.
The communists gradually gained control of the country and on 1st
October, 1949, Mao
Zedong announced
the establishment of People's Republic of China.
Chiang
and the remnants of his armed forces fled to Formosa (Taiwan). His
autobiography, Summing up at Seventy
, was published in 1957. Chiang
Kai-shek died on 5th April 1975.
(1)
Su
Kaiming, Modern China (1985)
After setting up his military
headquarters at Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, Chiang
Kai-shek considered himself strong enough to defy the authority of
the revolutionary Nationalist government at Wuhan, which was then
dominated by Kuomintang left-wingers (including Mme. Sun Yat-sen)
and Communists. In January 1927, he demanded that the government be
moved from Wuhan to Nanchang, where he was in complete control. In
reply, the central committee of the Kuomintang at Wuhan took away
his leading positions in the party, government and army in an attempt
to prevent him from seizing all power.
Bankers from Shanghai,
politicians representing various warlord governments and the agents
of foreign imperialists all converged on Nanchang to offer Chiang
their help. In secret talks he was promised a loan of 60,000,000 Chinese
dollars if he would break with the Communists and the Soviet Union
and suppress the peasants and workers. Chiang quickly agreed.
In the early hours of April
12, 1927, thousands of thugs from the underworld Green Gang came out
of the International Settlement disguised as workers to attack the
workers' armed militia. Pretending to oppose "internal dissension
among the workers", Chiang Kai-shek ordered his troops to disarm
the workers and occupy the headquarters of the General Trade Union,
where a spurious union composed of underworld figures was immediately
set up. Next day the Shanghai workers called a mass rally and demanded
the return of their weapons. Unaware that Chiang Kai-shek had turned
against the revolution, they went to the General Headquarters of the
Northern Expeditionary Army to present their petition, only to be
mowed down by machine-gun fire. The blood of hundreds of workers stained
the rain-washed streets of Shanghai red.
(2)
Qi
Wen, China (1979)
In 1923, the Chinese Communist
Party decided to establish a revolutionary united front. It helped
Sun Yat-sen reorganize the Kuomintang (the old Tong Meng Hui was reorganized
into the Kuomintang after the Revolution of 1911). With the formation
of the Kuomintang-Communist united front, the Chinese Communist Party
mobilized the masses on a broad scale, and the revolutionary situation
developed vigorously. It continued to rise after the death of Sun
Yat-sen in 1925. Organized and energized by the Party, the revolutionary
forces swept away the reactionary forces in Guangdong, and in 1926
the Northern Expeditionary War began. Supported by the masses, the
revolutionary army defeated the counter-revolutionary armies of the
Northern warlords and occupied central and south China. The worker-peasant
movement grew rapidly throughout the country.
Seeing that the warlord
regime they supported was tottering in the sweep of the revolutionary
tide, the imperialist forces hastily looked for new agents and finally
picked Chiang Kai-shek who had worked his way into the position of
Commander-in-Chief of the National Revolutionary Army". In April
1927, at a crucial moment in the forward advance of the Northern Expeditionary
War, Chiang staged, with the active support of the big bourgeoisie
and landlord class, a counterrevolutionary coup d'etat against the
Chinese Communist Party and the revolutionary people.
(3)
Zhong
Wenxian, Mao Zedong (1986)
In 1927, the right wing
of the Kuomintang controlled by Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei betrayed
the Kuomintang-Communist anti-imperialist and anti-feudal alliance
decided on by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and staged successive counter-revolutionary
coups which led to a complete break of Kuomintang-Communist cooperation.
On August 7 in Hankou an emergency meeting was called by the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The session put an end to
the Right capitulationism of Chen Duxiu and decided on an overall
policy of carrying out agrarian revolution and armed resistance against
the Kuomintang's campaign of organized slaughter, policies which were
designed to save the Chinese revolution at a critical moment. It was
at this meeting that Mao Zedong put forward the idea that political
power was to be seized with revolutionary armed force. This was of
great importance in bringing the. Chinese Communists to a correct
understanding of the characteristics and direction of the Chinese
revolution. Elected an alternate member on the Central Political Bureau
at the meeting, Mao Zedong was then sent back to Hunan by the Party
Central Committee. On September 9 he led the Autumn-Harvest Uprising
on the Hunan-Jiangxi border. Shortly after, he led the insurgent troops
up to the Jinggang Mountains, where he carried out an agrarian revolution
and set up China's first rural revolutionary base.
(4)
Mao
Zedong, interviewed by Edgar
Snow in Red Star Over China (1936)
In April the counter-revolutionary
movement had begun in Nanjing and Shanghai, and a general massacre
of organized workers had taken place under Chiang Kai-shek. The same
measures were carried out in Guangzhou. On May 21 the Xu Kexiang Uprising
occurred in Hunan. Scores of peasants and workers were killed by the
reactionaries. Shortly
afterward the 'Left' Kuomintang at Wuhan annulled its agreement with
the Communists and 'expelled' them from the Kuomintang and from a
Government which quickly ceased to exist.
Many Communist leaders
were now ordered by the Party to leave the country, go to Russia or
Shanghai or places of safety. I was ordered to go to Sichuan. I persuaded
Chen Duxiu to send me to Hunan instead, as secretary of the Provincial
Committee, but after ten days he ordered me hastily to return, accusing
me of organizing an uprising against Tang Shengzhi, then in command
at Wuhan. The affairs of the Party were now in a chaotic state. Nearly
everyone was opposed to. Chen Duxiu's leadership and his opportunist
line. The collapse of the entente at Wuhan soon afterward brought
about his downfall.
(5)
Zhou
Enlai, Mao Zedong (1978)
Reactionaries, including
Chiang Kai-shek, often claim that they are for freedom of thought.
As everybody knows, that
is nonsense, for what freedom is there under Chiang Kai-shek's rule?
The people are suffering oppression and exploitation. Only the small
handful of reactionary landlords and bureaucrat-capitalists are free
- free to exploit, oppress and slaughter the people. In the bourgeois-democratic
countries, only the bourgeoisie have freedom of thought, which is
denied to the workers and peasants. In our new-democratic country,
the people will enjoy full freedom of thought. Aside from reactionary
ideology, all other kinds will be allowed to exist. Not only progressive,
socialist or communist but also religious ideas may exist. The propagation
of reactionary ideas is not allowed, but apart from that, there is
freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association. The Communist
Party holds that historical materialism is correct and that Mao Zedong
Thought is correct. These ideas, of course, should be propagated.
But it does not mean that other ideologies are not allowed to exist.
We educate people in our ideology, but they are free to choose whether
to listen or not, whether to accept or not. This is the only approach
that is truly educational and appropriate to leadership - an approach
of working together with other people, a co-operative approach.
(6)
Anna Louise Strong, An Interview With Chairman Mao Zedong (1960)
In China a condition of
formal truce continued between Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist-led
forces but it was being frequently violated by Chiang, whose armed
assaults against the Communists had continued even during the Anti-Japanese
War. America's official position was that China should be unified
under Chiang, and that the Communists should give up their separate
armies and be legalized as a minority party. A truce had been signed
that was known as the Marshall Truce, because General George C. Marshall
also signed it and set up in Beijing an "Executive Headquarters,"
with participation of Chiang and the Chinese Communists under American
chairmanship. Its alleged purpose was to settle the armed clashes
that arose. For this purpose "truce teams" were set up in
almost forty cities of North and Northeast China, connected with Executive
Headquarters by American military planes.
Washington's purpose in
all this was to gain control of all China through treaties with Chiang
Kai-shek. They used the truce to transport Chiang's soldiers by ship
and plane into North and Northeast China, to places from which they
could most easily attack the Liberated Areas of the North. Their connections
by plane to forty Chinese cities were not controlled by any Chinese
supervision; they were able to photograph from their planes all China
as far as Qiqihar. The purpose of the American reactionaries was not
only to gain control of China's wealth, which they hoped to exploit
and grow rich on for another fifty years. But also, as revealed by
General Wedemeyer, they hoped for military bases in the Northeast
and in Xinjiang to use against the U.S.S.R.; they also expected the
use of millions of Chinese soldiers as cannon-fodder in this future
anti-Soviet war.
|
Generalissimo:
Following his acclaimed studies of the state of modem France and
how Hong Kong has changed since the 1997 handover, Jonathan Fenby
now turns his attention to one of the most interesting yet under-reported
figures of twentieth-century history. Chiang Kai-shek was the
man who lost China to the Communists. As leader of the nationalist
movement, the Kuomintang, Chiang established himself as head of
the government in Nanking in 1928. Yet although he laid claim
to power throughout the 1930s and was the only Chinese figure
of sufficient stature to attend a conference with Churchill and
Roosevelt during the Second World War, his desire for unity was
always thwarted by threats on two fronts. Between them, the Japanese
and the Communists succeeded in undermining Chiang's power-plays,
and after Hiroshima it was Mao Zedong who ended up victorious.(Jonathan
Fenby, The Free Press, ISBN 0 7432 3144 9, £25.00) |
Jonathan
Fenby, Generalissimo (Free Press)
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