Jiang Jieshi

Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) (1887-1975) was the autocratic military leader of the Guomindang from 1925 following the death of Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen), and from 1928 until his death in 1975 was the paramount leader and (with brief interruptions) President of the Republic of China.

Early life

Jiang was born in the port city of Ningbo (Wade-Giles: Ningpo) in Zhejiang province in 1887, and like many educated and patriotically-minded youths in the dying days of the Qing dynasty chose to follow a military career. He studied at a military academy in Japan between 1908 and 1910, where Jiang joined the Tongmenghui (United League) - which was shortly to merge with other revolutionary groups to become the Guomindang or Nationalist Party. At the time of the 1911 revolution Jiang was based in Shanghai and at that time became involved with the local secret societies and gangs who were to aid him later in his career. During the 'Second Revolution' of 1913 (against the reactionary rule of Yuan Shikai) Jiang led an attack on the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai but the bungled operation was a disastrous failure and Jiang was forced to flee. He attached himself to the entourage of the Guomindang leader Sun Yat-sen and to the ramshackle Guomindang government which Sun set up in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou (Canton). When Sun concluded an alliance with the Comintern in 1923, brokered by the Soviet agent Adolph Joffe (the 'Sun-Joffe Agreement'), Jiang Jieshi was appointed commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy at Guangzhou, established with Soviet aid and with Soviet and other foreign communist advisers. The purpose of the Academy was to train a Nationalist army capable of uniting China under Guomindang rule.

Northern Expedition

As commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy, Jiang had to work closely with Soviet advisors and Chinese Communist Party officials (the Guomindang and the CCP had formed a 'united front' as a result of the Sun-Joffe Agreement, the CCP existing as 'bloc within' the Guomindang). Zhou Enlai (Wade-Giles: Chou En-lai) was a senior political commissar at the academy. However, Jiang was very suspicious of his Communist allies. Following the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, Jiang became the most powerful individual Guomindang leader, and on March 11 1926 launched a limited purge of communists in Guangzhou (the so-called 'Canton Coup'), as a result of which all his Soviet advisors were expelled. However, he did not dissolve the united front, and the CCP, under orders from Moscow, also continued to maintain the status quo.

On July 1, 1926, Jiang launched the Northern Expedition. Guomindang armies marched north from Guangzhou in a bid to free China from the warring warlord factions which had been the sole fluctuating authority in the country since the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916, and to unify the country under Guomindang rule. However, Jiang was aided by the 'Guangxi Clique' of nationally-minded warlords; and the northern progress of the expedition was aided by carefully-timed popular uprisings planned by the CCP against local warlords. By September 1926 the Guomindang had captured Wuhan on the middle Yangtse, and a Guomindang government was established there. Instead of continuing to press north, Jiang turned east and in March 1927 occupied Nanjing, which was to become the Nationalist's capital city, and Shanghai.

On April 12, 1927 Jiang again turned on the communists in the 'Shanghai Coup'. Aided by the police of the International Settlement and the French Concession in the city, and by gunmen of the influential 'Green Gang' criminal network, Jiang's troops and police rounded up and executed hundred of communists and trade unionists; in the weeks to come thousands more communists and other left-wingers were killed. The Guomindang government at Wuhan, led by Sun Yat-sen's widow Song Qingling and by Wang Jingwei initially protested at Jiang's actions but by the autumn of 1927 they, too, dissolved the united front. Jiang was now the undisputed leader of the Guomindang and the most powerful man in China. In 1928 two northern warlords, Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang, pledged their loyalty to him, and Yan's troops drove the last major warlord opponent, Zhang Zuolin, out of Beijing. The Northern Expedition was over, and Jiang was master of China.

President of the Republic of China

The period of the 'Nanjing Republic' (1928-37) was too short and too troubled to enable a full assessment of what established Guomindang rule might have brought China. Jiang was faced by a series of serious internal and external problems:

• Although President of China, his direct rule only extended to the lower Yangtse provinces; the rest of China continued to be ruled by warlords expressing greater or lesser degrees of loyalty to Jiang. In 1929-30 his erstwhile allies Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan rebelled against him and his rule was saved by the intervention of Zhang Xueliang.
• The communists, defeated in April 1927 and in a number of ill-planned urban uprisings later that year, had regrouped in the countryside and established a number of 'base areas' (most notably that of Mao Zedong in southern Jiangxi province). These bases were expanding, and efforts to eliminate the Jiangxi Soviet in a series of 'encirclement campaigns' in the early 1930s had failed. The fifth encirclement campaign of 1933-34 succeeded in destroying the Jiangxi base, but not the communist Red Army, which broke thorough government lines and embarked on the Long March.
• China was increasingly threatened by Japanese expansionism in this period. Jiang had backed down from confrontation with Japan during the 1928 Jinan incident; he forbade resistance to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. In 1932 the armed resistance in Shanghai to Japanese aggression took place against his orders; in 1933 he acquiesced in the Japanese occupation of Rehe. While Jiang expressed the view that 'communism was a disease of the internal organs, the Japanese a disease of the skin', and that to build a strong China it was necessary to defeat communism first, to an increasing number of Chinese his attitude appeared capitulationist and unpatriotic.
• Jiang became increasingly distanced from the Guomindang and increasingly autocratic. He became reliant on a small clique of wealthy supporters, particularly the Song (Soong)family, into which he had married (his wife, Song Meiling (1897-2003), was the sister of Sun Yat-sen's leftist widow, Song Qingling (1892-1981)). One brother in law, T.V. Soong, was his Finance Minister. In 1932 Jiang founded a quasi-fascistic 'Blue Shirts' organisation, and in 1934 Jiang launched the 'New Life Movement', emulating fascist developments in Italy and Germany. this sought to make China strong by stressing traditional virtues, banning spitting, and so on; in the face of Japanese aggression and rampant corruption it seemed a ludicrous distraction and was widely derided where it was not ignored.

The Xi'an Incident and the Second United Front

In December 1936, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, two KMT generals, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an. This has since been referred to as the Xi’an Incident.

At the beginning of the incident, the leaders of the CCP wanted to kill Chiang Kai-shek, At that time, the CCP had a very weak base in northern Shaanxi province, and had been in danger of being completely eliminated in a single battle. The CCP instigated Zhang and Yang to revolt.

In order to pin down the Japanese and prevent them from attacking the Soviet Union, Stalin personally wrote to the Central Committee of the CCP, asking them not to kill Chiang Kai-shek, but to cooperate with him for a second time. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai realized that they could not destroy the KMT with the limited strength of the CCP; if they killed Chiang Kai-shek, they would be defeated and even eliminated by the avenging KMT army. The CCP changed its tone. The CCP forced Chiang Kai-shek to accept cooperation a second time in the name of joint resistance against the Japanese.

The CCP used the opportunity to latch onto the KMT government for the second time. The Red Army was soon turned into the Eighth Route Army and grew bigger and more powerful than before.

More and more documents have revealed that many CCP spies had already gathered around Yang Hucheng and Zhang Xueliang before the Xi’an Incident. Liu Ding, an underground CCP member was introduced to Zhang Xueliang by Song Qingling, wife of Sun Yat-sen, a sister of Madame Chiang and a CCP member. After the Xi’an Incident, Mao Zedong praised that, “Liu Ding performed meritorious service in Xi’an Incident.” Among those working at Yang Hucheng’s side, his own wife Xie Baozhen was a CCP member and worked in Yang’s Political Department of the Army. Xie married Yang Hucheng in January of 1928 with the approval of the CCP. In addition, CCP member Wang Bingnan was an honored guest in Yang’s home at the time. Wang later became a vice minister for the CCP Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was these CCP members around Yang and Zhang who directly instigated the coup.

The Civil War and Jiang's flight to Taiwan

He ostensibly converted to Christianity (specifically, to Methodism) on his marriage to Song Meiling and was a fierce opponent of Communism.

When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, Jiang gave precedence to defeating the internal threat posed by the Chinese communists over resisting the Japanese invasion. However the communists managed to evade final destruction, by fleeing from loyal forces on the Long March of 1934. Subsequent to World War II, the resurgence of Communism under Mao Zedong resulted in civil war, and Jiang had to depart the Chinese mainland for the island of Taiwan in 1949, where he resumed his position as president, albeit of a massively reduced territory. The new government was a authoritarian and repressive dictatorship, but at least it was right-wing and friendly to the US.

Poetry

Jiang was also known for his poetry. He wrote a poem expressing exultation after his victory over the Communist Party, in 1928:

The yellow crane has long since gone away,
All that here remains is Yellow Crane Tower.
The yellow crane once gone does not return,
White clouds drift slowly for a thousand years.