Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  If there is any record of Chiang Kai-shek’s opinions on this situation, it has not been played up. He had them, but he didn’t express them on paper. During the Master’s seven months in the Rue Molière, he was in Fukien reorganizing the Army in preparation for a return to Canton: he looked forward to an early engagement with Chen Chiung-ming. His duty was political rather than military; traveling from one section to another, haranguing the officers and flourishing Sun’s name like a magic talisman. But we find a good deal about Russia in one of Sun’s characteristic letters to Chiang, calculated to soothe the feelings of the prima-donna chief of staff. Sun rallied Chiang:

  “I have just seen your letter … in which you said, ‘If there is no progress at all within ten days then there is nothing for it.…’ etc. Pooh. What rubbish you talk!… Even though we have made no progress, the enemy is losing ground every day. For instance, his officers and men are beginning to see light; his unification is gradually dissolving; the people in Kwangtung are hating him more and more, and thinking of us more and more.…

  “You had hopes for the West. Recently I have felt the same here, and now the thing is well in hand. But it is very complicated, ten or even a hundred times more so than in Fukien. No wonder all the comrades of our country went to their capital in high spirits, to come back dejected. Luckily I have found the way, and we are coming nearer together every day. But fundamentally we must have a base to rely upon, and then we can make use of it. If we have nothing at all ourselves, we will not be able to do anything, even though we were as agreeable to their principles as the Communist youth of our country. That is why the people in that capital have been urging the Communists to join the Kuomintang. We know we must have a foundation first, and to get that we must recover Kwangtung.…

  “Now I am moving things outwards, and you and others are in Foochow as my backing. With this backing, my plans are progressing every day. It may turn out that before you can recapture Canton my plan will succeed. You can never tell!… The progress here cannot be conveyed on paper with ink.… We haven’t had such a wonderful opportunity for more than ten years.”

  All this obviously refers to Joffe. The Ambassador had arrived in Shanghai and was devoting a lot of time to the Doctor. It is a fair guess that he had promised that the Russians would send aid on demand; the same promise he had made to Peking. All camouflage was abandoned a few weeks later, when Joffe and Sun came into the open with a joint statement, a “manifesto” of friendship between Russia and China. Joffe reiterated the protestations of the Karakhan statement. Today Sun’s admirers, feeling that they must apologize for this move on his part, maintain stoutly that he was never sincere in his alliance with the Soviet; that he meant to use it to needle the Western nations into helping him. But the letter to Chiang proves that he was in earnest.

  The Manifesto ushered in a period of triumph for Sun Yat-sen. For some time things had gone better for his cause in Canton in that they were going badly for Chen Chiung-ming. Now at last Chen was definitely driven out by a rival war lord, and the conqueror sent word to Sun that he could come back. During these pleasant occurrences Chiang was on sick leave in Fenghua, complaining that his eyes were giving him trouble. He was worried, too, about future plans for the Kuomintang. His correspondence with his friends was fidgety and querulous, even for him.

  Was he in love? A novelist could make out a good case for the theory. Chingling’s little sister Mayling, last of the Soong girls to return from America, had been home since 1917. In 1918 Charlie Soong died, but his reforming spirit lived on in his daughter. Mayling threw herself into public works with all the vigor of her father’s clan, urged on by the shock her tidy soul received when she looked again on the China she had not seen since she was ten years old. Such dirt! Such squalor! Such suffering! She felt as if life would not be long enough to effect all the reforms that needed doing. Unlike Chingling, she did not interest herself in the theory of politics: she preferred immediate, practical measures of reform. She was a quick-moving, spirited girl; impatient, eager, intelligent, and, incidentally, pretty. This last quality was apt to be overlooked in her girlhood, not only by Soong associates (who preferred Chingling’s fragile beauty) but by Mayling herself. The question of personal beauty was one of the things that made her impatient. Women’s rights interested her more. She was a bluestocking and gloried in it. She joined the Child Labor Commission, and was a star member of the Y.W.C.A. She was an American dynamo. Eling and Chingling, departures themselves from the old-fashioned type, regarded her with indulgent amusement.

  She must have frightened Chiang Kai-shek the first few times he encountered her in the Suns’ house. He didn’t know any other women like that. He knew his mother and his wife, and the pretty ladies who accepted his attentions when he was in the money, but he had never had much experience of foreign-educated girls sparkling with energy and ardent to improve the country, girls who argued with you and started all their replies with the phrase “Yes, but …”

  Being a married man had never weighed very much on Chiang’s conscience, though he accepted the status as a natural thing. In his world, everyone his age was married. His wedding was a dim, far-off, long-ago thing, impressed on him only by the presence of his little son Ching-kuo, and until now it had not interfered with such sentimental dalliance, or any other sort of dalliance, that came his way. In the years that followed Mayling’s return he found himself contemplating a new idea for a Chinese of his upbringing; a marriage not of convenience but of choice, based on common interests. What was suitable for a village boy, he probably reflected, did not necessarily continue suiting a mature man whose outlook had widened.

  In the Western fashion, he began a correspondence with Mayling.

  Sun returned to Canton in February 1923, this time for good. It was roses, roses all the way. At the University of Hongkong he was carried from gate to auditorium by adoring students. In less than a year his reputation had soared from the depths. Chiang stopped complaining about his health and followed his Master, gloomily convinced that his services would soon be needed. He was not wrong. The war lord who had cleared a path for Sun’s return regretted his act and tried to kick out the Nationalists once more, but lessons of the past had not been wasted. This time, Generalissimo Sun had a large and cohesive force of his own, and Chiang Kai-shek was chief of staff. Things quieted down under military control.

  The friendship between Canton and Moscow developed apace, but up to the moment of commitment Sun was reluctant to turn his back on the West he had known so long. He had a last try at gaining the support of the powers, when Schurman, America’s first Ambassador to China, came down to Canton on a visit and interviewed him. Sun suggested a period of five years’ joint intervention by the powers in the form of military occupation by foreign troops of the chief Chinese cities, while the nation learned from Westerners how to govern themselves and native administrators were trained. At the end of this time, he was sure, the country would be ready for an election. But nothing came of his suggestion; Europe and America were not in a mood to invest men and money in a country which nothing, it seemed, could ever settle.

  It was clear that China must turn to Russia, so Sun came out openly against the powers and blamed them for practically everything that was wrong in the country. Lawlessness and excessive militarism? They were due to the civil wars, and the civil wars were due to the short-sighted policy pursued by the powers themselves in shoring up Peking. “By their action, they have given Peking moral prestige,” declared Sun. “Unconsciously, perhaps … they have intervened in China’s internal affairs by practically imposing upon the country a government repudiated by it.” He referred with bitterness to the fact that the increasing revenues of the Customs and the Salt Gabelle, both of which were managed by foreigners, were regularly handed over to Peking.

  Sun’s sense of grievance grew in direct proportion to the aid he received from Russia. With their advice and munitions and teachers, he was getting more and more material for speeches. C
hina was a victim of foreign countries. “She is really in a worse condition than Korea or Formosa. They have one master; we have many.… If the foreign countries will let us alone, China will have her affairs in shape within six months.… The Peking government could not stand twenty-four hours without the backing it receives from foreign governments.… It can collect taxes in the provinces; it lives entirely upon foreign-collected money.

  “We have lost hope of help from America, England, France or any other of the great powers,” he said. “The only country that shows any signs of helping us in the South is the Soviet Government of Russia.”

  Then as an earnest of the new orientations of China’s hope, Generalissimo Sun sent Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow to study military methods and political institutions.

  Consistency is not one of the vices of public opinion. When Chiang Kai-shek came to the top he was attacked by his enemies on three counts; that he was too Chinese, that he was too Japanese, and that he was too Russian. Considering the shape of things which came, these complaints have not been heard recently, but in the late twenties the allegation against his Russian sympathies resounded through the banking streets of Shanghai. He was said to have a completely Kremlin outlook, for he had lived and worked in Russia and had doubtless picked up the contagion.

  In fact, Chiang was in Russia for only a few months of 1923, and his brief visit was not highly important either to him or his hosts. To the Kremlin, China was merely one of a number of prospects, nor was Chiang the first pilgrim from his country. A large community of Chinese was there already; students from Peking with a scattering of others. Chiang and Canton, however, interested the Russians more than did the already converted.

  The C.C.P. had grown big, but Moscow had still to be convinced of its worth. The leader Ch’ên Tu-hsiu had been in Russia just before Chiang’s visit to attend the Comintern Fourth Congress. He was badly snubbed by Radek, who scolded him in open meeting, declaring that the Chinese comrades had failed to associate themselves with the masses. Instead they locked themselves up, said Radek, studying Marx and Lenin as they had once studied Confucius. Clearly, Canton was Moscow’s favorite at the moment, and the intellectual comrades must learn to collaborate with the Nationalists.

  After considerable pressure, the C.C.P. announced meekly that “due to the inroads of imperialism” China was still dominated by feudal militarists and bureaucrats; that feudalism inhibited the emergence of capitalism with its properly aggrieved proletariat; that until such time as the proletariat was ready to seize power it must unite with democratic groups against feudal militarism. In short, Chinese Communists must join the Kuomintang.

  The C.C.P. leaders were violently unhappy about all this. Union with the Kuomintang, they protested, would confuse the class structure and curb their independence. On his side, Sun Yat-sen was equally against the coalition; he had no desire to sell the Kuomintang down the river. He stipulated that any Communist who entered the Kuomintang must submit completely to its rules and recognize no party outside it. He seems never to have realized the true nature of Communism. Or did he believe, perhaps, that in the last analysis he could outguess Moscow? More likely he was simply guileless and sentimental about these people who had offered to help him. Always at his elbow was Chingling, who had dedicated her faith to Communism.

  Chiang went to Moscow without understanding the language—he doesn’t claim, today, to speak any Russian—and there he was shepherded around by liaison officers and given as much practical training as he could take in, in the time available.

  “Few in Moscow probably noticed the youthful, thin-lipped Chinese officer whose cold, beady black eyes probably noticed a great deal,” says Harold Isaacs, who, to understate the matter, didn’t like Chiang. But there were people who did notice him—the other Chinese. They resented his position. After all, who was he? A reactionary militarist; if not quite a running dog of the war lords, still a low type from the Kuomintang. One day they assembled to hear the man give a talk on Sun Yat-sen’s work in the revolution, and when he had finished they heckled him. They found fault with his knowledge of revolutionary theory. Hadn’t Marx said …? Didn’t Russia’s experience prove …?

  “I haven’t been speaking about Russia,” said Chiang sharply. “My talk was on China. You ought to learn more about your own country and your own great men’s accomplishments before you are so glib on foreign theory.”

  “Nationalism! Arrant nationalism!” they said to each other, no doubt, and reflected that such abysmal ignorance and illiteracy could hardly be a danger to the cause. For the moment, however, the bitter fact was that nationalism was not considered a swear word in Moscow.

  Chiang had only four months in Russia. He wasn’t honored with an interview with Lenin, but Tchitcherin was nice to him and he met Trotzky. He saw the military and naval installations, and may have been awed—Isaacs thinks he ought to have been—but Russia’s development in 1923 was not much ahead of what he had witnessed in Japan.

  He was still away from China when the most important Russian yet seen in Canton made his appearance there in October. Michael Borodin had a complicated history. He was born in Russia and brought up in Latvia under his real name, Grusenberg. He returned to Russia and became a revolutionary, and got into trouble and went to America. In Chicago he changed his name to Berg and opened a business college. After the Russian Revolution he went back to Moscow, in 1918, and worked for the Party, and was sent out to serve in Mexico and then in Turkey as chief representative of the Third International. He had recently been imprisoned in Glasgow and then deported as an agitator.

  Borodin came to Canton disguised as a newspaperman, representing the Rosta News Agency, but no one attempted to keep up that fiction. Nor did he come alone. By the time Chiang returned, the city was swarming with Russian advisers and Sun had written off England and America completely. He now convinced himself that the British supported Peking because they didn’t like him personally, and that America neglected him on Britain’s account.

  No mere sick fancy gave him this impression, but the very real vexation of Canton Customs revenue. In the spring of 1923 he had first raised the question of this money, which, as he pointed out, though collected in his domain, was immediately handed over to his enemies in Peking. Sun felt that the collectors in Canton should turn Canton revenue over to himself. The collectors, however, took the (legally correct) attitude that they were not empowered to change the rules. Sun brooded about this, and finally came up with a decision. He would seize the Canton Customs House itself.

  The foreigners who were responsible for the service, with Britain at their head, promptly took action. On the seventh of December, 1923, seventeen ships collected at Canton, a motley collection of flags being flown—British, American, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese. It was an impressive sight, and it was intended to be. Sun did no seizing of Customs after that, but his prestige among his countrymen didn’t suffer. Hundreds of people sent telegrams of congratulation. In the end the British consented to a compromise arrangement by which his government shared in the Customs surplus.

  On the last day of the year, in an address given at the Canton Y.M.C.A., Sun made the statement that has since been quoted, over and over, by Communists:

  “We no longer look to the Western powers. Our faces are turned toward Russia.”

  Li Ta-chao, former employer and teacher of Mao Tse-tung, was the first Chinese Communist to enter the Kuomintang. Many more followed him. But Communists in the Kuomintang did not much impress Kai-shek when he got back to Canton: he was more interested in the arrival of Blücher, or Galen as he called himself, former army officer in Austria and one of Russia’s most prized generals.

  Chiang had met him in Russia and discussed with him the possibilities of a military academy at Whampoa where cadets could be intensively trained in Russian methods of warfare. At the beginning of 1924 Galen set to work on this project, and also advised the Kuomintang officers on the reorganization of the revolutionary army.r />
  Advice was not the only commodity the Russians were free with. As they flooded in—at least thirty more military men arrived within the next six months—they brought funds, credit, and material. An officer who had been instructed by Joffe set to work on the workers and farmers, organizing labor unions and peasant movements. On all this activity Sun beamed approval. He was aging visibly; the secret disease that was to kill him was making itself felt, but it was poignant happiness to him that things were going his way at last.

  Chiang, too, had reason to feel pleased with developments. The academy was quickly assembled, and by the middle of June opened its doors. Galen was chief of the Russian staff, Borodin hovered over it as Kuomintang adviser, and he himself, Chiang Kai-shek, led all the rest as President. He could have been so gratified by his position that his doubts were stilled, but he wasn’t. The memory of certain impressions gathered in Russia remained with him.

  “From my observation,” he wrote to a friend a few months after his return, “the Russian Party is lacking in sincerity. Even when I told you … that only thirty per cent of what the Russians said was believable, it was said only because you … were so enthusiastic in believing the Russians that I had not the heart to disappoint you altogether. Regarding their respect for Mr. Sun personally, they are not Russian Communists but international partisans. As for those of our country who are in Russia, they have nothing except slander and suspicion for Mr. Sun.