Yet with all the smiles, courtesy, small gifts provided me, and talk of the “soft power of persuasion,” there was a tough, inflexible, and steely edge to Taiwanese policy.13 Andrew Yang, the vice minister of national defense, had a massive map in his office of Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait, and the nearby mainland. He pointed out a wide, semicircular arc reaching deep into the mainland that constituted the air defense identification zone over which Taiwan conducted twenty-four-hour surveillance. “We have been doing this for decades. Our mantra is air defense and sea control. There will be no blockades, no amphibious landings to our detriment. If they bomb our runways, our fighter jets will use our superhighways.” One of his aides pointed out to me the fewer than a handful of places on the Taiwanese coast where the mainland Chinese could attempt amphibious landings. “They have few options because of geography. If they tried, they would have the same horrible experience of U.S. Marines assaulting Japanese-held islands in the Pacific in World War II. We will be the defenders, and the defenders have the advantage.”
Referring to a 2009 study by the RAND Corporation, suggesting that by 2020 the United States might no longer be able to militarily defend Taiwan, Yang called the report “too much arithmetic.” It left out the intangibles of just what would be required to conquer the island. Again, there was a reference to Mearsheimer: holding a beachhead and then moving large forces inland is just plain hard. Then there was the North Korea factor, which few spoke about these days in connection to Taiwan. It was the Korean War of 1950–1953, and China’s epic military involvement in it, that saved Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland at a time when Chiang Kai-shek’s new regime was at its most vulnerable. If over the next quarter century the regime in Pyongyang falters, in whatever way, China would be too tied down with problems in the Korean Peninsula to even contemplate an invasion of Taiwan.
Of course, there were many other scenarios short of an actual invasion in which China could overwhelm Taiwan, thus forcing a political capitulation of sorts by Taipei. For example, a protracted campaign of Chinese cyber-warfare aimed at Taiwan’s power grids and other infrastructure could undermine morale on the island. Yang understood all this, yet continued to talk about indigenous air defense, Patriot missile batteries, Taiwan’s desperate need for the United States to retrofit its F-16A/B fighter jets, as well as sell Taiwan the more powerful F-16C/Ds. What Taiwan really required, he told me, was the new vertical launch F-35Bs, thereby undermining China’s strategy of bombing the island’s runways. He and other officials complained to me about their thirty-five-year-old F-5s, which were quite literally ready for museums.
The numbers were daunting, with the mainland’s armed forces increasingly outpacing those of the island. Taiwan had 430 fighter jets; mainland China thousands, with seven hundred of them assigned to coastal areas near Taiwan. But with Taiwan’s economy growing at only 3 to 5 percent annually in recent years, Taipei in any case was having trouble paying for arms purchases, and that’s if it could arrange them in the first place. Most countries would incur Beijing’s wrath by selling Taiwan weapons and transferring the latest military technology to Taipei. Even the United States had exquisite diplomatic calculations to make: just how much could Washington sell Taipei—and what quality of hardware and software could it pass on to the Taiwanese military—without fundamentally damaging its relations with Beijing, with which it had far more equities at risk.
The Taiwanese, Yang told me, also needed more underwater mines to deter Chinese amphibious ships from approaching the island, as well as new submarines to replace their 1970s subs from the Netherlands. But who would sell it to them? The United States manufactured only nuclear-powered subs; not the ultra-quiet diesel-electric ones in which Taiwan was interested. As far as third countries were concerned, again there was the problem of incurring Beijing’s ire. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese legislature had recently levied funds to field a squadron of Hsun Hai fast patrol boats, the kind that could hide in caves and shelters around the island’s rough coast, in order to conduct independent operations in “wolf packs” against enemy shipping.14 It was a decidedly mixed picture, if not a bit dreary, as far as Taiwan’s defense was concerned. What Taiwan wanted and what it had were two different things. But through it all, the message I got was that Taiwan would remain just militarily formidable enough to make any kind of armed intervention from the mainland fanciful. And yet, the question remained:
Given Beijing’s seemingly inexorable air and naval buildup in the Western Pacific, was there a point where Taiwan—though not as geographically vulnerable as Finland during the Cold War—would still have to politically accommodate the mainland more than it already was doing? Could the Chinese in the future be able to exercise an invisible veto power over who is elected to run Taiwan? Could certain prospective candidates and ministers be excluded from office because they are judged too hostile to China? In other words, Beijing could have a larger and larger vote in future Taiwanese elections. The United States undermined China’s attempt at intimidation during the 1996 Taiwanese elections through a show of force. But China’s own growing capabilities make that less likely in the future. With 40 percent of Taiwanese exports going to the mainland, was Taiwan’s de facto independence already slipping away?15 Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou was presently upholding the status quo with his dictum: no unification with the mainland, but no declaration of independence by Taiwan. Yet would China, in the face of its rising military power, always have to be satisfied with that?
The most vivid symbol of national and cultural pride in Taipei is the National Palace Museum. The thousands of objects here represent the material inheritance of Chinese dynasties stretching back to early antiquity. In 1948, as Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang contemplated defeat at the hands of Mao’s communists, items from the Palace Museum in Beijing, the rare books from the Beijing Central Library, and artifacts from the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica were selected for removal by air and sea to Taiwan. By 1949, almost 250,000 objects had arrived on the island in crates. It represented only about a fifth of the masterpieces in Beijing, but it was the “cream of the collection.”16 The inventory wasn’t completed until 1954, with a new museum sturdily built into a pitch-dark green mountainside, and completed in 1965. The ownership of much of the material legacy of an entire civilization—however outrageous the theft from the mainland—coupled with the signal fact of Taiwanese democracy, provides Taiwan with a certain legitimacy that its lack of diplomatic relations with the outside world cannot take away.
You can travel throughout the mainland and not get such a compressed and comprehensive insight into what, aesthetically, constitutes China as you can in this museum in Taiwan. Busloads of tourists from the mainland flock here to see what wonders their own culture has wrought.
I gaze at the time line of Chinese dynasties reaching back to the Bronze Age: Shang, Zhou, Han, the Three Kingdoms, Qin, Sui, Tang, Northern and Southern Sung, Yuan, Ming, Qing—multiple phases of fragmentation with intermittent periods of unity. I observe the magnificent bronze vessels of the Shang that convey awe and reverence to the gods and ancestors; the jade animals, dragons, and phoenixes of the Han emperors; Tang figurines; the mathematical simplicity of Sung pottery, in which a few spare lines can create an aura of vastness; rich imperial Yuan portraits reflecting the nomadic origins of these Mongols; cobalt blue and white Ming vases, and the faint, feathery elegance of Ming landscape painting; Qing vases with Indian motifs testifying to the territorial immensity of this empire. I learn that there are few things as beautiful as a Chinese box inlaid with coral, jade, and turquoise; or as beautiful as a vase with a hundred deer painted on it; or a simple basin with celadon glaze; or ink painted on silk.
This museum is a political statement: that by virtue of our possession of these objects we in Taiwan are the real China, and we will change the mainland before the mainland changes us.
Taiwan begins and ends with the legacy of Chiang Kai-shek, who, along with his son, Chiang Chin
g-kuo, orchestrated the immense transfer of this material cultural inheritance in the first place. Chiang Kai-shek is as crucial to Taiwan as Lee Kuan Yew is to Singapore, and more so than Mahathir bin Mohamad is to Malaysia.
But Chiang is a far more problematic figure than Lee, and a far more pivotal one in terms of the history of the twentieth century. While Lee built tiny Singapore, Chiang lost China to Mao. The escape of Chiang’s forces to Taiwan and the subsequent building of a new political order on the island flow from that stark fact. The Chiang Kai-shek memorial complex in Taipei, with its seventy-meter-tall memorial hall made of white marble, topped by a blue-glazed upturned roof in traditional Chinese style, and with two sets of eighty-nine granite steps leading down to vast gardens, towering ornamental gates, and gargantuan pavilions, represents a degree of vanity and grandiosity that one does not associate with the corporate and businesslike Lee. Honor guards stand vigil before a huge, Lincolnesque statue of Chiang, even while his legacy has dimmed on the island itself, as Taiwan evolves into something dissimilar from its mainland Nationalist past. Indeed, it was Chiang’s son, Ching-kuo, who played more of a role than his father in transforming Taiwan into a prosperous democracy.
Nevertheless, Chiang Kai-shek is a totemic figure when it comes to the South China Sea. For the South China Sea is about more than just competition for blue territory on the map, which may or may not have much extractable oil and natural gas. The South China Sea is also first and foremost about the destiny of China, the geopolitical hinge on which war or peace in the region rests. No figure besides Mao Zedong himself has determined China’s destiny in the twentieth century as much as Chiang Kai-shek. Mao looks worse and worse from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, owing to the tens of millions who died through his policies (as well as because of the post-Cold War realization that communism was as much an evil as fascism). But in recent years the reputation of Chiang has improved somewhat among scholars. And this revisionist treatment of Chiang is revealing about the future of China.
Chiang Kai-shek and my interest in him is also a lesson in how travel involves surprises. The surprises stem not only from what you see but from what intellectually sparks your interest at the moment, leading you, in turn, to read and reread books you never thought you would. So it was with myself and books about Chiang Kai-shek, which followed from my fascination with Taiwan, and led me to some intrepid historians.
In 2003, Jonathan Fenby, former editor of the London Observer and the Hong Kong South China Morning Post, published a rather revisionist biography, Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost. Fenby partially challenges the received wisdom about Chiang, that he was a corrupt and inept ruler, who dragged his heels on fighting the Japanese despite all the aid he got from the United States during World War II, and who lost China to Mao because he was the lesser man. Fenby notes, in passing, that had Chiang not been kidnapped for a few days in 1936, he would have been in a political circumstance to launch an offensive against the communists right there and then when they were still weak, and the twentieth-century history of China might well have been different.17
Then, in 2009, Jay Taylor, former China desk officer at the U.S. State Department and later research associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, followed up with a stronger revisionist biography of Chiang, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, which more so than the Fenby book took apart many of the preconceptions about the founder of Taiwan. Both authors, Taylor especially, blame the unduly negative image of Chiang on the journalists and State Department foreign service officers who covered China during World War II. The pivotal character in this story was the wartime American military commander in China, Army Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell. Stilwell quite simply hated Chiang, calling him “Peanut” behind his back, and passed on his bile to the journalists and foreign service officers, who, courted by Stilwell, naturally took the American general’s side. Taylor mentions Time’s Theodore H. White, Newsweek’s Harold Isaacs, and the New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson in this regard. It was they especially who began a legend that poisoned Chiang’s reputation for generations to follow.
Indeed, Theodore White writes in his memoir that Stilwell “wanted us to know that from the day of Pearl Harbor on, ‘this ignorant son of a bitch has never wanted to fight Japan.… Every major blunder of this war is directly traceable to Chiang Kai-shek.’ ” Actually, what really turned White against Chiang was his coverage of the Honan famine in 1943, when he saw how Chiang’s soldiers were, by collecting grain as taxes, literally starving masses of peasants to death. Another factor was the glowing reports that journalists such as White were filing about the communists, including Mao and his number two, the “suave, engaging” Zhou Enlai, with whom, as White admits, he “had become friends.” The “wine of friendship flowed,” White recalls about his relationship with Zhou. White admits from the vantage point of 1978—three and a half decades after the war—that in Zhou’s presence he had “near total suspension of disbelief or questioning judgment.… I can now see Chou for what he was: a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century.” Then there was the heady experience of actually meeting Mao himself in his northern China lair in Yan’an during World War II. “What scored on my mind most was his [Mao’s] composure,” White writes. “There was no knee jiggling as with Chiang Kai-shek.… The indelible impression was … a man of the mind who could use guns, whose mind could compel history to move to his ideas.” About Chiang, White writes of his “rigid morality … animal treachery, warlord cruelty and an ineffable ignorance of what a modern state requires.” It would have been better had Chiang been removed from the Chinese leadership early enough in the war, White says.18
Historians Jay Taylor and Jonathan Fenby go a significant way toward dismantling the worldview of White and his colleagues.
Taylor’s book, published by Harvard University Press, is particularly trenchant, given what we in the West think we know about Chiang. Precisely because Taylor (and Fenby, too) do not engage in a whitewash, after finishing their books we feel that we know Chiang from the inside, rather than through a Western journalistic prism unduly influenced by Stilwell.
Taylor admits that Chiang (unlike Mao) “had little charisma and was generally not liked by his peers.… He was an inhibited man … a staid seemingly humorless individual who had a terrible temper.” More crucially, Chiang from early on, as a result of his studies, was consciously Confucianist, a worldview that emphasized political order, respect for family and hierarchy, and conservative stability. It is this belief system that has ultimately triumphed—whether admitted to or not—throughout much of East Asia and in China itself, accounting for the region’s prosperity over recent decades, even as the communism of Mao and Zhou Enlai has been utterly discredited.19
Besides Confucianist thought, Chiang in his early years was also deeply influenced by the culture of Japan, which to Chiang embodied “disciplined efficiency,” from the train system to education to manufacturing. Japan’s fierce modernism infected Chiang with the need to fight corruption. But here he encountered fierce resistance, like when Nationalist army commanders rejected Chiang’s calls to centralize military financing. Chiang, according to Taylor, “soon realized that he had to give the fight against corruption much lower priority than that of retaining cohesion and loyalty among his disparate supporters … both civilian and military. He had no choice.” Chiang has often been accused of tolerating corruption, but the alternative in the warlord age in which he operated was to become an extremist ideologue, like Mao. Chiang was far from perfect; but neither was he as deeply flawed as his detractors, applying the standards of the West to a chaotic early-twentieth-century China, demanded. “Craftiness and suspicion are the usual marks of successful political leaders in Chiang’s circumstances,” Taylor explains. No doubt, years of warfare in the 1920s and early 1930s established Chiang as an exceptional
military commander, maneuvering multiple army corps over thousand-mile fronts, without tanks, maps, and trucks, and with only a few rail lines, often in circumstances of personal bravery. He used bribery and divide-and-rule tactics against the warlords, even while, “as an expression of rote neo-Confucian self-cultivation,” Chiang complained in his diary of his personal shortcomings.20
A map of China during this period establishes the formidable circumstances facing Chiang, as well as his considerable achievement: the whole of central and coastal China divided into massive puddles of warlord control, over which Chiang slowly, painstakingly, established a very tenuous primacy. And he did it without foreign aid, unlike Mao’s communists. He was paying for weapons and training from Germany, even as there is no evidence in his statements or in his diary that he ever subscribed to Hitler’s fascist ideology, according to Taylor. Under Chiang, says Taylor, the power and authority of the central government was greater than at any point since the mid-nineteenth century, while the rate of illiteracy among government troops diminished over these years from 70 to 30 percent. Fenby concurs, pointing out that Chiang’s Nationalist ascendancy in parts of the country “was a time of modernization such as China had not seen before … there was a flowering of thought, literature, art and the cinema,” and the repression used by the regime was not comparable to what the communists would later unleash. Without Chiang, Fenby writes, “the odds would have been on a continuation of the warlord era, and the fragmentation of China into eternally conflicting fiefdoms.” It was Chiang who kept in check pro-Japanese elements in his administration, which on their own might have allied China with Japan, opening up an attack on the Soviet Union from the east while Hitler attacked from the west. After the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese in 1937, Taylor writes, “Chiang Kai-shek issued a proclamation as rousing as that which Churchill would give twenty-one months later and with some similar imagery.”21
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