The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  WHEN NEWS FROM the peace conference at Versailles reached Asia in the spring of 1919, the Chinese were furious to discover that their government in Peking had promised to return the territory ceded by Germany to Japan during the war to the Japanese. On May 4, three thousand students in Peking demonstrated against the government, and some of them broke into the home of one of the officials responsible. The police were called, and thirty-two students were imprisoned. Others organized themselves in an effort to arouse sympathy for their incarcerated comrades, to demand the resignation of the offending officials, and to keep the government from signing the Treaty of Versailles. This demonstration, its aftermath, and the resulting upheavals in Chinese society became known in history as the May Fourth Incident.

  News of the May 4 demonstration reached Shanghai the next day. During that afternoon, the chamber of commerce, institutes of learning, and various guilds sent wires to Peking demanding that the government dismiss three of its important officials and release the students who had been taken into custody. The students of Shanghai also went on strike, and two days later its citizens started a boycott of Japanese goods. On May 26, a much larger strike took place, and Shanghai became the center of student activity as their peers from Peking, Tientsin, and Nanking converged on the city. On June 5, the merchants, shop owners, and clerks of Shanghai joined the striking students, and by noon the walkout had encompassed the entire city, including the foreign (British, American, and French) concessions. As workers from various trades became involved, it was estimated that around one hundred factories were affected by the strike, and by the time it ended, on June 12, Shanghai’s beggars, thieves, singsong girls,* and gangsters had joined their fellow citizens in supporting the students. Two weeks later, the Chinese delegation left Paris without signing the Treaty of Versailles.

  May-ling had an interesting reaction to the strikes and general sense of fury in the city, which she wisely confined to letters sent to Emma Mills. It is clear from her comments that her American education had not been wasted.

  “Several papers in the city have called me up to ask for my opinion on this boycott question,” she wrote Emma on June 5,

  but I am refusing to be interviewed, for whatever I say will be twisted around. To tell you the truth, I feel that this boycott movement is effective only in so far as it leads to a constructive program. You may be sure that Japan will hold everything regarding this movement against the Chinese, and when the day comes they will make us pay if they can. And if we are not ready to face them… we will get the worst of it. Therefore while I approve of this boycott movement, in that it shows to the world… the oneness of our eighteen provinces, I feel that boycotting is after all a passive state. I would suggest that in every school… the students should be taught contemporary history.… It is really discouraging when one thinks of the amount of history the students study, but not one jot of it is about China since the Revolution. Our oriental mind seems to be steeped in the glories and conquests of the past, and if something is not done to change this, we shall be a second Korea.

  If I had the means I would open an industrial school for the children of the streets. They should be taught trades such as mat weaving etc. The Japanese get all our trade in making mats etc. and really if the children were taught, they would be able to do as well as the products sent from Japan, and the products could be sold infinitely cheaper. The children too should have two or three hours a day of instruction in Chinese and arithmetic so that in time they would be able to read the newspapers in the colloquial tongue and thus be informed of the state of affairs in the country.… The Japanese however have such a hold on our market that they could easily cripple any one who dares to finance the movement.…

  Mother has just returned from down town.… She said that many of the students were running wildly away from the policemen who have orders from the Government to arrest them. It is thought that because the Japs have bribed certain officials in Peking.… [They] have promised to do away [with] the boycott.… My heart bleeds for the poor students, and I hope those who are so rotten, so damn greedy and inhuman as to sell their country will Go to Hell. It is bad enough to hate men of another nation, but to feel perfectly helpless with rage against the very men who by all laws of decency and humanity should be patriotic is Hell.… The Japanese are not afraid of our Government, for they know that it is weak and largely composed of self interested men; they are tho [sic] afraid of the Chinese people, for in spite of what they say about our lack of patriotic feeling, they know only too well that when roused we are a terrible people to deal with. They have had a taste of what length we might be driven to as evinced in the fact that a few days ago several Japanese settlements were destroyed by fire.

  “Shanghai,” she continued ten days later,

  is under the authority of the Municipal Council. The men who composed this Council are all foreigners, and of course as there is a Japanese on it, he would be against the good of the community etc. As a result the Council forbade the students to have parade[s] or put up posters… the students behaved in a remarkably sane manner. They moved their headquarters to the Chinese City… they wrote pamphlets for the benefit of the foreign population telling them that the movement was not anti-foreign in its aim.… They regretted that the foreigners were inconvenienced in the general closing of the shops etc. but as that was the only and most effective method to bring pressures upon the Peking Government, we Chinese had to resort to it.… Before this movement, the Japanese behaved with the most remarkable hauteur and superiority. You ought to see the way they slink around the corners now. They would make you think of a cur with his tail between his legs.… The Japanese Government is so terrified that they have sent four gun-boats to Shanghai.

  UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES such as May-ling described, it is hardly surprising that Chinese students and intellectuals began looking for answers other than traditional Confucianism. The teens and twenties were times of great cultural and intellectual ferment in China, particularly among the young. In 1915, Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the son of a rich family who had studied in France and Japan, founded a magazine, New Youth, which denounced Confucianism and the old traditions in favor of the new gods of Science and Democracy. Chinese thought, he claimed, was a thousand years behind that of the West, and China was doomed to end up like Babylon unless the entire social structure of the country was changed. In another area of reform, Charlie Soong’s former student Hu Shih began a movement aimed at supplanting the old classical Chinese language with the vernacular. This, he claimed, was the appropriate medium for all forms of written communication, including scientific, and by 1930, this simplified language was being taught in elementary schools.

  It is hardly surprising that one of the most compelling waves of thought gaining ground among young Chinese intellectuals was Marxism. After October 1917, many students looked north to Russia, where revolution had also swept away the monarchy, to find solutions to the problems that followed their own upheaval. One morning in July 1921, a secret meeting was held in a girls’ school on Joyful Undertaking Street in the Chinese quarter of Shanghai. It was attended by a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher from Hunan province:

  At 106 Rue Watz he paused, then slipped in quickly through the carved portals.… There were perhaps a dozen men in the room.… Two were not Chinese: a representative of the Trade Unions International… and another Soviet agent.… The gathering was clandestine, and none of those present was to remember the details very well. But the twenty-eight-year-old delegate, and the resolves he took home with him to Hunan, were presently to change the world. The man was Mao Zedong, and the meeting was the opening congress of the Chinese Communist Party.”*

  The meeting lasted four days. During that time the delegates lived in the nearby Bo Wen Girls’ School, whose students were on holiday. They ate meals cooked by the school janitor and remained undisturbed—until the fourth day, when a stranger appeared at the door asking for an address that was only a few houses away. The delegates, realizing
that he must be a spy, got out just before the police arrived. They moved to a lake eighty miles south of the city and hired a pleasure boat, on which they finished their meeting.

  One of the men at this meeting was an agent for the Comintern, a tall Dutchman with a mustache who used the name Maring.* Although the Kremlin, anxious to encourage revolution to the south, was willing to make use of any warlord who seemed agreeable, Maring decided to ally the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with Sun Yat-sen. Shortly after the Congress ended, Maring went to Shanghai to see the leader of the Kuomintang. He was the first of many emissaries sent by Moscow to make friends with the little doctor.

  Sun, who had sent Lenin a note of congratulations after the revolution of 1917, was both embarrassed and encouraged by repeated offers of Russian friendship and advice. Still resentful of the Western nations that had refused to bankroll the Kuomintang, he allowed himself to be convinced that an alliance between Russia and the KMT was possible and would help his cause. For his part, he hoped to absorb the fledgling Chinese Communist Party into the KMT. The Russians, of course, had other intentions. A Chinese nation, freed from its bonds with the imperialistic nations of the West, might stand as a bulwark against them. Moreover, as Stalin later spelled out in a speech to three thousand Communist functionaries, “At present, we need the Right,” he declared, explaining that the KMT had “connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.”

  Sun, who could never be brought to question the motives or examine the aims of contributors to his cause, was confused about the failure of his republic. He had always thought that the hard part would be overthrowing the Manchus, not establishing a workable government. “When the period of destruction closed,” he said, “revolutionary reconstruction seemed an easy thing to me.” Although Sun had helped destroy the mandarins, it had not occurred to him that he needed to replace the men who had performed many of the functions of Chinese society. Most peasants had no comprehension of the role of a citizen in a representative form of government, and there had been no effort to train them or, in fact, even to teach them to read. Moreover, the leaders of the Kuomintang, having allied themselves with one military man or another over the years, had never paid any attention to building up an army of their own. Realizing the need for military control, Sun had himself elected not president but generalissimo of the southern government. As his chief of staff he appointed one of his disciples, a thirty-six-year-old whom he sent to Moscow in the summer of 1923 to study Russian military organization.

  The man whom Sun sent to Moscow was Chiang Kai-shek, who would one day become China’s leader and the husband of May-ling Soong.

  9

  [B]efore he [Chiang Kai-shek] was forty, there was “no doubt” in his mind that he was China’s son of destiny.

  —PINCHON LOH

  CHIANG KAI-SHEK came from the village of Chikow in the province of Chekiang, located on the seacoast south of Shanghai. For hundreds of years, his ancestors* had lived in and around this village, which lies in a secluded valley among purple mountains. Waterfalls and streams cascaded down the hills around the town, and nearby terraces were planted with rice and tea. Surrounded by huge forests of bamboo prized for their height, width, and the straightness of their trunks, Chikow had only one street, divided into Upper, Middle, and Lower. The Chiang family lived above their salt store, a whitewashed building at number 51 Upper Street, where Kai-shek† was born on October 31, 1887.

  Chiang’s paternal grandfather was a great influence on the boy. “In my grandfather’s time,” Chiang Kai-shek wrote, “he established himself by commerce and became very wealthy in the salt business. He had a kindly disposition. In dealing with others he was always generous. But in bringing up his children and grandchildren he was very strict. He never wore silk and was a vegetarian. He was devoted to the study of Buddhism.… As a boy I was more often unwell than not. My grandfather always treated and nursed me. He was constantly by my bedside. If the malady was serious he would keep watch over me, never going to bed himself at night.… Nearly all my ailments were healed by the medical skill of my grandfather.”

  If Chiang was sickly, he was also difficult and full of mischief. At three he apparently stuck a pair of chopsticks down his throat to see how far they would go. They got stuck, and when they were removed, there was some question as to whether he had damaged his vocal cords. At six, he was playing with one of the mammoth jars placed under the eaves of Chinese houses to catch and store rainwater. Trying to get hold of a piece of ice, he fell into the water and barely got out before freezing to death.

  To keep him busy and out of trouble, his mother started his lessons at the age of four or five. She tried, he said, “to teach and persuade me to study,” and when that failed, she had “to use the birch repeatedly in order not to spoil me.” He was, however, a natural leader among the neighboring children. As their self-appointed general, he led them in war games or told stories from a platform, “his manner haughty, his gait lordly, and his gestures extremely free.” According to one of his tutors, “At play, he would regard the classroom as his stage and all his schoolmates as his toys: he could be wild and ungovernable. But when he was at his desk, reading or holding his pen trying to think, then even a hundred voices around him could not distract him from his concentration. His periods of quietude and outburst sometimes occurred within a few minutes of each other: one would think he had two different personalities.”

  We know very little about Chiang’s father, who died when the boy was nine, two years after his beloved grandfather. Chiang, who was not fond of him, adored his mother, his father’s third wife, who had been married at twenty-two to a man twenty years her senior. A devoted Buddhist, she ran a large household, which included a stepbrother and stepsister by Chiang’s father’s first wife and Mrs. Chiang’s own six children, two of whom died in childhood. According to Chiang, his mother “endured thirty-six years of hardship” and “swallowed much bitterness” from the time of her marriage in 1886 to her death in 1921. This was due to the fact that she was left the female head of the house, unprotected from the local authorities after the men in the family died. He himself, he said, was “frequently discriminated against… because of my humble origin.”

  “It will be remembered that the then Manchu regime was in its most corrupt state,” Chiang wrote in later years. “The degenerated gentry and corrupt officials had made it a habit to abuse and maltreat the people. My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the target of such insults and maltreatment. From time to time usurious taxes and unjust public service were forced upon us and once we were publicly insulted before the court. To our regret and sorrow none of our relatives and kinsmen was stirred from his apathy. Indeed the miserable condition of my family at that time is beyond description. It was entirely due to my mother and her kindness and perseverance that the family was saved from utter ruin.” When one of the citizens of Chikow failed to pay his rice tax and fled the district, the local authorities, knowing there was no adult male in the Chiang household, arrested young Chiang, took him to court, and threatened to throw him in jail if he or his family did not pay the fine owned by the missing citizen. It was apparently an enormous humiliation for both the boy and his mother, one that he often mentioned in later years as “the first spark that kindled my revolutionary fire.”

  In spite of this, Chiang was not his mother’s favorite. That role was held by the youngest boy, who was, as Chiang put it, “endowed with extremely good looks, which none of the others of us had.” With his older brother the head of the family and his younger brother the favorite, there seems to have been no special role left for Chiang. His sense of being left out was reinforced by a traveling fortune-teller who told him—in front of the entire village—that his cranium was different from everyone else’s and that he was an “exceptionally strange child.”

  Before he was nine, Chiang had read and memori
zed the four Confucian Classics, which, we must assume, he understood no better than any other Chinese boy of his age. After that came the Confucian Canons.* Having completed the usual classical education by the age of fifteen, Chiang tried out for the civil examinations, which would have qualified him to enter the bureaucracy. “He went to the examination to satisfy his curiosity,” said his tutor, “and was disgusted by the cruel and humiliating regulations of the examination hall. He severely disparaged the Manchu court for the contempt with which the young scholars were treated and for the despicable habits of decadence and pedantry it encouraged, and was greatly pleased when he learned, not long afterward, of Yuan Shih-kai’s memorial to establish a new educational system in place of the civil service examination.” According to the author of the book from which this is quoted, “We may assume that Chiang failed in the examination.”

  The year before, when he was fourteen, Chiang had been married by his mother to an illiterate local girl, Mao Fu-mei. Nineteen at the time of their marriage, Fu-mei was a heavyset girl with a pleasant disposition. The marriage was never a success, although Fu-mei claimed that they were happy for the first two months, until her mother-in-law began to berate her for joining Chiang in the long daily walks through the mountains that he adored.