The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  She blamed me bitterly for being a disturbing influence on her son and accused me of aiding and abetting him in his idleness. She even said I was leading him astray: “You are a shameless hussy to gallivant all over the mountains and monasteries with a man.… It ill becomes a young married woman like you, and it must stop.”… But trouble did not end there. Things became intolerable whenever Kai-shek and I talked or laughed in the house. Our mere conversation irked Mama Huang terribly, and she cursed me for talking. In order not to cause any more unpleasantness, therefore, I kept quiet and seldom spoke.… The strain gradually caused a split between Kai-shek and me.

  Having managed to destroy the relationship between her son and his wife, Chiang’s mother was apparently no worse than Chiang himself, who, Fu-mei confided to friends, beat her. As their son later recalled, he also dragged her down the stairs by her hair.

  After failing the civil service examinations, Chiang attended the Phoenix Mountain School near his home, then transferred to a school in Ningpo to study under a professor who gave him special assignments and pushed him toward an exacting Confucianism that preached self-discipline and self-denial. He brought the boy into contact with The Art of War, by Sun Tzu,* who explained his theories of divide and conquer and the use of intelligence agents. A teacher at Chiang’s next school, the Dragon River Middle School, described the young man at the age of eighteen: “Chiang Kai-shek was an early riser, and, after his matutinal ablutions, it was his custom to stand erect on the veranda in front of his bedroom for half an hour. During this time his lips were compressed, his features were set in determination, and he stood with arms firmly folded.” The teacher, Hollington Tong, who later worked for Chiang and wrote his authorized (i.e., highly laudatory) two-volume biography, said that the future leader of China made a “deep impression” on him. It was during his years at the Dragon River Middle School that Chiang underwent a typical teenage rebellion, cutting off his queue and sending it home to declare his independence from the Manchus and his village. When he was nineteen, he asked his mother for travel costs and left for Japan to prepare himself for a career in the military.

  Japan, the most up-to-date militarily of the Asian nations, had just emerged the proud victor over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Upon his arrival in Japan, Chiang discovered that he needed the endorsement of what was called the Chinese Board of War in Peking to enroll in a Japanese military academy. He returned home and entered a competition to qualify as one of fourteen merit students (as distinguished from forty-six others nominated by the government) from his home province. Deemed ineligible since he had not taken the school’s course in the Japanese language, he petitioned the head of the school, saying that he had studied the language while he was in Japan; he was then allowed to take the exam, passed, and was sent to the Shimbu Gakkô School in Tokyo for three years’ training. It was during these years that Chiang, given only one or two small bowls of rice per day with “tiny portions of fish and a small dish of daikon [radish],” developed the spartan appetite for which he was later known. He graduated in 1910, the year before the Chinese Revolution, and was assigned to a field artillery regiment in the Japanese army for a final year of training.

  It is interesting to note that Chiang Kai-shek, who was often said to have impressed his Chinese superiors, had little or no effect on his Japanese ones. He was not popular with the other students, and the general who commanded the 13th Division of the Japanese army, to which Chiang belonged, had difficulty remembering much about him. All he could say was that he had once invited Chiang to tea, that the young man had arrived immaculately dressed, “like a smart filmstar,” and was extremely courteous, leaving a written commentary—four Chinese characters meaning “Never neglect Master’s instructions.” From this, the general drew the erroneous conclusion that Chiang’s later successes were due to loyalty and gratitude.

  It was during his years in Japan that Chiang became involved in the Chinese revolutionary movement. This came about through his association with Chen Chi-mei, a member of Sun Yat-sen’s inner circle. Regarded by many as the most gifted of Sun’s early followers, Chen, a former military governor of Shanghai with a huge price on his head, had fled to Japan with Sun after Yuan’s victory over the KMT. An unlikely-looking revolutionary with round glasses and ears that stuck out from his head, Chen came from the same province as Chiang and was nine years his senior. “More manipulative, more of an organizer and less of an idealist” than Sun, he was said by his detractors to be “ruthless and unscrupulous” and “a none too savory item of the Shanghai underworld.” Under Chen’s influence, Chiang began leading a group of young men in secret Sunday meetings “to deliberate and make plans for important matters of the revolution.” In spite of his high voice and plebeian accent, Chiang used his unusual gifts as a speaker who “never failed to make his listeners’ hair stand on end.” If his early experience with the civil service examination had left him disgusted with the Manchus, his new friend and newly discovered political cause supplied an alternative to the reigning dynasty and the Western powers, both of which he felt had exploited his native land. The revolution also gave him a ready outlet for his seething anger.

  During his summer vacations Chiang worked at the secret revolutionary headquarters in the French Concession in Shanghai. It looked as if Chiang’s mother was destined to have no grandchildren—until one summer when she took matters in her own hands. Having heard from a fortune-teller that Fu-mei would give birth to a boy who would become an official of high rank, she took her daughter-in-law to Shanghai, where she threatened to kill herself unless Chiang fulfilled his conjugal duties. Chiang and Fu-mei’s only child, a son, was born in April of 1910. He was named Ching-kuo and registered in the Chiang family records at his grandmother’s request as the son of Kai-shek’s younger brother, deceased at four but still their mother’s favorite.

  In 1911, the year of the revolution, Chiang returned to Shanghai, where Chen put him in charge of a brigade of 3,000 men, “recruited from the riffraff of Shanghai.” After whipping them into shape, Chiang led another hundred men in the “liberation” of Hangchow in his home province. He then “abandoned himself” to dissipations readily available in Shanghai, disappearing from headquarters for months at a time into the brothels on the Kiangsi Road (the red-light district), contracting venereal disease several times and apparently becoming sterile. He rationalized his excesses in a letter written over a decade later: “Everybody says that I am given to lust, but they do not know that this is a thing of last resort, in a state of utter depression.” In 1912, he met Yao Yi-cheng, a maid in a Shanghai brothel, who became his concubine and stayed with him for the next eight years.

  An upper-class woman of the day describes Shanghai’s prostitutes as

  big and sturdy, yet their extravagantly bound feet were the size of a four-year-old child’s.… Their coiffures were fearfully complicated, hair coiled at the neck, generous bangs, and sideburns which reached almost to the chin and which were lacquered to the cheeks. During their occasional daytime outings they drove around in victorias dressed in brightly brocaded jackets and trousers, their faces half concealed by the dark glasses which were the high fashion of the moment. But in the evening the sing-song girls were magically transformed into exotic creatures from the Arabian Nights… carried to their various rendezvous on the shoulder of huge, half-naked coolies. The coolie draped a towel over one shoulder and held the singsong girl firmly on her perch, with an arm around her waist and one hand grasping both pathetic little feet. He moved with a swift practised rhythm, his sweat-streaked face glistening in the dim light of the street lamps; the girl, with her arm around his neck, swaying slightly to his stride.

  Along with uncontrolled lust, Chiang began to exhibit a “fiery, uncompromising temper which weighed very tryingly on his friends.” This unattractive trait, which caused his voice, high-pitched at the best of times, to soar to a near falsetto, was noted by one of his most sympathetic biographers, who also not
ed his “obdurate” nature. “Not infrequently,” the writer said, “he would fly into storms of temper before which few human beings could stand. No-one could endure him, and by degrees he became more and more disagreeable to his associates.” Sent to see a hospitalized rival of Chen’s, Chiang argued with him, lost his temper, and shot him in his hospital bed. Probably because of this incident, he returned to Japan, where he spent some months writing for a magazine, Military Voice. Whereas his early articles spoke of world harmony, he came to believe that China needed a huge army, requiring an expenditure of between half and two thirds of the national income.

  Returning to China, Chiang joined the abortive Second Revolution against Yuan in 1913. The next year he was sent on a mission to Manchuria to investigate the local Kuomintang agent’s report that the time was ripe for an uprising. Chiang, who reported just the opposite, spoiled the plans of the agent, who had been hoping to raise funds ostensibly for the revolution but really for himself. In 1916, Chiang led a group of soldiers in capturing a fortress lying between Shanghai and Nanking, only to find that on the fifth day his men had deserted and left him alone. What one biographer calls his “sense of persecution and alienation” was heightened by this experience, along with the untimely death of his close friend and mentor, Chen Chimei, which occurred around the same time.

  It will be remembered that Yuan Shih-kai, the Chinese prime minister with monarchical ambitions, had died in the spring of 1916. But before his death, which he must have expected, he had his agents assassinate his old enemy Chen, using a ruse based on the Kuomintang’s lack of funds. Offered some money for the cause by a fellow member of the KMT who said he knew where to apply for help, Chen was gunned down on his way to the “meeting” with the supposed benefactor. Chiang Kai-shek, who appeared at the funeral in white mourning robes, was devastated. “Alas!” he cried. “From now on, where can be found a man who knows me so well and loves me so deeply as you did?” Fearing he would be Yuan’s next victim, Chiang hid out in a brothel and then moved in with one of Chen’s nephews. Later on, he would claim that it was Chen’s death that had pushed him “into a life of debauchery.”

  Before Chen was killed, he had introduced Chiang to a Shanghai merchant known by foreigners as Curio Chang,* a crippled dealer who had grown enormously rich selling Chinese curios in Paris and who now befriended Chiang. Curio Chang was from Chiang and Chen’s home province, had given a great deal of money to Sun Yat-sen for his revolution, and was said by one knowledgeable journalist to be “the brains in the Sun Yat-sen movement. He had the intelligence and the Western orientation. Sun had tremendous respect for him.” Others, however, called Curio Chang “one of the most sinister characters in the Revolutionary Movement,” due to his close ties with the Shanghai underworld, most of whom belonged to the powerful secret society known as the Green Gang. Shanghai was, in the words of author Han Suyin,* “a fabulous gangster city… unparalleled by any other metropolis. Beside it the Chicago of Al Capone was a staid, almost pious, provincial town.” Through Curio Chang, Chiang met other members of the Green Gang. A “kingmaker by instinct,” Curio Chang, like Chen before him, apparently realized that Chiang Kai-shek had the makings of a leader.

  After Chen’s death Chiang apparently suffered some sort of breakdown, and his mother came to Shanghai to take care of him. Wanted by Yuan’s police, he was probably helped to avoid arrest by members of the Green Gang. In 1917, he was appointed military counselor to Sun and spent the next three or four years with the 2nd Detachment of the Cantonese army under the command of a man known as the Hakka General.† Chiang did not trust the Hakka General and warned Sun to be wary of him. Prevented from choosing his own officers or disciplining his soldiers, Chiang recommended that his detachment be disbanded and spent most of a year on home leave (which he took to include Shanghai and Tokyo) and eventually resigned from the detachment. This was the first instance of an oft-repeated maneuver in which Chiang would resign from a post when things were going badly in order to prove that he was irreplacable. He learned that this usually led to an improvement in the circumstances of his job and an increase in his power. As it would in the future, the scheme worked. Both Sun and the Hakka General begged Chiang to return and reorganize the Kwantung army. Chiang hesitated until the Kwangsi Clique, a group from Kwangsi province that opposed Sun, assassinated another of his friends, Chu Ta-fu. His change of heart may also have been due to the following letter, which he received from Sun:

  The sudden tragic death of Chu Ta-fu is a loss to me comparable to that of my right or left hand. When I look upon the members of our party I find very few who are experts in war and also loyal. Only you, my Elder Brother,* are with us, you whose courage and sincerity are equal to those of Chu Ta-fu, and your knowledge of war is even better than his. But you have a very fiery temper and your hatred of mediocrity is excessive. And so it often leads to quarrelling and difficulty in cooperating. As you are shouldering the great and terrible responsibility of our party, you should sacrifice your high ideals a little and try to compromise. This is merely for the sake of our party and has nothing to do with your personal principles.

  Returning to his post, Chiang was furious when he learned that the Hakka General had not finished off the Kwangsi Clique according to the plan Chiang had drawn up. But when he went to Shanghai to complain about this to Sun, the leader gave him no satisfaction. Thoroughly disgusted with both men, Chiang used the death of his mother in June of 1921 as the excuse he needed to absent himself from a frustrating situation. He returned to Chikow, where he stayed on and off until her funeral in November.

  The following month, on December 5, 1921, Chiang married again, this time a girl of his own choosing. Her name was Chen Chieh-ju, known as Jennie Chen. Chiang had first met her in 1919. She was tall and thin, the opposite of his village wife. In Jennie’s version of their courtship, she was not particularly interested in him and avoided him for some time, particularly after he tricked her into going to a hotel and tried to force himself on her. (He was thirty-two at the time; she was thirteen.)

  But Chiang persisted, and Jennie’s mother, concerned about her daughter’s future, engaged a professional investigator to look into his past. The report stated that Chiang lived in Shanghai, was essentially unemployed, and already had a village wife and a concubine. But shortly after the death of Jennie’s father in the fall of 1921, Jennie’s mother received a visit from Curio Chang, Chiang’s dealer friend and Jennie’s godfather, who assured her that Chiang’s first wife, Fu-mei, had “become a devout Buddhist and renounced the world” and that his concubine Yao was currently living in Soochow and “had recently accepted a settlement of $5,000 to relinquish any and all claims on Kai-shek.” After this, Jennie’s mother gave Chiang permission to marry her daughter. The wedding was celebrated in a civil ceremony at the Great Eastern Hotel in Shanghai. Around fifty relatives and friends were present at the feast presided over (and probably paid for) by Curio Chang. During their honeymoon, Jennie discovered that Chiang had disobeyed his doctor and married her before completing a series of treatments for venereal disease. He gave her gonorrhea, a disease that left them both unable to have children,* and in repentance he swore never to drink alcohol again.

  Meanwhile, Chiang’s concerns about the Hakka General had been proven right. When Sun arrived in Canton, he found that the Hakka General had expropriated for himself a long list of impressive titles, including minister of war and governor of the province of Kwangtung, leaving Sun, the founder of the revolution, with nothing but the title of minister of the interior. To counter this, Sun had himself elected provisional president of China by a rump Parliament, called together for that purpose. But the Hakka General was no longer willing to subordinate himself to Sun. Commander of a huge army, in charge of all the arms and provisions Sun needed for his troops, the Hakka General was in effect the warlord of southern China, and the Peking government, always willing to side with whoever was on top, supported him over the revolutionary Sun. Sun’s scheme of hav
ing himself named president had failed. Whatever he called himself, the foreign embassies in Peking refused to recognize him or turn the customs duties over to him. Taking advantage of the situation, the Hakka General sent troops to attack Sun’s headquarters in Canton. Chiang, who was not there at the time, claimed that the Hakka General had offered his soldiers a bonus of $200,000 and three days’ free looting if they managed to kill Sun. Sun’s staff finally convinced him to flee.

  “About two o’clock on the morning of June 16th Dr. Sun roused me… telling me to hurry and dress, that we were in danger and must escape,” Ching-ling wrote in the only description she ever gave of the perils of being Sun Yat-sen’s wife. “…I thought it would be inconvenient for him to have a woman along with him, and urged him to leave me behind for the time being.… At last he saw the sense of my argument, but he would not go even then until he had left all fifty of our bodyguard to protect the house. Then he departed alone.

  Half an hour after he had gone… rifle shots rang out.… The enemy fired downhill at us from two sides, shouting, ‘Kill Sun Wen [Sun Yat-sen]! Kill Sun Wen!’ Pitch darkness covered them completely.… As day broke our men began to reply to the fire.… My bath was smashed to bits. One-third of our handful of troops had been wiped out, but the remaining men resisted with more determination than ever.… By eight o’clock our store of ammunition was running low.… Our Captain advised me to leave… promising… to stay there in order to halt any possible pursuit.… Later, all of the fifty were reported killed. Four of us… taking with us only the most necessary supplies… crawled along… to make our escape.… Twice bullets brushed past my temple without injuring me. From eight in the morning till four that afternoon we were literally buried in a hell of constant gunfire.… Once the entire ceiling of a room I had left only a few minutes before collapsed.… Our iron gates were soon smashed and we were confronted by the bloodthirsty bayonets and revolvers of the soldiers.… I succeeded in making an escape, wearing Colonel Bow’s hat and Dr. Sun’s raincoat.… I was absolutely exhausted, and begged the guards to shoot me. Instead they dragged me forward, one on each side supporting me.… Corpses lay about everywhere.… Their chests were caved in, their arms slashed, their legs severed.… Again our way was cut off by a group of the mob.… The whisper ran through our party that we should lie flat in the street, pretending to be dead. In this way we were left unmolested; then we arose and continued our journey.… Half an hour later… we came to a small farmhouse. The owner tried to drive us out, fearing the consequences of sheltering us; his attempt was forestalled, however, by a timely swoon on my part.