Chiang:
If you have no previous knowledge of the affair, you should see that I return immediately to Nanking or Loyang. Then it may not be difficult to settle this affair.
Chang:
I did not know anything of the actual developments, but I wish to lay my views before Your Excellency, the Generalissimo.
Chiang:
Do you still call me the Generalissimo? If you still recognize me as your superior, you should send me to Loyang; otherwise you are a rebel. Since I am in the hands of a rebel you had better shoot me dead. There is nothing else to say.
Chang:
If Your Excellency accepts my suggestions, I shall obey your orders.
Chiang:
Which are you, my subordinate or my enemy? If my subordinate, you should obey my orders. If you are my enemy you should kill me without delay. You should choose either of these two steps, but say nothing more for I will not listen to you.
When Chang tried to explain that he wanted to talk about policy, Chiang became even angrier, refusing to discuss such matters with anyone of lower rank. For Chiang, there was only right or wrong, loyalty to China or disloyalty to the leader. To quote Edgar Snow, “Chiang’s concept of loyalty” was “the classical one of old China—not as a bond between equals, but as a somewhat feudal code between inferior and superior: son to father, subject to ruler, soldier to general, general to Heaven.” When the Young Marshal asked him why he was so obstinate, he retorted:
What do you mean by “obstinate”? I am your superior, and you are a rebel. According to military discipline and the law of the land, you, as a rebel, deserve not only reprimand but also punishment. My head may be cut off, my body may be mutilated, but I must preserve the honour of the Chinese race, and must uphold law and order. I am now in the hands of you rebels. If I allow the honour of the 400,000,000 people whom I represent to be degraded by accepting any demands in order to save my own life, we should lose our national existence.… If you are a brave man, kill me; if not, confess your sins and let me go.… Why don’t you kill me now?
After this, Chiang closed his eyes and refused to talk. Food was brought to his room, but he refused to eat. The next day, he ate nothing and again refused to speak to Young Marshal Chang, although the latter came to see him four times. When the governor of the province of Shensi, who had been detained along with Chiang, advised him “to be more lenient to Chang,” he replied, “I used to have high hopes of Chang. On former occasions he treated me as if I were his father. I could speak harsh words to him without hurting his feelings. In ordinary circumstances Chang could say anything to me, but today I will listen to his words only when he does not present any demands or conditions to me.… He should awake from his dream of a Sino-Russian Alliance.… He should realize that if he commits such folly… [he] will lose the respect of the whole world.”
Later, Chiang, mindful of his place in history, wrote in his diary, “The courageous life as taught by the late Dr. Sun should be followed by us all. Unless we do, this calamity will certainly overtake us. Jesus Christ was tempted by Satan and withstood him for forty days. He fought against evil influences more strongly than I do today. I am now, however, fighting… with ever-increasing moral strength. I must maintain the same spirit which led Jesus Christ to the Cross, and I must be ready to meet any death.”
On the third day of Chiang’s captivity, Young Marshal Chang came to see him again, “standing behind the door, with tears in his eyes,” according to Chiang, “as if he regretted very much what he had done.” Chiang still refused to engage in conversation with him. The Young Marshal came back later in the day and asked Chiang to move, explaining that the guards in his current residence were not his (Chang’s) soldiers. He himself had only four hundred bodyguards inside the city and six thousand outside, and he could not take full responsibility for Chiang’s safety under these conditions.
By now, Donald had arrived from Nanking and had given the Young Marshal a section of Chiang’s diary that May-ling had told him to take along. When Chiang again refused to move, the Young Marshal told him that they had read his (Chiang’s) diary and discovered that he had intended to fight the Japanese as soon as he was able to crush the Communists. “Your loyalty to the revolutionary cause and your determination to bear the responsibility for saving the country far exceed anything we could have imagined,” the Young Marshal said. “… If I had known one-tenth of what is recorded in your diary, I would certainly not have done this rash act.… Now that I realize your qualities of leadership I feel it would be disloyal to the country if I did not do my best to protect you.… If you are unwilling to walk out yourself I will carry you out on my back.” But when Young Marshal Chang said that he wanted to send him back to Nanking secretly, Chiang refused, saying that he would return to the capital “openly and in a dignified manner or not at all.” According to Chiang, the Young Marshal left him reluctantly, again in tears. Earlier that day, Donald had spoken with the younger man. “I cursed him,” Donald wrote an American correspondent; “went and saw the Generalissimo and… cursed all and sundry for giving me so much trouble.” Donald had brought Chiang a letter from May-ling saying that she too was coming to Sian. Only when Donald suggested that Chiang move closer to the home of the Young Marshal did he finally agree.
Later that day, Chiang asked the Young Marshal if he and his fellow rebels would send him back to Nanking, since he had now complied with the projected move. The Young Marshal said that they had laid out eight conditions for his release, including reorganization of the government, cessation of civil wars, pardon of political offenders, release of those arrested during the Shanghai crackdown, and freedom of political dissent. Chiang rejected them all, saying that he had decided to sacrifice his life rather than sign anything under duress. When the Young Marshal tried to argue, the older man said that he had not “learned the great principles of revolution.… If I should try to save my life today and forget the welfare of the nation… my character as a military man will be destroyed, and the nation will be in a precarious position. This means that the nation will perish when I live. On the other hand, if I stand firm and would rather sacrifice my life than compromise my principles, I shall be able to maintain my integrity till death, and my spirit will live forever. Then multitudes of others will follow me, and bear the duties of office according to this spirit of sacrifice. Then, though I die, the nation will live.” Chiang Kai-shek, as Donald wrote an American friend, “was quite content to be a martyr. In fact I think he was very disappointed when he did not succeed in that respect.”
Donald was not wrong, and during the generalissimo’s captivity he wrote a new will, asking May-ling to “regard my two sons as your own children.” Then he addressed his sons: “Chiang-kuo and Wei-kuo, I was born for the revolution and I will die for revolution.… Soong May-ling is my only wife. If you regard me as your father, Madame Soong May-ling should be your only mother. When I die, you two must obey your mother.”
The following evening, Young Marshal Chang explained to Chiang that General Yang had “long wanted to rebel, and that although he himself had been repeatedly instigated to participate, he hesitated to do so.” That was until their last meeting, when Chiang berated him for supporting the Chinese students. It was at that point that Chang had decided to join forces with Yang.
“I was only twenty eight years old when I controlled one-third of China,” Chang wrote some fifty years later.
I launched the Sian Incident without any thought for myself.… There was nothing I wanted because I already had both power and fortune.… Did I ask Mr. Chiang for money? Did I ask Mr. Chiang for territory? I did not. I sacrificed myself. Why did I sacrifice myself? The first reason is that the civil war had to be stopped. Both the CCP and we are Chinese. Why were we fighting the CCP? It was a political problem, which could have been resolved by negotiation. I stood for negotiation. I told Chiang that he could not exterminate the CCP. When he asked for the reason, I answered that the CCP had won the support
of the people which we had lost.… He believed that we should stabilize the domestic situation before resisting foreign aggression, while I said that we should resist the foreign aggression first. There was no other conflict between us.
During the next four days of Chiang Kai-shek’s captivity, there was a great deal of back-and-forthing about the possibility of releasing him. Meanwhile, he confided to his diary that he was suffering from pain “so acute that I can hardly sit up.” On December 20, T.V. arrived to negotiate his release. “I gathered the impression that the Generalissimo’s life was in the greatest danger,” he later wrote, adding that one man had told him that “if war once broke out on a large scale the committee had decided to hand the Generalissimo to the communists for safe keeping. This was no empty threat.”
Representing the Communist camp was Chou En-lai, Chiang’s Kai-shek’s old underling and associate from Whampoa, who was considered by all, friends and enemies, not only a military authority but a superb diplomat. “I met with Chou En-lai,” the Young Marshal said, recalling those days many years later. “I admire Chou most of all among the men in contemporary Chinese history. I realized that he understood me completely when we met for the very first time. He admired me a lot… we felt like old friends at our first meeting.” Chou apparently paid the Young Marshal the ultimate compliment, telling him, “We in the CCP can give up all these things [the bones of contention between the two sides] if you can be the leader. We hope that you can be the leader. We prefer you as the leader.”
Meanwhile, T.V. saw Chiang alone: “He [Chiang] was much moved and wept bitterly. I comforted him and told him that instead of being humiliated the whole world was concerned and sympathise[d] with him.” T.V. had brought a letter from May-ling. “Should T.V. fail to return to Nanking within three days,” she wrote her husband, “I will come… to live and die with you.” Chiang’s eyes, he admitted, “got wet.” Nevertheless, he asked T.V. not to allow her to come to Sian. The next day T.V. flew back to Nanking and returned with May-ling.
THE NEWS OF Chiang’s capture had been given to his wife by her brother-in-law, H. H. Kung, currently serving as minister of finance and vice premier. “There has been a mutiny,” Kung told her, “and there’s no news of the Generalissimo.” May-ling, who was in Shanghai consulting a doctor, immediately left for Nanking. Kung then approached his sister-in-law Ching-ling to ask for her signature on a document denouncing the Young Marshal. “What Chang Hsueh-liang [the Young Marshal] did was right,” she retorted. “I would have done the same thing if I had been in his place. Only I would have gone further!” According to Edgar Snow, who interviewed Ching-ling some months later, Chang had met earlier with Ching-ling, who had urged him to take action, saying, “You must do something to wipe out your disgrace [the loss of Manchuria].”
With Chiang in captivity, Kung, who was in Shanghai at the time, was now acting head of the government. “I was the one who had to shoulder the responsibility.… I saw it was absolutely essential that I go to Nanking immediately… many of my colleagues were strong for military action. They wanted to bomb the whole city [Sian]… I could not help but feel that the solution of the problem was not to use military force, but that by personal appeal… things could be settled peacefully.” In spite of Kung, the trigger-happy generals in the capital sent bombers and troops to Sian. Chiang agreed to ask the central government to postpone its assault for three days. “It was obvious,” Donald said, “that a gang in Nanking wanted to take advantage of the situation to secure the reins of Government, thinking that the Generalissimo would never return to Nanking because, if he was not killed by the so-called rebels he would be killed as a result of bombardment which they had ordered.” It was said that General Ho Chien, a KMT commander, and others wanted Wang Ching-wei to form a more pro-Japanese administration, and Chou En-lai told T.V., in the course of their negotiations, that “important functionaries at Nanking are giving banquets to take over control expecting that the Generalissimo would never return.”
In spite of the fact that May-ling realized that she was “regarded as a woman who could not be expected to be reasonable in such a situation,” she held a series of “stormy conferences” with members of the government, lobbying for calm instead of what she called “an unhealthy obsession on the part of leading military officers who asserted that they felt it their inexorable duty to mobilize the military machine forthwith and launch an immediate punitive expedition to attack Sian.” Once again, Donald, who wrote a friend that May-ling “had a devil of a scrap” with the military, summed up the situation: “the Gissimo was in less danger from the Sian people than he was from the gang at Nanking who tried to use his detention as an excuse to put him out of business and get the seats of the mighty.”
Added to the warlike generals, led by Chiang’s trusted General Ho, were the rumormongers. Some spread a story that the Young Marshal was demanding a huge ransom in exchange for Chiang; others—inspired by a Japanese news agency—insisted that Chiang was already dead and if by some miracle he was still alive, he would never be allowed to leave Sian. But Donald called May-ling from Loyang to assure her that her husband was being well treated, that he was “still furious and resentful,” but that he had spoken with the Young Marshal, who had admitted his mistakes. “I feel sorry for Chang Hsueh-liang [the Young Marshal],” said his old friend May-ling more than once during the crisis. The Young Marshal, knowing that May-ling was the only person who could reason with her husband, had, in fact, wired her to come to Sian.
Before May-ling could leave, the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police, Tai Li, arrived in Sian, claiming that he was “wracked with remorse for his inability to forestall this crisis.” Armed with two revolvers, saying that he would “share life or death” with Chiang, he fell to his knees the moment he was ushered into Chiang’s room. He then walked over to the generalissimo’s bed, took hold of Chiang’s legs, and, weeping “bitterly,” reproached himself for having failed in his duty to his chief. “Tai Li’s dramatic behavior may have been contrived,” said his biographer, “but… his presence in Sian was crucial” in the eventual outcome of the situation. It also raised his value in the eyes of May-ling, who arrived the next day.
By the time she left for Sian, however, the disaster scenarios had gotten to her, and Chiang’s wife admitted feeling “anxious and apprehensive.” T.V. and Donald, whom Chiang had “repeatedly asked… not to leave him,” had returned to Nanking to make the trip with her. Before landing, she gave Donald her revolver and made him promise “that if troops got out of control and seized me he should without hesitation shoot me.” A good actress, the May-ling who landed in Sian managed to appear calm and at ease. When the Young Marshal, “looking very tired, very embarrassed, and somewhat ashamed,” came on board the plane to escort her off, she greeted him as usual and asked him not to let his soldiers mess up her bags by searching them. When General Yang appeared, she shook hands with him as if she were “arriving on a casual visit.” Yang too, she said, was “obviously very nervous and just as obviously very relieved at my calm attitude.” Even with her husband—or perhaps more with him—she wrote that she “felt it advisable to remove whatever tension I could from the situation.”
“I was so surprised to see her,” Chiang wrote, “that I felt as if I were in a dream.… I was very much moved, and almost wanted to cry.” He said that he had been reading the Old Testament that morning and had come across the passage in Jeremiah that said, “Jehovah will now do a new thing, and that is, He will make a woman protect a man.” Taking no chances, however, Chiang warned May-ling not to do anything or agree to anything on his behalf that would compromise his principles.
“My husband was in bed,” she wrote later, “suffering from a wrenched back. He looked wan and ill.… As I saw him lying there injured and helpless, the shadow of his former self, with his hands, legs, and feet cut by brambles and bruised by the rocks he clambered over when scrambling about the mountain, I felt surge through me an uncontrollable wave of r
esentment against those responsible for his plight.” In a more practical vein, May-ling had brought her husband a spare set of false teeth, which she gave him to put in his mouth, while those accompanying her looked the other way.
She then sent for the Young Marshal, with whom she spoke quietly about the situation. She told him that whatever he and his cohorts thought, the people of the nation were not with them, “he had made a bad mess of things,” and the big question now was, how did he plan to extricate himself? “If you had asked me,” she said, “I could have told you that you could not get the Generalissimo to do anything by using force.”
The Young Marshal explained that they had done this “for the good of the country” but that Chiang would not even talk to them. “Please, you try to make the generalissimo less angry,” he begged her, adding, “I know I have done wrong, and I am not trying to justify myself or this action. The motive was good and it would never have happened if you had been here with the generalissimo as you usually are. I tried again and again to speak to the generalissimo, but each time he shut me up and scolded me violently.”
“The generalissimo only scolds people of whom he has hopes,” she told him. “If he thinks people are useless he just dismisses them—he won’t take the trouble to scold them.”
“You know I have always had great faith in you,” Chang said, “and my associates all admire you. When they went through the generalissimo’s papers… they found two letters from you… which caused them to hold you in even greater respect. They saw by those letters that you were heart and soul with the people, and therefore they know, as I know, that you can adjust this situation so far as the generalissimo is concerned so that he can quickly leave Sian.” Chang then explained that he himself was perfectly willing to release Chiang “immediately,” but he had to get the consent of the other kidnappers. “Well, then you had better go and talk to them,” she said. “… I will wait up for your reply.” But the Young Marshal did not return until after 2:00 A.M. “Yang and his men are not willing to release the generalissimo,” he told her. “They say that since T.V. and Madame are friendly towards me, my head would be safe, but what about theirs? They now blame me for getting them into this affair, and say that since none of our conditions are granted they would be in a worse fix then ever if they now released the generalissimo.”
The Last Empress Page 34
