During the following days, “days of increasing anxiety,” according to May-ling, T.V. was kept “incessantly occupied with conferences with this group of officers or that. He seemed to be involved in a perpetual motion contest of defeating one set of ‘final’ arguments and requirements to be immediately confronted with a dozen others just as ‘final’ and just as impracticable.” Her husband, May-ling said, “was not of so much help just then; he was so tired of the shilly-shallying, the impossible arguments… that he did not care whether he left Sian or not. ‘I’ll refuse to go,’ he exploded at one time, ‘if this kind of thing continues.’
“Christmas Eve was filled with beliefs and dashed hopes. I told Hanching [Young Marshal Chang] that he should get the Generalissimo out on Christmas Day; that the truce was up on that day, and if an attack were launched we would surely be killed, and he with us.… He explained that he had practically no troops in the city, and that Yang’s soldiers held the gates.” When the Young Marshal suggested that May-ling and Donald fly to Loyang while he disguised Chiang and smuggled him out of the city, May-ling refused. “He will not be disguised, and if he cannot go openly by airplane then I will stay with him, and if he is to die because of attacks on the city by the government forces then I will die with him.” T.V. and the Young Marshal thought she “was just as obstinate as the generalissimo” and behind her back made arrangements to get her out if the worst were to happen.
By this time, the entire incident had been reduced to a question of “saving heads.” That evening the Young Marshal had a fight with General Yang. “You started the coup and without securing anything you are allowing the generalissimo to go,” Yang said. “He will surely cut off our heads.” In response, May-ling assured the rebel leaders that “if they really repented their heads would be safe.… They knew the Generalissimo was magnanimous, and they would have to depend upon his magnanimity.” The person who finally convinced the Young Marshal, according to Tai Li’s biographer, was the head of the Secret Service: “According to foreign intelligence reports at the time,” he wrote, “no one other than Tai Li could have convinced the ‘Young Marshal’ that he would enjoy the protection of the Nationalist secret service once they were both back.”
But the real source of Chiang’s deliverance was not Tai Li but a telegram, which had suddenly arrived from Stalin for Ching-ling with instructions to forward it to Mao. The wire said that the Chinese Communists must use their influence to see that Chiang was released. Otherwise, “they would be denounced by Moscow as ‘bandits’ and repudiated before the world.” After he read it, Mao “flew into a rage… swore and stamped his feet. Until then they had planned to give Chiang a public trial and to organize a Northwest anti-Japanese government.”*
“In reality,” May-ling said, “all the political reforms the Sian leaders espoused, had long been in the mind of the Generalissimo himself, as they themselves saw from his diary and private papers. True to his nature, however, he kept what was in his mind to himself, and was, perhaps, too intolerant of others when they endeavoured to express views to him, especially if those others (as in this case) were subordinates who, he thought, were not performing their duties according to orders. Being a rigid disciplinarian he resented any departure from fundamental military requirements by officers. ‘Theirs but to do and die, theirs not to reason why’ was what he expected.”
At 10:30 on Christmas morning, the Young Marshal told the Chiangs that their plane was ready, “but nothing is settled.” T.V. then went to see General Yang, who, after a conversation with Chou En-lai, agreed to go along with the Young Marshal’s plan to send Chiang back to Nanking. Before he left, however, Chiang insisted on seeing both the Young Marshal and General Yang and giving them (from his bed) what he called “a long and sincere talk,” a version of which he later included in his diary. He told them that their coup d’état had had a grave effect on “the continuity of Chinese history of five thousand years and the life and death of the Chinese nation” but that their decision to return him to Nanking was “an indication of the high moral and cultural standard of the Chinese people.” He said that since they had acknowledged their error, they were “entitled to remain as [his] subordinates” and that he would urge the Nanking government to treat them with leniency. He then reiterated the importance of the nation over the individual.
After the lecture, Chiang got up, dressed, and went to the airfield with May-ling and the Young Marshal—“the first time on record,” according to May-ling, “that any high officer responsible for mutinous conduct had shown eagerness to proceed to the Capital to be tried for his misdeeds.” When they got to the airport, there were four lines of the Young Marshal’s soldiers, bayonets fixed, guns ready to shoot. The Young Marshal climbed into the copilot’s seat next to his pilot. The others sat or lay down in the back of what was known as Chang’s “Flying Palace”—a silver twin-engine monoplane lined in red plush, with upholstered chairs, sofas, a writing desk, a radio, and a refrigerator.
Chiang had urged the Young Marshal not to accompany him back to Nanking, but Chang insisted, telling his subordinates that his presence would show that he was sorry and would help the leader regain his reputation after Sian. “A true man is always responsible for what he has done. I don’t care about my punishment. Let him do as he likes, I will never regret it,” he confided to a fellow Manchurian. He later told an interviewer that he had been prepared for death when he accompanied Chiang back to the capital.
“Are you ready to go?” May-ling asked Chang’s pilot, Royal Leonard.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Get out of here! Let’s get going!”
Leonard, who was instructed to go to Loyang, said that from time to time, he “looked back into the cabin” to observe his passengers. “Madame,” he said, “was looking out of a window, a faint smile of happiness on her face. Donald was chuckling to himself. T. V. Soong occasionally looked at some papers but spent most of the time resting, with his eyes closed. The Generalissimo [who was lying down] continued to sleep. When we arrived at Loyang just at dark the Young Marshal asked me to circle once or twice to let them know we were landing.”
“Nobody send message we come?” the pilot asked in pidgin.
“No. Not many people in Sian know we leave. No want anyone to know we come,” the Young Marshal replied.
When the soldiers and students who had gathered on the airfield after the warning saw May-ling step out of the door of the plane, they saluted, and two officers came forward to help her alight. When the Young Marshal followed her out, the soldiers pointed their guns at him and asked if they should kill him. “No! Let him alone!” she said, putting her arm around him. He, in turn, put an arm around her. When Chiang Kai-shek was carried off the plane, the soldiers threw their hats in the air and began to cheer. Apparently, some even had tears in their eyes as they helped him into his automobile.
The next morning the Chiangs returned to Nanking, where they were welcomed with great enthusiasm. When the news of his release reached Peiping, the entire city is said to have “erupted with joy. Firecrackers were set off everywhere and the streets were packed with cheering crowds. Many people gave parties to celebrate the occasion.”
The story of what had occurred during those two and a half weeks in December 1936 came to be known in Chinese history as the Sian Incident. It reverberated throughout the country and sent shock waves around the world. It also made Chiang Kai-shek (however briefly) into the icon he aspired to be and May-ling into a universal symbol of the fearless and devoted wife.
PART FOUR
1937–1942
24
Recent events in China constitute not only a warning but a final signal that the white man’s burden soon will be taken over by a very willing Japan. The reign of the white race in the Far East is coming to an end.
—DR. SVEN HEDIN, SWEDISH EXPLORER IN ASIA, 1937
IN SPITE of May-ling’s assurances of her husband’s generosity and promises given him by Tai Li
and T.V.,* Young Marshal Chang, who returned to Nanking with the Chiangs to stand trial, was court-martialed and sentenced to ten years in prison, followed by five years’ deprivation of his civil rights. The harshness of his sentence probably had to do with the fact that the man who “unquestionably saved the Generalissimo’s life” told the court that “with the exception of the Generalissimo he despised the whole Nanking bunch and would, when he got out, even if single-handed, agitate against them.” Although his sentence was reduced the next day to house arrest and military surveillance, Chiang’s generals retaliated by keeping pressure on the generalissimo to prolong his detention. Once the strongest warlord in the North, the Young Marshal became, according to one of Chiang’s biographers, “the perpetual prisoner of the Generalissimo, traveling about like a parcel in the retinue of his captor, never permitted to speak for publication or to explain himself.” Royal Leonard says that he tried to see his employer every day for three weeks after his return to Nanking but was refused admittance. According to him, there were twenty-five guards around H. H. Kung’s house, where the Young Marshal was being detained.
While some contend that Chiang never forgave the younger man, Kung claimed that Chiang “pleaded with the government” to treat Chang “leniently.” The Young Marshal himself said that Chiang “always found me the best place to stay anywhere I went” and took care of him when he was ill, sending a doctor from the government hospital. “He really cared about me all along,” Chang said. “Of course, political problems have nothing to do with personal emotion.” It must be noted, however, that the Young Marshal also said that “the longer Soong May-ling lives, the longer I will live,” acknowledging the fact that it was probably her influence as much as or more than Chiang’s generosity that kept him alive after Sian. Asked at the end of his life if he thought that the generalissimo had been a success or failure, Chang said, “I think he was a failure.… He was too conservative and too stubborn. The truth is he wanted to be an emperor. He believed that what he said was right and should be considered right.”
In 1974, thirty-eight years after the event, the Young Marshal finally released his memoirs, in which he claimed that Chiang’s kidnapping had been the result of a “Communist plot.” He said he had met Chou En-lai before the actual incident to discuss the terms under which the CCP would agree to cooperate with Nationalist troops in fighting the Japanese. Chou had promised him that the Communist troops would be disbanded as soon as the war with Japan was over and that all the CCP wanted was to be “allowed to function as a legitimate political party.… I felt elated in the belief that the country will march toward the goal of fighting the Japanese against a backdrop of internal harmony. Now I know how foolish and naive I was.” The Young Marshal explained that he had written the memoirs in 1940 for Chiang Kai-shek, who apparently released them in order to expose “the treachery of the Chinese Communists.”
Time magazine, which reported the Sian incident over a period of three weeks in excessive detail, most of it wrong, fastened on Donald as the most newsworthy of the exotic cast of characters. According to Time, Donald had owned “perhaps the most sumptuous home in Peking, certainly the most artistic summer residence in a magnificent abandoned temple. His collection of Chinese antiques, historical paraphernalia for opium smoking, French wines, Scotch whiskeys, and Cuban cigars was astounding for a man who himself never took a puff or a drop.” Moreover, Donald had “perhaps killed more ladies (in the complimentary, Edwardian sense of ‘lady-killing’) than any other man in China’s swift, hard, cheap, international Shanghai-Peiping set.”
“I never read such balderdash,” Donald wrote a friend who sent him the article. “I wonder how they happen to get hold of such material, and who gets paid for writing it. I could give them a much better tale at half the price and twice as accurate.”
All the other participants except General Yang* came out of the Sian Incident very well. Chiang emerged with his principles intact and his popularity noticeably increased. During his captivity, he had told the governor of Shensi—in one of his sanctimonious inversions of logic—that the coup had been (Chiang’s) fault because “I trusted others too much and neglected to take necessary precautions. For this reason,” he said, “a great injury has been done to the country. After my return to Nanking I shall tender my resignation again and ask the Central Government to punish me.” True to his word, he did just that: “I sincerely hope that the Central Executive Committee will censure me for my negligence to duty,” he told them. “I further request the Central Executive Committee immediately to appoint some other competent man to take over my duties, so that I may retire from active service and await disciplinary punishment. In that case the discipline of the State will be upheld and my conscience may be set at ease.”
Chiang knew that this resignation and one that followed would not be accepted, and on January 2, 1937, he and May-ling traveled to Chikow, where he could recuperate from his injuries in the serenity of old surroundings. Since his first wife was in his old house, the Chiangs took up residence in his favorite home, a former Buddhist temple in the mountains. Their quarters, which were upstairs in the low, two-story structure, consisted of three large rooms—a living room, dining room, and bedroom, furnished with a large soft bed for May-ling and a narrow bed, “hard as a monk’s pallet,” for Chiang, who had also had himself fitted with a back brace. He interrupted his hiatus only once, when he flew to Nanking to repeat his resignation to a combined meeting of the Central Executive and Supervisory Committees of the Kuomintang. As expected, this time it was refused as well. He was also given an additional leave of two months.
The Chinese Communist Party also emerged from the Sian Incident with tangible gains, although Mao, only marginally less hypocritical than Chiang, issued a statement calling on Chiang to reverse his “wrong policy” of the previous decade and “remember that he owes his safe departure from Sian to the mediation of the Communist Party” along with the generals involved. Changes in the status of the CCP came about in several stages, starting in February 1937, when the Communists sent a wire to Nanking, promising to discontinue their efforts to overthrow the central government, to abolish the Soviet government in China, to subsume the Red Army into the National Revolutionary Army, and to carry out Sun’s Three Principles of the People. In return the CCP asked the KMT to stop the civil war, guarantee freedom of speech, release political prisoners, improve living conditions, convene a multiparty conference of national salvation, and complete preparations to fight the Japanese.
Neither the government nor Chiang Kai-shek, currently on sick leave, would agree to these points, but open fighting between the Kuomintang and the Communists stopped, as did Chiang’s Communist extermination campaigns. During the spring of 1937, negotiations between Chou En-lai and a representative from the KMT resulted in restoration of communications between the KMT and the CCP, lifting of the economic blockade of the Red-controlled areas, the release of some political prisoners, and an end to the kidnapping and torture of Communists by the Blue Shirts, who now turned their attention to Japanese spies. Chiang also placed the Red districts within the “national defense area.” In return the CCP said it would stop seizing landlords’ farms, although it refused to return lands already confiscated, and would stop issuing antigovernment and anti-Kuomintang propaganda— promises it did not honor.
With the CCP and the KMT agreeing to cooperate against a common enemy, the way was finally open for Stalin to send Chiang’s son Ching-kuo back home, and in April of 1937, the stocky, unpretentious twenty-eight-year-old arrived with his Russian wife and family. “Welcome, my son!” Chiang Kai-shek is reported to have said. “And now you must meet your new mother.”
“That is not my mother,” Ching-kuo replied, saying that he wished to go see his real mother. Although May-ling tried to build a relationship with him, he continued to refer to her as Madame Chiang for several years. Chiang’s other son, Wei-kuo, had come home earlier and been placed under the supervision of May-ling. Since
she could not manage him, he had been sent to Germany for military training but had emerged in London during the coronation festivities of King George VI, insisting that the Chinese delegation get him invited to all the good parties.
During his twelve years in the Soviet Union, Ching-kuo had been thoroughly indoctrinated with an ideology at the opposite end of the political spectrum from that of his father. Hence, Chiang embarked on a course of retraining his son, who, for his part, seemed to accept his new education with good grace. “With a view to the fact that I went abroad as a young boy and stayed in a foreign country too long,” Ching-kuo explained, “Father feared that I lacked deep understanding of China’s moral philosophy and national spirit.… Apart from studying the Three Principles of the People and books of a similar nature, I was also instructed by my father to read classics and history books extensively, as well as Chinese philosophers. More than that, Father repeatedly asked me to re-read what I had read before, memorising many classical pieces by heart.” Beyond reading and memorizing, Chiang insisted that Ching-kuo put his reactions and comments on paper so that he could correct them.
The major result of the Sian Incident, however, was the decision of Japan to get on with its plans to conquer China, since the ongoing unification of the Chinese would only make them harder to subdue. What the Japanese now needed was an incident that they could escalate into open hostilities. Meantime, they planted several signposts on the road to war. In early May of 1937, three divisions of the Japanese army arrived in China. Ten days later the Japanese minister of war issued a public complaint about the fact that the Chinese were acting in an overconfident manner that was insulting to the Japanese. On May 24, the Japanese foreign minister said that if Japan’s honor were slighted by the Chinese, Japan would have no alternative but to declare war. And on July 7, 1937, Japan manufactured an incident that it could blow up into a casus belli.
The Last Empress Page 35
