In the middle of December of 1949, Madame cabled Chiang some disturbing news from the United States: “Our embassies in North America, South America, and Canada are owed months of back pay, and the Communists are using bribes to get close to the embassy staffs.… We must pay their salaries. We should have paid them before and avoided this situation.”
This last piece of advice was sent to Taiwan. Although Chiang had told his wife early in the year that neither he nor his government would ever give up, another series of defections had finally convinced him that he could not set up a base on the mainland. On December 8, 1949, the Executive Yuan had voted in an emergency session to move the capital of Nationalist China to the island, and two days later, Chiang himself left for Taiwan.
PART EIGHT
1949–1975
50
Taiwan became part of unified China nearly 200 years before Sicily became part of unified modern Italy. Taiwan came under China’s direct administration system about 200 years before Hawaii achieved statehood in America.
—RICHARD CHU
AN OLD Chinese tale says that the island of Taiwan was built by a fire-breathing dragon piling up gigantic rocks in the sea. More likely, it came about as the result of two earthquakes: the first, burying the East Asian coast in the ocean, and the second, throwing up enough rocks and soil to create a landmass shaped like a tobacco leaf, twice the size of New Jersey. Originally populated by headhunting aborigines, it got its name from Portuguese sailors on their way to Japan. They called it “Ilha Formosa,” beautiful island.
The Dutch invaded Taiwan in 1624 but didn’t last long. They were followed by Chinese loyal to the Ming Dynasty, who fought forty-five bloody rebellions against the Manchus. Even though Formosa was considered “one of the most dangerous and unhealthy spots in the Orient,” its tiny population prospered and by 1893 had grown to over two and a half million. Like their countrymen, the Taiwanese suffered from the ubiquitous Chinese squeeze. According to one Canadian missionary, “From the highest to the lowest, every Chinese official in Formosa has an ‘itching palm,’ and the exercise of official functions is always corrupted by money bribes.… In the matter of bribing and boodling, the Chinese official in Formosa could give points to the most accomplished office-seekers and money-grabbers in Washington or Ottawa.”
In 1885, Taiwan was declared a province in its own right with its own governor, who transferred the island’s capital to Taipei, built a power station and a railroad (the second in all of China), and started a limited postal system. But the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, which had started as a fight over Korea, ended with China’s being forced to cede Taiwan to Japan. To quote a Japanese historian of the day, “The white people have long believed that it has been the white man’s burden to cultivate the uncivilized territories and bring to them the benefits of civilization. The Japanese people now have risen in the Far East and want to participate with the white people in this great mission.”
The Japanese, who began their takeover with a savage repression of revolts, established peace within four years. Although two thirds of the island was mountainous and less than one third of the rest was arable, Taiwan became a model of agricultural and industrial prosperity with a far higher standard of living than the mainland. The island produced sizable amounts of copper, aluminum, and gold, and its citizens acquired radios, bicycles, and watches sent by Japan in exchange for rice and sugar. In spite of a strict quota on Chinese immigrants, Taiwan’s population doubled between 1895 and 1945. This was undoubtedly due to Japanese standards of hygiene and public health—areas in which the Chinese had always been deficient. The 350,000 or so Japanese residents of the island also took care not to fraternize socially with their Chinese subjects.
During World War II, Japan used Taiwan as a base of operations, and the island suffered from U.S. bombing raids. In September 1945, Japan was forced to give Taiwan back to China, and Chiang Kai-shek sent troops to take over the government. According to George H. Kerr, a navy man who had taught in Taiwan before the war and was made vice consul afterward, the island was “rich, orderly and modernized” when the Chinese arrived. “It is difficult,” he said, “to convey… the atmosphere of great expectation which enveloped the island” when the Chinese replaced the Japanese. Delighted citizens were quickly disillusioned, however, when they discovered that their own countrymen were rapacious, corrupt, and at least as “brutal and insensitive” as their predecessors. According to the Taiwanese, “We think of the Japanese as dogs and the Chinese as pigs. A dog eats, but he protects. A pig just eats.”
The dishonesty prevalent among Chinese officials was encouraged by General Chen Yi, whom Chiang appointed governor of the island in 1945. A native of Chiang Kai-shek’s home province of Chekiang, Chen Yi—short, fat, jowly, and beady-eyed—considered himself above the law. He had previously served for eight years as governor of the province of Fukien, where it was said that he had managed to hide a thriving trade carried on between his powerful patrons and the Japanese enemy. In his new role, Chen appointed commissioners of finance, transport, industry, etc., who staffed their departments with relatives and friends. Kerr tells us that the police chief of one city listed more that forty relatives on his payroll, while a “prominent Commissioner was alleged to have a concubine on the Department payroll, listed as a ‘technical specialist.’ ” These officials and their appointees expropriated the best houses for themselves, taking over 90 percent of the important industries and replacing the Taiwanese workers with their own people, regardless of competence or experience. They and their cronies confiscated approximately $1 billion worth of nonmilitary properties and $2 billion worth of military supplies, most of which disappeared into the black market. Within a year and a half of their arrival, the economy of the island had collapsed.
While Chinese officials hoarded rice and smuggled it to the mainland, raising the price of food by 700 percent during the year after the war, deterioration in sewage disposal, house-to-house disinfection services, and other health measures led to epidemics of cholera and bubonic plague. When something called the “Peace Preservation Corps” expropriated Taipei’s garbage trucks to haul stolen goods to the waterfront, gigantic piles of trash collected in parks, alleyways, and side streets, and the population of rats on the island “multiplied fantastically.” Attempts to rehabilitate public water systems failed, due to widespread theft of plumbing fixtures, faucets, pipes and fire hydrants. The director of public health tried to stop the free distribution of antimalaria tablets in order to put his own pharmaceutical company into the quinine business. His successor finally distributed 45 million Atabrine tablets that had been lying in warehouses for more than a year while the government collected storage fees, which were eventually charged to the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. “The range and variety of fraud and speculation,” said Kerr, “was limitless, extending into every sector of island life.”
In October of 1946, the generalissimo and Madame had paid a visit to the island, purportedly to celebrate the first anniversary of Japan’s surrender but really to avoid a meeting General Marshall had set up for Chiang with Chou En-lai. The couple made their triumphal entry into Taipei, where a holiday had been declared, but the citizens, who had been “marched into place” hours before, mostly kept silent when the Chiangs passed. Shown only what officialdom wanted him to see, Chiang praised the unscrupulous Chen, and moderate Taiwanese, who had been hoping that conditions would improve “if the Generalissimo only knew the truth,” were devastated. Four months later, a group of young Formosans delivered a petition to the U.S. Consulate, addressed to Secretary of State Marshall, begging the United Nations to take the island under its protection. “Our fine island, Beautiful Formosa,” it read, was being “trampled away by Chinese maladministration.”
On the evening of February 27, 1947, a Taiwanese woman with two small children who was selling black-market cigarettes from a portable stand was pistol-whipped to death by agents from the Monopoly Bureau f
or not paying her taxes. The next day, a protest march over the killing encountered more agents from the same bureau abusing two children also selling cigarettes. The angry crowd beat the agents to death and sacked the storerooms at a Monopoly Bureau branch office. Meanwhile, at least four members of a silent crowd of islanders who had gathered in protest before the governor’s gate were gunned down by heavily armed Nationalist soldiers. The Taiwanese organized a “committee for the settlement of the February 28th Incident,” which they presented to Chen, along with demands for various kinds of reform. Although he promised to organize a committee composed of “representatives from the people of all walks of life,” Chen ordered in reinforcements from the mainland, and trucks filled with government soldiers and machine guns drove through the streets killing pedestrians and looting at will. Along with some ten thousand ordinary Taiwanese, certain educators, doctors, politicians, publishers, and businessmen had been targeted for systematic elimination. “We saw students tied together, being driven to the execution grounds,” said Kerr. “… One foreigner counted more than thirty young bodies—in student uniforms—lying along the roadside… they had had their noses and ears slit or hacked off, and many had been castrated.” Thus, according to The Wilson Quarterly, “a whole generation of Taiwanese leaders was lost.”
A month later, the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang adopted a resolution censuring Chen Yi and demanding that he be dismissed. On March 28, he bowed to the pressure and offered his resignation. To save his face, Chiang allowed Chen to remain in Taipei for six weeks— plenty of time to kill off old enemies and fill his suitcases with money. Five days before his departure, his government decreed a Day of Thanksgiving for which all schoolchildren had to contribute money to thank the Nationalist army for the protection they had been given during the protests. Each primary school child was assessed five yen,* and middle school students had to contribute twice that amount. Even after dismissing Chen from the governorship of Taiwan, however, the generalissimo appointed him governor of their old province of Chekiang, and it was not until Chiang learned that Chen had been dealing with an old Communist associate that he had him arrested. Chen Yi was eventually executed—not for stealing and mass murder but for double-crossing Chiang.
On April 22, 1947, Chiang Kai-shek, who had originally offered a public defense of Chen Yi, was given a full report on the massacres by Ambassador Stuart. Stuart recommended that T.V. take over the governorship, but May-ling’s brother refused to move to Taiwan, and Chiang replaced Chen with a former ambassador to Washington. A year and a half later, the new governor was abruptly dismissed by the G-mo and replaced by Chen Cheng, the general who had given his house in Chungking to the Chiangs. Called by Crozier “one of the great men of modern China,” Chen Cheng was tough, loyal, and popular with Americans.
By the time Chen Cheng took over, refugees from the mainland were arriving in droves (one estimate puts the number at 5,000 per day). Rich immigrants sent what Kerr describes as “entire shiploads of personal property, industrial raw materials, dismantled factories and foodstuffs” across the strait, while the poor just managed to get themselves to the island, landing at junk harbors, river mouths, and beaches. To handle the influx, General Chen brought in Ching-kuo to deal with security issues, and, according to Kerr, “1949 is remembered on Formosa as a year of terror.” It is estimated that Chen and Ching-kuo arrested some 10,000 people—some interrogated, some imprisoned, some executed. As a correspondent from the London Daily News reported, “The Formosans are probably the only Orientals who wouldn’t be sorry to see the Japanese back.”
On December 10, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek retreated to the island with his loyalists, machinery, and hardware salvaged from dismantled factories on the mainland and the huge collection of art treasures, originally from Peking, that had been packed up a dozen years before and hidden in caves around Chungking during the war. Eleven days after his arrival, General Chen was moved over to the position of president of the Executive Yuan (i.e., premier), and Chiang appointed Dr. Wu Kuo-chen, known in America as K. C. Wu, governor of Taiwan—the third governor in as many years. A liberal, a man of integrity, and an experienced administrator, Wu had attended college in the United States (Grinnell and Princeton) and had served as mayor of Chungking, vice minister of foreign affairs, and mayor of Shanghai. According to one observor, Chiang’s choice of Wu was indicative of his desperation. Chiang’s state of mind could not have been helped by President Truman’s announcement on January 5, 1950, that the U.S. government was not interested in establishing military bases on the island, that it did not intend to get involved in the civil war in China, and that it would “not provide military aid or advice to Chinese Forces on Formosa.”
Three days after Truman’s discouraging statement, Madame Chiang left the United States for Taiwan.
FIVE OR SIX years after the event, the generalissimo’s wife wrote about why she had decided to “return to share the fate of my husband and my people on Formosa,” in spite of the fact that both friends and family had tried to “dissuade” her:
In those dark days, I kept on praying.… Over and over again I would ask my sister, Madame Kung, “How can God allow anything so wicked to happen? How can He allow the Communists to overrun the mainland? Doesn’t He know they are His enemies?” She would reply, “Keep on praying and be patient. I am certain He will open a way.” “Then one morning at dawn, unaware whether I was asleep or awake, I heard a Voice—an ethereal Voice saying distinctly: “All is right.” Fully awakened by the words, I immediately rose and went to my sister’s room.… Before I could speak, she sat up and said: “What has happened? Your face looks radiant.” I told her that I had heard God speak to me. This was not the first time in my life that I heard The Voice, for I had other experiences when I was somehow aware of His Presence.… Fortunately my sister understood what I meant. When I announced that I was going home by the first available plane, she helped me to pack. No longer did she protest.
During her sojourn in the States, the G-mo’s wife had given no speeches and had refused to meet with reporters. Her silence made her fifteen-minute farewell address, broadcast over NBC, even more dramatic. She delivered it at noon on January 8, 1950, from the living room of the Kung home on Riverside Drive. She was, she said, returning “to my people on the island of Formosa, the fortress of our hopes, the citadel of our battle against an alien power which is ravaging our country.” For more than twenty years, she said, her husband had “led his people in the fight against Communism.… Chiang Kai-shek, of all the world’s statesmen, was first to perceive the treachery of the communist.… A few years ago he was exalted for the courage and tenacity of the fight he waged. Now he is pilloried. Times have changed, but the man has not changed. My husband remains resolute.” Nationalist China, according to Chiang’s wife, now stood “abandoned and alone,” shouldering “the only rifle in the defense of liberty.” She was, she said, too proud to ask the American people for any more help. “When a nation, like a man, does an act of justice,” she said, “it must be of his conscience and not by request or demand.”
Having discovered that the United States would not provide her with transportation home—Washington had billed the Chinese government for her trip from China in a U.S. navy transport plane—the Madame arrived in San Francisco looking “tired and pale after a rough and stormy cross-country flight aboard a Trans World airliner.” After a stopover in San Francisco, she boarded a Pan American Stratocruiser for Hawaii, where she rested at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel before taking a tour of Honolulu. She and her party then left for Guam, Manila, and Taiwan. After more than a year’s separation, she and Chiang greeted each other with what one reporter called “a brief handclasp.”
The Chiangs had not lived together for some time, but May-ling moved into her husband’s residence in Shilin, a village just outside Taipei.* Built in the Western style seven years earlier, the residence was adjacent to a park and hidden from the main road. It was a modest one-story granite
house that lent itself to a far quieter life than any they had shared on the mainland—the sort of pseudo-simplicity that Chiang relished and May-ling put up with for the sake of appearances. Moreover, they were now in a political situation that left little room for personal animosity or extracurricular activities. The first couple eventually built a chapel on the grounds, which May-ling encouraged their friends and visitors to attend with them.
In summers the Chiangs moved up to Grass Mountain Château, a villa built by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation to house the Japanese crown prince while on a visit to the island. Fairly high up in the mountains, their summer retreat was only a twenty-minute drive from the center of Taipei.† The best thing about it was apparently the view; built on the side of a hill, it looked out beyond a narrow strip of garden many miles to the south and the west. Inside the front door, the visitor entered what one reporter referred to as “a strange room,” nearly twenty by thirty feet. The expanse was broken up by four square stone columns; standing in the central space was a dining table seating eighteen along with some overstuffed, slipcovered chairs. The walls— gray below, pale green above—were accented by a soft blue band around setbacks containing indirect lighting fixtures. Tables with potted plants— azaleas and orchids—were placed around the room, each plant carrying a tag with its Latin name. Beyond the great room were four small ones: his study, her study, a small conference room, and a private dining room. There were four cubicles, originally for servants, now shared by secretaries and aides, and one bathroom.
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