On February 7, 1954, Wu appeared in Chicago on a television program similar to Meet the Press. Pushed by reporters, he talked about the Taiwanese government’s “use of Communist tactics in fighting communism.” In retaliation, the president of the Legislative Yuan denounced him, and the National Assembly demanded his recall to Taiwan for disciplinary action. On March 15, The New York Times reported Wu’s open break with Chiang and the subsequent attempt on his life. “But the greatest concern for me,” Wu said, “was to get my younger son out of Formosa. Of course, now I could openly state that Chiang had been holding my son as a sort of hostage, and I wrote him a letter asking him to issue a passport to my son in thirty days. I said, ‘If you still persist in refusal after thirty days I will be compelled to take other action.” His son, whom Ching-kuo’s Youth Corps had been trying to get to denounce his father, was finally allowed to join his parents in Illinois.
Once he was free to speak, Dr. Wu wrote a series of “open letters” to members of the National Assembly, warning them that reform was needed if the Taiwanese government were to survive. He wrote mainly about Chiang Ching-kuo’s police, who “interfered with free elections… made numberless illegal arrests… tortured and… blackmailed… relying on their special backing… [they]… have no regard for law.” The letters were duly suppressed, and Chiang answered Wu by accusing him of “treason,” “dereliction of duty,” and “corruption in office.” Wu replied—from the safety of Illinois—that he would be happy to stand trial in an American or international court, but not in any court set up by the generalissimo.
China’s former ambassador to the United States, Dr. Hu Shih, also spoke out, explaining to a reporter from The New York Times that he felt he had a “moral obligation” to return to Taiwan to vote in the National Assembly: “I hope this new assembly will be the beginning of a new era.… ‘Obey the leader’ [Chiang Kai-shek] has become one of the basic slogans of the Kuomintang’s anti-Communist… campaign.… Loyalty should be to the state and not to an individual.… I would like to see still more freedom of press and person in Taiwan.”
52
He [Chiang] still ruled like a feudal chieftain, giving high positions to his relatives, his favorite generals, and his two sons. They could commit no wrong, and were never called to account. Corruption was widespread; the army ruled; the secret police were everywhere.
—ROBERT PAYNE
THERE WERE few men like K. C. Wu who refused to be silenced and who were lucky enough to escape from the clutches of Chiang and his police. When it came to matters of “face,” the generalissimo never hesitated to persecute those who defied his will—always, of course, in the name of the honor of the state.
In the fall of 1951, a big corruption story had erupted on the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post involving Chinese generals who resented the fact that military supplies purchased through Lend-Lease were being routed through the Chinese procurement office in Washington, thus limiting their opportunities for squeeze. Brought to light by Lieutenant General P. T. Mow, now chief of staff of the Chinese air force* and Mow’s executive officer, Colonel Hsiang, the story started when Mow discovered a transfer of $430,000† from New York to Hong Kong, ordered by General Chou Chih-jo, the G-mo’s chief of staff.‡ Mow told Walter Judd about the transfer, and Judd wrote Chiang to ask for an explanation. The G-mo promised to institute an inquiry, which he did not do. Instead, he set up an investigation of Mow, with whom he was furious for causing him to lose face with Judd. According to Hsiang, “the President’s first thought was… to deny the case, but finally he decided to admit the truth after Madame Chiang and Mr. Kung convinced him that denying the case would not solve the problem, but would show… that he was untruthful and insincere.” Chiang asked Mow to come to Taiwan to testify, but Mow wisely refused. In a lengthy letter to Wellington Koo, China’s ambassador in Washington, Chiang explained that the money had been needed to move military factories from the mainland to Taiwan and that it was important to get Chinese funds out of the United States to prevent their being frozen. An obvious cover-up, the letter concluded with a paragraph in which the G-mo warned, “From now on, if any official of the Government stationed in a foreign country should attack the high officials in the Government irresponsibly, without first knowing all the actual facts, and thereby undermine the prestige of the Government he will be severely punished under law so that the honor of the nation may be preserved.”
Meanwhile, Mow and Hsiang’s inquiries into methods of procurement had uncovered the machinations of Commerce International Corporation; CIC was the designated contractor for the Board of Supplies of the Executive Yuan of the Taiwanese government, which was discovered to be in league with Chou. According to The Washington Post, CIC organized and paid the salaries of an entity called the American Technical and Military Advisory Group, based in Taiwan, headed and staffed by retired U.S. Admiral Charles M. Cooke, Jr. Ross Koen* tells us that “the real importance” of this group was its ability “to channel contracts for supplies directly to CIC and permit them to bypass official Chinese procurement offices abroad.” As retired military men, Cooke’s group was “in a position to apply pressure in Washington to grant more money to Chiang with which to pay the exorbitant prices charged by their employer.” For this service, CIC received $750,000† a year.
As a typical example of malfeasance, Mow and Hsiang pointed to a cable from General Chou in May of 1950 telling them to negotiate with CIC officials in the United States for the purchase of “a large quantity of bombs located by CIC in Europe.” But according to the Post, these bombs were surplus American property that had been sold to a private company in Italy under the proviso that they be used for civilian purposes only—i.e., the shells as scrap metal and the explosives processed into fertilizer. Hsiang calculated that the asking price was double that by which new bombs could be bought directly from the U.S. government. He took the case to the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, which conducted an “exhaustive and expert” inquiry, during which the vice president of CIC tried to bribe him with close to $8,000 for each of twenty-five F-51 planes purchased through CIC for the Chinese air force. In another deal, Mow said, General Chou had tried to purchase some F-51 planes through CIC at $36,840 each, when they were available through the U.S. government for $16,000.
On November 14, 1951, Chiang’s Nationalist government sued Mow and Hsiang in U.S. Federal Court, demanding the return of $7 million* in unused funds entrusted to them and all government records in their possession. The two men tried but failed to have the suit dismissed and, when they did not appear in court, lost the case by default. Mow escaped to Mexico, where he was arrested by the Mexican government at Chiang’s request and held in prison for nearly three years before being freed on bond, despite the fact that a Mexican judge ruled that he was a political refugee entitled to asylum. Hsiang’s wife, harrassed by process servers, and his two young sons, chased through the streets of Washington by “unidentified persons,” managed to escape to Hong Kong and from there presumably to Communist China. Both Mow and Hsiang disappeared into thin air.
UNABLE OR UNWILLING to see his own failings, Chiang was unlikely to change his ways or those of his underlings. After the move to Taiwan, his main object in life was to convince the world that he was still the legitimate head of all of China. “In the eyes of the uninvolved,” Crozier writes, “Chiang’s claim to sovereignty over the Chinese mainland was viewed as at best an absurdity and at worst an impertinence.” In spite of the fact that members of the National Assembly were supposed to be elected every six years, most of its members had come to Taiwan from the mainland, and, “solemnly, year after year until death claimed them, the ageing legislators sat on, claiming to represent the interests of distant ‘constituents’ in the mainland provinces of China, with whom they had long since lost all contact.” While the doddering delegates postured, local Taiwanese were reduced to minor positions in the government. As before, the KMT bureaucrats owed their high positions to Chiang,
who saw to it that they were given large properties to make up for what they had lost on the mainland. And as before, they received very minimal compensation for their work and were expected to make up the difference in squeeze. “Corruption was so widespread,” according to Payne, “that it affected all departments of government at all levels.” It was, he tells us, “especially prevalent among policemen, tax officers and school administrators, who demanded the payment of bribes from the teachers before they were given positions.”
There was an occasional attempt to paper over the squeeze. The mayor of Taipei, arrested for taking bribes from the bus administration, was shocked that he, a high official of the KMT, could be brought to court. He produced an account book that showed that he had never in his entire political life accepted a bribe and was acquitted, while his judges were given higher positions in the judiciary. His wife, convicted of embezzling $300,000, was given a deferred sentence.
This kind of pseudojustice demoralized the average islander, who, according to Payne, “learned to obey, pay bribes and live quietly and obscurely. The overhelming might of the regime, exercised through the army and the secret police, enforced obedience. The revolutionary Kuomintang had degenerated into a comparatively small body of men exercising the rights of prison wardens.” To remain safe from Ching-kuo’s police, the average citizen had to either support Chiang vociferously or become completely apolitical. As in all such regimes, the arts and sciences suffered.
The publicity surrounding Wu had been particularly bad for Ching-kuo, and “to remove him from the scene temporarily,” approaches were made to the U.S. Department of Defense, which invited him to the United States. Li tells us that the trip was endorsed by both Defense and State, who let it be known that they hoped a sojourn in America would broaden the G-mo’s son’s “intellectual horizon—on which Soviet Russia looms so large.” Traveling from coast to coast, Ching-kuo was feted with receptions and banquets, after which he usually went into the kitchen to meet the help. In Washington, he called on President Eisenhower and had “a friendly exchange” with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The secretary, explaining that he had “heard from some of our representatives that the General was a little rough in his methods,” cautioned him on the necessity to preserve the human rights of prisoners—advice to which Ching-kuo “murmured an inaudible acknowledgment.”
The break with the Wus had also affected May-ling, whose skin rash flared up again, and, accompanied by Jeanette Kung, a nurse, and two male attendants, she returned to the hospital in San Francisco. “I think the balmy California weather and the medical care will eventually affect a cure,” she wrote Wellington Koo, adding that her doctors were “of the opinion that some form of allergy is the basis of my illness.” After allergy tests and a month in the hospital, she left for New York for more treatment. Her friend Dorothy Thomas* visited her in the hospital there; to prevent anything touching her skin, she lay under what Thomas described as “a bamboo sort of cage,” over which the nurses put the sheets and blankets. Later, she asked Thomas to come visit her at the Kung home in Long Island: “I asked my daughter-in-law to come with me, and when we got there… I looked up and there was a screen on the second floor, and behind the screen there was something moving. And when we got into the living room, Anne, my daughter-in-law, said, ‘What do you think that was?’ I said, ‘That was Madame Chiang. She was looking at us. That’s what they always do. They always look at you first before they see you, you know. That’s why they have so many screens.’ ”
Before leaving New York, May-ling had lunch with another friend and fellow writer, Grace Oursler. She had originally met the Ourslers* in Shanghai, where, Grace said, the two woman had formed what her husband, Fulton, called “friendship-at-first-sight.” Madame had sent a long cable and subsequent letter when Fulton died, the sort of communication which, according to the widow, “sealed my knowedge of the depth of that friendship.” But Grace had not heard from her friend for two and a half years when Madame’s secretary suddenly called with an invitation to lunch in New York.
“I am very concerned,” May-ling told Grace. “Certain spiritual questions torment me. I want you to try and remember anything Fulton ever said on the subjects. I feel certain if I could only sit and talk to him, I would find the answers. So often he gave me the thought I needed.” The questions were, of course, unanswerable: “When was civilization going to find a new answer to war?… When would a good, fully dedicated Christian fight?… Can one condone wrong in others and to others and still be a good Christian?… Wasn’t this a time for Believers to hold out a hand to those who had no Faith?” etc. These questions “haunted” Grace Oursler during their subsequent correspondence. People with whom she spoke about this, she said, “urged” her “to ask Madame Chiang to give the world a share in her spiritual battle.” The ladies cabled back and forth until Grace, who had gone “to Hollywood on business,” decided to keep on going across the Pacific to Taiwan.
She arrived in February of 1955, only to find May-ling “so exhausted as to be actually ill” from dealing with refugees from the Tachen Islands, recently evacuated by the Nationalists. Grace had arranged for her trip to be financed by an advance on an article on Madame’s spiritual quest for Good Housekeeping magazine—a fact that “enormously disturbed” May-ling, who offered to refund the money. She told Oursler “that she thought I had come to her as a loving friend when she was in great distress.… She told me that she herself wanted nothing and would take nothing: she is exceedingly sensitive about past criticism on money matters, not only of herself but of the entire Chinese set-up.”
“For eighteen days and nights we worked together on this piece,” Ours-ler wrote in an introduction to the article. “Madame dictated, pouring out her heart as the words and memories tumbled from her lips.” In writing about the finished product to Herbert Mays of Good Housekeeping, Oursler was highly enthusiastic: “I am in love with it and somehow feel that it and she were inspired.”
But Grace was lonely in her admiration. Accompanied by a four-page, single-spaced commentary, the piece was turned down by Good Housekeeping as “much, much too long” with “too many arguments on behalf of Chiang and the Nationalists.” Oursler then combined two of her own essays—one on the Madame, the other on Taiwan—with Madame’s manuscript, but The Saturday Evening Post refused this version as well.
It was not until two months later, in June, that the Fleming H. Revell Company accepted the piece for publication, first as a condensation for Reader’s Digest, then in book form, titled The Sure Victory, for Christmas. “There is no other periodical which I would prefer more than the ‘Digest’ for its publication,” May-ling wired Grace, when she got the good news. This was followed by some bad news from the publisher: “Dear Grace: Enclosed is the introduction which you so graciously wrote for Sure Victory.… we regret exceedingly that Madame Chiang did not approve of its being included in the book.”
IN APRIL 1955, Chiang’s faithful supporter, Time magazine, once again put him on its cover, calling him “Man of the Single Truth” and quoting from a fable of Archilochus: “The Fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The interviewer who settled down on Chiang’s “veranda, with its silvery curtains and pale green furnishings,” described its owner as a man who imparts an air of “sureness.… For among the foxes of the world, Chiang Kai-shek long ago found the hedgehog’s one big thing: the world’s primary and implacable enemy was and is the Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow.”
For some years the generalissimo had been working on his second book, Soviet Russia in China, which he completed in 1956, the year he turned seventy. Like his earlier effort, it is a compilation of Chiang’s theories put into words by his secretaries. Unlike China’s Destiny, it benefits from contributions from his wife, who shared his belief that the Russians had been the cause of all of China’s ills. With her broader outlook on the world, however, May-ling had managed to tone down her husband’s rhetoric, complaining to E
mma Mills after it came out that the publishers had not sent her the galleys as requested and that it still “needed further editing.”
The author’s note at the beginning of Soviet Russia in China is dated December 1, 1956, the day of the Chiangs’ twenty-ninth wedding anniversary: “In reviewing our past,” Chiang wrote, “my wife and I share an acute consciousness of failure in not living up to the lofty ideals instilled in us by our mothers.… The double challenge of the mainland remaining unrecovered and our people therein crying out in vain for deliverance aggravates our sense of regret.” In the text itself, Chiang blamed China’s catastrophies on the Russian Communists working through their surrogates, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, going so far as to actually claim that it was the CCP that had caused the “hatred between landlords and tenants” on the mainland. He also accused the Communists of “precipitating a war with Japan” in order to gain time to overcome the Nationalists. Ignoring the fact that he himself had used the threat of a separate peace with the Japanese during World War II, Chiang blamed the Russians for spreading “rumors… to the effect that the Chinese Government was carrying on secret negotiations with Japan for cessation of hostilities” in order to get the United States to stop giving aid to the Nationalists. “This was Moscow’s plot,” Chiang said, “but few could see it at the time.”
The Last Empress Page 79
