Chiang Kai-Shek Read online

  The Protestants entered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and they persisted in spreading the gospel, often at considerable risk, through the troubled years that followed. As treaty after treaty was forced upon China by the Western powers, the missionaries marched farther and farther into the country with their compatriots, the traders. They found more hostility than friendship.

  Yet the Christians from the West played an important part in reconciling East and West points of view. Missionaries spent much more time in the country, as a rule, than did the foreign government officials, and when people live in one place for a long time, especially if they behave circumspectly and with good will, friendship with the neighbors is bound to develop. Many of them took eagerly to the ways of the educated Chinese and became Sinologues, a sure way of winning the respect of the locals. Through mission money, schools were built. Missionaries brought in Western books and medicines. Their influence cannot be overrated. They played an essential part in the education of Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries. Even Chiang, though he didn’t join the Church until middle age, felt their presence long before his conversion.

  Meanwhile the Manchu Court at Peking, walled off from the vast country it professed to govern, carried on in medieval splendor in complex conditions. The Emperor, Kuang Hsu, was only a boy, and his claim to the throne was shaky, but he had been placed there by the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, who was Regent, and no one attempted to question it. Tzu Hsi had everything under control. She was a redoubtable character with great tenacity and a greedy ambition. Also, she possessed all the prejudices of her class. In this respect Manchus and Chinese were alike: they hated Western innovations.

  There were no state schools for young children. Education was the responsibility of the villages or of private persons, but since in China there has always been a tradition of respect for learning, most communities managed somehow to provide a teacher for their young. Chinese have always honored scholars above all other men, paying their learned gentlemen every courtesy except that of a living wage. This remark is not as cynical as it sounds, for honor means much in China and not only the scholars, but most other people, were poor. If a man’s son showed a talent for books he was not pushed into a more profitable occupation. His father would make great sacrifices to obtain an education for him.

  As Americans we applaud the sentiment, but our teachers would look with horror on the school system that was the result of it. At the age of four little Kai-shek had fearsome tasks to accomplish. He was expected to start off with Confucius.

  “The first little book which the scholar has put into his hands,” wrote Arthur Smith, a missionary contemporary in China, “is probably the ‘Trimetrical Classic,’ so called from its arrangement in double lines of three characters above and three below, to a total number of more than 1,000.” Reasonably well-educated people aspire to the knowledge of two or three thousand characters, but a truly learned man knows at least six thousand. “… The very opening sentence of this initial textbook in Chinese education contains one of the most disputed doctrines in the ancient heathen world: ‘Men at their birth, are by nature radically good; in their natures they approximate, but in practice differ widely.’”

  Try that out on your own four-year-old.

  Of course a child that age wasn’t expected to take in the philosophical connotations of the text. The system was aimed solely at developing the memory, a most important function when you consider the complications of Chinese writing. Nevertheless there was a secondary hope that the boy, babbling such pious precepts in singsong, would ultimately imbibe their meaning by a process of osmosis. And so he did. At least, Chiang has not forgotten his first textbook maxims: he is never at a loss for some historical example or improving proverb with which to illustrate his oratory, and for this he is much admired in China. (Though he bores people, too.)

  His lessons must have been unutterably wearisome. Children were expected to begin their studying before breakfast and carry on until the end of daylight, and Kai-shek was not considered too young for this routine. For two years he concentrated on reading Confucius’s Great Learning and The Golden Mean.

  “These two works … are in classical style,” says S. I. Hsiung. “Rarely could a boy in his early teens really understand their meaning.” (Chiang Kai-shek had to tackle them at five.) “… they are the first two volumes of the Four Books of the Confucian Classics, which are invariably imposed upon any youthful beginner who is intended for a scholastic career.”

  The Chiang child finished memorizing his first two classics by the age of seven. He was now attending school in the village, a place which was not luxurious. It took little preparation to open a Chinese classroom; any empty room in a temple or an unused house would do, and the scholar provided his own table and stool. Discipline was severe and from our viewpoint unconstructive. It was assumed that a scholar who didn’t know his lesson was being deliberately naughty, and a forgetful boy was roundly beaten. Every day the pupil would be given a line of characters to learn in his book. The teacher ran through them with him once or twice so that he might hear the right pronunciation, and from then on for the rest of the day the child was left to study, shouting aloud at the top of his voice, committing the sounds to memory. When he was word-perfect and could chatter the line, parrot-like, at top speed, he was given another selection.

  We are in no position to patronize; our own system at that time was not much better. Our schools too favored the committing to memory of catalogues, lists of kings and battle dates. But in self-defense we can at least lay claim to an alphabet of only twenty-six letters, which is not much tax on the memory. Chinese students had to remember vast numbers of ideographs, and from this exercise they developed extraordinarily retentive visual memories which served them well in examinations, but let them down when they had to show initiative. Even today, Chinese are slow in developing their talent for independent reasoning: it becomes almost ossified during their youth.

  The adult Chiang Kai-shek is austere: he has much respect for discipline, and no wonder. It took a long time to instill that respect, however. Nature kept breaking in: the boy was often boisterous.

  2 IDEALS AND REVOLUTION 1905–12

  Chiang got into trouble with the authorities when he was about eighteen. He was no gangster: he had the most exemplary reasons. All boys with any gumption, he might well have protested, got into trouble with the authorities sooner or later, especially when they were southerners like himself. Take it all in all he was a pretty solid citizen by that time, and a married man to boot. His mother had found a suitable girl in the village, a Miss Mao, and married him off when he was fourteen. As was customary in his country, the marriage made little difference in his life. He had changed schools some time before and was now living with his mother’s family in nearby Fenghua, helping out in the shop when he wasn’t studying. Miss Mao remained in Chikow in the Chiang house.

  Chiang was a grave youth according to all accounts, and a photograph taken in 1905 bears this out: he looks repressed and humorless. Of course, sitting for a photograph in those days was no joke, but we know that he really worked at being grave and inscrutable. “He would stand with his eyes closed and his mouth tightly shut,” says Chiang Hsing-hai, “for a quarter of an hour or more as if he were going through some exercise to strengthen his will power.” That is exactly what he was doing, as a matter of fact; his diary confesses it. He had, and still has, several heroes in history; chief among them is Chu-ko Liang, nicknamed Wo Lung, or Sleeping Dragon. Wo Lung was a great military strategist and sage of the Three Kingdoms, who lived in the third century A.D. It was said of him that he was so free of wrinkles that his face was like a piece of white jade. No Confucian gentleman gives rein to his emotions; emotions are what wrinkle the face.

  Hollington Tong, whose life has since been mingled with Chiang’s to an intense degree, knew him then as a student; Tong was English teacher in the Fenghua school. “A certain aloofness—that has since been mistaken for p
ride—manifested itself,” he says. “Although he was ready to join any game in which physical fitness was a requisite—he ran third in a race at the first international school athletic meeting in Ningpo—he was averse to spending his time in empty talk. Often, while others were engaging themselves in the ‘tremendous trifles’ that preoccupy schoolboys, he wandered away by himself and was evidently ruminating deeply.”

  Chiang had gone to Hangchow to investigate the possibilities of continuing his education in a law school there. That was his mother’s idea: his own tastes were already formed: he preferred military science. Hangchow, the capital city of Chekiang Province, is one of China’s famous beauty spots. The lake has been landscaped; a charming series of zigzag pathways on piles, like bridges going nowhere, lead out over the water to pavilions. Ornamental flat-bottomed pleasure boats drift about, and gentle hills fade away in the distance across the lake, giving an illusion of size and space. There are famous Hangchow dishes of fresh-water fish and shrimps; there are innumerable walks and pine-forested temples and tombs of heroes. It seems that Chiang was sitting in one of the lakeside restaurants eating his lunch and bothering nobody when the waiter asked him to move to another place. The table he had, explained the waiter, was the best in the place and was wanted by a couple of important officials.

  Chiang took umbrage. He had—perhaps—drunk a little wine; in any case he was easily inflamed by any show of authority on the part of Manchu-appointed officials. He refused to give up his table. He made a scene. The outcome of the story is rather vague; some people say that the police followed him back to his lodgings and kept an eye on him after that, but this is doubtful. If it were true he would probably never have got into a government military academy as he later did. However, the incident became famous in a small way, and it led him to acquaintanceship with older men who were genuine revolutionaries.

  It would have been strange if he hadn’t been implicated in some conspiracy. He was an impressionable boy when the Japanese trounced China’s forces and chased them out of Korea, when the Manchu Court had to sue for peace and sign the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chiang heard furious talk about this in the teahouses of Fenghua. He was thirteen at the time of the Boxer rising, and there was more humiliation for China in that. By the time he had grown up he was spoiling for great deeds to do and his mind was full of the heroes of old he had read about at school and seen on the stage, who had freed their country from tyrants. When he wasn’t seeing himself as the smooth-faced Wo Lung, he dwelt lovingly on the story of Yo Fei.

  Yo Fei was a twelfth-century general of the Sung Dynasty, who at the age of twenty-five, when China was overrun with barbarians from the north, delivered Hangchow from bondage and chased the enemy back to Shantung. He would have pushed them beyond, into Manchuria, if plotters at Court had not falsely accused him of treason and brought him to account. There was a splendidly dramatic moment during the trial when Yo Fei snatched off his clothes to exhibit his back, on which his mother, presumably in nursery days, had branded the words, “Be loyal to your country.” But he was dishonored in spite of this proof, and died in prison. The statues of the wicked Minister Chin Kuei and his wife, who conspired against the hero, stand near his tomb in Hangchow, where people still spit on them in passing. The story of Yo Fei was heady stuff for Chiang Kai-shek.

  And a modern hero was not wanting, for there was also Sun Yat-sen. Sun was a Cantonese doctor, a southerner like Chiang, poor too—even poorer than Chiang—and a born rebel. He was twenty-one years older than the Chekiang boy. Emigrating to Hawaii as a child to live there with an older brother, he had been converted to Christianity and promptly sent home by his scandalized relatives. Back in Choyhung he was so faithful to his new religion that, though a gentle man ordinarily, he deliberately damaged the idols of the village temple, and had to be shifted out of town again, this time to Hongkong.

  British Protestant missionaries helped him attend the Hongkong College of Medicine, where he took his degree. Joining the political struggle was inevitable for a man of Sun’s temperament. He soon founded a secret society, with branches abroad, aimed at collecting funds to promote reform for the people of China. As its representative he traveled about furthering the cause. He brought about revolutions, many of them, and all but one abortive. The first failure sent him into exile, and at that time he made a gesture familiar among people of his persuasion: he cut off his queue. (Among the purchases made and smuggled into China for the revolt—gunpowder and rifles for the most part—was a most hopeful item; a pair of scissors intended for everybody’s queue. The scissors, and the Day of Jubilo, had to wait.)

  The most exciting part of Sun’s early history, the incident that made him internationally famous, was his kidnaping by Manchu agents in London in 1896. Thanks to his missionary friend Cantlie and the British Foreign Office he was extricated. After that his name was an inspiration to China’s discontented youth, and he continued to be a romantic figure, coming and going in disguise, running the gauntlet of Manchu guards at the seaport.

  There were other excitements in the North: the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 when a scholar named K’ang Yu-wei almost managed to instigate a peaceful change-over to more enlightened government and saw his Emperor disempowered for his pains; then the Boxer rising and its aftermath. All this was a long way from the Fenghua school and the solemn, eager young man who was interested only in military subjects, but he knew every bit of news about local revolts that ever drifted down to Chekiang. He had his sources.

  The Hangchow project had not worked out, but Mrs. Chiang, after scraping and saving and coaxing her brothers and in-laws for enough money to send her son somewhere for a higher education, did not intend to drop her ambition for him. For some time before the final decision they wrangled, if wrangled is the word for Chiang’s respectful discussions with his mother, as to what he should do with that money instead of training himself as a lawyer. He wanted to be a soldier. Mrs. Chiang opposed the idea strongly because in China soldiers were thought to be low morally, intellectually, and socially. Chiang wanted to be like Yo Fei, the gallant martyr, delivering his country from tyrants, but his mother saw him, if such a catastrophe as a military career should actually overtake her darling son, as a down-at-heel hangdog mercenary, a bogey of country children, a second-string bandit, a permanent landless wanderer. Nevertheless he had his way. Circumstances helped. While he was still smoldering with rebellious fervor after the Hangchow restaurant scene he had a run-in with the local authorities about something that was not his fault at all. A neighbor failed to pay his taxes, the taxgatherer held the whole village responsible, and Chiang Kai-shek was summoned to court arbitrarily, to be rated and disgraced. He came home in a fury against Manchu injustice and packed his bag and marched out. As a final sign of defiance, he cut off his queue, like Sun Yat-sen.

  Japan was his destination; in Tokyo there was a famous military academy, the magnet for all Chinese would-be generals. Japan’s stock in the Eastern world even more than in the Western had been soaring high ever since her defeat of Russia. Every Asian felt vicariously proud of the islanders, and the fame of their newfangled methods in naval and military technique had spread a long way through the countries on the mainland. Yuan Shih-kai, Generalissimo of the Imperial forces of China, had made an arrangement by which a number of his young hopefuls crossed the waters every year to enter the Tokyo academy and take lessons from these masters.

  Too, Japan was the place where every up-and-coming radical Chinese desired to go; for it was the Eastern capital of ideas, as Paris used to be for young Americans. Sun Yat-sen made his headquarters there though, admittedly, he never lived long at a time in any one country, and so did K’ang Yu-wei of the Hundred Days. Such serious thinkers gathered around them hundreds of eager youths. Tokyo was stimulating, and—probably chiefly because it wasn’t home—it seemed free. There was as yet little national jealousy in Chinese hearts, and not much resentment of the islanders.

  Japan was romantic; Jap
an meant adventure and opportunity. So in 1905 Chiang Kai-shek, his cropped head feeling strangely light and naked, went to Tokyo.

  It must have been an exciting journey. He passed through Shanghai and saw his first big modern city, with high foreign-style buildings along the Bund, and hundreds of carriages in the roads, and swarming city-dwelling coolies, and foreigners lounging in business houses and banks or dashing about in pony traps. Then there was the sea voyage, and after that Japan—smart, sleek, modern, hard-working Japan, with its arrogantly Europeanized cities and its neat little fields crowding the countryside.

  Unfortunately, as Chiang soon discovered, he had been too precipitate; the long arm of the Manchu stretched out and reached even this land of promise. Yuan Shih-kai’s candidates were sitting in all available posts at the military academy; the Chinese quota was filled. Chiang had been naïve in supposing he could simply walk in with the fee ready in his pocket and take a seat in a lecture hall. A man had to come to Tokyo in the regulation way from an accredited school in China or else be wangled in by way of the War Board in Peking.

  In the West, it would have taken an aspiring student one morning or afternoon to find out the situation, accept his fate, and make other plans. It is not like that in the East. Days went by while Chiang talked, argued, listened, and discussed his case and his chances of getting around the difficulty with cronies living in the Chinese community of Tokyo. He was in Japan for several months, during which time he set to work and learned the Japanese language. He also made a lot of acquaintances among aspiring young revolutionaries. One of these men, Chen Chi-mei, became his good friend, and Chen was important in the group. Possibly Chiang had brought with him a letter of introduction to Chen from kindred souls in China. Until then he had not made many intimate friends and he took this encounter all the more seriously for that reason.