Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and military commander who led the Republic of China from 1928 until his death in 1975. His government was based in mainland China until it was defeated in the Chinese Civil War by Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party in 1949, after which he continued to lead the ROC government on the island of Taiwan. Chiang served as leader of the Nationalist Kuomintang party and the commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, which was reorganized into the Republic of China Armed Forces in 1947, from 1926 until his death.
Born in Zhejiang, Chiang received a military education in China and Japan and joined Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui organization in 1908. After the 1911 Revolution, he was a founding member of the KMT and head of the Whampoa Military Academy from 1924. After Sun's death in 1925, Chiang became leader of the party and commander-in-chief of the NRA, and from 1926 to 1928 led the Northern Expedition, which nominally reunified China under a Nationalist government based in Nanjing. The KMT–CCP alliance broke down in 1927 following the KMT's Shanghai Massacre, starting the Chinese Civil War. Chiang sought to modernise and unify the ROC during the Nanjing decade, although hostilities with the CCP continued. After Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, his government tried to avoid a war while pursuing economic and social reconstruction. In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by his generals in the Xi'an Incident and forced to form an anti-Japanese Second United Front with the CCP, and between 1937 and 1945 led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, mostly from the wartime capital of Chongqing. As the leader of a major Allied power, he attended the 1943 Cairo Conference to discuss the terms for Japan's surrender in 1945, including the return of Taiwan, where he suppressed the February 28 uprising in 1947.
When World War II ended, the civil war with the CCP resumed. In 1949, Chiang's government was defeated and retreated to Taiwan, where he imposed martial law and the White Terror, a campaign of mass political repression; they lasted until 1987 and 1992, respectively. Beginning in 1948, he was re-elected five times by the same Eternal Parliament with six-year terms as President of the ROC, the head of a de facto one-party state, for 25 years until his death. Chiang presided over land reform, economic growth, and crises in the Taiwan Strait in 1954–1955 and again in 1958. He was considered the legitimate leader of China by the United Nations until 1971, when the ROC's seat was transferred to the People's Republic of China. After Chiang's death in 1975, he was succeeded as leader of the KMT by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, who was elected president in following terms by the same parliament since 1978.
Chiang is a controversial figure. Supporters credit him with unifying the nation and ending the century of humiliation, leading the resistance against Japan, fostering economic development and promoting Chinese culture in contrast to Mao's Cultural Revolution. He is also credited with safeguarding Forbidden City treasures during the wars with Japan and the CCP, eventually relocating some of the best to Taiwan, where he founded the National Palace Museum. Critics fault him for his early non-resistance to Japan's occupation of Manchuria, flooding of the Yellow River, cronyism and tolerating corruption of the four big families, and his White Terror on both mainland China and Taiwan.
Names
According to Chinese practice, Chiang had several names. At his birth, his grandfather chose a "milk name", Chiang Jui-yüan, meaning 'auspicious beginning'. All the children in his generation, the twenty-eighth since the clan, the Wuling Jiangs, was established in Xikou, at the foot of the Wuling Mountains, contained the character 瑞. His register name, inscribed in the genealogical records of his family, is Chiang Chou-t‘ai. It is the name by which his extended relatives knew him and used in formal occasions, such as marriage, but not outside of the family.In 1903, the 16-year-old Chiang went to Ningbo as a student, and chose a "school name", Chih-ch‘ing, which means 'purity of aspirations'. For the next fifteen years he was known by this name and by which Sun Yat-sen knew him. This was the formal name used by older people and the one he would use the most in the first decades of his life. As he grew older, younger people would use one of the courtesy names. Colloquially, the school name is called "big name", whereas the "milk name" is known as the "small name".
In 1912, when Chiang was in Japan, he started to use the name Chieh-shih as a pen name for the articles that he published in a Chinese magazine he founded: Voice of the Army. Chieh-shih is the Wade–Giles romanization of this name, based on Standard Mandarin, but the most recognized romanized rendering is Kai-shek which is in Cantonese romanization. Because the Republic of China was based in Guangdong, Chiang, who never spoke Cantonese but was a native Wu speaker, became known by Westerners under the Cantonese romanization of his pen name, while the family name as known in English remained Chiang.
Kai-shek soon became Chiang's courtesy name. Some think the name was chosen from the classic Chinese book the I Ching; c="介于石", is the beginning of line 2 of Hexagram 16, "". Others note that the first character of his courtesy name is also the first character of the courtesy name of his brother and other male relatives on the same generational line, while the second character of his courtesy name shek suggests the second character of his "register name" tai.
Sometime in 1917 or 1918, as Chiang became close to Sun Yat-sen, he changed his name from Chiang Chih-ch‘ing to Chiang Chung-cheng. By adopting the name Chung-cheng, he was choosing a name very similar to the name of Sun Yat-sen, who is known among Chinese as Chung-shan. The meaning of uprightness, rectitude, or orthodoxy, implied by his name, also positioned him as the legitimate heir of Sun Yat-sen and his ideas. It is the name under which Chiang is still commonly known in Taiwan. For many years passengers arriving at the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport were greeted by signs in Chinese welcoming them to the "Chung Cheng International Airport". Similarly, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, was named "Chung Cheng Memorial Hall" in Chinese. In Singapore, Chung Cheng High School was named after him.
Chiang also acquired informal or popular names. In the West and in the Soviet Union, for a time he was known as the "Red General". In 1926, when he became the commander in chief of the Nationalist armies, in English he was called by the informal sobriquet, "Generalissimo". In Taiwan he was sometimes called "The Late President Honorable Chiang", where the one-character-wide space in front of his name showed respect. He is often called Honorable Chiang.
Early life
Chiang was born on 31 October 1887, in Xikou, a town in Fenghua, Zhejiang, about west of central Ningbo. He was born into a family of Wu Chinese-speaking people with their ancestral home—a concept important in Chinese society—in, a town in Yixing, Jiangsu, about southwest of central Wuxi and from the shores of Lake Tai. He was the third child and second son of his father Chiang Chao-tsung and the first child of his father's third wife who were members of a prosperous family of salt merchants. Chiang's father died when he was eight, and he wrote of his mother as the "embodiment of Confucian virtues". The young Chiang was inspired throughout his youth by the realization that the reputation of an honored family rested upon his shoulders. He was a naughty child. At a young age he was interested in the military. As he grew older, Chiang became more aware of the issues that surrounded him and in his speech to the Kuomintang in 1945 said:In early 1906, Chiang cut off his queue, the required hairstyle of men during the Qing dynasty, and had it sent home from school, shocking the people in his hometown.
Education in Japan
Chiang grew up at a time in which military defeats, natural disasters, famines, revolts, unequal treaties and civil wars had left the Manchu-dominated Qing dynasty unstable and in debt. Successive demands of the Western powers and Japan since the Opium War had left China owing millions of taels of silver. During his first visit to Japan to pursue a military career from April 1906 to later that year, he describes himself as having strong nationalistic feelings with a desire, among other things, to 'expel the Manchu Qing and to restore China'. In a 1969 speech, Chiang related a story about his boat trip to Japan at nineteen years old. Another passenger on the ship, a Chinese fellow student who was in the habit of spitting on the floor, was chided by a Chinese sailor who said that Japanese people did not spit on the floor, but instead would spit into a handkerchief. Chiang used the story as an example of how the common man in 1969 Taiwan had not developed the spirit of public sanitation that Japan had.Chiang decided to pursue a military career. He began his military training at the Baoding Military Academy in 1906, the same year Japan left its bimetallic currency standard, devaluing the Japanese yen. He left for Tokyo Shinbu Gakko, a preparatory school for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy intended for Chinese students, in 1907. There, he came under the influence of compatriots to support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Manchu-dominated Qing dynasty and to set up a Han-dominated Chinese republic. In Japan, he learnt the Japanese and English languages, equestrianism, as well as various subjects of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He ate simple meals of only rice with either salted fish or umeboshi, and also grew to idolise bushido. He befriended Chen Qimei, and in 1908 Chen brought Chiang into the Tongmenghui, an important revolutionary brotherhood of the era. Finishing his military schooling at Tokyo Shinbu Gakko, Chiang served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.