Chiang Kai-shek & The History of China vs Taiwan Documentary

Dive into the intricate and controversial legacy of Chiang Kai-shek, a pivotal figure in Chinese and Taiwanese history, in this comprehensive podcast episode. Explore Chiang's journey from his early life in Zhejiang Province to his military training in Japan, where he connected with revolutionary movements and Sun Yat-sen, setting the stage for his influential role in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.

Follow Chiang's ascent through the chaotic political landscape of early 20th-century China, marked by warlordism and power struggles. Discover his significant impact during the Northern Expedition and the establishment of a provisional government in Nanjing, alongside the ideological divides within the Kuomintang that led to the Chinese Civil War. The episode also delves into Chiang's personal life, highlighting the influence of his marriage to Sung Mei Ling and the transformative yet turbulent Nanjing Decade.

Uncover the complexities of Chiang's legacy during his retreat to Taiwan amid the Chinese Civil War, the establishment of the Republic of China on the island, and the chilling White Terror campaign. Examine the international dynamics during the Cold War that shaped Taiwan's defense and sovereignty, and reflect on Chiang's impact on Taiwan's eventual journey toward democracy.

Join us as we analyze Chiang's multifaceted character, his conservative yet unpredictable leadership, and his contentious legacy, which continues to influence global politics today. Whether viewed as a Chinese patriot or a corrupt military dictator, Chiang Kai-shek's story is one of power, revolution, and the quest for national identity.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
The man known to history as Chiang Kai Shek was born on the
31st of October 1887 in the townof Shiko in Zhejiang Province in
the eastern region of China, on the other side of Hangzhou Bay
from the city of Shanghai. His father was Chang Zhao Tsung,
a moderately prosperous merchant.

(00:26):
His father before him had found success as a salt merchant, but
Zhao Tsung expanded his businessinterests into selling rice
wine, rice, vegetables and othercommodities.
Chang's mother was Wang Tai Yu. She and Zhao Tsung had four
children together, of whom Changwas the 3rd.

(00:48):
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Don't lose any time. Chang's life was shaped by

(01:53):
political and social processes which were already under way
when he was born in 1887. 1/2 a century earlier, China's long
held policy of cutting itself off from Western influences had
come to a crushing end when Britain went to war with the
Chinese in an effort to, amongstother things, force it to open
its ports to the sale of opium from British India.

(02:15):
In the decades that followed, China had gone through political
and social revolutions as its culture was bombarded with
Western ideas. Similar processes were underway
in neighboring Korea and Japan, though Japan adapted more
quickly and by the 1880s was emerging as a regional power
with a Western style government and military.

(02:36):
In contrast, China was being pulled between 2 opposing
factions. One consisted of traditionalists
who wanted to maintain the styleof imperial government that had
prevailed for millennia, and which had been represented by
the Qing dynasty of emperors whohad ruled since 1644.
The others wanted to create a Republic, although even amongst

(02:57):
these there were competing factions who wanted a
conservative Republic based on traditional values such as
Confucianism, and those who wereinspired by radical socialist
thinkers from industrial Europe whose writings were being read
in intellectual circles in cities like Beijing, Shanghai
and Nanjing. The battle to reconcile these

(03:18):
competing outlooks was the backdrop against which Chang
grew up and lived. When he was 8 years old, Chang's
father died. His mother was left largely
destitute, and in later years Chang would speak of being left
virtually orphaned at this time.Although she lived until the
early 1920s, it was a difficult childhood thereafter.

(03:39):
In 19 O Six, he determined to take charge of his life by
heading to Japan, the most modernized nation in the Far
East, one which had recently managed to defeat Russia in a
brief war. To acquire military training
within the Japanese army there, he spent time at Shinbul Gako
Military Academy in Tokyo. The Academy was a place of

(04:00):
learning for many Chinese students at the time and was a
hotbed of political radicalism. With many of the students
looking towards the overthrow ofthe Qing dynasty in Beijing and
the modernization of China so that it might emerge as a
revitalized power similar to Japan.
One of the radical groups here during Chang's time was a branch

(04:21):
of the Tung Mung Hui, or United League, a secret society that
had been founded back in 19 O 5 by 1 Sun Yat Sen, a Chinese
philosopher and revolutionary who had spent time in the United
States and had returned to Asia,determined to achieve.
What he called the three principles of the people,
nationalism, democracy and welfare.

(04:42):
Inherent in his political philosophy was a determination
to overthrow the Qing dynasty, which he not only perceived as
being archaic but also critiquedas a dynasty of the northern or
Manchu Chinese. Chang would become intrinsically
connected with Sun Yat Sen and the political movements he led
for the next 20. Years.

(05:03):
Between 19 O 9 and 1911, Chang continued to serve in the
Japanese Imperial Army, while also fostering his associations
with Chinese revolutionary movements.
He only returned to China in thelate autumn of 1911, when the
outbreak of a revolution known to posterity as the Shinhai
Revolution led to a major political crisis for the Qing

(05:25):
Dynasty government. The imperial government had been
weakened already through the succession of a 2 year old
emperor Pui in 19 O 8, and without strong leadership and
little desire to maintain the imperial regime throughout China
at large, the imperial system collapsed in a matter of weeks.
On the 1st of January 1912, a New Republic of China was

(05:47):
brought into being, bringing theimperial system which had
dominated the country for over 2millennia to an end.
Sun Yat Sen was appointed as theprovisional president of the
Republic. By then, Chang was active in the
politics of the city of Shanghaiand moved between there and the
capital. Of the New Republic, Beijing.
In the autumn of 1912, he was involved with Sun Yat Sen in the

(06:10):
creation of the Nationalist Party, a political successor to
the Tung Mung Hui. While the Shinhai Revolution of
1911 and the creation of the Republic of China were momentous
events in China's history and its modernization, they did not
bring a stable democracy into being.
In the 1910s and into the 1920's, the political landscape

(06:33):
was a chaotic one in which warlords who had formed part of
the old imperial system carved out their own principalities in
the provinces. Additionally, Sun Yat Sen, Chang
and the Nationalists were soon outflanked in the country's
constitutional politics by the Progressive Party that was
formed in 1913. This led to what is known as the

(06:54):
Second Revolution, a period in which Sun Yat Sen and his
followers refused to acknowledgethe authority of the Bai Young
government in Beijing. Led by Yuan Shikai, an old
Chinese general who was seen as being tainted by his
associations with the Qing dynasty and who briefly tried to
restore the monarchy in 1915, there was in effect.

(07:15):
A form of civil war throughout. China during these years.
Although it was a very chaotic state of affairs rather than an
organized conflict between competing entities, Chang was a
bit player in all of this, a midranking figure within the
Nationalist Party, one who actedas a liaison for Sun Yat Sen
between Japan and Shanghai, travelling over and back between

(07:37):
the two. But few people who knew him
during these years would have predicted his rise to national
prominence in years to come. As these momentous events were
playing out in China's politics,Chang's personal life was taking
on a complex shape as well. Back in 19 O1, Chang had been
married when he was just 14 years old to a woman named Mao

(07:59):
Fume, a 19 year old acquaintanceof the family.
This was an arranged marriage which was entered into for
financial reasons to aid the family following Chang's
father's death several years earlier.
Their tumultuous relationship reflected this unorthodox start.
Chang followed the practice of concubinage, a Chinese tradition
whereby he took mistresses that were almost like second or third

(08:22):
wives. One of these was Yao Yia Chung,
a woman he began a relationship with in 1912, while later in
1921 he started a separate relationship again with Chun
Jairu, a 15 year old girl that he had first met a few years
earlier when she was either 12 or 13.
These overlapping relationships have led some accounts of his

(08:44):
life to state that Chang technically had multiple wives,
though he divorced Mao Fumei in 1921 when his relationship with
Chun Jairu became more formalized.
Only one biological child, a sonnamed Chang Ching Kua, born to
Mao Fumei, and he in 1910, was born of these relationships,

(09:04):
although Chang also adopted a second son, Chang Wei Kua, the
illegitimate son of an associateof Chang's in Japan in the mid
1910s who gave up the child for fear of disgrace.
Chang's political career shiftedconsiderably in the late 1910s
and into the 1920s. In 1919, Sun Yat Sen, along with

(09:26):
other Chinese revolutionaries such as Chang, formed the Kua
Mintang, a new political party, as a successor to the
Nationalist Party, a name which translates as China's National
People's Party. This new iteration of the party
was based out of Guangdong in the South of the country, and
was committed to armed struggle to overthrow the government in

(09:46):
Beijing and unify the country under a strong centralized
leadership. It was willing to accept the
help of any group which would further that goal, including the
new communist regime which had seized power in Russia late in
1917 and which was gradually winning a civil war there to
establish the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1923, Chang was

(10:08):
sent by Sung Yat Sen on a mission to Moscow to organize
additional aid to the Quo Min Tang and to review the Soviet
military system. Chang was not entirely convinced
that the Soviet system was suitable for China, though.
Sun Yat Sen is claimed today as one of the forefathers of the
Chinese Communist movement. As a result of Sun Yat Sen's

(10:28):
death in the spring of 1925, theKuo Mintang would come to be
identified as the power opposed to communism in China.
With this, Chang began to exercise increasing control of
the Kuo Mintang and move the Nationalists in a different
ideological direction to what Sun Yat Sen had planned.
The event which really catapulted Chang to the

(10:50):
forefront of Chinese politics and made him a pivotal figure in
the history of modern China was the Northern Expedition.
This was a military expedition which the Kuomintang commenced
in the summer of 1926 under his military leadership.
Its name is derived from the fact that the Nationalists
headed north from their base in the southeast of the country to

(11:12):
campaign against the warlords that controlled the provinces in
the north and against the government that operated from
Beijing. When it commenced in July 1926,
Chang had less than 100,000 men under his command, a moderate
force given the sheer size and population of China.
A series of swift victories in the months that followed saw

(11:32):
Chang wrest control of the provinces of Hunan, Jingxi, and
Fujian by the end of 1926. His forces swelled as he did so,
and by the time he began his attacks on Shanghai and Nanjing
in the spring of 1927, he and the rest of the Kua Mintang
commanders had half a million followers.
With such an immense force, theymanaged to secure control of

(11:56):
central China and established A provisional government at their
new capital of Nanjing in the late spring.
From here, the Northern Expedition would continue
through 1927 and into 1928, eventually unifying most of the
country under Nationalist rule after a decade and a half of
division and anarchy since the promulgation of the Republic

(12:17):
back in 1912. But it would be an all too
fleeting victory. Chang was the central character
in creating the split in the Nationalist movement which led
to the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, even as the Northern
Expedition was still under way. The tendency today is to view
the Kuo Mintang as a right wing organization, and there is

(12:38):
little doubt that it became so over time under Chang's
leadership, albeit with socialist elements to it, even
during the Civil War. However, in the first half of
the 1920s it was a much more complex and fluid political
movement, one with a left wing and a right wing, as exemplified
in Chang's own mission to the Soviet Union late in 1923.

(13:01):
These divisions became more stark in the first months of the
Northern Expedition, as the leftwing, led by Wang Jing Wei at
this time formed a solid block of opposition to the right wing
which was emerging under Chang in the closing months of 1926.
This left wing was increasingly dominated by Communists who were
close to Russian military advisors and politicians who

(13:23):
were active in China. When Chang led the campaign to
Shanghai and Nanjing in the spring of 1927, the left wing
formed a splinter faction that tried to retain control of the
city of Wuhan, which had brieflyserved as the Kua Mintang's
headquarters in the final monthsof 1926.
Thus, even before Chang secured Shanghai and Nanjing in the

(13:46):
spring of 1927, the left wing under Jing Wei had already begun
to splinter at Wuhan while divisions were rifle ready By
1927. Chang and his conservative
allies within the nationalist movement spurred on the drift
towards civil war in the weeks after capturing Shanghai and
Nanjing by violently suppressingcommunist movements and groups

(14:09):
within the captured cities, a campaign of repression termed
the White Terror. The worst of this came in
Shanghai on the 12th of April 1927, when Kuomintang military
units, acting on Chang's orders,began purging the citys
communist groups. Similar incidents were
replicated across the cities under nationalist control in the

(14:30):
weeks that followed, and by the late summer it was clear that
the communists would have to oppose the Kuo Min Tang
leadership if their ideological goals were to survive.
Hence, the Chinese Civil War began on the 1st of August 1927,
when left wing nationalists began an uprising in Nanchang, a
date which is typically identified in Chinese Communist

(14:52):
history as marking the formationof the People's Liberation Army.
The movement was led by figures like Wang Jing Wei, Zhu De and
Zhou Enlai. At this juncture, Mao Zedong was
a minor leader within the initial uprisings who would only
rise to the fore of the Chinese Communist movement.
In the 1930's, the period aroundthe commencement of the Chinese

(15:16):
Civil War was one of further unrest in Chang's personal life,
though it also led to lasting stability in his romantic life.
Many years earlier, back when the Kuomintang was being formed
in the late 1910s, he had met and begun A quasi relationship
with Sung Mei Ling, the daughterof Charlie Sung, A prominent

(15:36):
Chinese businessman who had spent time in America in his
youth, hence his Anglicized name.
The Sung family became prominentin Chinese business and
political circles thereafter, and Mei Ling's sister Qingling
had been the wife of Sun Yat Senfor the last decade of his life.
Meiling's family had warned her off a relationship with Chang

(15:57):
back in the late 1910s, owing tohis wife and concubines and the
fact that he was over a decade older than her, but in the mid
1920s they began spending time together.
In 1927, Chang divorced Chung Jie Ru and ended his concubine
relationship with Yao Yu Chung in order to marry Mei Ling.
Thereafter, he remained A broadly monogamous husband.

(16:20):
This final marriage of his wouldlast for the remainder of his
life, and Mei Ling became a prominent figure within the quo.
Min Tang in her own right. They would not have children,
though Mei Ling may have suffered a miscarriage in 1928.
From 1927 onwards, even as the civil war between the
Nationalists and the Communists was raging, Chang and the other

(16:42):
Kuo Mintang leaders were overseeing a period of Chinese
governmental reform and expansion known as the Nanjing
Decade, so termed because the capital remained at Nanjing even
after Beijing was seized. While many criticisms could be
levelled at the Nationalists, there was no denying that this
was a period of progress in a number of important respects.

(17:04):
The economy expanded principallythrough a cooperative movement
which revolutionized the cotton industry.
The number of factories increased massively, while there
was nearly four times as much length of modern highways in
China by 1936 as there had been in 1927.
As a nationalist, Rd. building program was initiated, access to

(17:25):
education expanded greatly and literacy levels increased.
Things as simple as an effectivepostal system and an operational
banking system emerged after decades of sluggishness in
introducing such modern conceptsinto China.
Yet there were issues. Regional famines and food
shortages persisted. At the same time, while Chang

(17:46):
was the most powerful figure within the Kuomintang, he was
far from all powerful, and numerous factions had power ebb
and flow between them in the decade following the Northern
Expedition. It was clear by the time the
Northern Expedition was achieving its goal of unifying
much of China in 1928 that the nationalist movement was not

(18:07):
exactly a homogeneous ideology, and various factions within it
were now descending. Into a civil war.
So what did Chang actually standfor?
As a leader of the right wing ofthe Kuomintang, where the
communist left wing branch was modern and socialist in its
outlook, Chang looked backwards to a more traditional view of
Chinese society 1 rooted in Confucianism, the philosophical

(18:31):
religion that had shaped so muchof Chinese society for
millennia. He also incorporated elements of
conservative imperialist traditions into his political
philosophy. In this sense, he was profoundly
different to Sun Yat Sen as well, a figure he claimed to be
the political successor to. But who would been a modern
liberal who admired figures likethe British liberal philosophers

(18:53):
John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, senior and
junior, as well as Theodore Roosevelt?
In the United States, these views of Chang were most clearly
expressed in the 1930s in the New Life Movement, a civic
campaign led by the Nationalistswhich sought to promote Neo
Confucian values and a form of Chinese corporatism exemplified

(19:16):
in the Blue Shirt Society, a Chinese version of the fascism
sweeping Europe in the 1930s. This raises questions as to who
Chang himself was. Much like the political movement
he led, he was a bundle of contradictions.
On the one hand, he presented himself as a stalwart
conservative and upholder of Chinese traditions set within a

(19:38):
more modern China. But on a personal level he could
be erratic, violent and oppressive towards those around
him. On occasion, this resulted in
him physically attacking membersof his staff.
Despite his support for upright behaviour in public life, he was
incredibly corrupt and fostered such corruption in the Qua Min
Tang generally. These contrasting approaches

(20:01):
were perhaps most clearly seen through his sons.
His adoptive son, Chang Wei Kuo,was sent to Germany and ended up
a junior officer in the German Viemacht, taking part in the
Nazi annexation of Austria, while his biological son Chang
Qing Kuo spent many years in Soviet Russia.
The one thing that can be said without equivocation is that

(20:22):
Chang was an ultra nationalist. One American military
commentator referred to Chang's one major publication, a book
called China's Destiny, as a Chinese Mein Kampf.
Such was it's xenophobic portrayal of people beyond
China's borders. Another thing that is undoubted
is that Chang was a reasonably effective military commander in

(20:45):
the course of the late 1920s andthe early 1930s.
He very nearly won the Chinese civil.
War. By the end of the 1920s, he and
the Nationalists had successfully managed to wrest
control of virtually all of eastern China, where the great
cities of the nation lay along the coastline from the
Communists, isolating the Communists.

(21:05):
In regions like. Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei and Shanxi
provinces towards central China.By then Mao Zedong was emerging
as a new leader of the Chinese Communist movement, though it
would be the 1940s before he became pre eminent.
The communist movement very nearly didn't survive that long.
In the autumn of 1933, Chang's armies began an encirclement of

(21:29):
the communist position in Jiangxi, and over the space of a
year long campaign very nearly wiped out the communist movement
in China. It only remained alive as units
of the Chinese Red Army broke through the Nationalist cordon
late in 1934 and began what has been immortalized in Chinese
Communist propaganda as the LongMarch to Freedom.

(21:51):
The movement remained alive intothe second-half of the 1930s,
but there is no doubt that priorto Japanese intervention in
China from 1937 onwards, Chang and the Kuo Mintang were on the
cusp of complete victory. Late in 1936, Chang faced the
greatest threat to his own life in many years.
On the 12th of December that year, he was in the city of

(22:14):
Xi'an in Shanxi province in central China to review a
military detachment when he was taken prisoner.
Chang had travelled to Xi'an in the 1st place to review the
troops and raise their morale here, as there had been issues
with divisions in the region being unwilling to fight the
communists. The issue ran much deeper and in
reality the communists had infiltrated the army here.

(22:36):
As a result, on the 12th, soldiers stormed the complex
where he was staying and took him captive in Nanjing.
The government was in disarray when news arrived.
Meanwhile, the Communists sent Zhou Enlai, a figure who would
rise to become the second most powerful politician in Communist
China in the 1950s, to negotiatewith Chang.

(22:57):
Over a course of a week or so, Zhou and he came to an
arrangement whereby Chang would be released on condition that he
would commence peace negotiations once back in
Nanjing and that they would thencombine to resist Japan's
expansion in the Far East. With this, Chang was released on
the 26th of December. After two weeks in captivity, he

(23:17):
returned to Nanjing and did order a ceasefire, but the
nationalists were deeply dividedinto 1937 about how to proceed
regarding the Communists in the aftermath of the Xi'an Incident.
The Xi'an Incident pointed towards the spectre that was now
haunting China from without. Japan had modernized so

(23:37):
effectively by the 20th century that it was determined to become
the pre eminent power in the FarEast and the Western Pacific,
having conquered Korea decades earlier.
In 1931, the Imperial governmentinvaded the Manchuria region of
northeastern China and formed itinto the puppet state of
Manchukwo. A wider war was avoided through

(23:58):
Chinese reticence to engage withJapan at that time, while the
Nationalists and the Communists were mired in civil war.
But in the summer of 1937, the Japanese invaded China again,
this time occupying the major cities of the east.
Beijing and Shanghai both fell quickly and Nanjing was captured
in December 1937, leading to mass atrocities in the

(24:21):
Nationalist capital by the Japanese in the weeks that
followed. During the Rape of Nanjing, as
it is termed, upwards of 200,000people were murdered and 10s of
thousands of women were raped. Chang had eloped with his
government and divisions of the Kuo Mintang to the city of
Chongqing, further inland in central China, which the Chinese

(24:42):
resistance to Japanese occupation would establish as
their capital for years to come.The outbreak of the Sino
Japanese War presented a problemfor both Chang and the leaders
of the communist movement. Like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.
They would not continue to fightwith one another while also
trying to resist the Japanese ineastern China, and uneasy peace

(25:05):
was accordingly patched togetherfor the duration of the
conflict, however long it might last against the occupying
power. An additional benefit of this
was that while the Communists could acquire aid from the
Soviets in Russia, Chang and theNationalists had favorable ties
with the British in India and Burma, as well as the United
States, which was already anxious by 1938 and 1939 about

(25:29):
Japanese expansion in the Pacific, a sphere which America
considered absolutely vital to its economic and national
interests. Both Chang and his allies and
the Communist leaders were in nodoubt, however, that as soon as
Japan was defeated, the Civil War would resume.
It would be many years. Before that occurred.
From 1938 a bitter struggle commenced with the Nationalists

(25:53):
and the Communists controlling much of the West and central
regions of China, while Japan was largely content to occupy
the economically more important West and South of China, where
the great cities of the country lay along the course of the
Yellow, Yangtze, and Pearl rivers.
That the Japanese did not press westwards and attempt to

(26:13):
conclusively defeat the Nationalists and the Communists
was in large part because their interest was drawn elsewhere.
Japan desperately needed oil if it was to have any chance of
besting the United States in a war.
The nearest large supply of thiswas in Southeast Asia, around
the Dutch East Indies and also British Wells in Burma and

(26:33):
around Borneo and Brunei in the East Indies.
Supplies of oil, steel and otherresources needed for warfare
were also prerequisites for Japan to be able to defeat Chang
and his armies in central China.So when the US cut off supplies
of oil and steel to Japan in thecourse of 1940 and 1941, it left

(26:53):
the Japanese with no option but to either risk a war with the US
or else abandoned its expansionist policy.
The regime in Tokyo chose war and attacked Pearl Harbor in
Hawaii on the 7th of December 1941.
It was the salvation of the Chinese cause.
Within a year, the Second World War had turned decisively

(27:14):
against Japan and its main ally Nazi Germany, and with America's
economy transformed to focus exclusively on the conflict, war
material began arriving to the Chinese in ever greater amounts
in 1940, two, 1943 and 1944. Chang held the office of Premier
of the Republic of China in the Chongqing government for most of

(27:36):
the war period. He had held this office
periodically during the 1930s, though not without interruption.
While from April 1938 he would serve as the Director General of
the Kuomintang until his death nearly 4 decades later.
Therefore, while there were other rivals for power within
the Nationalist government during the Nanjing decade, the

(27:58):
outbreak of the Sino Japanese War in 1937 allowed Chang to
consolidate his control over thegovernment and given this.
He should be viewed. Unequivocally, as the individual
who was responsible for the prolific corruption of the
Nationalists during the wartime period, Enormous sums of money
were embezzled by the Quo Min Tang officials during the late

(28:20):
1930s and through the 1940s, much of it being funding sent by
the Americans and British to support the war effort.
Most scholars agree that Chang was not personally guilty of
excessive corruption himself, but he turned a blind eye to it,
notably the huge sums of cash stolen by the former Minister of
Finance and head of the Chinese central bank, Kongxiangxi.

(28:44):
Kong was married to Chang's sister-in-law, Sung AI Ling, and
he was unwilling to stop he and his wife from siphoning off 10s
of millions of dollars into American accounts.
They would later leave China after the war and live in luxury
in Beverly Hills with wealth stolen from the Chinese state
during the war. Kung and AI Ling were just the
most glaring example of this pilfering of the government

(29:06):
coffers. Chang did little to stop
corruption proliferating at every level within the
nationalist apparatus in the 1930s and 1940s.
It is widely accepted today thatone of the reasons why the
Chinese Communists were able to build support in these years and
finally emerge victorious in thecivil war was owing to public

(29:26):
apathy about this enormous levelof corruption because of his
position as Premier of the Republic of China.
And also owing to the fact that the Chinese, both the
Nationalists and the Communists,were receiving the bulk of their
military aid from the British and Americans through India and
Burma. Chang was the paramount figure
when it came to diplomacy between the Chinese and the

(29:49):
Allies during the Second World War.
For instance, Chang was the 3rd senior most figure at the Cairo
Conference in November 1943, next to U.S.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill. The Soviet leader, Joseph
Stalin, was not present here. He pushed for a massive campaign

(30:09):
into the Burma region which would strike at the Japanese
positions there and to the southeast towards Singapore, a
project which would pull Japanese resources away from
China and allow for American bombing of Japanese military
targets within eastern China. Roosevelt was immensely
supportive of the Chinese position and even agreed in
principle to an injection of $1 billion of financing for the

(30:33):
Chinese at the Egyptian conference.
The Americans were also interested in the possibility of
the Chinese overseeing Indochinaafter the war, being
uncomfortable with the colonies of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia
returning to French colonial rule once the Japanese were
defeated. This was the high watermark for
Chang's diplomacy, though in thecourse of 1944, the American

(30:57):
general in charge of the China, Burma, India Theatre, Joseph
Stillwell, became profoundly disillusioned with Chang and the
Nationalists and their corruption, believing their
embezzling of money had largely caused the fall of the city of
Changsha to the Japanese in Junethat year.
Stillwell was eventually replaced, but American faith in

(31:18):
Chang and the Nationalists withered away nonetheless.
The fall of Changsha was one of the last major victories for the
Japanese in China during the war.
By the second-half of 1944, the war had swung definitively
against Germany and Japan in Europe and Asia.
The American economy had now been entirely transformed and

(31:39):
directed towards the war effort,and men, aeroplanes, tanks,
ships and armoured vehicles poured into the Pacific theatre
every day. In the spring of 1945, the
Chinese advanced into southern China towards Guangdong.
The intention had been to campaign N thereafter and retake
Nanjing and Shanghai in what would have been a carbon copy of

(32:01):
the Northern Expedition 2 decades earlier.
But before these plans were everinitiated, the United States
dropped the atomic weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in early August 1945, leading to Japan's surrender a
few weeks later. With this, the war came to an
end in China, along with the Eastern Front in Russia and

(32:22):
Eastern Europe. Between 1941 and 1945, the
Chinese Theatre had been by far and away the most deadly theatre
of the Second World War, with between 15 and 25 million people
being killed here through combat, Japanese atrocities and
several famines between 1937 and1945.

(32:43):
Despite this, peace with Japan did not bring peace to China.
Within weeks, both Chang's Nationalists and the Communists
were preparing for the descent back into the Civil War, which
had only been on hiatus for as long as the Japanese occupied
eastern China. By 1946, the Chinese Civil War
was back in full swing. However, where the Nationalists

(33:05):
had been close to victory back in the 1930s, they were now much
more evenly matched. Furthermore, while Moscow was
willing to support Mao's Red Army as much as necessary, the
Americans were seeking a way outof the war in the Far East and
sent the Secretary of Defense George Marshall to China in 1946
to try to broker a peace, a signof their wavering commitment.

(33:29):
The Nationalists were dealt a further major blow in 1947 when
the administration of President Truman in Washington began
drastically curtailing the amount of financial aid that it
was providing to the Kua Mintang.
Having tired of the endless corruption of Chang's
government, Chang himself was elected as President of the
Republic of China in 1948 following the promulgation of a

(33:52):
new constitution. But within months he was
threatening to resign following major military losses against
the Communists. The last year of the civil war,
from mid 1948 onwards, was characterized by a growing
rivalry between Chang and his Vice president Lee Zingrun over
the management of the governmentand the golden dollar reserves

(34:13):
at their disposal, even as the Communists captured new towns
and cities every month. When Nanjing, the nationalist
capital, fell in April 1949, it was the beginning of the end.
Thoughts now turn to the island of Taiwan.
Early in 1947, an incident occurred which was to have a
bearing on China's future and inparticular on Chang's legacy.

(34:37):
It happened well away from the centre of political power in the
cities of eastern China. The episode occurred on the
island of Formosa, better known today as Taiwan.
This was a peripheral part of China, one which had been
controlled for half a century between 1895 and 1945 by the
Japanese. In the aftermath of the war, the

(34:58):
Chinese government had taken it back over and the governor, Chen
Yi, was appointed to oversee theisland.
The local population soon becamedisillusioned with the Chinese
administrators and the Kuo Mintang rule, perceiving the
Nationalists as being as corruptas the Japanese had been.
Brutal heavy-handed policies culminated in February 1947 in

(35:20):
protests over the sale and supply of tobacco.
This all boiled over on the 28thof February in an insurrection
which was brutally suppressed byChen Yi and the Nationalist
Garrison with authorization fromChang.
The death toll on the February 28th incident is a point of
major contention in Taiwanese history, with some claiming that

(35:41):
as many as 25,000 people were killed, though other modern
analysts argue the figure could not have exceeded 10,000.
Whatever the death toll might have been, it is coloured views
of Chang's legacy in Taiwan downto the present day.
The February 28 incident would not have become a central an
episode in Chang's career were it not for the fact that his

(36:03):
life would become so entwined with the island shortly
afterwards. By 1949, the situation on the
mainland was desperate for Changand the Nationalists.
In January of that year, he stepped down as leader of the
Kua Mintang and was replaced fora time by lead Zung Run.
He remained central to military planning and in the months ahead

(36:23):
oversaw A gradual withdrawal of nationalist forces.
From Nanjing, Chengdu and Chengqing.
And other cities and towns southwards towards Canton.
Aware that they could not hope to resist the Soviet backed
Communists on the mainland, Chang and the other Nationalist
leaders now began preparing to evacuate the mainland and pull
their forces back to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea

(36:47):
and Taiwan, with the latter being the focus of the retreat.
Chang and the others realizing that the Communists would find
it difficult to take the island stronghold, particularly since
the United States would aid the Nationalists here and still had
huge military forces stationed in the Western Pacific since the
end of the Second World War. Thus, in the course of the

(37:08):
autumn and early winter of 1949,hundreds of thousands of
Nationalist troops and personnelbegan evacuating from the
mainland to Taiwan when the trickle of individuals who had
already fled here since 1946 to avoid the fighting that was
taking place in China proper is taken into account.
It is estimated that 2.2 millionpeople relocated from mainland

(37:31):
China to Taiwan between 1946 andearly 1950, having overseen this
massive operation over the course of several months.
In late 1949, Chang and the other leaders of the Kuomintang
arrived in Taiwan and began establishing it as a rival
Republic of China. Even as the Communists were

(37:51):
solidifying the People's Republic of China's hold over
the mainland, the island of Hainan was overrun by them in
the space of a few weeks in the late spring of 1950, ensuring
that the Nationalists were now confined entirely to Taiwan and
some small island chains which lie around the larger island of
Formosa. Taipei was established as the

(38:12):
capital of the Republic of Chinaon the island, and Chang was
quickly confirmed as the new President of the Republic.
Such was the international situation at this stage in the
Cold War that the Republic, despite being confined to the
island and having lost all of the mainland, continued to be
recognized by the Western powersas the legitimate Chinese

(38:32):
authority and the Roc. The acronym for the Republic of
China held a position of the United Nations from which the
People's Republic of China was excluded for the next 20 years,
a major boon to Chang and his followers following the
disastrous end to the Chinese Civil War.
One of Chang's first tasks on Taiwan was already under way

(38:54):
from the middle of 1949, when the first steps had been taken
to turn it into a nationalist stronghold.
This began with the imposition of martial law and was soon
expanded into a campaign to crack down on anyone who might
be opposed to the new regime, especially anyone remotely
connected to the Communist movement.
Much like the wave of anti communist attacks launched by

(39:17):
the Quo Min Tang back in 1927 during the Northern Expedition.
It has come to be known as the White Terror, a campaign which
technically lasted until the lifting of martial law through 2
measures in 1987 and 1992, but which was carried out most
brutally in the early 1950s. In those early years, 10s of

(39:37):
thousands of Taiwanese people were imprisoned, while 3000 or
so were executed. Undoubtedly, some of those who
were arrested and even executed were opponents of the regime,
but like all such campaigns of state terror, huge numbers of
people were punished excessivelyfor only minor associations with
the dissidents, while others still were entirely innocent of

(39:59):
any crime. Many of the purges were
personally commanded by Chang against the Navy and Army, where
hundreds or dozens of people were arrested at a time,
ostensibly to root out communistsympathizers.
Though often in reality to remove any potential rivals to
his rule, by the time the White Terror ended, it is believed

(40:19):
that as many as 140,000 people spent periods imprisoned.
The severity of the White Terroron Taiwan in the first years of
the establishment of the Nationalist government was not
entirely unjustified. The Communists on the mainland
had not simply forgotten about the Kuomintang.
After Chang led his people and armies to Taiwan in 1949, Mao

(40:42):
and the other leaders of the People's Republic were
determined to retake Taiwan, as much for the purposes of
destroying A rival Chinese polity As for the actual
strategic and economic value of the island itself.
They had an opportunity to do soin 1949 and early 1950, at which
juncture the United States probably would not have made any

(41:04):
efforts to stop a Communist invasion of Taiwan.
But following the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of
1950 and Chinese intervention insupport of North Korea the
following October, the US made it clear it would not look
kindly on any efforts to attack Chang's nascent nation.
Nevertheless, in 1954 and again in 1958, the People's Republic

(41:26):
began bombing some of the smaller islands in the Straits
of Taiwan and seemed to be inclined to launch an invasion
on both occasions. President Dwight Eisenhower, who
remains the only sitting American president to have
visited Taiwan when he did so in1960, affirmed himself to be a
staunch ally of Chiang Kai Shek,having the US Senate agreed to

(41:48):
the Formosa Resolution early in 1955 whereby US aid in defense
of Taiwan should it be invaded. It was affirmed while in 1954 a
very direct threat was issued toBeijing that if Mao's government
moved to invade, the US would consider employing its nuclear
arsenal against China. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese, who

(42:10):
would not acquire nuclear capabilities themselves until
1964, backed down. It wasn't all a one way St. when
it came to plans to resume the war between the Nationalists and
the Communists. Chang also developed plans to
invade the mainland in the 1950sand into the 1960s.
One of these involved the training of elite bands of

(42:32):
insurgents by the American CIA under the terms of the Sino
American Mutual Defence Treaty, The plan being to send these to
the mainland to operate alongside anti communist
elements there. A 1956 plan envisioned the
mobilization of approximately 3/4 of a million troops to
invade the mainland, an enormousforce in any other corner of the

(42:55):
world, but perhaps nowhere near enough to invade and conquer
mainland China. The most elaborate scheme was
Project National Glory. Or Project Guangwang.
An initiative around 1960 and 1961 that aimed to take
advantage of the chaos which hadbeen unleashed across China by
the Great Leap Forward. As Chairman, Mao's efforts to

(43:16):
have China become one of the most industrialized nations on
earth resulted in a catastrophicfamine that killed 10s of
millions of people. The plan was shelved when the
United States refused to sanction it following the
debacle of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in April 1961.
Any hopes of invading the mainland were fully abandoned

(43:37):
from the mid 1960s once the People's Republic acquired a
nuclear arsenal In 1954, the first presidential elections
were held in Taiwan following the flight to the island in
1949. This was not an open election,
but instead just over 1500 delegates to a National Assembly

(43:58):
determined who would serve as president for a term of six
years. Chang garnered 97% of the vote,
hardly surprising given the dominance of the assembly by the
Kua Min Tang. A similar system was employed in
elections in 19601966 and 1972, with Chang winning overwhelming
victories on each occasion. As president, he ruled Taiwan as

(44:22):
a military dictatorship. It came with the usual features
one would expect of this. The White Terror continued in a
slimmed down manner. A secret police crackdown on
open expression of political views and cultural liberalism
and the cult of personality he had first fostered on the
mainland continued. But there were some advances.

(44:42):
Aware that the excessive corruption the Kuomintang had
engaged in back in the 1930s and1940s had been substantially the
cause of their losing the Civil War, Chang attempted to reform
this element of the Nationalist government.
Moderately socialist policies were also pursued, and the
middle class was cultivated through progressive taxation.

(45:03):
Economically, Chang was a protectionist in the 1950s,
seeking to build up indigenous industries and self-sufficiency,
though that would change in time.
Diplomatically, Chang fostered relations with the United States
as Taiwan's closest ally, while also seeking close ties to
Japan, a country which emerged quickly from the disaster of the

(45:25):
Second World War to become an economic powerhouse of Asia.
To a much greater extent than back in China in the 1930s and
1940s. Chang promoted a cult of
personality on Taiwan from 1950 onwards.
There were reasons for this. Firstly, it was to a much
greater degree the unchallenged dictator of Taiwan after the

(45:47):
flight to the island in 1949, whereas he had rivals for power
within the Nationalist movement back in China in the period from
the mid 1920s to the end of the 1940s.
This was also a period of growing dictatorial rule and
personality cults in Asia more broadly, with figures like Kim,
Illinois Sung and Sung Man Re dominating North and South Korea

(46:10):
from the late 1940s onwards. In Taiwan, this took the form of
images of Chang in public spaces, encouragement of people
to keep images of the leader in their homes, and also the
erection of civic buildings in honor of Chang and his family.
This cult of personality would persist long after his death and
continue to be promoted by his son and his widow.

(46:33):
It has only gradually been dismantled in Taiwan since the
1990s. Despite Chang's initial economic
protectionism in China and in his first years of his rule over
the Republic of China's island home, his quarter century rule
there saw Taiwan begin to enter into an economic miracle.
In the 1960s and 1970's, the country experienced annual rates

(46:58):
of GDP growth of nearly 10%. Much of this was driven
initially by a commitment to creating small and medium sized
cooperatives that mass produced goods that required little
technological know how or industrial capacity to make.
For instance, beginning in the 1960s, Taiwan began to mass
produce umbrellas. By the 1970s, three quarters of

(47:20):
the world's umbrellas were made in Taiwan, and this was just one
of many such products that the country cornered the market in.
From there, it began to build technical expertise and use both
American and Japanese financial aid and direct investment to
begin developing more sophisticated products.
For instance, the last years of Chang's time as head of the

(47:42):
Republic saw the first plants opened to manufacture
semiconductors. Today, the semiconductor
industry in Taiwan is worth over$100 billion and the island
produces 20% of the world's supply.
Earlier, critics suggested that the Taiwanese economic miracle
happened despite Chang's protectionist impulses.

(48:03):
But in 1959, his government had adopted an economic reform plan
that prioritized market liberalisation and foreign
investment. The early 1970s brought a shift
in international relations, which was profoundly negative
for Taiwan and the position Chang had tried to establish for
his nation on the world stage ever since 1949.

(48:27):
Throughout the 1960s, Western countries, led by the United
States had been under growing pressure from Moscow and Beijing
to recognize the primacy of the People's Republic of China at
the United Nations. In 1961, the communist
government was admitted to the UN, meaning there were now two
nations within the organization that claimed to be the

(48:48):
legitimate government of China. In the years that followed,
several Western nations shifted their stance to recognize the
People's Republic as being the de facto government of China,
while many of the leading non aligned countries in the Cold
War such as India also pressed China's case.
Then finally, in 1971, the United States shifted its stance

(49:11):
following a visit by the American Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger to Beijing. As a consequence, late that
year, Aun Resolution effectivelyexpelled Taiwan from its
position on the Security Counciland admitted China as the
recognized Chinese government. Then U.S.
President Richard Nixon undertook a state visit to China

(49:32):
in February 1972 to begin normalizing relations.
In the end, the reality of the People's Republic controlling
all of mainland China and the economic benefits which would
accrue to the Western world by normalizing relations with
Beijing prove decisive factors, and most countries withdrew
official recognition of the Taiwanese government.

(49:55):
Chang was an aging man by the time that the Western powers
began changing their diplomatic stance to acknowledge the
People's Republic as the power that represented China on the
world stage. Already into his 80s by the
1970s, he began to suffer from numerous ailments during these
years, notably kidney problems and heart issues.

(50:17):
A heart attack preceded his death from kidney failure and
pneumonia at 87 years of age. On the 5th of April 1975 / 1/4
of a century after the retreat to Taiwan, a month of mourning
was declared in Taiwan. Both before and after his state
funeral on the 16th of April, a huge tomb was created to house

(50:38):
his remains, the Chiang Kai ShekMemorial Hall, which is located
in central Taipei next to the National Theatre.
Today, a library and museum commemorating his life and the
history of the Republic of Chinaare inside the hall.
He was succeeded as president byyen Cha Khan, who served out the
remainder of Chang's fifth term.When fresh elections were held

(51:00):
in 1978, Chang's son from his first marriage, Chang Qing Kua,
was elected as the new president.
He gradually oversaw a looseningof qua mintang and military
rule, and is generally credited with beginning the transition to
a democracy. After his father's dictatorship,
Chang left behind a contested legacy.

(51:22):
On the one hand, his life's workhad ensured that an alternative
version of China, one very different from the People's
Republic of Mao Zedong, remainedalive on Taiwan.
Yet its position was weak at thetime of his death, and the
Western world clamoured to recognize the People's Republic
and in the process turned their back to some extent on their
Taiwanese allies. Both China and Taiwan have

(51:45):
changed. Greatly since.
Mao's near successor, Deng Xiaoping set China on a course
of economic liberalisation and further rapprochement with the
Western world. What has developed since through
the Chinese economic miracle is a country which remains
communist in the barest sense inreality being a capitalist state

(52:06):
with elements of a command economy, one where an autocratic
government reserves the right tointervene substantially when
it's interests are threatened. Taiwan has become much more
democratic since Chang's time, and despite his position as
father of the nation, he is ranked poorly as a leader there
on account of being a quasi dictator.
Nevertheless, while Taiwan has become a democratic nation and

(52:30):
China a pseudo capitalist one since Chang's time, the tensions
between the two nations and China's desire to reincorporate
what it perceives as a breakawayprovince.
Have not gone away. Quite the contrary, as anyone
who keeps an eye on world politics will be aware, Tensions
have been escalating in the Straits of Taiwan again in
recent years, and China's desireto annex Taiwan will be one of

(52:53):
the most important flashpoints in the growing rivalry.
Chiang Kai Shek was one of the most important individuals in
the history of modern China for a period of half a century.
Between his rise to the top of the Kua Mintang following the
death of Sun Yat Sen in the mid 1920s, down to his death in
1975, he was at the forefront ofthe nation's politics.

(53:16):
For exactly half of that period he was the leader of the
Nationalists on the Chinese mainland, a period which saw him
lead the Northern Expedition, then nearly achieved victory
over the Communists in the early1930s, only to have the Japanese
invasion occur from 1937 onwards, followed by the Second
World War, a resumption of the Civil War in 1945, and final

(53:40):
defeat in 1949. Few individuals lived through
such historic events, let alone or at the centre of them,
continuously for several decades.
The encore was 1/4 of a century as head of the Republic of China
on the island of Taiwan. And yet, despite being
unquestionably the most significant figure in the
history of modern Taiwan, his legacy there is very contentious

(54:03):
today. This in many ways reflects his
career. He was an individual of enormous
ability, though fatally flawed with the corruption and the
brutality that the Kuor Mintang became synonymous with in the
1940s, ultimately allowing the Nationalists to snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory in the civil war.
What do you think of Chiang Kai Shek?

(54:26):
Was he a Chinese patriot who could have steered China on a
far better course if he had led the Nationalists to victory in
the civil war? Or was he a corrupt military
dictator who simply looks good in retrospect by comparison with
Mao Zedong? Please let us know in the
comments section. And in the meantime, thank you
very much for watching. Supremacy 1914 is a free online

(54:54):
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