The man who made Taiwan the focus

And some journalists reflect

Delightful autumnal warmth remained today along with crisp pictures. The glassy look of the water early in the morning speaks to how few folks brave the colder sunrise temperatures at this point.

I call these swimmers the Spa Creek Flotilla. They have been patrolling the Creek all day.

I have mentioned Taiwan’s early years as the Republic of China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. Have you read anything about him otherwise? If interested, here are some suggestions.

The Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York publishes a daily news dump you might find interesting if you seek to delve more deeply into news on the bilateral ties. It’s called TheWireChina.com. An outgrowth of the Wire is the China Books Review with some neat features.

Today’s Review features British historian Rana Mitter offering a brief but worthwhile bibliographic essay on recent revisionist biographies of one of the two dominant men in early twentieth century China. A scholar of mid-century Chinese history, Mitter’s own China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism is most illuminating on its own.

Chiang, was a figure long criticised for his actions on the mainland, then increasingly the ones associated with governing Taiwan fairly harshly between 1949 and 1975 (largely unknown by the U.S. public). I acknowledge my own views of Chiang result from reading about his rule in preparation to move to Taibei in 1970, though we diverted to Bankgkok, instead. I formed strong views from Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience. This volumed explored the general who clashed repeated with Chiang as our primary military representative during the Second World War. To say Tuchman drew a poor view of Chiang understated it but Stilwell himself was a controversial, volatile figure in the U.S. Army. Card carrying China specialists generally discount her book fifty years after its appearance but it left a distinct impression on me.

A distinctly more positive assessment appeared a decade ago when the late Jay Taylor published The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. Taylor again wrote on a man living into his eighties who loved and hated the Japanese, worked with before fighting Russians, lost at governing the mainland unevenly over a twenty year period, then ruled as the ‘legitimate government’ of China in U.S. eyes until he passed away in 1975.

Mitter highlights the two new studies with access to the Chiang diaries at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I read Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine’s, Victorious in Defense: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, a couple of months back. Accessing these diaries, it is almost an exhausting and definitely an exhaustive volume. While I had read a great deal about this man and a several biographies of his wife, Song Meiling, I still found it most worthwhile because of the use of Chiang’s own words.

The strongest value of this information is the powerful anti-American views Chiang held. He was every bit as sensitive to disrespect for his nation as are Xi Jinping and the CCP today. He resented, yet voraciously demanded, U.S. financial assistance to free the eastern portion of the country from Japanese occupation. He wanted billions of dollars in assistance but not to fight the Japanese but to hoard for use against the Communists; let the Americans under Stilwell fight the Japanese. One could easily substitute Chiang’s name with Mao’s for the sentiment. This biography leaves no question of the Generalissimo’s frustration over years with U.S. policy makers yet he never rejected help no matter what his personal sense of unhappiness. His goal was, unsurprisingly, retaining power.

I have yet to read Parks Coble’s The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Ka-Shek Lost China’s Civil War but I have it to chew on next week over the holidays. Mitter’s take is that this volume illustrates the dangers of a system, the Guomingdang or Nationalist Party, so compromised by voracious greed. That’s a noteworthy condemnation but an appropriate topic to discuss as Taiwan’s increased focus on defense raises questions about democracy’s financial fidelity in the face of much foreign assistance.

You might find these books worthwhile so I provide citations below.

This China Books Review also has a most interesting interview (transcript or link to a podcast included) on American journalists in the Middle Kingdom over the past eighty years. Mary Kay Magstad of National Public Radio interviewed former CNNer Mike Chinoy on the latter’s fifteen year project contemplating journalists. I enjoyed the observations, suspecting you will too.

Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences. Our quest for a enhanced civil discussion with respect is all the more important by the day. I genuinely hope you’ll drop me a comment, if a paid subscriber, or send me an email message otherwise. I read them all.

Be well and be safe.

Parks M. Coble, The Collapse of Nationalist China; How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China’s Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Mary Kay Magistad, ‘American Correspondents in China’, China Books Review’, no. 3, 16 November 2023, retrieved at https://chinabooksreview.com/2023/11/07/ep-2-american-correspondents-in-china/

Rana Mitter, China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020.

—The Shadow of Chiang Kai-shek’, China Books Review’ no. 3, 16 November 2023 retrieved at https://chinabooksreview.com/2023/11/16/the-shadow-of-chiang-kai-shek/

Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine, Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887-1975. New London: Yale University Press, 2023.

Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2011.

Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience. New York: Random House, 1970.