Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, and of the Republic of China from the late 1920s until his death in 1975. He reunified much of China by force in 1928, led the country through eight years of war against Japan, and then lost the civil war to the Communists under Mao Zedong, after which he ruled Taiwan as a one-party, martial-law state for a quarter of a century.

Chiang was born on 31 October 1887 in Xikou, a village in Fenghua county, Zhejiang province, into a family of salt merchants. His father died when he was a child and he was raised by his mother, a devout Buddhist. Following custom, he was married young, in 1901, to Mao Fumei, the mother of his son Chiang Ching-kuo.

Determined on a military career, he studied briefly at the Baoding military academy and then in Japan, where in 1908 he joined the Tongmenghui, the revolutionary league led by Sun Yat-sen, and served in the Imperial Japanese Army. When the 1911 revolution broke out against the Qing dynasty, he returned to fight in Shanghai. The next decade, when China fragmented among warlords, he spent partly in revolutionary politics and partly in the Shanghai underworld and stock market, with links to the Green Gang secret society.

In 1923 Sun sent Chiang to Moscow to study Soviet military and party organisation, and in 1924 appointed him commandant of the new Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, set up with Soviet help to train officers for the Kuomintang, which was then allied with the young Chinese Communist Party. Whampoa graduates formed the core of Chiang's personal following. After Sun's death in March 1925, Chiang outmanoeuvred his rivals, and in July 1926 he launched the Northern Expedition to defeat the warlords.

As his armies reached the Yangtze, Chiang turned on his Communist allies. On 12 April 1927, in the Shanghai massacre, Nationalist troops and gangsters attacked Communists and left-wing labour unions in Shanghai; thousands were killed in the purge that followed across the country. The break began two decades of civil war. In December 1927 Chiang married Soong Mei-ling, from a powerful Christian banking family, and in 1930 he was baptised a Methodist. By 1928 his forces had taken Beijing, and he headed a national government with its capital at Nanjing.

Between 1928 and 1937 Chiang's government built roads, railways and schools, modernised the army with German advisers, and tried to promote national renewal through the New Life Movement, which mixed Confucian ethics with military discipline. Its authority, however, rested on bargains with regional militarists, and corruption and repression were widespread. Chiang gave priority to destroying the Communists, whose base in Jiangxi he encircled in 1934, forcing them on the Long March to the north-west.

He avoided all-out war with Japan even after it seized Manchuria in 1931, arguing that internal unity had to come first. In December 1936 two of his own generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, detained him in the Xi'an Incident and released him only after he agreed to a second united front with the Communists against Japan.

Full-scale war with the Empire of Japan began in July 1937. Chiang's best divisions were destroyed defending Shanghai, and Japanese troops then took Nanjing and carried out a massacre of civilians and prisoners. In June 1938, to slow the Japanese advance, Nationalist forces broke the dykes of the Yellow River; the resulting floods killed several hundred thousand Chinese and made millions homeless. The government retreated to Chongqing in Sichuan and held out there, with heavy losses, for the rest of the war.

After Pearl Harbor, China became one of the Allies in the Second World War. In November 1943 Chiang met Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference, which promised the return of Manchuria and Taiwan to China. His relations with the American general Joseph Stilwell were bitter, and US observers increasingly criticised the corruption, inflation and conscription abuses of his regime, which killed many soldiers through starvation and disease. Even so, China's resistance tied down large Japanese armies until 1945.

After Japan's surrender, American mediation failed and the Chinese Civil War resumed in 1946. Despite larger forces and US aid, the Nationalists were undermined by hyperinflation, loss of public support and military errors, and they suffered crushing defeats in Manchuria and northern China in 1948. Chiang was elected president under a new constitution that year but stepped down in January 1949. On 1 October 1949 Mao proclaimed the People's Republic in Beijing, and in December Chiang's government moved to Taipei, followed by up to two million soldiers and civilians.

Chiang resumed the presidency in 1950 and was re-elected repeatedly by a legislature chosen on the mainland in 1947. Two years before his arrival, troops sent by his government had crushed the uprising that began on 28 February 1947, killing an estimated 18,000 to 28,000 people, many of them Taiwanese intellectuals and community leaders. Martial law, imposed in May 1949, lasted until 1987. During the period known as the White Terror, around 140,000 people were imprisoned for real or alleged opposition, and several thousand were executed.

Chiang never gave up the goal of retaking the mainland. The Korean War and the Cold War brought him American protection, formalised in a 1954 defence treaty. His government carried out a successful land reform and laid foundations for Taiwan's rapid industrial growth. In 1971 the United Nations transferred China's seat to the People's Republic. Chiang died in Taipei on 5 April 1975; his son Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded him as party leader and later as president.

Chiang's reputation is sharply divided. Admirers credit him with unifying China, resisting Japan for eight years and preserving the Republic of China on Taiwan, which became prosperous and, after the 1980s, democratic. Critics point to the massacres of 1927 and 1947, the Yellow River flood, corruption, and four decades of dictatorship on the mainland and on Taiwan. In Taiwan today many of his statues have been removed, and the future of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei is a continuing political argument.