老蒋失马焉知非福.docVIP

Tweet IN IMPERIAL China, overthrown rulers were ill-treated in the official histories written by the dynasty that succeeded them. They were blamed for all the evils that justified the transfer of the mandate of heaven. Today, not all Chinese history is written by its latest winners, the Chinese Communist Party. But its victory certainly colours views of the Republican period that preceded the revolution. One casualty of this has been the reputation of the Republics leader, Chiang Kai-shek. During the second world war, he was a hero in the West, feted in Cairo in 1943 by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as the free worlds great hope against Japan and the Communists in China. But, after the war, as the armies of his Kuomintang KMT government crumbled in the face of Mao Zedongs Communists, Chiangs standing likewise disintegrated. The KMT was a dictatorial regime that had risen to power partly through exploiting its links with Shanghai gangsters. It was monstrously corrupt and mismanaged the economy into hyperinflation. It collapsed, largely, it seemed, under the weight of its own fecklessness and cruelty, and ended up ruling just Taiwan, from where Chiang dreamed ever more forlornly of recovering the mainland. Alliance with the dictatorship he brutally established there seemed one of those embarrassing right-wing entanglements the cold war foisted on America. Chiang himself, with his glamorous wife, Soong Mayling, his cool, austere manner and his comic-book title, “the Generalissimo”, seemed somewhere on the spectrum between joke and monster. This enthralling book by Jay Taylor of Harvard University shows that these conventional views of both Chiang and the Chinese civil war are caricatures. It is the first biography to make full use of the Chiang family archive. This includes Chiangs own diary, in which he wrote at least a page of classical Chinese daily from 1918 to 1972. The picture that emerges is of a far more subtle and prescient thinker than the man Am