Chiang Kai-Shek
(1887–1975), Chinese Nationalist general and president. A major twentieth-century Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek headed China's first modern government after 1928 and led the country against Japan in World War II. Chiang Kai-shek (in pinyin romanization, Jiang Jieshi) came from a gentry family in Fenghua county in Zejiang province. He studied at military academies in China and Japan in preparation for a military career.
In Japan, Chiang joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary society, the Tongmenghui, which later evolved into the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party. Chiang returned to China in 1911 and participated in various campaigns with Nationalist units against the Manchu Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644. The last Qing emperor abdicated in 1912, and the Nationalists took control of China. In 1922 Sun summoned Chiang to Canton to work for his reorganized Nationalist party. Chiang traveled to the Soviet Union in 1923 to observe the Red Army and became chief of staff of the Nationalist army and commandant of its military academy (called the Whampoa Military Academy, later the Central Military Academy).
In July 1926 Chiang was appointed commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army and launched the Northern Expedition to unify China (the north at that time being under the control of various warlords). Rapid successes against larger warlord forces resulted in intense competition between the left wing of the Nationalist party and its allies (the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists) and the anti-Communist forces led by Chiang. He ended the coalition with the Soviet Union and purged the Chinese Communists from the Nationalist party. The Northern Expedition completed the nominal unification of China in 1928 and established its capital at Nanjing.
Chiang led the Nationalist government and its military forces during the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), defeating rivals within the party and making many reforms. But his government was trapped between Japan's rising imperialism, which sought to conquer China before it could modernize and truly unite, and the Chinese Communists, with their vision of a Marxist China. Japanese aggression culminated in the July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The result was an eight-year Sino-Japanese war, which merged to become part of World War II in Asia in 1941.
China emerged as one of the victorious Big Four allied powers in 1945, but the war had shattered China's economy and the morale of the Nationalists. Mao Zedong won the ensuing civil war and established the Communist People's Republic of China in 1949. Chiang's defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Elected president of the Republic of China in 1948, Chiang continued to serve on Taiwan until his death in 1975.
The United States, which withdrew its support for the Nationalists in the civil war, resumed its alliance with Chiang's government after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. U.S. military and economic aid and reforms instituted by the Nationalist government turned Taiwan into an economic powerhouse, and later a democratic nation.
Further Reading
Chiang Kai-shek. (1957) Soviet Russia in China: A Summing Up at Seventy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
Furuya, Keiji. (1981) Chiang Kai-shek: His Life and Times. Abridged English version by Chun-ming Chang. New York: St. John's University.
Wu, Tien-wei. (1976) The Sian Incident: A Pivotal Point in Modern Chinese History, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
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