The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek And The Struggle For Modern China

 The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek and the Struggle for Modern China

Jay Taylor

th e bel k n a p press of h a rva rd u n i ver si t y press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En­gland 2009

Contents

List of Maps   ix Acknowledgments   xi Note on Romanization   xiii

Prologue   1

I Revolution

1. A Neo-­Confucian Youth   7



2. The Northern Expedition and Civil War   49



3. The Nanking Decade   97

II War of Resistance

4. The Long War Begins   141



5. Chiang and His American Allies   194



6. The China Theater   245



7. Yalta, Manchuria, and Postwar Strategy   296

III Civil War

8. Chimera of Victory   339



9. The Great Failure   378

viii

Contents

IV The Island

10. Streams in the Desert   411



11. Managing the Protector   454



12. Shifting Dynamics   503



13. Nixon and the Last Years   547 Epilogue   589 Notes   597 Index   699

Maps

Republican China, 1928   80–81 China, 1929   87 Allied Retreat, First Burma Campaign, April–May 1942   206 China, 1944   293

I revolution

1 A Neo-­Confucian Youth

It was late on the morning of August 15, 1945, in the battered and steaming city of Chungking, when an aide brought a shortwave radio into the large but spare of­fice of the leader of China, Chiang Kai-­shek, and tuned in Radio Tokyo. A few minutes later, Chiang, who understood Japanese, listened quietly as the Japanese people for the first time in history heard Emperor Hirohito, the “Voice of the Crane.” The incarnate divinity embodying the soul of Japan was telling them to “bear the unbearable.” In order to save innocent lives from the “cruel” bombs of the enemy, he had accepted the Potsdam Declaration of the Allied leaders. In other words, the great samurai nation had accepted unconditional surrender. Finally, it was over. Under Chiang’s leadership, the Chinese people had fought an eight-­year bloody war, half the time virtually alone. The war of resistance had ac­tually been raging on and off since Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931. By the end of the fourteen-­year con­flict, at least three million Chinese soldiers had been killed or wounded, and perhaps another million or more had died of disease and malnutrition.1 The vast majority of those soldiers killed—over 90 percent—had been in Chiang’s armies, not those of the Chinese Communists. Nine million Chinese civilians, too, died in the war— bombed, shot, burned, starved, or drowned. Tens of millions had been refugees for various periods, with huge numbers dying in camps or while on the move. Middle-­class families who had fled Shanghai and other cities had seemingly lost ev­ery­thing. Millions of farm families, victims of the Japanese Imperial Army’s policy of “burn all, destroy all, kill all,” were destitute, and whole cities had been burned to the ground—some, like Changsha, more than once. *  *  *

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th e ge ne r a l is s imo Early that evening, Chiang went to a stifling hot broadcast studio in Chung­ king to announce the news to the Chinese people. He stood before the microphone, straight and erect as usual, dressed in a simple military uniform. His secretary, Chen Bulei, was sick, so he had written the speech himself. He adjusted his horn-­rimmed glasses and spoke to the nation in his clear, high-­ pitched voice, reporting the surrender, praising the Chinese for their heroic struggle, but also giving credit to the Allies.2 “The truth that justice must overrule force,” he began, “has fi­nally been proved . . . the historic mission of our national revolution has been achieved.” Most Chinese could hardly understand his thick Ningbo accent, but they knew what he was saying. Then he spoke about the future: “I believe all our compatriots as well as the people of the world must hope that this will be the last war all the civilized countries have to fight. If so we will not count the price we have paid and the time we have wasted, although we all have suffered indescribable cruelties and humiliations.” Then in a concluding, oblique reference to the internal enemy, he said, “The current peace procured by our armed forces is not the full realization of eternal peace. Only when our enemies are also conquered in a battlefield of reason, become thoroughly repentant, and are transformed into peace lovers like us, can we say that we have reached the final aim of this war—human peace in eternity.”3 Repeated first by those few with radios, the news spread by shouts and runners through all the cities and towns of China. Most villages had no radios but virtually all seemed to hear the report within an hour. In cities from Shanghai to Chungking and in rural areas almost ev­erywhere, ­women, men, and children—a few hundred million—poured into the streets yelling and cheering, while Japanese soldiers remained in their barracks in a daze. Millions upon millions of firecrackers crackled through the night and into the next day. In Chungking, Americans joined the celebration, and crowds “clutched at their uniforms, cheered them, and suffocated them, shouting ‘Mei guo ding hao!’” (America is the very best!)4 It was arguably the biggest celebration in human chronicles and the greatest moment in Chinese history. The fact that the Americans and the atom bomb had defeated the Japanese did not distract from the sense of a great Chinese victory. After all, the Chinese felt that they had done their part all those years, tying down more than a million Japanese soldiers and as many as a thousand enemy warplanes. In his radio address, Chiang told his countrymen that the people of Japan were not their enemy and “not for a moment [should Chinese] think of revenge or heap abuses upon the innocent people of Japan.”5 As he left the ra-

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

dio studio that night, the American reporter Theodore White observed that for a fleeting moment “the smooth exterior of this contemporary mandarin was punctured, the weariness and strain of the years broke through.” Then the lapse was gone. “Nodding but unsmiling, the Generalissimo, as Westerners called him, passed through the cheering crowd and returned to his command center.”6

Some five hundred miles to the north, in Mao Zedong’s headquarters in the dusty town of Yan’an, the celebration of V-­J Day was muted. The American team at the CCP base noted that the Communists welcomed the news with a seemingly hastily or­ga­nized, spiritless demonstration. No doubt the CCP leaders recognized that people throughout China perceived the triumph as Chiang Kai-­shek’s victory. But neither Chiang nor Mao was celebrating that night. The Chinese Nationalists and the Communists had been fight­ing off and on for almost twenty years to see which party and leader would guide China toward ful­fill­ ing its dream of becoming a great nation restored. Both leaders talked of engaging in negotiations to achieve a peaceful and united China, but they each knew that in fact a battle to the death had begun. Steel determination and a stubborn stoicism had seen both men through grave defeats and long periods when their respective enemies were much stronger than they. At this moment, Chiang seemed to have ev­ery military and economic advantage and he was more popular and powerful than he had ever been. Indeed, the Americans were in the pro­cess of completing the training and arming of thirty-­nine government divisions, offering Chiang his best hope in the coming struggle. But Mao was more optimistic than Chiang. The presence of the Americans in Yan’an symbolized a dormant but grave problem for Chiang—the disdain for his leadership within the U.S. government. At the same time, Chiang himself had long privately believed that Communist of­fic­ ers and troops as well as Communist civilian cadre were on the whole more dedicated and disciplined than their Kuomintang counterparts—a conclusion that darkened his outlook even at this moment of triumph. Chiang sent a telegram to Mao assuring him that “eternal peace was on the horizon” and “sincerely” inviting him to “our temporary cap­ital” to discuss problems of “critical importance to our nation.”7 Mao clearly viewed the invitation not only as a stratagem in the Nationalist-­Communist contest to appear the most desirous of unity and peace, but also as a demonstration of

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what he had long seen as Chiang’s disingenuous but strong belief in his own benevolent and moral character­—not to mention Chiang’s skill at political manipulation and crisis management.

The story of Chiang’s rise is one of persistence, loyalty, physical courage, personal honesty, and a willingness to acknowledge that much of the tragedy that befell him and China was outside his control. He evolved from a narrow­minded military of­fi­cer with only one year’s training at a military preparatory school into a national leader with a strategic vision who understood the dynamics of Chinese and world affairs and, often, how best to play a weak hand. He also rationalized coldhearted strategic and political decisions on the mainland and ruthless acts of military as well as secret-­police suppression on Taiwan—acts that cost the lives of thousands—by citing the exigencies of a terrible war and the need to achieve national goals. He was as hypocritical as the next undemocratic powerful leader, but he was not a cynical man. Like others at the time, including the Communists, for a long period he had important connections with a secret political and criminal society, and taxes on the opium trade in part fi­nanced his government on the mainland. Still, he thought of himself as a moral, sincere, up-­to-­date Confucian Christian, and he was motivated less by the desire for personal power than by a vision of a uni­fied, modern, in­de­pen­dent China. Mao, of course, jus­ti­fied the killing of a million land owners and other atrocities in a similar manner, pointing to the need for a violent destruction of the old order to achieve the transcendent goal of an egalitarian, utopian society.

I In the late nineteenth century, Chiang Kai-­shek’s paternal grandfather, Jiang Yubiao, owned 30 mu (about five acres) of farmland outside Xikou, a small hamlet in the coastal province of Zhejiang, 150 miles south of Shanghai. Misty mountains with dramatic names like “Tiger Killing” and “Hole in the Snow” rose in the near distance and sparkling waterfalls cascaded into the valleys. Local teas such as “Wuling” were and still are among the most popular and expensive teas produced in China. The Chiang property in Fenghua County consisted of hillside bamboo, terraced rice paddies, and some tea bushes. Those five acres made the Chiangs economically one of the top five families in the Xikou area and thus part of

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

the rural elite, though not of the rural gentry.8 A few years after the end of the bloody rebellion against Manchu rule in the 1860s by the messianic, crypto-­ Christian Taiping, Jiang Yubiao rented out his agricultural land and opened a salt shop in the village. Salt was a government monopoly and Chiang obtained his license through some connection or ser­vice, perhaps related to helping end the Taiping Rebellion. The store did not begin to prosper until Kai-­shek’s father, Jiang Suan, took over the business and procured a license to sell wine, another of­fi­cial monopoly. The three generations of Chiangs lived together in the rooms above the store just across the road from Shan Creek, a usually placid stream that regularly flooded in the spring and on occasion submerged the first floor of the salt shop. Suan’s first wife left behind a son, Xuhou, and a daughter, Ruizhun. His second wife died without having children, and in 1886, Suan took as his third wife a young woman named Wang Caiyu, who was twenty-­two when she wed the forty-­two-­year-­old widower with children. A close relative of both the Jiang and the Wang families recalls that Caiyu came from a “very poor village of hillbillies” whose principal crop was bamboo, and like many Chinese ­women of the day, she hobbled about on bound feet.9 (Originally an affectation of the rich, by the late nineteenth century a good percentage of Chinese parents—though not the ruling Manchus—were tightly strapping the feet of their daughters, a painful practice that bent the instep and reduced the length of the foot by about a third.) Nonetheless, Caiyu was intelligent and shrewd and would prove ambitious for her children. On October 31, 1887, a year after her marriage, Caiyu bore a son in a room above the salt store. The grandfather gave the boy his generational name, Ruiyuan (good omen), and his of­fi­cial name, Zhongzheng (balanced justice). In keeping with the Chinese custom, Ruiyuan eventually was given an honorific name—Jieshi, literally “upright stone.” Decades later, the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-­sen would call him by the Cantonese pronunciation of this name, and the outside world would also come to know him as “Kai-­ shek.” The Jiang’s general store thrived and in 1889 the family moved into a two­story merchant’s house a hundred feet or so down Wu Ling Street. Two new daughters soon appeared, but only one, Ruilian, survived infancy. In 1894, the grandfather, Jiang Yubiao, died, and that same year Caiyu gave birth to a second son, Ruiqing, a beautiful boy with a lovable disposition who became his mother’s favorite. Kai-­shek, her first born, was neither handsome nor academic, and grew to be rebellious and temperamental. According to his own

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th e ge ne r a l is s imo account, his mother had “to use the birch repeatedly in order not to spoil me.”10 Yet he was articulate and had a volatile and commanding disposition. In 1896, Kai-­shek’s fifty-­year-­old father, Suan, suddenly passed away and afterward Suan’s brother ­adopted Kai-­shek’s older half-­brother, Xuhou, who inherited the salt shop. The nine-­year-­old Kai-­shek inherited the house, the bamboo grove that produced forty to fifty (probably Mexican) silver dollars a year, and the rice paddies.11 The ­women in the family received nothing substantial. The young Kai-­shek’s early education consisted of sessions with a series of neo-­Confucianist tutors, men who had passed only the lowest-­level exam to become a “Shengyuan.” Before he was nine, he was said to have read “the four books”—The Great Learning, The Middle Way (The Doctrine of the Mean), the Analects, and Mencius.12 All these texts, however, were written in classical Chinese characters, and Chinese contemporaries recalled in their memoirs that they were mostly “gibberish” to the students, who spent hours a day “squawking [the words] out loud in unison.”13 When he was fourteen, Kai-­shek’s mother, a strong-­willed widow, decided for several reasons that it was time for her son to have a wife. As a relative suggests, Caiyu wanted a strong and willing daughter-­in-­law for herself and a servant for her son.14 For the bride, his mother chose a young, rather plain nineteen-­year-­old named Mao Fumei with only partially bound feet from a nearby poor village called Yandou. The wedding was sometime in the winter of 1901–1902, after which Fumei moved into the Chiangs’ two-­story upper-­ class merchant’s house.15 That Fumei did not become pregnant until eight years later suggests the marriage went unconsummated for a long while.16 In 1903, Chiang took the new civil ser­vice examination and failed. This did not deter his mother, who promptly enrolled her son in the Phoenix Mountain Academy, a small Confucian school in Fenghua, the county cap­ ital. The curriculum was heavily classical, but included lessons in En­glish and mathematics.17 And while Fenghua was a small town it was far more sophisticated than Xikou; it was there that Kai-­shek saw his first “big-­nosed” foreign missionary—and where he began to regard as an embarrassment his illiterate peasant wife who kept house for him.18 According to various reports, Fumei complained to her friends that Kai-­shek frequently beat her.19 But according  to local lore, she retained her warm and friendly nature, perhaps because, as Chiang later recorded in his diary, his mother often sided with her against him.20

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

II Two distinct forces shaped Chiang Kai-­shek’s identity and outlook during these formative years. The first in­flu­ence was Confucianism and even more importantly, neo-­Confucianism, which originally was a reaction to the catastrophe of the Mongol invasion of China in the thirteenth century. After that calamity, Chinese scholars and of­fi­cials were obsessed with restoring and safeguarding the cultural heritage of China, and by the late nineteenth century, when Chiang was a student, art, music, and arithmetic were considered far less important than rote learning of the more than two-­thousand-­year-­old

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th e ge ne r a l is s imo Chinese classics and preparations for writing the infamous “eight-­legged” essays on these ancient collections. But the aspect of neo-­Confucianism that most affected the young Chiang was its emphasis on character development, self-­discipline, and the conscious cultivation of the self, along with a sense of duty, courage, honor, and ac­ tivism rather than passive contemplation. The concept of the superior man emerged from the nurturing of these principles. At the same time, the neo-­ Confucianists promulgated the traditional Confucian concepts regarding moral behavior and the hierarchy of obligations in society. The Confucian approach to morality was based on the political order and had a political objective—the creation of a harmonious, orderly society. It was an ethos shaped by millennia in which extended families lived in crowded, clan-­based agricultural communities where survival depended on a combination of in­de­pen­ dent, household farming and communal maintenance of infrastructure and order. The second force that shaped the political views and career of Chiang Kai­shek, and virtually all other Chinese leaders of the twentieth century, was the extraordinary loss of sovereignty, territory, and self-­respect that China—the center of world culture in the eyes of its people—had suffered during the previous sixty years. When Kai-­shek was born, once nomadic Manchus from north of the Great Wall had been ruling China for some 250 years. But while the foreign rulers maintained their own Tungusic tongue and forbade intermarriage with ethnic Chinese (the Han), they ­adopted most other aspects of Chinese culture. Like other foreign dynasties before them, their system of rule depended on the cooperation of the Chinese mandarins as well as the rural elite and gentry. But in the 1840s, the Qing dynasty endured a series of mortifying military defeats and humiliations at the hands of Westerners, who not only did not look Chinese, but also did not accept the benevolent supremacy of Chinese culture as had the Manchus and other barbarians surrounding China. The ensuing record of defeat, dishonor, and loss of sovereignty was as­ tonishing. Over the last half of the nineteenth century, military routs at the hands of the Western powers forced China to accept, among other humiliations, the import of opium, and by the early 1900s, millions of Chinese— possibly tens of millions—were smoking the drug. The weakened dynasty was also compelled to surrender all legal, including criminal, jurisdiction over Westerners in China to their respective embassies or consulates, and to open speci­fied “treaty ports” to Western traders and missionaries, who received

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

special rights and privileges that even the richest Chinese did not enjoy. In addition the powers took over management of China’s customs collections in order to extract payment for the brief punitive wars that they had been “forced” to wage against China. The British, French, Germans, and Russians all gained separate special rights, leases, or concessions over Chinese territory. In the American West, anti-­Chinese riots broke out and the U.S. Congress banned Chinese immigration. Then Japan, only forty years out of its medieval isolation, joined the feeding frenzy. After a short war it forced China to pay a large indemnity and cede Taiwan to it “in perpetuity.” The Chinese were stunned that the “dwarf pirates,” who had derived their culture from China, now possessed a modern army and navy like those of the European powers. Even some ossified mandarins realized that drastic changes had to be made, but the powerful empress dowager and the Manchu court brutally suppressed the “One Hundred Days of Reform” begun by the young Emperor Guang Xu.

In 1887, the year of Chiang Kai-­shek’s birth, a twenty-­one-­year-­old medical student in Hong Kong named Sun Yat-­sen embraced the idea of creating a modern, democratic China. Sun, who had spent some years in his youth living with his brother in Hawaii, earned his medical degree in 1892, but two years later decided to become a full-­time rebel dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.21 Sun’s first uprising in Canton ended abruptly in failure and he fled the country, eventually taking up exile in Japan. There he was supported by Japanese liberals and radical nationalists, both of whom foresaw a Sino-­Japanese alliance against the West. Sun also thought Japan was China’s natural ally. Kai-­shek was an impressionable thirteen-­year-­old when China’s humiliation reached a new low with a patriotic but ludicrous and bloody anti­foreign movement that burst on the scene. The Boxers, who engaged in martial exercises called “harmonious fists” and were dedicated to the extermination of all foreigners in China as well as Chinese Christians, brutally butchered tens of thousands of converts and several hundred foreign missionaries, including ­women and children. The empress dowager feared the Boxers but she hated the foreigners even more, and the initial success of the Boxers convinced her they did indeed have magical powers, so she sided with them. But a joint expeditionary force put together by the foreign powers, including Japan and America, easily routed both the messianic warriors as well as

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th e ge ne r a l is s imo the Manchu Army and arrived in Peking just in time to save several thousand Chinese converts and foreigners. The occupying troops then went on their own rampage, killing, looting, and raping, and the powers forced China to pay a staggering indemnity—about $5 billion in 2002 U.S. dollars—and to agree that it would not establish defenses along its own coast.22 Most Chinese, including the most obscurantist mandarins, the Manchu court, and the illiterate majority, now understood that the West and Japan were not only militarily stronger than China, but also far ahead in science, technology, medicine, education, public ser­vices, and standards of living. A stream of edicts from the Forbidden City called for, among other things, a new system of government schools featuring mathematics, engineering, and modern science. Implementation of the reforms, however, was painfully slow.23 By this time Japan and Russia were vying for control over China’s Northeastern provinces, the region Westerners called Manchuria. This vast homeland of the Manchus was four-­and-­a-­half times the size of Great Britain, rich in mineral resources, and despite the supposed ban on migration, was populated with far more Han Chinese than ethnic Manchus. In 1905, Japan and Russia went to war in the region, and in May the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated a large Russian fleet that had sailed from the Baltic to do battle. To informed Chinese, this defeat of a European power was a stunning and encouraging development, and it was probably a principal catalyst in young Chiang Kai-­shek’s decision to make the military his career and to do so as a Chinese republican revolutionary, not as a defender of dynastic China. In February 1903, he transferred to the Golden Arrow Academy in Ningbo.24 Mao Fumei made the move with him, but after a few months Chiang, ir­ ritated with her country manners, sent her back to Xikou to live with his mother.25 In February 1906, Chiang decided to transfer to an academy back in Feng­ hua called the Dragon River School, apparently attracted by a neo-­Confucian but modern teacher named Gu Qinglian. Gu encouraged his new student’s fascination with the scholar-­generals—Wang Yangming (1472–1529) from Zhejiang and Zeng Guofan (1811–1872) from Hunan. Wang had taught that self-­understanding was the key to moral action, and that ethics only had meaning when converted to direct, decisive, and spontaneous action. But as a “Confucian gentleman,” he also stressed rectitude, integrity, honesty, and loyalty.26 The philosophy seemed to resonate with the young Chiang Kai-­

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

shek. Hollington Tong, a teacher at Dragon River with a room on the same floor as Chiang, recalled that ev­ery morning the eigh­teen-­year-­old student would rise early and stand erect on the veranda in front of his bedroom for half an hour, with his lips tightly pressed, a determined look in his eyes, and his arms folded, concentrating on his goals for the day and in life.27 It was a ritual he would continue as long as he could rise from his bed. After only a few months at Dragon River School, young Chiang informed his family he was going to Japan. In a dramatic demonstration of his anti-­ Manchu views he cut off his queue or pigtail, an act that alarmed his relatives and neighbors. At eigh­teen, Chiang was already a revolutionary.

III A year earlier, leaders of various anti-­Manchu or­ga­ni­za­tions and a group of students had met in Tokyo and formed a new revolutionary movement called the Alliance Society (Tongmenghui), electing Sun Yat-­sen as “Zong Cai” or director-­general. By then, Sun had developed his synthesis of major trends in modern political theory and practice—the Three People’s Principles (San min zhu yi), emphasizing nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood. It was a centrist and moderate platform that re­flected the intellectual currents of the day in the West. Again leaving his estranged wife behind, the young Chiang from Xikou lived several months in the Chinese community in Tokyo, studying Japanese at his own expense and getting to know this extraordinarily clean and orderly country where ev­ery­thing seemed to run ef­fi­ciently—the tram system, the police, the utilities—and of course, the army.28 Chiang’s self-­support at this time indicates that in addition to property he had inherited a modest or more than modest nest egg, probably in Mexican silver dollars. But he was getting nowhere in his hoped-­for military career, and he returned home to take the highly competitive exam for the Central Army School at a place called Bao­ ding near Tianjin. He passed the exam, spent about a year at Baoding, and then passed another exam that allowed him, and a few other cadets, to go to Japan for training. Back in Tokyo, he entered the Shimbu Gakko, a school set up especially for Chinese students wishing to attend a Japanese military academy. Chiang was aloof, which caused resentment among many of his fellow students, but he did have a few companions, including another former Baoding cadet from Sichuan named Zhang Qun, who would remain his closest friend

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through life, and an intense young man from Guizhou named He Yingqin, one of Chiang’s key future generals. On free nights, Kai-­shek and his companions passed their time drinking in cafes and sometimes visiting favorite Japanese girls in selected brothels. It was at this time that Chiang developed his penchant for beautiful and expensive prostitutes, ­women with whom he would often become infatuated. On liberty days from the school, however, he also kept up his contacts in Tokyo with Chen Qimei, a fellow provincial from Zhejiang and an important activist in Sun Yat-­sen’s Alliance. Chiang had met him during his earlier stay in Japan. Under Chen’s auspices, Chiang and his friends joined the Alliance and Chen became Kai-­shek’s mentor and “big brother.”29 Chiang also became friends with a Chinese law student at Japan University named Dai Jitao, a precocious and determined young man whose passion for restoring China’s national integrity greatly impressed Chiang.30

A Neo-­Confucian Youth

During these years, Chiang read Min Bao (People’s News), the revolutionary paper of the Chinese exiles in Japan, which introduced him to Western thinkers from Jean-­Jacques Rousseau to John Stuart Mill. Two of the editors and key writers of Min Bao were Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, Cantonese men who were both destined to play a major role in the future Kuomintang. Wang, a graduate of Japan University’s law school and a gifted polemicist and thinker, was, along with Tai, one of the golden young men among the revolutionaries in Japan. The Min Bao advocated not only the overthrow of the Manchus through any means, including assassination, but also the nationalization of land and support for the revolutionary cause around the world. This decidedly leftist world view ­adopted by many Chinese studying abroad, including Chiang, became a cause of growing concern to the ruling oligarchs in Japan, and in 1907 the government asked Sun Yat-­sen to leave the country. For their part, many of the Chinese students were becoming alarmed at the steady march of Japanese imperialism, particularly in Korea. The Alliance leaders, however, were not prepared to criticize Japan and still made cooperation with Japan a key objective of the party. Before his departure, Sun had even intimated in a speech in Tokyo that he would have no complaint if Japan felt it deserved northern Manchuria in return for its assistance to the revolutionary cause.31 That same year, Chiang’s mentor, Chen Qimei, moved from Tokyo to Shanghai where he set up a secret headquarters to prepare for uprisings in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, provinces that were adjacent to Shanghai. During his summer vacations Chiang joined Chen in the city and worked on various proj­ects. In the summer of 1909, Chiang decided to break up with Mao Fumei, but his mother had learned from a fortune-­teller that her son’s first wife would bear a son who would become a high-­ranking of­fic­ ial. Caiyu took matters into her own hands and escorted her daughter-­in-­law to Shanghai. When they arrived in the city, Kai-­shek at first refused to go along with his mother’s plans, but after she wept and threatened to kill herself, Chiang agreed to do his duty. Fumei lived with Kai-­shek over the hot summer months. When she told Chiang she thought she was pregnant, he sent her home.32 On April 27, 1910, Fumei delivered their son. Very likely it was Caiyu who, recalling the fortune-­teller’s words, chose the boy’s name “Ching-­kuo” (save or manage the county). The character kuo henceforth would be the generational part of the given name of any children Kai-­shek might have.33 On Ching-­kuo’s first birthday, his father took no note of the event.34 His lack of

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