Considering the magnitude of her mark on 20th-century China and Taiwan and their relations with the United States, remarkably little has been written about Mayling Soong, the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. This was partly because she was a woman, but it was also an outgrowth of her predilection for secrecy. Soong, who served as spokesperson to her husband's Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, is often relegated to the footnotes of contemporary Chinese history.
From Eleanor Roosevelt's famous broadside claiming that Madame Chiang spoke of democracy but did not understand it, to accusations that she tried to reinject herself into Taiwanese politics in the 1980s, Madame Chiang was the target of much criticism throughout her life and has continued to be so until the present day.
In the early 1970s, Sterling Seagrave published his unflattering "The Soong Dynasty." Madame Chiang responded by suggesting someone else write a more accurate account of her life. She declined interview requests right up to her death, however, making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so.
"As a student of history, I find it sad that she did not speak more information about her life," said Fredrick Chien, who served as Chiang Kai-shek's personal advisor in the last decade of his authoritarian regime and agreed to be interviewed for Laura Tyson Li's book "Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China's Eternal First Lady." For that reason alone, Li gets credit for penning a full-length biography of Madame Chiang.
Li does not succeed in answering the well-known unknowns of Soong's epic life, such as why this product of the wealthy, influential Soong family married the volatile warlord Chiang. The book is filled with references to secondary sources. As for her primary research, one gets the feeling that Li ran into the same brick walls as many a biographer before her.
"She didn't want to be written about," admits Li, former reporter for The South China Morning Post and Taiwan correspondent for The Financial Times. "She and her inner circle had this incredible paranoia and secrecy. You were either inside that circle, or outside of it."
Li, nevertheless, manages to create a three-dimensional portrait of Madame Chiang. Though claiming to have written objectively, Li examines her subject through the lens of modern feminism, and this is one of the book's strengths.
When Soong returned to Shanghai in 1917, China was in turmoil amid Sun Yat-sen's unfinished revolution to create a modern China after the fall of the Ching dynasty (1644-1911). Courted by many prominent Chinese and even foreigners, Soong, who spoke better English than Mandarin, felt like a foreigner in her own country. Using letters she wrote to Emma Delong Mills, her best friend from Wellesley College, Li poignantly depicts Soong's struggle to balance her role as a budding power broker.
"Since I cannot marry someone I really care for, I shall not marry for anything else except fame or money," she told Mills in 1917 after her horrified parents scuttled a romance with a Dutch suitor. Two years later, her attitude took a more traditional turn. "The profession of marriage is the most important for every woman," she wrote to Mills. "And not to be subordinated to any other profession or inspiration."
Eventually, Soong split the difference by marrying Chiang, an arrangement that catapulted her to a position of considerable power, though as Li points out, her power was necessarily derived from her husband. Through exhaustive research, Li is able to hint at the "maybes" but not provide the "whys" behind her decision.
Throughout the book, Li's research fleshes out new, and occasionally scandalous, details of Madame Chiang's life. One of the most serious allegations Li writes about occurred during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While the KMT remained embroiled with Mao Zedong's Communist forces in China, Madame Chiang went on a speaking tour to the United States, ostensibly to raise funds for "warphans" as well as for the Nationalist cause. Li writes of U.S. diplomat John S. Service who, during a return trip to Washington, D.C., was asked to brief Roosevelt aide Lauchlin Currie on China. Service, who had no communist affiliation, said he was dismayed with the KMT's administration of the country and, conversely, impressed with the Chinese Communist Party revolutionaries under Mao.
Currie, it so happened, was an agent of the Soviet Union, and took a keen interest in Service's statements.
Li suggests that Currie used Service to initiate a backlash via the media against Madame Chiang, whose public standing was high in both China and the United States. He instructed Service to speak to the influential Washington columnist Drew Pearson, and to "spread the word that the picture in China was not as rosy as depicted in the press."
Currie also initiated investigations of his own. On May 26, 1943, he wrote that Madame Chiang had turned over US$370,000 of the money collected during her fundraising campaign to David Kung, her cousin. Kung then proceeded to deposit the money into his personal U.S. bank account.
The motive for Currie's secret campaign remains unknown, as do many details surrounding Madame Chiang's life. Be that as it may, Roosevelt publicly expressed a desire to elevate China's standing in the world. "Whether Currie's secret campaign to undermine Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese government was ordered by Moscow, arose of his own initiative, or was even undertaken at Roosevelt's behest is unclear," Li writes.
Despite this serious allegation, "Madame Chiang Kai-shek" can hardly be dismissed as an opportunistic broadside like Seagrave's "The Soong Dynasty." Li, who is more reporter than historian, says she tried to write the book objectively.
That seems a fair goal, given the hostility that often swirled around Madame Chiang. In the United States, she was often called a "dragon lady," a pejorative term for an icy, manipulative East Asian femme fatale. The Chinese viewed her as a dragon lady too, but with very different connotations. In China, the dragon is a resourceful and occasionally mischievous creature, responsible for bringing the rain necessary for farming. While Madame Chiang may have manipulated American good will at times, Li reminds us what America wanted from China.
From the mid-1800s until Mao closed China's doors to the West, churchgoers across America gave their pocket change to support a plethora of Christian missions in China. With its vast population and political vulnerabilities, Americans saw China as the mother lode of souls to be saved by Jesus Christ.
"America's interest had a peculiar emotional intensity lacking in its relations with say Russia," Li says, who characterizes the Christian Soongs as perfect foils for America's "rescue complex." Li deftly links the export of American Christianity with the rise of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang. Soong was a rare Chinese Christian, the result of her father's education in the United States. Her Westernization--epitomized by her religious faith and perfect command of English--enabled her to convince decades of presidents that her husband was America's man in China.
The romance between the United States and the KMT-ruled Republic of China turned sour with U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to the People's Republic of China and the two countries' issuance of the Shanghai Communique in 1972. It ended with President Jimmy Carter's recognition of the PRC in 1979.
The reversal of U.S. policy, Nixon said, was necessary to avert a collision between two of the world's great powers. Historians and political scientists are in general agreement, however, that he had the more immediate goals in mind of teaming up with China to create a counterbalance against Soviet power and to secure Beijing's assistance in helping the United States extricate itself from the Vietnam War.
For Soong and her husband, the move was a betrayal. "Just as a person has integrity, a nation has its integrity," she told Chiang's inner circle as they prepared for a trip to New York with the aim of retaining the ROC's seat in the United Nations General Assembly while ceding its permanent seat on U.N. Security Council to the PRC in accordance with a U.S. proposal for dual representation. In an instant, the mood in the room changed, Fredrick Chien said. Based on Madame Chiang's statement, he added, Chiang decided his KMT government could not endorse the humiliating proposal, even though it would have saved a place for the ROC in the United Nations.
Subsequently, the General Assembly passed Resolution No. 2758, harshly stripping Chiang Kai-shek's representatives from the United Nations. Thus began the tortuous struggle of people in Taiwan to regain representation in the world body, some wishing to re-enter under the name Republic of China, and a growing number wanting to applying for new membership under the name Taiwan.
Though it leaves many mysteries unsolved, "Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China's Eternal First Lady" is a fascinating overview of the woman who had such tremendous influence over relations between Taiwan, the United States and China throughout much of the 20th century. For the sake of history, one only wishes Madame Chiang had been less secretive, and that her inner circle was less protective.
Copyright ?2007 by Thibault Worth
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