Chiang Kai Shek

The story of China-a story more than four thousand years old-has become the tale of a single man. What that man says is his country's policy, What he does becomes his people's history. His name is Chiang Kai-shek. He is the best known and the least known of all living Chinese. The world press headlines his name with regular frequency. He crushes a rebellion here, he averts a rebellion there. He hurls his troops against the Communists, he makes peace with the Communists. He is kidnapped, he escapes. He attempts to stave off war with Japan, he finds himself at war with Japan. And casual readers of newspapers in London and New York and Prague become vaguely aware that a Strong Man rules China, that his name is Chiang.

The day for most of Chikow's population was inauspicious, but in wine merchant Chiang's house there was excitement-a second son was born. The gods were kind to the Chiangs, had sent them double assurance that the ancestral tombs would be swept and joss paper always burned at the family shrine.

It was the fifteenth day of the ninth moon of the Year of the Pig. The foreign calendar hanging in the mission compound said October 31, 1887. Wrapped in swaddling bands lay China's future leader. Bright red eggs were sent to friends and relatives to announce his birth. The name, freely translated, means 'clean as a stone.' It was not until later years, when he became associated with the southern Chinese who pronounced the same characters differently, that he came to be known as Chiang Kai-shek.

The year Chiang Kai-shek was born, a youth named Sun Yat-sen left Canton for Hongkong to study medicine. The trip marked the start of a revolutionary career which led to the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, the establishment of a republic, the martyrdom of Sun Yat-sen, and ultimately to the supremacy of the Chikow-born Chiang in a new and revitalized government.

Young Chiang, eighteen years old at the time, took the examination conducted for the purpose by the Chekiang provincial government. To the surprise of his Fenghua relatives, who had concluded that the youth would never be more than a tramp soldier, he took first place in the tests, and was chosen for the next class at Paotingfu.

Chiang Kai-shek, they say, was only fifteen or perhaps a year older when the fortune-tellers matched his horoscope with that of young Miss Mao of Fenghua and found them suited to each other. The exact date of the wedding is uncertain; there are no official records and no marriage register.

Until the day the young bridegroom sent a grand redlacquer sedan-chair for his bride, he had neither seen nor spoken to her. She came to him, gorgeously arrayed in heavily embroidered red silk becoming to the daughter of a comfortably situated bourgeois family about equal in rank to the Chiangs. His family funds were low. To acquire plenty of 'face' among his friends and relatives, new and old, Chiang Kai-Shek borrowed heavily to finance his wedding.

Three days after the ceremony, the young couple, in accordance with old custom, paid their first call on the bride's parents. In his youthful desire to please his fatherin-law, so the story goes, Chiang Kai-Shek brought along a number of professional and amateur actors. Theatrical people were in the lowest strata of society in those days, and frowned upon by the respectable. In a conservative rural community like Fenghua, feeling on the subject was even stronger than in the sophisticated larger cities. Unaware of the social misstep he was making, Chiang Kai-Shek presented a show. Father-in-law was shocked and disgusted. There was a family row. Chiang was told to leave.