Chiang Kai-Shek: The General who Created Modern China

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If you were asked to name the most important figure in modern Chinese history, who would you pick? The obvious answer is Chairman Mao, the communist leader who ruled China with an iron fist for over 25 years. But there’s another figure at least as influential as Mao: Chiang Kai-shek, modern China’s longest-serving ruler. Chiang Kai-shek started out as a low-level revolutionary before rising to the very top of the Kuomintang. It was under his watch that China was reunified after its warlord era, that the prosperity of the Nanjing decade was ushered in, and that China took its place among the superpowers of the day. Yet it was also under Chiang that a brutal Japanese invasion took place, that Mao’s communists were allowed to gain strength, and that the deliberate flooding of the Yellow River killed up to a million people. Both a dictator and a democrat, a Confucian and a Christian, an icon and a monster—this is the life of Chiang Kai-shek, the man who created modern China.

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When Chiang Kai-shek was born on October 31, 1887, it was into an empire that was on the verge of collapse. The last century had been one of unparalleled catastrophe for China, with the Opium Wars, European colonization, and the gigantic Taiping Rebellion. In short, the writing was on the wall for the imperial family in Beijing. But Chiang’s parents could have had no way of knowing how he would help dispose of them, especially since the family was doing pretty well. Chiang’s father owned a plantation that brought in 60 Mexican silver dollars a year, a huge sum by rural Chinese standards, and just one of the many currencies in use at that time. When he died in 1895, the plantation passed to Chiang, making him comparatively wealthy. Yet there was still something rotten below the surface—something no one in China could then ignore: the Qing Dynasty, rulers of China since 1644. But as Chiang would soon discover, they wouldn’t be around much longer.

In 1903, the boy ran away from his village to join the army. At the military academy, he came into contact with hundreds of Chinese from rural backgrounds, all openly anti-Qing. By the time Chiang left the academy for Japan in 1907, he was already a die-hard republican. At this stage, you might be wondering why the future president of China would head off to Japan, given that the two countries hated each other’s guts. For that, you can thank the imperial army. Just a couple of years earlier, Japan had become the first Asian nation to beat a European power on the battlefield when Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. For the Chinese, who had spent half a century watching their country get kicked around by colonial powers, this had been an eye-opening moment. Plenty of young men hightailed it to Tokyo to learn war from the experts, among them Chiang.

That was how Chiang Kai-shek came to spend four years serving in Japan’s imperial army. It was while abroad that Chiang completed his journey to republicanism. He symbolically cut off his queue, the long braid of hair Qing subjects were legally obliged to wear—an act that marked him out as a revolutionary. Sadly for Chiang, he wouldn’t be there when the revolution actually came. In 1911, a police raid on an underground bomb factory became the spark that ignited China’s Xinhai Revolution. By December, dozens of cities were in open revolt, and a provisional government had been set up in Nanjing under Sun Yat-sen. Over in Japan, Chiang had become something of a notorious womanizer, keeping dozens of girls on the go at any one time. Now he ditched them all and hightailed it back home—there was no way he was going to miss this.

Unfortunately, that’s more or less what happened. In January 1912, Qing General Yuan Shikai talked the imperial family into voluntarily giving up power. On February 12th, the boy emperor Puyi abdicated, ending the revolution—only not quite. Within a year, General Yuan had killed China’s fledgling democracy, making himself military dictator. Suddenly, Chiang Kai-shek had a cause that he could actually fight for, and he wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste. In the end, Yuan’s dictatorship lasted a mere three years. After three years of fighting, Chiang Kai-shek lived to see the general deposed. But rather than usher in a new era of peace, Yuan’s downfall instead ushered in the warlord era, with former Qing generals conquering whatever they could. The result was China shattering into warring provinces, each headed by its own warlord.

By now, though, Chiang Kai-shek had had enough. Presumably muttering “whatever, dude,” the former revolutionary moved to Shanghai and joined the Green Gang, a famous gang of opium traffickers. But this would be just a detour, a pause before his life story proper could begin. Down in southern China, Sun Yat-sen was growing in strength. In case you forgot him in the barrage of names we threw at you, Sun was the guy who declared a provincial government in Nanjing during the revolution. Now leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, he was also the country’s most ambitious warlord. Sun planned to reunite China, a plan young Chiang Kai-shek could get on board with. In 1918, Chiang joined the KMT, soon rising up the ranks. He was so competent that in 1923, Sun chose him to go to the USSR to study Soviet tactics. When Chiang returned, it was with Soviet advisors who quickly set about whipping the KMT’s National Revolutionary Army into shape. It was the start of a world-changing movement.

It was in their new form that the KMT started admitting communists, once their mortal enemies. Although some worried this would empower the KMT’s hard left, it soon turned out that they underestimated Chiang’s cunning. On March 12, 1925, Sun Yat-sen died of cancer, but not before outlining a detailed plan for crushing the warlords, reunifying China, and slowly implementing democracy. Chiang Kai-shek was named his successor and spent the next year preparing a massive campaign against the warlords. Then, on the eve of battle, Chiang pulled off a breathtakingly bold move. The Canton Coup saw the arrest of prominent communists and the exile of the KMT’s Soviet advisers. It was a risky play, one that could have sparked a civil war in the KMT, but Chiang had picked his moment perfectly. With his upcoming Northern Expedition, it was the only chance to crush the warlords. Even the remaining communists stayed loyal—a decision they’d deeply regret.

From 1926 to 1928, Chiang’s Northern Expedition toppled warlord after warlord. By 1927, it was so obvious that the KMT was going to unite China that Chiang was able to ditch the communists once and for all. On April 12, KMT troops in Shanghai joined forces with the Green Gang to mass-execute up to 5,000 communists. It was the start of a wave of violence that left the hard left broken and Chiang in the ascendancy. Finally, in late 1928, the KMT captured Beijing, the last remaining warlords swore fealty. Against all odds, Chiang Kai-shek had done it. He had fulfilled his old mentor Sun Yat-sen’s plan to head north and reunify China under a single government. Now all he needed to do was finish implementing democracy, but turns out democracy wasn’t particularly high on Chiang’s list of priorities.

In no time at all, the former revolutionary was going to become the very person the masses were revolting against.

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Even before taking Beijing, the Kuomintang had established a new capital that would give its name to the coming era. The Nanjing decade was a time of relative peace and prosperity for China. Under Chiang, the republic embarked on a modernization spree that saw things like expanded education opportunities, industrial development, and massive road building. For those who had lived through the warlord era and Yuan Shikai’s half-hearted dictatorship before that, it must have seemed like a golden age. But only compared to what had come before. Objectively, the Nanjing decade was beset by problems. The first was the KMT’s vice-like grip on government. When Sun Yat-sen had envisioned a dictatorship that transitioned to a democracy, his proteges were all like, “Yeah, we’re good.” There was a secret police that arrested or assassinated dissidents, and among Chiang’s generals, corruption was rampant. It probably didn’t help that Chiang had recently converted to Christianity and married into the extremely wealthy Song family. For the dirt-poor Buddhist peasants that made up 90% of China’s population, it must have seemed like the Generalissimo was from another world.

But the real reason the Nanjing decade was doomed can be summed up in three words: warlords, communists, Japan. Let’s tackle the communists first. Despite Chiang’s 1927 purge, the communists hadn’t been wiped out; they had simply retreated to their countryside base in Jiangxi province, where they continued to plot revolution. Only now they were doing it against the KMT. For his part, Chiang tried time and time again to wipe them out, throwing armies at Jiangxi until he finally had the communists surrounded in October of 1934. But even this would go horribly wrong when the communists broke through the lines and spent the next year marching the 6,000 kilometers to their new base in Shaanxi, known as the Long March. The narrow escape became the communists’ foundational myth and inspired tens of thousands of people to join them. It also led to the rise of their undisputed leader, Chairman Mao.

But despite being indestructible, the communists weren’t China’s biggest threat. That would be Chiang’s old inspiration: the imperial army of Japan. In September 1931, Tokyo used a false flag attack to invade and occupy Manchuria in China’s northeast, establishing a sadistic puppet state under the former boy emperor Puyi. Yet even as Japan used Manchuria as a staging post for annexing more Chinese territory, Chiang refused to stop focusing on the communist threat. As the decades slipped by, this became more and more nonsensical. By 1935, the imperial army had annexed parts of Hebei province and modern Inner Mongolia, and they were starting to encircle Beijing. Yet Chiang insisted on sending his troops chasing after Chairman Mao.

Now this leads us neatly to the Nanjing decade’s final fatal flaw: the warlords. When the Northern Expedition ended, not all warlords had been defeated; some simply switched to nominal support for the KMT while maintaining their own power bases. One of these was Zhang Xueliang in Xi’an, who felt China should really be focusing on these Japanese invaders rather than worrying about a bunch of communists. So he just straight up kidnapped Chiang. Taking place over the winter of 1936, the Xi’an Incident was an epic humiliation for Chiang. Zhang held him prisoner for two weeks until Chiang basically said, “Okay, you win. I promise I’ll stop fighting with the communists.” Although Zhang would be arrested after freeing the Generalissimo, it was now too late for the KMT to change its mind. In early 1937, the Kuomintang and communists formed the Second United Front to counter any further Japanese invasions. They sealed their pact just in time.

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The apocalypse came to China on July 7, 1937. That evening, a skirmish with Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge snowballed into the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was like opening a floodgate. The imperial army swept across China, capturing Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Nanjing. Come January 1938, the government had been forced to move the capital to Wuhan, but even that was under threat. Although the KMT had the communists and warlords on their side, this was just extra cannon fodder for a well-oiled fighting machine like the imperial army. It was sort of like trying to take down Genghis Khan by teaming up with the Mighty Ducks. By summer 1938, Japanese bombers were devastating cities as the army closed in on Wuhan. It was in the face of this threat that Chiang Kai-shek made his most controversial decision yet. The imperial army was advancing across the Yellow River floodplain, a swath of land where powerful floods occasionally washed away millions. So why not flood it deliberately? On June 9, 1938, KMT troops, acting under Chiang’s orders, blew up 17 kilometers of dikes, substituting water for soldiers. No warning was given to the civilians when the dynamite went off; the river came surging out, drowning the country’s heart. Today, it’s estimated that 890,000 people died in the 1938 Yellow River flood, and maybe another 3 million in the subsequent famine, almost all of them Chinese peasants. Nor did the waters slow the Japanese. In fact, breaching the dikes was so useless that Chiang blamed it on Tokyo.

In the wake of the failed flood, Chiang retreated again, establishing a new wartime capital in Chongqing. Once there, he did absolutely nothing. It’s common to criticize Chiang’s actions in this part of the war, when his entire strategy revolved around waiting for the U.S. to save him. But what else could he do? There was no way the KMT, even with the communists, would be able to defeat imperial Japan. Better to just keep your head down and wait for Tokyo to slip up. And slip up they did. The Japanese advance had been so swift and China so vast that Tokyo found itself unable to police behind its own lines. This allowed communist partisans and warlord armies to attack and destroy Japanese supplies almost at will. It should have been a fatal mistake for the imperial army. Unfortunately, Chiang was having problems of his own. As the 1940s dawned, the Chongqing government plummeted in popularity. There was inflation, shortages, and rampant corruption in the KMT, even as it cracked down on everyone else. Oh, and that whole thing about Chairman Mao working with Chiang? Turns out both leaders had been crossing their fingers behind their backs. As the war raged around them, the KMT and communists clashed, each blaming the other for the mounting death toll. In effect, China split into three nations: Nationalist China in the west, Communist China in the north, and Japanese China in the east. It was an impossible state of affairs, one that demanded a clear winner to unify the fractured land.

For a long time, it looked like the winner would be Chiang Kai-shek. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese committed a gargantuan blunder by attacking Pearl Harbor. As America came crashing into World War II, China’s position was elevated from desperate underdog to one of the big four allies, placing Chiang alongside FDR, Churchill, and Stalin. Great as this was, though, it wouldn’t be until 1944 that Japan was weak enough for the U.S. to actually start supplying China with material help. Even then, with American support flooding in, Chiang still committed some terrible mistakes. Terrified his generals might try to overthrow him, he deliberately kept vital supplies back from his own army. By this stage, though, no amount of mistakes could slow Japan’s collapse in 1945. Tokyo pulled back from China to concentrate on defending the homeland. Into this power vacuum swept Mao’s communists, who liberated city after city in the east, leaving the KMT scrambling for a propaganda win. It was the start of a complete breakdown between the two armies, the end of what little remained of the united front. In no time at all, China was going to transition from a catastrophically deadly war with a foreign power to a catastrophically deadly civil war.

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If you were an ordinary Chinese peasant in 1945, you might have not unreasonably been thinking something along the lines of, “Well, hooray, peace at last!” But no sooner had Japan surrendered than the Chinese Civil War was revving right back up. To their credit, both Chiang and Mao tried to negotiate a peace deal, but although they announced a framework for talks on October 10th, by then war was already underway. And so we come to the single most damning fact in the life of Chiang Kai-shek: he should have won the civil war. When negotiations broke down in 1946, the KMT seemed poised for victory. They had more troops, more areas under their control, better equipment, and at least partial American backing. That fall, as KMT troops laid siege to communist cities, Chiang oversaw the opening of a new national assembly purged of all leftists. Had you been betting on the outcome of the war, you wouldn’t have even considered Mao a long shot. So what the hell happened? A simple answer: hubris. While the KMT were concentrating on taking the cities, the communists were focusing on the countryside. Remember how I said that 90% of China’s population were peasants? Well, Mao certainly remembered, and he knew it didn’t matter how many cities Chiang took as long as the communists had the peasants on their side. They would