Word: chiangs
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When corruption was rife, when top officials piled up vast fortunes in unexplained transactions, when officers defected, Chiang instinctively turned his thoughts inward to reproach himself for failure to inspire with his own standards. After his final retreat to Formosa, he told the National Assembly: "I must put the blame on myself . . . The disastrous military reverses on the mainland were not due to the overwhelming strength of the Communists, but due to the organizational collapse, loose discipline and low spirits of the party members...
...Chiang moved swiftly to restore Formosan morale. He installed as governor frail, ulcer-ridden Chen Cheng, a general turned civilian who had been with Chiang since student days. Chen simultaneously tightened police control and initiated basic reforms, notably land reform. Chiang had learned his lesson on the mainland: "The consensus is that our party failed during the past four years because we failed to enforce the principle of the people's livelihood...
...limiting rents, which had ranged as high as 70% of the year's crop, to 37.5%. The government broke up and sold off the big landholdings inherited from the Japanese; it bought land from the landlords and resold it to tenants on easy terms. In four years of Chiang's rule, tenancy has been reduced from 40% to 20%, and thousands of Formosans built "37.5% houses" and took "37.5% brides...
...Chiang has isolated himself from most day-to-day routine, and from direct contact with all but a selected few (some ministers concerned only with domestic affairs may see him once a year, if that). Daily, Chiang rises before 6. At that hour, the house on the lower slopes of Grass Mountain, just north of Taipei, is quiet; outside, the ever-present armed guards stand silently among the trees. Chiang's day begins with an hour of prayer and meditation. Often Madame Chiang joins him, and they may sit silently together for the whole hour...
...then that he gets his strength for the day," explains Madame Chiang. Comments a Westerner who knows him well: "He is a very spiritual person, almost a mystic. One of the reasons people sometimes find him stubborn is that he tries to find the answer not only in himself, but in the God he serves." Commented a Western-educated Chinese scholar more tartly: "He is a saintly man. But saintly men are also impossible...