Word: chiangs
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...lords, bargained with those he could not defeat, stalled off the Japanese, chased the Communists out of Kiangsi on their famed Long March, and forged a nation. Although many liberals around the world, infatuated with the heady reports of the fine new Communist world in Russia, were already denouncing Chiang as "counter-revolutionary," in those ten years China made more progress than it had in the previous hundred. Chiang broke the economic shackles which the foreign concessions had fixed on dismembered China. For the first time, Chinese felt themselves a modern nation; there was order and purpose. Magazines flourished, students...
...those years, Chiang took to wife the beautiful Mei-ling of the famed Soong sisters (one sister was the widow of Sun Yatsen, another the wife of Financier H. H. Kung, longtime member of Chiang's Cabinet). Chiang was a revolutionist of unity, not upset. His mission was to weld a nation out of many pieces, not to overthrow a monolithic government in the name of individual liberty. Dr. Sun Yat-sen used to argue that, unlike Europe, China had not too little but too much liberty without organization, "and we have become a heap of sand." What...
...Chiang made his decisions by introspection amounting almost to spiritual flagellation. Daily he set aside a time for meditation (he was converted to Christianity and became a Methodist, at the urging of his wife, in 1932). He kept a diary with a page at the end of every week for rigid self-examination, instructed his chief officials to do likewise. He quoted the famed Confucian sage, Mencius: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am not upright, shall I not be in fear even of a poor man in his loose garments of hair cloth? If, on self-examination...
...inner certainty this gave him was Chiang's strength, and the force that for 22 years held China together. Threatened with death when the Young Marshal kidnaped him in Sian in the famed 1936 incident, Chiang refused to make any concessions: "If I should try to save my life today and forget the welfare of the nation . . . the nation will perish while I live," he told the Young Marshal. When the Japanese attacked in full assault in 1937, Chiang retreated behind the Yangtze gorges to Chungking, and fought with no help from the U.S. or any ally, doggedly sure...
...Chiang's certainty was also the source of his weakness. His inner conviction led him to confuse criticism of his actions with a threat to the nation's welfare, and he could be cruel to opponents. He thought in moral, not social, terms. Too often, while the unrest loosed by the very revolution he had set loose seethed around him. Chiang exhorted and scolded his people like a Savanarola, when the times called for vigorous social reforms...