Understanding Greatness

CHIANG KAI-SHEK (382 pp.)--Emily Hahn--Doubleday ($5).

In the early 19305 every U.S. schoolboy --and his teacher, too--knew the essential facts about China's Chiang Kaishek: Chiang, married to a pretty Chinese girl with a U.S. education, was a selfless Christian general who had fought down Communists and war lords to unite his country for the first time in its modern history. Ten years later many a schoolboy, teacher and clubwoman was hearing a far different story: Chiang's wife was an arrogant creature who slept on silk sheets, while Chiang himself was corrupt and stupid; he stubbornly blocked the path to China's progress, and went out of his way to pick fights with those persecuted heroes of agrarian reform, the Chinese Communists. It was to the mutual disaster of both Chiang and the U.S. that in the critical years following World War II the Communist-line distortions of the second picture were smearily reflected in the smart talk of sophisticates, in the books and the book reviews on China, in college lectures and in the official papers of the U.S.

Author Emily Hahn, whose youthful passion for Manila cigars, free love and self-advertisement caused arching eyebrows from Shanghai to Chungking in the 19305, has now maturely channeled her fierce independence to good cause. With the informal, sometimes gabby style of her China Coast pieces in The New Yorker, and of her bestsellers (China to Me, The Soong Sisters), she has written the first popular biography to examine Chiang in the only way he can be understood: as a singularly great man, a lonely combination of Confucian self-discipline and Methodist virtue, forced to fight at once against centuries of obsolete custom, Japan's armed invasion, and a vicious, un-Chinese revolution inspired by Moscow.

Stalin Outguessed. Without belaboring the point, Author Hahn lets the facts prove that Chiang was awesomely right in recognizing the Communists as the greatest threat of all. After a trip to Moscow in 1923 he wrote: ". . . Some of our Chinese Communists who are in Russia always scold other people as slaves of America, of England and of Japan, never realizing that they themselves have already completely become slaves of Russia."

In 1926, preparing to lead his Nationalist army north to Peking, Chiang threw out the Communists who had edged themselves into powerful positions in the Kuomintang--including the head of the Nationalist propaganda department, one Mao Tse-tung. In 1927 he turned irrevocably and ruthlessly on the Communists, both in the army and in the Red industrial stronghold of Shanghai. Says Author Hahn: "On [this] 'white massacre' that began April 12 Communists are eloquent. Chiang did not wait to be betrayed; he committed the unforgivable sin; he outguessed Stalin and struck first."

Communists Outfought. The Communists withdrew southward to Kiangsi and Hunan Provinces, boldly resumed their offensive while the Japanese were striking in Manchuria in 1931. Chiang alienated many a patriotic student and intellectual when he turned the Japanese invasion over to the League of Nations and prepared to turn his armies on the Communists instead of the Japanese. "If China ventures to fight the Japanese," he said, "the Communists will attack from the rear and chaos will quickly overtake the whole country."

More important from today's viewpoint, in attacking the Red stronghold in Kiangsi, Chiang set a classic example of how to fight Communism: he developed a political-military offensive that cut off the Communists from supplies, disrupted their relations with the local populace, decimated their best armies and sent the remnants trudging into the far northwest on the famous Long March.

A later phase of Chiang's fight with the Communists is one to make Americans wince. Author Hahn never says outright that the U.S. was a powerful force aiding the Communist comeback in China during World War II--she does not have to. By this time the reader knows Chiang and knows the Chinese Communists. He can only sit and grit his teeth as, one after another, the leading and lesser lights of U.S. diplomacy--Stilwell, Marshall, Wallace, Vincent--use every known diplomatic pressure and indignity to get Chiang to form a coalition government with the Communists. Then Yalta secretly opens Manchuria to the Russians; bad U.S. military advice (plus Chiang's own stubbornness) leaves the Nationalist armies strung out weakly when the Communists begin their big push; and--finally--the State Department administers Secretary Acheson's personal coup de grace--the China White Paper.

Authentic Background. With all this said, Emily Hahn's biography is no apologia. She duly notes Chiang's stiff-necked obstinacy, his tendency toward long-winded and redundant speeches, his slowness in pushing the democratic side of the revolution. She grants that corruption ran rampant in the Kuomintang in the final days when Chiang was preoccupied with military crises, acknowledges that the Nationalist government was ruthless and predatory during its first days on Formosa--until Chiang changed command.

Author Hahn's contribution lies in recognizing that Chiang needs no apologia, that his character comes clear when placed against the authentic background of the convulsions that racked China in his day.

Essentially she finds herself in agreement with one of Chiang's followers on Formosa, who was attempting to explain Chiang's weak points. Said her informant: "Chiang is so obstinate . . . that you would not believe it. He is so obstinate that-- ' Then he broke off and thought for a moment before he found the words he wanted. "He is so obstinate he won't even stop hoping."

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