Chiang's Last Redoubt: Future Uncertain

EVERY year, the old man orders that his birthday be officially ignored, and every year it is celebrated as a national holiday. Early this week, in the wake of a stinging repudiation by the assembled nations of the world, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was to observe his 84th birthday, and so the presidential office building in Taipei was decorated with pine trees and long noodles, both symbols of longevity. An army chorus of 10,000 men gathered to sing Long Live the President. Some 20,000 others prepared to chant the same message from the mountains of southern Taiwan.

Slightly stooped, bald, armed with a cane, the granitic old man still gets up early every morning for an hour of prayer and meditation. At his age, any man would have much to reflect on. He has more than most. Perhaps he remembers the wartime meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, the great victories and the shattering defeats. Perhaps he also recalls one of his favorite lines from the Confucian scholar Mencius, which he used to quote to his aides: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands."

He was the son of a salt merchant, but he always wanted to be a soldier --and a revolutionary. At the Paoting Military Academy, he was the only cadet who cut off his pigtail, that symbol of submission to imperial rule; seven years passed before an obscure Changsha student named Mao Tse-tung made a similar gesture of revolt.

After Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang revolution finally overthrew the corrupt Manchu empire in 1911, Chiang served as one of Sun's best young officers, then went to Moscow for further training. "I admired in those days the whole revolutionary attitude of the Communists," Chiang said later. "When I arrived in Russia, all my hopes about the revolution were blasted."

Back in China after Sun's death, Chiang shrewdly used Communist forces to help rout various warlords and establish his command over Peking in 1928. But in the course of the campaign, he turned on the Communists and eventually drove them into the remote hills of Kiangsi. From that day to this, the two have been at war. In 1936, when Chiang was kidnaped by a group of Nationalist officers who wanted to stop the anti-Communist campaign and unite against the Japanese invaders, he refused to bow. "If you want to shoot me," he said, "do so at once." He was finally released at the behest of a young Communist, Chou Enlai.

World War II ended, after a loss of 22 million Chinese lives, with Chiang nominally the ruler of all China, one of the world's Big Five, and a founding father of the U.N. But the generalissimo soon proved unable to govern his ruined country. Corruption reigned, abetted by hoarding, inflation, hunger --and, as Chiang himself later admitted, "organizational collapse, loose discipline and low spirits of [our] party members." When Mao's Communist forces besieged Peking, early in 1949, Chiang's defenders defected to the enemy and Chiang himself resigned the presidency. For six months, while city after city fell to Mao, Chiang seemed in a kind of trance. He retired to his native village and took long walks in the woods; he cruised idly up and down the China coast, inspecting fortifications.

Not until the end of that year did he arrive in Taiwan. He summoned whatever Kuomintang remnants could reach his side, and proclaimed the "holy task" of reconquering the mainland. The U.S., by this time, had lost all confidence in its wartime ally; President Truman announced that the U.S. would send no aid to Chiang and did not support his claims. Six months later came the Korean War and the sudden re-emergence of Chiang's regime as "Free China."

In recent years, age has won some skirmishes from the generalissimo. The daily briefings are much shorter than they used to be, and Chiang does not always read them. He no longer supervises such details as the promotion of every officer above the rank of colonel. His son and heir, Vice Premier Chiang Ching-kuo, 62, takes care of all that. But the old man is still at war.

Last week he spoke out again as though the past 20 years of exile and erosion had never happened. The U.N. had "become a den of iniquity," he said, and its vote of expulsion was "illegal" and "shameless." The "Mao Tse-tung bandit regime" was "the common enemy of all the Chinese people," he went on, whereas he, Chiang, would continue the "unalterable national purpose" of reconquering the mainland. "The Republic of China is not a weakling of Asia or the world, which can be arbitrarily sold out by anyone. As long as we ourselves are strong, no force in the world can shake us."

Chiang does indeed have one of Asia's better fighting forces--an exile army of about 400,000 men, rejuvena'ed by local conscripts, an American-trained air force of 80,000 men and 385 warplanes. But virtually nobody--perhaps not even Chiang himself--believes that he will ever set foot on the mainland again.

What Chiang has achieved instead is the transformation of Taiwan from an agricultural colony of Japan into a prosperous industrial state. Starting with land reform, and continuing with some $4 billion of U.S. aid, Taiwan's economy has been growing at an average of 10% a year for the past decade. Cheap wages (an average of $1.80 a day) have inspired both U.S. and Japanese entrepreneurs to build plants for the manufacture of computers, TV sets, electric generators. Taiwan now boasts a G.N.P. of $6 billion, and its thriving export trade ($2 billion) is as great as that of the entire mainland. "With the head of steam they've developed," says an American executive in Taipei, "being barred from the U.N. should make no more difference than it does to West Germany."

Even before the U.N. vote, Chiang's government had hung the streets with banners that said: "Don't be shaken. Maintain your self-respect. Be self-reliant." Quiet anger seemed to be the mood of Taipei last week. When Government Spokesman James Wei spoke bitterly of the U.N. vote, he treated it as a consequence of Nixon's changing policy on China. "The Nixon trip to the mainland is a big slap in the face to us," he said. "What have we done to cause our friend to almost disown us?"

Obviously, the U.N. vote does not overwhelm Taiwan, but it does cast doubts over the island's future. Can Taiwan maintain its prosperity if international business loses confidence in it, or if the Chinese Communists really apply pressure? Last week the Taiwan government announced three new multimillion-dollar investments from abroad --an American fiber plant, an Austrian steel mill and a Hong Kong housing project--but overall foreign investments have already dropped from a record $139 million last year to an estimated $100 million for this year.

Politically, as the balance of world recognition continues shifting from Chiang to Mao, it becomes doubtful that 2,000,000 mainland refugees can continue indefinitely their authoritarian rule over 12 million Taiwanese. Many Taiwanese, descendants of early settlers from Kwangtung and Fukien provinces, want self-government, but when they rebelled in 1947, Chiang's troops massacred about 10,000 of them.

The alternative, which some experts predict will happen in as few as five years, is reunification--a euphemism for Peking's takeover. Last week, not for the first time, there were widespread rumors that Chiang Ching-kuo actually visited the mainland recently for secret talks with the Communists. Officials in Taipei once again denied any possibility of a deal with the mainland, but when the elder Chiang departs, even reunification is not inconceivable.

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