In His Father's Footsteps

President Chiang Ching-kuo of Taiwan was so unlike his famous father that he hardly resembled him at all. While Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was wiry, aloof and dictatorial, his son was rotund, jovial and pragmatic. The elder Chiang fielded armies against both the Japanese and Mao Zedong's Communists. The younger, though bearing the nominal rank of general, never saw action on the battlefield. Yet after the Nationalists fled the mainland, it was the son who helped transform the father's defeat into victory. Chiang Ching-kuo's inheritance was the loss of China; when he died last week of heart failure at 77, he left the miracle of Taiwan as his own legacy.

Chiang Ching-kuo grew up barely knowing his father, who was away most of the time making a career in the military. He was educated in the Soviet Union, embraced Communism for a time, and at one point signed a denunciation calling his father an "enemy of the working class." Later, Soviet authorities made - Chiang a virtual hostage, banishing him to Siberia and the Urals. There he married a young Russian woman named Faina.

In 1937, Chiang Ching-kuo was finally allowed to return home after twelve years in the Soviet Union. He served in a succession of government posts, and in 1949 joined his father and 2 million other mainlanders in a mass retreat across the Formosa Strait after the Communists seized power in Beijing. Chiang Ching-kuo then presided over a political-warfare department that policed the island against mainland infiltrators and waged propaganda campaigns against the Communists.

Upon the Generalissimo's death in 1975, Chiang, already Premier, succeeded him as Chairman of the Kuomintang. Given the title of President in 1978, he wisely encouraged active Taiwanese participation in the island's surging economy, thereby promoting political stability. He also gained considerable personal popularity, mixing regularly with farmers, laborers and fishermen. Some setbacks occurred, however, most notably the U.S. decision in 1979 to recognize the Beijing regime.

Chiang continued to pay lip service to the Generalissimo's dream of recovering the mainland. But as his own health began to deteriorate, the son began to relax the father's military grip. Last summer, at the President's behest, the state of martial law that had begun shortly before Chiang Kai- shek's arrival on Taiwan and lasted 38 years was ended. With that, the groundwork was laid for an era of political normality the island republic had never known.