Business Weekender

June 30, 2007

Patrick Laurence

ONE of the many interesting facets of the changing kaleidoscope that is China today is the lack of enmity or even derision towards Chiang Kai-shek, the implacable foe of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China.

The house he lived in shortly before he fled mainland China after his military forces were defeated by Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army is treated by the government of the People's Republic of China's as part of China's heritage, not the lair of a fascist to be vandalised.

The house - reported to be his last place of residence before his flight to Taiwan after the defeat of his nationalist army by their communist adversaries in the civil war of 1946-49 - is discreetly modest compared with the palatial homes of some of the Chinese aristocrats during the country's imperial past.

Situated just off a main street in Xikou, Chiang's place of birth, the house is reminiscent of a Roman villa. The rooms of the house form a wall around a restful courtyard, graced by carefully placed trees. The trees define themselves as the silent guardians of tranquility. It is as though time has stood still.

An inscription on a placard reminds the visitor that its peace has been violated in the past. It tells of how Chiang's first wife was killed during an attack on Xikou by Japanese aircraft during the Sino-Japanese war of 1931-45. It is easy to imagine the terrifying sound of the exploding bomb that caused part of a wall to collapse and crush her to death.

A photograph on a wall in another part of the house offers an equally mesmerising glimpse into the past. A strikingly beautiful woman looks out at the visitor. The caption identifies her as Soong-Mayling, younger sister of the wife of Sun Yet-sen, founder of the Republic of China in 1911, which was replaced by - or, in Marxist ideology, "progressed dialectically" into - the People's Republic of China in 1949.

The caption under the photo says that when she agreed to marry Chiang, she set three conditions: first, Chiang would have to guarantee her status as the first lady of the household; second, he would have to convert to Christianity; and, third, he would have to agree that there would be no children from the marriage as she wanted him (and herself, presumably) to stay young.

The inscription resolves the riddle of why Chiang, a conscientious Confucian until then, converted to Christianity and became a member of the Methodist Church. It offers another intriguing detail; Soong-Mayling, who served as Chiang's interpreter during negotiations with the US, came to be known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek and died in the US in 2004 at the age of 103.

It is important to bear in mind when appraising the tolerant attitude of the present-day People's Republic of China towards Chiang that he twice tried to destroy Mao's Chinese Communist Party: In 1935, when his National Revolutionary Army (NRA) encircled the communists at Jiangxi in 1934, only to see them escape in the Long March of nearly 10000km to Yan'an in the north to live to fight another day; and In 1946, when Chiang's NRA attacked communist forces in and around Manchuria in the north, only to suffer a series of devastating defeats that led to his flight to Taiwan - territories administered by the Republic of China.

SEEN in the broad historical context outlined above, it is legitimate to ask why communist officials in today's China included the stop at Chiang's former home in Xikou during my recent visit to Zhejiang province.

One explanation is that they were simply seeking to offer as wide a perspective as possible to a foreign guest, a not uncommon state of mind in China today.

Another is that Chiang has been dead for more than 30 years and that his dream of invading mainland China from his nationalist or Kuomintang base in Taiwan and ousting the Communist Party government in Beijing has died with him, thereby opening the way for the present-day Chinese government to recognise his positive contributions to the development of China.

A CHINESE official identifies two of Chiang's constructive achievements as his destruction of the power of warlords in China in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and his role in channelling military resistance to the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s.

A more cynical interpretation is that the People's Republic of China is seeking to advance a political agenda, which can be defined as furthering the cause of unification between mainland China and Taiwan, which the People's Republic of China regards as a prodigal son and/or renegade province that must be persuaded to return to the fold.

If the People's Republic of China is pursuing the notion of reconciliation and unification between two rival Chinese traditions, it makes sense not to adopt too harsh an attitude towards Chiang.

What the mainland officials seem to be saying can be summarised as follows: "We are all Chinese, with a common language, culture and history and we ought to be able to work on a formula that will advance the cause for unification across the straits separating the People's Republic of China and Taiwan."

A subsidiary clause might be encapsulated thus: Chiang is as Chinese as Mao and the ideological differences between them are less important than their common roots, particularly in 2007, more than 50 years after the civil war of 1946-49.

The friendlier attitude towards Chiang and his legacy in the People's Republic of China might be described as the proverbial velvet glove that covers the iron fist, the iron first being the People's Republic of China's anticession law of 2005. The law contains a clause empowering the People's Republic of China to use military force if necessary to counter any attempt by Taiwan to declare itself a fully independent state, rather than a self-governing province of China.

The threat is backed by the strategic placement of missiles pointing across the straits to Taiwan from China's southwest coastline.

FOR the purposes of clarity, it should be noted that for decades, Chiang's Republic of China and Mao's People's Republic of China shared one central notion: both asserted there was only one China. The question was not whether there should be two Chinas, but rather, whether the Republic of China or the People's Republic of China was the legitimate heir to the republic established by Sun.

The notion of one China, however, seems to have slipped into the background in Taiwan over the past decade or so, particularly since the election in 2000 of Chen Shui-bian as president of the Republic of China, aka Taiwan.

The political drift away from the notion of one China since the late 1990s has, however, been countered by closer economic ties between Taiwan and its colossal neighbour.

Taiwanese investment in the People's Republic of China has played a significant role in the People's Republic of China's astonishingly high gross domestic product average annual growth rate of about 10% for the past 10 years. Ditto the role of businesspeople from Taiwan in China.

In an interesting development, the emergence of more a congenial attitude towards Chiang in the People's Republic of China has coincided with an apparent distancing from him in Taiwan. The clearest manifestation of this is the absence of photographs of him in government offices.

There are plenty of photographs of Sun, but virtually none of Chiang, even though Chiang was a president of the Republic of China in mainland China as well as Taiwan. Statues of Chiang have similarly disappeared from public buildings in Taiwan, while the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport was renamed last year as the Taiwan Taoyyuan Airport.

There is an echo of the diminishing number of soldiers who were willing to fight for Chiang in the civil war of 1946-49 in his waning status in Taiwan since about 1990. As online encyclopaedia Wikipedia notes, Chiang started the war with an army of 4,3-million soldiers, but by the time it ended his army had shrunk to 1,5-million. During the same period, Mao's army grew from 1,2- million fighters to 4-million. Desertions from Chiang's army to Mao's are identifiable as a major factor in the reversal in the fortunes of the two men.

The final judgment of history still awaits Chiang. Ironically, however, it may depend on events in the People's Republic of China as to whether Chiang will be accorded a modest but honourable place, or all but fade from memory.