Madame Chiang Kaishek and Her China

By Eastbridge Books

When Soong Meiling, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, died in October 2003, her life of over a century almost exactly paralleled America's own century of direct involvement with Asia, which began with the acquisition of the Philippines. Alone among Western Powers, the United States championed an Open Door policy toward Chi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eastbridge Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781788691024

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the inspiration of my father, General Chu Shih-ming (MIT, 1925; Norwich University, 1926; Leavenworth Staff College, 1934), who was special American and later Japanese advisor to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, and of my mother, Mrs. Grace Zia Chu (Wellesley, 1925), Professor of Physical Education, Ginling College, and part of Madame Chiang’s group of woman friends. Both of them were in the entourage of the Madame during her triumphant tour across the United States during World War Two.

Special thanks are owed Professor Paul Cohen of Wellsley College and Professsor Richard Smith of Rice University. Among the contributing authors, Rhoades Murphey, Susanne Wilson Barnett, Christopher Jespersen, and Anne Chao helped in numerous ways beyond writing their chapters.

Finally, as this book intends to emphasize the special quality of Madame Chiang as an outstanding pioneering woman leader in modern Chinese history, critical readings of different parts of the book by Professor Ling Arenson of DePaul University, Professor Kathleen Lodwick of Pennsylvania State University, Professor Bonnie Oh of Georgetown University, and Professor Heidi Ross of Indiana University have proved invaluable.

Thank you to all the people mentioned above as well as to the contributors, who wrote their chapters on a very tight deadline.

Chronology

Introduction

Soong Meiling and Her Times

(1897–2003)

Samuel C. Chu

When Soong Meiling, better known as Madame Chiang Kaishek, died in New York City on October 23, 2003, at the remarkable age of one hundred and five, most Americans, if they had ever heard of her at all, had forgotten her. But sixty years ago, in the throes of World War II, virtually every American knew her and her husband, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. In those pre-TV days her face and words were in many issues of Life and Time magazines. Americans admired her for her courage, and for representing her country so eloquently.

They knew something about her American education, and her involvement in the building of a new China, before the Japanese invasion. But how could this woman whose family spoke English in China go on to become one of the world’s best known Chinese figures, not to say one of the world’s most famous women?

In this book, designed expressly for English readers who know little of Soong Meiling, a dozen established American historians of China offer the story of this remarkable woman. They show how the Soong family, through their youngest daughter, Meiling, secured power and represented China to the world, especially to the United States, at a time when Americans had a unique affinity with China.

The book begins by addressing the question of whether traditional Chinese women, steeped in a system of Confucian values that gave women, especially mothers, great respect within the family, could still assume an active role in a male-dominated public realm. Thomas Kennedy offers as examples two of the best known Chinese women, direct descendents of the hero who saved the Manchu Qing Dynasty from a quasi-Christian rebellion. These women were activists, albeit within the boundaries of their traditional society.

But Soong Meiling was not a traditional Chinese woman. Her Chinese father was an American-educated missionary-turned-businessman in China. He raised all six of his children to be English speakers and saw them graduate from American colleges. Daniel Bays and Suzanne Barnett explain the special affinity American Protestant missionaries had for the China mission field, where Chinese Christians, while paying certain social and psychological costs, nevertheless became a type of new Chinese, pioneering political and economic changes in the country.

The city that best represented this Chinese-Western mixture was Shanghai, which, as Rhoads Murphey shows, grew from a sleepy little fishing town and local trade center into an international metropolis. In Shanghai, under Western laws and an international police force, Chinese Christians flourished, alongside Western and Chinese companies. Also in this nontraditional city were political agitators, literary and media pioneers, and a mafia-like underworld.

From the American perspective, the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 made the United States an Asian power, but it was China that most interested Americans. The United States’ championing of the Open Door policy, at a time when European Powers seemed bent on carving out pieces of the old empire for themselves, made the United States feel both benevolent and responsible. But was the American image of China true to life, and was American policy beneficial for the Chinese? Charles Hayford and Phililp West look at both sides of these questions, asking whether American influence really was both good to China and good for China.

The Soong family married well. The oldest daughter, Ailing, married Oberlin College-trained H.H. Kung, whose family claimed direct decendency from Confucius. The second daughter, Qingling, married Dr. Sun Yatsen, often called the George Washington of China for his role in overthrowing the two-millennia-old imperial system and trying to establish a republic, modeled in part on the United States. As for Soong Meiling, she married Chiang Kaishek, a rising military and political star, whom she converted to Christianity.

Parks Cobel outlines how the Soong family, especially Meiling’s Harvard-trained brother, T.V. Soong, worked closely with Chinese capitalists in Shanghai to finance Sun’s coming political changes. Sun himself would not live long enough to see his dream come true, but with the help of the Shanghai business class, the Guomindang (GMD), Sun’s party, unified much of the nation. Donald Jordan fills in the details of the remarkable Northern Expedition, in which the commander, Chiang Kaishek, demonstrated his military and political abilities. That key event ushered in a decade of GMD central government headquartered in the new capital of Nanjing. But two worries plagued the newly titled Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, the rising power of the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the growing threat of Japanese militarists. In 1931 Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria, the northeastern part of China, and six years later invaded the rest of China, as full-scale war erupted.

The destinies of China and America were becoming increasingly intertwined, especially after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Stephen MacKinnon tells of several remarkable Americans who lived in China for years, knew Madame Chiang well, and told their fellow Americans what the Chinese were doing. But the most effective voice of China to Americans was the Madame herself. First broadcasting from China, and later making triumphant tours across America, she, in her lilting southern English, pleaded for American help on behalf of her beloved country and people. That was the highpoint of her career, and Christopher Jespersen analyzes why Madame Chiang was particularly effective in touching American hearts. It was as if Americans immediately saw her as the soul of China, yet somehow American as well.

But in both appearance and reality, how did Chinese understand the Madame, who they would never refer to as Soong Meiling in her heyday.

Anne Chao recalls her youth, after the Chiangs were driven out of China onto the island of Taiwan. To Anne’s entire family, until the death of President Chiang Kaishek in 1975, she was always the Madame, venerated by old and young alike, especially by women This image of Madame Chiang, however real it was, had to be balanced against the fact that, as Keith Schoppa convincingly demonstrates, long before she was separated from mainland China, she had lived mostly in cities and suburbs, and hardly knew the rural countryside, where the vast majority of her countrymen lived and worked.

After the death of her husband, Madame Chiang lived quietly with her relatives, the Kungs, in and around New York City. It was only at her death, a quarter of a century later, that she returned to the awareness of the American people. While alive she had chosen to maintain a long silence. Now that she is gone, we think it is high time to reintroduce to the English-reading public the story of this remarkable woman, who in her days enthralled the public, in America and in China, with her elegance, courage, and eloquence.

* * *

Born in China and educated at Dartmouth (AB) and Columbia (MA and PhD),

Samuel C. Chu

has taught at the State University of New York, Bucknell University, the University of Pittsburgh, and since 1969, at Ohio State University, where he was the first director of East Asian Studies. He has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth, Michigan, Wittenberg, and Georgetown. At Georgetown he was the Visiting Sun Yat-sen Professor. He served as the founding chairperson of the Committee on Secondary Education of the Association for Asian Studies, 1969–70, and as the chair of the Selection Committee of the Wang Fellowship in Chinese Studies, 1982–87. He is the author of Reformer in Modern China: Chang Chien, 1853–1926 (Columbia University Press, 1965) and coeditor (with K.C. Liu) of Li Hung-Chang and China’s Early Modernization (M.E. Sharpe, 1994). In addition, he has written in various media, and lectured widely to many types of audiences. He is the coauthor of Passage to the Golden Gate: A History of Chinese in America to 1910 (Doubleday Zenith Books, 1967), and has been a coeditor of a series of books on world history, both for advanced secondary school students.

MADAME CHIANG KAISHEK AND HER CHINA

1

Activism Among Women of China’s Traditional Elite

Thomas L. Kennedy

Death comes from the clear blue sky. With these words uttered during a Movietone Newsreel of the Japanese bombing of Nanjing in 1937, Soong Meiling, Madame Chiang Kaishek, burst on to the world stage, leaving a visual and auditory impression that echoed through the accounts of World War II for the remainder of the century. Following the pitiful picture of a Chinese baby crying amid the rubble of a bombed out Nanjing neighborhood, Madame Chiang’s hauntingly beautiful visage appeared on screen to describe the horror endured by the Chinese victims of Japan’s aggression and to appeal to the audience to support China Relief.

Americans were quick to rally to the aid of China with informal assistance and, after Pearl Harbor, the two nations allied to resist Japan’s onslaught. Many Americans were captivated by the powerful media presence of Madame Chiang, who appeared with her husband, Chinese president Chiang Kaishek, on the cover of Time magazine as man and wife of the year for 1937. Many of these same Americans cherished the belief that she was more American than Chinese. The clear patrician tones of her English, her American education, and her Christian faith seemed to mark her as one of us and separate her from the popular notion of Chinese women, subordinate to their men, their activities and influence severely circumscribed by the power of the traditional family.

Indeed, subordination and deference to male leadership was the lot of most women in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century China, regardless of their station in society.

Footbinding, arranged marriage, and the limitation of educational opportunity, ingrained practices held over from earlier dynasties, were the most apparent, but not the only, customs signifying female subordination in the society into which Soong Meiling was born. Footbinding, the painful and demeaning process by which the bones of little girls’ feet were reformed to resemble a tiny hoof, the so-called lotus foot, had its origins in the harems of wealthy merchants centuries earlier. But footbinding spread throughout society, and in the early twentieth century the lotus foot was widely regarded as the standard of female desirability and a requisite for marriage, despite the crippling effect bound feet had upon women and the severe limitations they imposed on physical activity.

While bound feet were routinely required of a prospective bride, the bride herself had little or nothing to say about the marriage into which she entered. The union was viewed by society as the union of two families, and the bride as the instrument through which the husband’s family line could be continued. Since the marriage was of importance primarily to the involved families, the elders of the families decided upon a suitable match or sought the services of a professional matchmaker. The preference of the bride was rarely, if ever, a factor in determining to whom she was given in marriage. While selfless subordination and absolute fidelity were required of wives, husbands were free to take secondary wives and concubines.

Having relegated women to a position of powerlessness, physically and in marital relationships, it is not surprising that traditional society limited the scope of women’s education to those matters that applied directly to family life or reinforced the hierarchical model of society that excluded women from positions of power. The culinary arts, sewing, and household crafts, along with the memorization of texts that stressed traditional virtues were the subjects studied by young women in households sufficiently affluent to provide the leisure and literacy instruction needed for education.

This popular image of Chinese women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changed slowly, but steadily, as women began to assume different roles in a changing society. Studies appeared in the latter half of the twentieth century revealing the important contributions to the Chinese Revolution by the many women who espoused the Republican or the communist cause. There was, however, another stream of activism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China, neither revolutionary nor radical, that inspired women from the elite stratum of society. This activism drew its goals from China’s rich humanistic heritage as well as foreign models, and accommodated rather than challenged male domination in society. This tradition of activism, little known outside of China and often overlooked, or reviled, by the proponents of radical or violent change, is an essential ingredient of the background from which Madame Chiang’s patriotism and dedication sprung. Specifically, this activism was exemplified by women in the family of the renowned nineteenth-century Confucian scholar and statesman Zeng Guofan. Zeng, who rescued the Empire from the clutches of the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) and set China on the course of modernization, was the personal role model of Madame Chiang’s husband, Chiang Kaishek. The humanism, pragmatism, and openness to change that the women of the Zeng family evinced in China, Madame Chiang personified on the world stage.

In China, the latter half of the nineteenth century was a perilous time for the faltering Qing Dynasty. Like the United States, which struggled to reconstruct the fragile union following its Civil War, China’s rulers sought to strengthen the ailing dynasty in the wake of the greatest upheaval in China’s long history, the Taiping Rebellion. Foremost in their efforts was the strengthening of Confucianism, which gave legitimacy to the rulers and fostered hierarchical, male-led family, community, and government structures. Along with this, there were those who sought to selectively introduce western technology to bolster the capability of the Empire to defend itself. At the forefront of both of these efforts was the scholar, statesman, and victorious leader of the struggle against the Taipings, Zeng Guofan. Zeng demonstrated the same iron-willed determination and courageous leadership that he had shown in the struggle against the Taipings in the new struggle to restore the patriarchal systems of nineteenth-century Confucianism and introduce the technology of the barbarian West.

Perhaps it was Zeng’s iron will and the duality of his approach to leadership, nationally and in his own family, that explains the personality of his youngest daughter, Mrs. Nie Zeng Jifen (1852–1942). Her life exemplifies the fierce cultural pride and open-minded embrace of foreign models that distinguishes China’s conservative women leaders — the intellectual forebears of Madame Chiang. Born into one of the elite families of nineteenth-century China, Zeng Jifen’s childhood was overshadowed by the momentous military, diplomatic, and governmental events that swirled about her. Still, her father saw to it that she had an introductory education in the Confucian classics, albeit one cut short when a boy, not of her family, joined the class. Zeng Guofan then imposed a regimen of training in the domestic arts: sewing, cooking, and home management, aimed at cultivating in his daughter the virtues of industry and frugality and a sense of a woman’s place in the family hierarchy. This early education served Zeng Jifen well. Driven by her inherited sense of mission and responsibility, her actions throughout life would be guided subliminally by the Confucian teaching that to change the world one must begin at home. Industry, frugality, reliance on Confucian teachings, and the creative management of family affairs defined her life as she quietly guided her family through the treacherous bureaucratic