Posted on 02/17/2004 10:00:52 PM PST by quidnunc
Claire Chennault, the American founder of China’s air aces, the Flying Tigers, met his new boss on June 3rd 1937. “A vivacious young girl clad in a modish Paris frock tripped into the room, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm,” he recalled. It was “an encounter from which I never recovered”, and, whatever happened, that “young girl” would “always be a princess to me”.
Thus, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, half-dragon lady, half-Georgia peach, and an encounter from which many who should have known better never recovered. Her life is a monument to the power of personality in the great sweep of history. Most people who survive to 105 end up as living anachronisms: their world died long before they did. But, even as a frail centenarian taking her walks in Central Park unnoticed by the joggers and tourists, Soong Mei-ling had the satisfaction of knowing that, geopolitically speaking, we live in a world shaped in part by her extraordinary character.
Bad news comes in three, and so for the most part did Madame Chiang. She lived in three centuries. She was one of only three women to wield real power in modern China: Ci Xi, the former concubine turned Empress Dowager in the final years of the Qing dynasty; Madame Mao, who was jailed shortly after the death of her husband and killed herself in 1991; and in between, and on a different scale, Madame Chiang. She was one of three sisters, of whom it was said “one loved power, one loved money, one loved China”. Mei-ling was the first: she did love power, though, in the objective sense, she never had a lot of it. But America so loved her they treated her as if she did.
And so, in the most remarkable of Madame Chiang’s threesomes, China was invited to participate with Britain and America in the 1943 Cairo Conference. Roosevelt was insistent that the Chiangs be invited; Churchill thought it preposterous to pretend that General Chiang’s China was (along with Britain, the US and the Soviet Union) one of the “Big Four” world powers; their presence at the conference was “an absolute farce”. The reason for this difference of opinion was simple: Churchill had never met Madame Chiang; Roosevelt had. Indeed, after visiting with Mei-ling in New York earlier that year, Eleanor Roosevelt announced that she wanted to “take care of her as if she had been my own daughter” and promptly moved her into the White House, which didn’t give Churchill a lot of room for manoeuvre.
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(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
HALF DRAGON QUEEN,
HALF GEORGIA PEACH
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, 1898-2003
Claire Chennault, the American founder of China’s air aces, the Flying Tigers, met his new boss on June 3rd 1937. “A vivacious young girl clad in a modish Paris frock tripped into the room, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm,” he recalled. It was “an encounter from which I never recovered”, and, whatever happened, that “young girl” would “always be a princess to me”.
Thus, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, half-dragon lady, half-Georgia peach, and an encounter from which many who should have known better never recovered. Her life is a monument to the power of personality in the great sweep of history. Most people who survive to 105 end up as living anachronisms: their world died long before they did. But, even as a frail centenarian taking her walks in Central Park unnoticed by the joggers and tourists, Soong Mei-ling had the satisfaction of knowing that, geopolitically speaking, we live in a world shaped in part by her extraordinary character.
Bad news comes in three, and so for the most part did Madame Chiang. She lived in three centuries. She was one of only three women to wield real power in modern China: Ci Xi, the former concubine turned Empress Dowager in the final years of the Qing dynasty; Madame Mao, who was jailed shortly after the death of her husband and killed herself in 1991; and in between, and on a different scale, Madame Chiang. She was one of three sisters, of whom it was said “one loved power, one loved money, one loved China”. Mei-ling was the first: she did love power, though, in the objective sense, she never had a lot of it. But America so loved her they treated her as if she did.
And so, in the most remarkable of Madame Chiang’s threesomes, China was invited to participate with Britain and America in the 1943 Cairo Conference. Roosevelt was insistent that the Chiangs be invited; Churchill thought it preposterous to pretend that General Chiang’s China was (along with Britain, the US and the Soviet Union) one of the “Big Four” world powers; their presence at the conference was “an absolute farce”. The reason for this difference of opinion was simple: Churchill had never met Madame Chiang; Roosevelt had. Indeed, after visiting with Mei-ling in New York earlier that year, Eleanor Roosevelt announced that she wanted to “take care of her as if she had been my own daughter” and promptly moved her into the White House, which didn’t give Churchill a lot of room for manoeuvre.
Nonetheless, the British Prime Minister’s judgment was the correct one, and thelanguid old Asia hands at the Foreign Office were calling America’s man “General Cash My-cheque” long before Washington noticed how much of the billions they’d lavished on his country had gotten Hoovered up by the Generalissimo’s near and dear. In fairness to Chiang, a lot of the money ended up in the hands of his wife’s family, who were already fabulously wealthy. Mei-ling’s father, Charlie Soong, got rich as a Bible salesman in China and then helped bankroll General Sun Yat-sen’s 1911 revolution. He had his children educated in the US, and the girls went to Wesleyan College in Macon. By the time she advanced to Wellesley, her English had acquired a southern lilt. The sisters were said to be the first Asian girls to go to college in America.
Three decades later, she became the first Chinese and only the second woman to address Congress. On that prolonged visitin 1943, she “enchanted” everyone - the Roosevelts, the Republicans, the Hollywood Committee to Receive Madame Chiang Kai-Shek (Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple, etc), an audience of 20,000 at Madison Square Garden and 30,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. Had America been an imperial power, Madame Chiang would have been one of a type. The annals of British colonialism are strewn with exotic figures - Indian maharajahs and African princes – who would have recognized Madame Chiang’s ornately convoluted English, as she denounced the “convulsions and perfervid paroxysms” of the Cultural Revolution or “the dastardly Communist poltroons” who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the United States is not an imperial power, and so Madame Chiang had the field of Americanised exotics all to herself. Her husband spoke little English, and she sold herself to both parties as a bridge between two cultures. Other than the American tenor who sang that quintessentially American wedding song, “Oh, Promise Me”, at their nuptials, to Madame Chiang East was East and West was West, and hardly e’er the twain did meet: for all her love of America, she never troubled herself with whether American notions of liberty or justice would be useful to China. Madame tailored her act to her audience: even the Georgia drawl was variable.
Many consequences flowed from that smash tour of 1943: first, the Cairo Conference, which so inflated the status of General Chiang’s China; second, and even more of “an absolute farce”, the decision to reward the General’s insignificant contribution to the allied victory with one of the five permanent places on the new UN Security Council. Though the British and Americans had agreed on much in the preceding years, both had their idiosyncratic fetishes: Washington thought de Gaulle was a poseur and Chiang would save his country; London thought vice-versa. In the objective sense, neither post-war France nor China merited a Security Council seat. But the former was at least a coherent nation state. Even in the Thirties, the Chiangs never ruled China, only a shifting sliver of it. A Japanese puppet emperor reigned in Manchuria; there was a Communist regime in Shanxi; the Soviet Union held Mongolia and Xinjiang; Shanghai and other “treaty ports” were garrisoned and run by Britain, America, France and Italy; and local warlords carved up much of what was left. Buffeted by these various factions, General Chiang moved his court from town to town according to which of his enemies was chastising him least. Chiang’s China was unstable, he was never a likely candidate to hold it together, and it was obvious who the likely successors would be. But the allies gave him a Security Council seat anyway.
In 1949, the Chiangs left mainland China for the last time and took their government into exile on Formosa, recently returned to the Middle Kingdom by Japan. Mei-ling was no longer the force she once was in America, but the residual aura helped persuade Washington to endorse an illusion: that she and her husband were the real government of China. And thus for the next two decades one of the five vetoes in the UN Security Council was wielded by a quasi-colonial dictatorship of outsiders on a small insignificant island. The Soviets were so affronted by America’s refusal to cede China’s seat to the fellows who actually ran China that they walked out of the Council, and in their absence the UN voted for the Korean War.
Maybe some of this would still have happened without Madame Chiang. But it’s doubtful a conventional, locally-raised Chinese wife would have so intoxicated an American audience. And the austere General couldn’t have done it on his own. In January 1938 he was one-half of Time’s “Man And Wife Of The Year”, a formulation that tells you the angle Henry Luce was interested in: the American college girl running an ancient civilization.
In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by Marshal Chang, who wanted him to quit battling the Communists and take on the Japanese. Eleven days after his capture, Mei-ling flew to Xian to be by her husband’s side, turned her charm on Marshal Chang, and within 48 hours the Generalissimo was freed. If she’d stayed home, if Chiang had been killed by his kidnappers, the last half of the 20th century might have been very different: China, the UN, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the fragile skein of history snaking back to a delicate, small-boned woman of fierce determination. At the end of her life, a woman who’d come into direct contact with all the great forces that blew through her country -from the emperors to Japanese militarism to Communism - found that the most potent was the one that made her dad rich a century ago: China is once again Christianity’s most fertile recruiting ground.
“Who lost China?” America’s anti-Communists agonised. Nobody. China was never lost. Chiang Kai-shek had never won it in the first place. And, if not for its sentimentalisation of “a vivacious young girl clad in a modish Paris frock”, America might have seen that six decades ago.
The Atlantic Monthly, January 2004
Do you believe in copyright infringment?
All that would have to happen for you not to have ANY Mark Steyn on FR is for him to contact Jim Robinson and demand that none of his material be posted here.
There are at least two media sites which have already done so and subsequently you won't see anything here from those sources.
The best thing that ever happened to her bungler of a husband.
If Hillary had her charm and beauty, we'd all be communists.
I'm old enough to remember Madam Chiang during WW II.
She was the darling of the movie newsreels.
R.I.P. Dragon Lady. You were in the eye of the storm.
105. Wow. What she saw.
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