Chiang Kai-shek (; 31 October 1887 – 5 April 1975) was a Chinese military commander, revolutionary, and statesman who was the President of the Republic of China from 1948 to 1975 and the head of the Nationalist government from 1925 to 1948. As the de facto leader of the Republic of China (ROC), he ruled the country through World War II and oversaw the relocation of its government to Taiwan following defeat in the Chinese Civil War.
Born in Zhejiang, Chiang received a military education in China and Japan, joined Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui in 1908, and, after the 1911 Revolution, participated in the National Protection War. In 1923, he was appointed by Sun as chief of staff of the Army and Navy Marshal stronghold, and served as commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy from 1924 until its closure in 1930. After Sun's death, Chiang wrested control of the party and army from Wang Jingwei in the Canton Coup. From 1926 to 1928, Chiang led the Northern Expedition and largely unified China under a Nationalist government based in Nanjing. He broke the First United Front by purging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members in the Shanghai Massacre, triggering the Chinese Civil War.
During the Nanjing decade, Chiang pursued modernization of China while prioritizing the suppression of the Communists over confrontation with Japan following the latter's invasion of Manchuria. The Xi'an Incident in 1936 forced him to form a Second United Front with the CCP against Japan. Between 1937 and 1945, Chiang led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, mostly from the wartime capital of Chongqing, resulting in a victory for the National Revolutionary Army. In 1943, Chiang attended the Cairo Conference to discuss the terms of Japan's surrender, including the retrocession of Taiwan, after which he suppressed the February 28 incident.
When World War II ended, the Chinese Civil War resumed. In 1949, Chiang's KMT was defeated by Mao's CCP and retreated to Taiwan. He imposed martial law and White Terror on the island that lasted until 1987 and 1992, respectively. Beginning in 1948, he was re-elected five times by the same Eternal Parliament with six-year terms as President of the ROC, the head of a de facto one-party state, for 25 years until his death. Chiang presided over land reform, economic growth, and the Taiwan Strait crises twice in 1954–1955 and in 1958. Taiwan also pursued an ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programme. Chiang was considered the legitimate leader of China by the United Nations until 1971, when the ROC's seat in the Security Council was transferred to the People's Republic of China.
Chiang is a controversial figure. Supporters credit him with unifying the nation and ending the century of humiliation, leading the resistance against Japan, fostering economic development and preserving Chinese culture in contrast to Mao's Cultural Revolution. He is also credited with safeguarding the Forbidden City's treasures during the wars, a substantial portion now housed at the Taipei Palace Museum. Critics fault him for his early appeasement of Japan, the deliberate flooding of the Yellow River, cronyism and corruption linked to the Four Big Families, and authoritarian rule on both mainland China and Taiwan.
At the time of his birth, Chiang's grandfather chose for him a milk name, Chiang Jui-yuan (Chinese: 蔣瑞元; pinyin: Jiǎng Ruìyuán; lit. 'auspicious beginning'), containing the generation name rui (Chinese: 瑞; lit. 'auspicious'). His clan name was Chiang Chou-t'ai (蔣周泰; Jiǎng Zhōutài), meaning lit. 'completely peaceful' or lit. 'boundlessly great'.
In August of 1903, Chiang, then 15 years old, chose a school name, Chih-ching (志清; Zhìqīng; 'striving to be honest'), to reflect his ambitions of passing the imperial examinations. In March 1912, by then already a revolutionary, he took on the name Chieh-shih (介石; Jièshí; 'firm as a rock')—a combination of the characters jie and shi from the ancient classic I Ching—and used it as a pen name. According to biographer Alexander Pantsov, when rendered in Cantonese, the name "sounds like Chiang Kai-shek, and that is how Jiang began to be called by that name from early 1918". It was also by the Cantonese pronunciation of this name that Sun Yat-sen knew him.
In 1917, Chiang assumed another name, Chiang Chung-cheng (蔣中正; Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng; 'central and correct'), which he took from the second line of the sixteenth hexagram of the I Ching: 不終日貞吉以中正也; Bù zhōngrì zhēnjí yǐ zhōngzhèng yě; '[He sees a thing] without waiting till it has come to pass', 'with his firm correctness
there will be good fortune: this is shown by the central and correct position
Chiang's best known titles include Commandant (Chinese: 校長; pinyin: Xiào Zhǎng; lit. 'principal', 'schoolmaster'), used among the alumni of the Whampoa Military Academy; "the Generalissimo" (Chinese: 蒋委員長; pinyin: Jiǎnɡ Wěi Yuán Zhǎng; lit. 'Chairman Chiang of the (Military Affairs) Commission') or "Gissimo" (Chinese: 委座; pinyin: Wěi Zuò; lit. 'Chairman'), used after 1926 when he became the commander in chief of the Nationalist armies.
Chiang was born on 31 October 1887 to a distinguished family of merchants in Xikou, then a small village about 48.2 kilometers (30.0 mi) south of the port city of Ningbo. His father, Chiang Chao-tsung (also known as Chiang Shu-an), was a salt-seller who ran the family business, the Yutai Salt Store, and was known for his honesty as a broker of village disputes. His mother, Wang Tsai-yu, was a seamstress, a devout Buddhist, and the daughter of a Buddhist monk. She was Chao-tsung's third wife; at the time of their marriage in 1886, Chao-tsung had a daughter, Chiang Ruichun, and a son, Chiang Ruisheng, from previous marriages. They were a wealthy family descended from the Duke of Zhou who possessed more than thirty mu of rice fields, bamboo groves, and tea bushes. Although salt and wine were state monopolies, Chao-tsung sold both, having obtained a license by means of guanxi. They moved out from the salt store into a new seven-room sanheyuan when Chiang was an infant. Chiang's sister Ruilian was born there in 1890, followed by another sister, Ruiju, in 1892 and a brother, Ruiqing, in 1894.
During his childhood, Chiang was described as "sprightly and prankish from disposition, but sickly in body," with a unique capacity for chasing, then escaping, difficult situations. At age three, he survived choking on a pair of chopsticks; in 1892, at age five, he narrowly avoided drowning in a man-sized water jar after climbing in. As a boy, he developed a fitness for swimming and hill-climbing and had a penchant for war games, in which he preferred to be the commander. At the behest of a relative, Chiang's mother committed him to a family tutor when he turned five, but he initially made slow progress in learning the Chinese classics taught to him.
When Chiang was seven years old, his paternal grandfather, Yu-piao, died of pneumonia. Months later, on 24 August 1895, Chiang's father died suddenly, at the age of 54. A property dispute left most of the family's estate with Chiang's half-brother Ruisheng, leaving a small parcel of land with Wang, who supported Chiang by weaving linen. Chiang later wrote in a diary in 1917: "After father died and my elder brother refused to take care of the family, everyone cheated us, and my mother quietly suffered, enduring trials and tribulations." In one instance, tax collectors pursued Wang and detained Chiang as collateral, an experience which affected him greatly. Qing officials brought the boy Chiang before a magistrate's court under threat of imprisonment. Ultimately the sum was paid, but Chiang later referred to the experience as "the first spark that kindled my revolutionary fire."
In 1898, Ruiqing died at age four, which deeply affected Wang, who focused all of her attention on Chiang thereafter and accelerated his schooling. Chiang had learned to read and write while attending a private village school and, under strict teachers, studied the Four Books and Five Classics. At ten years old he wrote his first essay in Classical Chinese and dedicated it to Ruiqing. In 1899, he began attending a school near his maternal grandmother, where a teacher encouraged him to write short prose essays and verses. In 1901, the year of his arranged teenage marriage to Mao Fumei, Chiang transitioned to a mountain school in Fenghua, where he led a protest for better teaching and was nearly expelled. He spent another two years at a private school in Ningbo before returning to attend middle school in Fenghua, a school whose method of rote memorization of classical texts later influenced his mindset of issuing orders, which he believed were to be followed, and enunciated, in the same way as Confucian truths. One of his teachers, Mao Sicheng, was a distant in-law; under Mao's direction, Chiang studied the I Ching and wrote essays in the classical style. Mao later recalled:He considered class a stage and his fellow students marionettes. He was wild and unrestrainable. But when he was answering at the board, reading, or clenching a writing brush in his hand and thinking over his answer, even thousands of voices around could not distract him from his profound concentration. He alternated between moments of calm and outbursts, sometimes in the course of several minutes. One might think there were two different persons. I found him very intriguing.