Fenby chose the Xi'an incident of December 1936 as the prologue for the book, exposing his readers right away to the drama of Chiang's detention, a key turning point in the Generalissimo's struggle for China. If Zhang Xueliang, who arrested Chiang, instead supported his commander in the final assault on the Communist positions, perhaps China would be reunified there and then. These ifs - Chiang's long list of lost opportunities - are brought vividly to light in this excellent biography, highlighting Chiang's numerous failures, as well as his remarkable ability to bounce back from the brink of defeat.
Chiang's main problem, in Fenby's account, was his method of leadership. Chiang was a master of political intrigue, of playing one rival faction against another, of forging and breaking alliances. But often Chiang's scheming, even if it achieved his immediate narrow ends, undermined his long-term objectives, fatally weakening the Generalissimo at crucial turning points in the struggle against the Japanese and the Communists. A micromanager, Chiang lacked a broader vision of what he wanted to accomplish: ultimately, even though he won many battles, he lost the war.
Fenby pulls no punches in his account of Chiang's relationship with his main ally and sponsor, the United States. The stars of the powerplay - the Generalissimo and "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell - were both at fault for allowing their personal vendettas interfere with the broader war effort. Each side pulled strings in Washington, leaving Roosevelt at a loss as to what to do about China, which was anyhow way down his list of priorities. But Stillwell, in particular, is criticized for his vanity, presumptuousness and stubbornness, and for putting his glorious campaign in Burma above the needs of the China theatre, especially at the time of the crucial Ichigo offensive. Had not Chiang and Swillwell worked at cross-purposes, perhaps China would have done better in the protracted war against Japan, leaving the GMD in a better position to cope with the Communist challenge.
Who lost China? Fenby is ambiguous on this point. He does seem to blame George Marshall at one point for his naïve efforts to bring the Guomindang and the Communists to the negotiating table, which allowed the CCP forces to regroup and may have ultimately cost Chiang his victory in the Civil War. At the same time, Fenby's account of the GMD's difficulties - rampant inflation, corruption, loss of support in the countryside - suggests that Washington could do very little to save the regime from collapse.
Equally ambiguous is Fenby's treatment of the Chiang-Mao talks in the early postwar. In places he seems to argue that if Chiang showed more willingness to compromise and if he had adopted democratic reforms, some modus vivendi could have been reached with the Communists. But elsewhere, Fenby relapses into a more fatalistic view that Chiang and Mao would fight to the death, and that there really was not ground for a compromise solution.
Fenby opens a revealing window into the Generalissimo's personal life, his relationship with his mother, his son, and, most intriguingly, with his wives, especially Soong Meiling, the "empress" of China. Fenby draws a fascinating portrait of Madame Chiang - attractive, intelligent but also vain and vicious, a pillar of support for her aloof husband but also a tireless plotter who at one point even had an affair with Wendell Willkie and conspired to rule the world hand-in-hand with the Republican hopeful. Chiang, despite his occasional womanizing, comes across as a family man (certainly, compared to Mao), a fatherly Confucian figure who treated his wives and children as he treated his nation: sternly but with some benevolence.
Was the cup half-empty or half-full? While stressing the Guomindang's multiple failures, Fenby gives credit to Chiang for implementing crucial, if aborted, reforms during the Nanjing decade, for uniting China, for raising her international profile to the exalted (even if superficial) status as one of the Great Four, for persisting in the war against Japan in the face of dire odds. Even if Chiang lost China, China was not lost. In part through his efforts it returned to the world stage as a nation, rather than a motley assembly of warring fiefdoms.
In his conclusion, Fenby addresses deeper questions of the meaning of China's encounter with modernity. Today's China in some ways has come to resemble China of the Nanjing decade, and the CCP, mired in corruption and in-fighting, looks more and more like the Guomindang of old. Yet China has also made a leap to modernity of the kind that would have tallied well with Chiang's hopes for his nation. In a strange way, then, the CCP continues Chiang's revolution. In the meantime, Chiang's republic in Taiwan made a leap of another kind - to democracy and rule of law, which are still absent in the mainland. This, then, is the irony of Chiang's life and times: China's present-day is more his than Mao's and, who knows, perhaps China's future is also his. One day, if and when China is democratized and reunified, Chiang's embalmed remains will return to the country that he had lost but also won.
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Top reviews from other countries
Gisli Jokull Gislason
A good book on Chinese history as well as the man.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2014
proliteboss
Makes you think what the world would be like today, especially if Japan had taken over complete control of China
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2015CR
Great book! Just wished it touched on Chiang's life in Taiwan as well
Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2015
