Chiang Ching-kuo

Moscow

Chiang arrived in Moscow in late November 1925, aged 15, with 21 other Chinese students, including Liao Chengzhi. The university president Karl Radek met the group at the station, and Chiang was given the Russian name Nikolai Vladimirovich Elizarov (Николай Владимирович Елизаров). He was placed in the same study group as Deng Xiaoping, the future leader of the CCP. About a month after his arrival, Chiang joined the Communist Youth League.^: 121 He studied the works of Leon Trotsky in a secret study circle and later admitted that his views had matched Trotsky's, though he played this down after returning to China.

Chiang graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in 1927. After his father broke with the Communists that year, Chiang Ching-kuo publicly denounced his father's action and was selected for the Central Tolmachev Military and Political Institute in Leningrad, from which he graduated. The Communist Wang Ming accused him of organizing a counter-revolutionary "Zhejiang association", and the university held a three-day meeting to purge its alleged members. In autumn 1931, after Chiang criticized Wang Ming at a university meeting, the Soviet authorities removed him from his post in the Chinese student delegation and sent him to a village near Moscow. His repeated requests to return to China were refused, and he became the Chinese student who stayed longest in the Soviet Union.

Chiang went on to work as an apprentice at a Moscow electrical plant, a laborer at a gold mine in the Urals, and a technician and assistant director at the Ural Heavy Machinery Plant (Uralmash), and he edited the newspaper Heavy Industry Daily. At the plant he met Faina Ipat'evna Vakhreva in 1933, and they married in March 1935. She later took the Chinese name Chiang Fang-liang. In 1936 Chiang denounced his father again, though he later said he had been forced to do so and to remain in the Soviet Union.

Chiang Kai-shek refused to negotiate a prisoner exchange in which his son would be released in return for a CCP leader.^: 247 He wrote in his diary, "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son."^{: 59 : 205} In 1937 he wrote that he "would rather have no offspring than sacrifice our nation's interests".^: 74 The writers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have argued that Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Communists to escape on the Long March of 1934–1935 in the hope that Joseph Stalin would return his son, and that Chiang Ching-kuo had been "kidnapped". Chiang Kai-shek's diary, however, records his own decision to send his son to Moscow.

Return to China and the Second Sino-Japanese War

Stalin allowed Chiang to return to China in 1937 with his Belarusian wife and their son Hsiao-wen. His father had by then formed a new united front with the CCP, and Chiang arrived in Shanghai on 25 March 1937.

During the war with Japan, Chiang held a series of military and administrative posts, and after 1941 his father increasingly relied on his advice. Before he turned 30, he became administrative inspector and security commander of the Fourth District of Jiangxi, centered on Gannan. There he proposed a "New Gannan" campaign, under which local officials promoted education and worked to eliminate opium, gambling, prostitution and banditry. He left Gannan in early 1944 to become education director of the Central Cadre School in Chongqing. In the late 1930s he met Wang Sheng, who remained close to him for the next 50 years.

The paramilitary Sanmin Zhuyi Youth Corps was under Chiang's control.^: 148 He used the term "big bourgeoisie" disparagingly to describe H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong.^: 148 Chiang was a member of the delegation led by Soong that arrived in Moscow on 30 June 1945 to negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. On 30 December 1945, he flew to Moscow again as his father's personal envoy and held talks with Stalin that night and on 3 January 1946.

While in mainland China, Chiang and his wife had a daughter, Hsiao-chang, born in Nanchang in 1938, and two more sons, Hsiao-wu, born in Chongqing in 1945, and Hsiao-yung, born in Shanghai in 1948.

Shanghai currency reform

During the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalist government announced the gold yuan currency reform on 19 August 1948. Chiang was sent to Shanghai as an assistant to Yu Hung-chun and was put at the forefront of pressing those who resisted to hand over their funds. The historian Wu Jingping has said that Chiang had no real voice in designing the reform. The biographer Jonathan Fenby writes that Chiang copied methods he had learned in the Soviet Union, attacking middle-class merchants and enforcing low prices on all goods to win support from the working class.^: 485

Chiang used his own agents to make arrests in Shanghai rather than the city police.^: 178 He relied on two relatively new organizations that answered directly to him.^: 178 He used the Sixth Battalion of the Bandit-Suppression National-Reconstruction Corps to search warehouses for hoarded goods and to place secret report boxes around the city where people could anonymously report violators.^{: 178–179} He also used the Shanghai Youth Service Corps for enforcement.^: 179

Chiang had H. H. Kung's son David Kung and several employees of Kung's Yangtze Development Corporation arrested on allegations of holding foreign exchange.^: 181 Soong Mei-ling complained to Chiang Kai-shek and also called Chiang Ching-kuo directly.^: 182 David Kung was freed after negotiations, and Chiang Ching-kuo resigned.^: 486 Wu Jingping argues that Chiang's failure to deal with the Yangtze company was not directly tied to the reform's collapse, which he attributes to rules that were unreasonable and hard to enforce, and to prices that quickly ran out of control. Wu described the campaign as a farce, though a tragedy for Chiang personally. According to the historian Parks M. Coble, its main effect was the flight of prominent capitalists from Shanghai to Hong Kong and elsewhere.^: 183

Political career in Taiwan

After the Communists took control of mainland China in 1949, Chiang and his father moved to Taiwan, where they re-established the government of the Republic of China. From late 1949, Chiang took charge of security, intelligence and military affairs. In March 1950 he became director of the General Political Department of the Ministry of National Defense. Chiang reorganized the military along Soviet lines, rebuilding the political officer corps and extending surveillance and KMT party activity throughout the armed forces.^: 195 General Sun Li-jen, a graduate of the American Virginia Military Institute, opposed these changes.^: 195 The China Youth Corps was established under Chiang's direction in October 1952, with Chiang as its first head.

Wu Kuo-chen, the governor of Taiwan and a rival of the Chiang family, was forced out of his post by Chiang Ching-kuo and left for the United States in 1953.^: 302 Chiang orchestrated the controversial arrest of General Sun in August 1955, on allegations that Sun had plotted a coup with the American Central Intelligence Agency against Chiang Kai-shek.^{: 302 : 181} Chiang Kai-shek placed Sun under house arrest. His detention continued after Chiang Ching-kuo became president, and he was released on the orders of President Lee Teng-hui a few months after Chiang Ching-kuo's death. The Control Yuan cleared Sun in 2001. The historian John W. Garver writes that Chiang also approved the arbitrary arrest and torture of prisoners.^: 243

In 1956 Chiang became head of the Executive Yuan's Veterans Affairs Commission. He was promoted to minister of national defense in January 1965, became vice premier in 1969, and was appointed premier in 1972. In 1970 he was the target of an assassination attempt in New York City by Peter Huang.^: 27

As premier, Chiang organized a people's diplomacy campaign in the United States to mobilize American opposition to the People's Republic of China (PRC) through mass demonstrations and petitions.^: 42 As part of these efforts, the KMT worked with the John Birch Society on a letter-writing campaign that urged Americans to ask their local officials to "Cut the Red China connection".^: 42

When Chiang Kai-shek died in April 1975, Vice President Yen Chia-kan completed his term as president, while Chiang Ching-kuo became leader of the KMT.

Presidency

The National Assembly elected Chiang president on 21 March 1978 for a six-year term, and he was sworn in on 20 May. He was re-elected in 1984 with Lee Teng-hui as his running mate. During his father's illness from 1973 to 1975 and after 1978, he worked to reduce corruption and favoritism and to bring more native-born Taiwanese into the legislative and executive branches, which had been dominated by officials from the mainland. He jailed some senior officials, including relatives, in an anticorruption campaign, imposed austerity, and introduced rules to make government more transparent.

Chiang is credited with the Ten Major Construction Projects. The writer Wu Feng-shan states that Taiwan's GDP grew nearly 16-fold during Chiang's 17 years as premier and president. Chiang also reformed labor rights in the 1970s and 1980s, covering child labor, women's employment, working hours, pensions, paid leave and employment contracts, through laws including the 1974 Labor Safety and Hygiene Law and the 1975 Factory Law. The average salary of Taiwanese workers tripled under his rule. Anti-strike laws and union-busting practices were relaxed, strengthening workers' bargaining power as martial law provisions were lifted.

After the United States ended formal diplomatic relations with the ROC in December 1978, Chiang kept Taiwan from overreacting and supported the Taiwan Relations Act, which preserved unofficial ties. He sought to protect Taiwan's foreign trade and political independence as many countries switched recognition to the PRC. He also adopted the Three Noes policy of no contact, no negotiation and no compromise with the CCP. In October 1981, the CCP leader Hu Yaobang publicly invited Chiang and other Taiwanese leaders to visit the mainland, an overture that Taipei rejected as a political maneuver aimed at eventual Communist rule over Taiwan. Chiang also rejected Deng Xiaoping's 1982 proposal of "one country, two systems", arguing that it would reduce the Republic of China to a local government. In the 1980s he opposed both recognizing the Communist government and negotiating reunification with the mainland.

After the August 1982 US–PRC joint communiqué, in which Washington agreed to gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan privately assured Chiang that it had not set a date to end arms sales, would not consult Beijing in advance on arms sales, and would not pressure Taipei to negotiate with the PRC, commitments known as the Six Assurances. Chiang also pursued a policy of military self-reliance to reduce Taiwan's dependence on the United States. As part of this effort, he launched the Indigenous Defense Fighter program, whose first aircraft was completed in 1988. Relations were strained after Taiwanese military intelligence operatives arranged the October 1984 murder of the Taiwanese-American dissident journalist Henry Liu in the garage of his home in California.

Chiang had a close personal friendship and political alliance with the Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, which laid the foundation for close cooperation between the two countries. Under an agreement codenamed Project Starlight, the Singapore Armed Forces trained troops and held military exercises in Taiwan, and Lee occasionally acted as a discreet go-between for mainland China and Taiwan.

In February 1985, Cathay Group, one of Taiwan's largest private conglomerates, and the Tenth Credit Cooperative, a major savings and loan institution, collapsed after violations of financial regulations, illegal self-dealing and unauthorized deposit collection. The failure caused panic and runs on local credit cooperatives, led to the resignations of senior officials, and weakened Chiang's political authority.

Political liberalization and succession

On 10 December 1979, a pro-democracy rally in Kaohsiung organized by the Tangwai opposition's Formosa Magazine turned violent after troops and police surrounded the protesters, in what became known as the Kaohsiung Incident. Opposition leaders including Annette Lu, Chen Chu and Lin Yi-hsiung were tried for sedition by a military court and received sentences ranging from 12 years to life imprisonment. Chiang later negotiated with the opposition, which led to Taiwan's first competitive national elections in 1980, and he oversaw the legislative election of 1983. When the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was founded on 28 September 1986, Chiang decided against dissolving the party or persecuting its leaders. That year saw Taiwan's first two-party election.

On 15 July 1987, Chiang ended martial law, which had been in force for 39 years. Military trials of civilians were abolished, but new national security laws kept bans on gatherings that promoted communism or independence. In the same year he ended the ban on travel to mainland China, opening personal and economic contact across the Taiwan Strait for the first time since 1949. The ban on new newspapers, in force since 1952, ended on 1 January 1988, and the number of newspapers rose from 31 to 126 by the end of that year. As premier in 1974, Chiang had defended the press environment by citing Taiwan's 31 newspapers and more than 1,900 publishing houses.

As premier, Chiang had recruited the agricultural economist Lee Teng-hui, who left academia, joined the KMT and became a minister without portfolio at the age of 49. Within a decade, Lee rose to become Mayor of Taipei and governor of Taiwan Province. Lee had built a reputation as an effective technocrat, and he had no power base of his own within the KMT. Chiang placed Lee and other Taiwanese in important positions in the party and government. In November 1983, he sidelined Wang Sheng, the head of the General Political Warfare Department, by sending him to Paraguay as ambassador.^{: 179–180} Lee became vice president in May 1984, which placed him first in line to succeed Chiang.

None of Chiang's three sons was considered a suitable successor, because of lack of interest, scandals and poor health. On 25 December 1985, Constitution Day in Taiwan, Chiang said that no member of his family would be a candidate in the next presidential election. In February 1990, after a group of National Assembly members proposed Lin Yang-kang for president, Chiang's brother Chiang Wei-kuo denied that Chiang had said members of the family could not run for president.^: 72

Legacy

Writing in Encyclopædia Britannica, the international studies scholar John F. Copper credits him with integrity and with democratizing Taiwan, launching a "political miracle" alongside its economic growth. Copper adds that polls into the 21st century found that most people regarded him as Taiwan's best president. In a 2019 Global Views poll, 38.7 percent of respondents named Chiang as the president who had contributed most to Taiwan, and a 2020 poll gave him a rating of 84.8 out of 100.

Wu Feng-shan acknowledges that Chiang was harsh toward political rivals and critics, and that many who suffered in his era still resent him, but judges that he did more good than harm. A 2022 editorial published in the Taipei Times credited Chiang with the Ten Major Construction Projects, localization, and the lifting of martial law and of the bans on new newspapers and political parties. The editorial also cited his role in the White Terror of the 1950s and 1960s, the Kaohsiung Incident and the murder of Henry Liu, and argued that his late reforms came mainly in response to pressure from Taiwanese citizens, the United States and diplomatic setbacks.

Relationship with Chang Ya-juo

Chiang met Chang Ya-juo when she was working at a training camp for enlistees and he was head of Gannan. The two had a relationship, and Chang gave birth to twin sons, Chang Hsiao-tzu and Chang Hsiao-yen, in 1942. In August 1942, Chang fell ill at a dinner party and died the next day in a hospital in Guilin. The circumstances of her death led to speculation that she had been murdered, and some of her relatives, including her sons, and former security officers said that the KMT security apparatus arranged her death to protect Chiang's career.

Chiang never spoke publicly about the twins. In a diary entry of 30 October 1954, he wrote that the twins' father was his late friend Wang Chi-chun, that he had acted as guarantor at the hospital, and that he supported the boys out of friendship for Wang. In a 2020 book on the diaries, the author Huang Ching-lung questioned this entry. He pointed to a 1942 entry in which Chiang was overjoyed at news of the twins' birth, and noted that the diary pages for 9 to 20 August 1942 are missing. Soong Mei-ling said that Chiang had denied being the father when she asked him.

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