The Generalissimo
Jay Taylor
Harvard University Press, 2022
Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalism defines modern China more than Mao’s communism. His was the first serious Chinese modernization project, which he achieved in Taiwan.
A few days ago, a sentence by Xi Jinping in the memories of the late Shinzo Abe caused a stir on social media. According to the Japanese president, Xi told him that if he had been born in the United States, he would have joined the Democratic or Republican Party, and not the American Communist Party. In short: he would have prioritized being a patriot over a communist. To some, that may sound strange: in today’s China there are still portraits of Mao and power is monopolized by the Communist Party. But if we look at China’s development in recent decades, the government’s project is closer to nationalism than socialism. And the first to put the idea of a modernizing nationalism for China into practice was not Mao Zedong, nor was it Deng Xiaoping, nor was it Xi Jinping. It was Chiang Kai-shek, a figure considered defeated, but the model of which has marked modern China more than that of the communist leaders he faced.
Chiang’s figure has been investigated and reassessed in recent years, after being marked more by communist propaganda and his Western allies, than by a serious historiographical knowledge of Chiang and his times. A good example of this rigorous new inquiry into his figure is the biography of Jay Taylor The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. Although at times a bit dry reading, Taylor’s biography is important, as it thoroughly studies Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) period of rule over China, dispels entrenched myths and clichés, and shows the clear links between the project of this one with present-day China.
Taylor leaves behind the widespread but simplistic image of the Chiang government as utterly corrupt, dominated by foreign powers, right-wing and inefficient. Indeed, Taylor shows how this caricature of Chiang was formed by a combination of Chinese communist propaganda and its repetition by Americans who saw Chiang as a corrupt military dictator, but instead viewed Mao and his ilk as as liberal quasi-democrats without an iota of totalitarianism. In Chiang’s nationalist China there were authoritarian practices, but there were always spaces for critical press and even national elections were promoted. In Mao’s China, those spaces for freedom and dissidence were not allowed: problems did not come to light because it was directly forbidden to show them. Many outside observers failed to realize that Chiang’s imperfect model was far more liberal than the supposedly conflict-free proto-totalitarianism that Mao was already…
