The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China

The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China Jay Taylor Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011Jay Taylor is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, having once served as the China desk officer in the U.S. State Department. When we consider the extensive original materials to which Taylor has had access, we can understand how it is that this very detailed, and yet readably accessible, chronological account of the life of Chiang Kai-shek is a substantial addition to the literature on modern China. Those materials, available through the Hoover Institution Archives, include the 56 years of Chiang's personal diary (the final portion of which was not released until the summer of 2009), and abundant memos and letters. Although the first Harvard University Press edition of this book came out in late 2008, Taylor added a Postscript in late 2010 to reflect those more recently released diary entries, which he reports have not contradicted any of the information conveyed in the original text.Chiang Kai-shek was, of course, one of the monumental figures of the twentieth century. His life, and the role he played at the center of China's history during the decades that followed the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, are essential pieces in the historical mosaic. This would make Taylor's biography of particular interest even if it were not made exceptional by the sources he has been able to employ.There are reasons, however, to see the book as both valuable and important while at the same time entertaining significant reservations about it. Taylor shows every indication of being a careful and meticulous scholar, and one who arrives at considerable objectivity by virtue of a basic fair-mindedness that precludes writing a partisan polemic. At the same time, however, he comes from an academic milieu that colors his perception of personalities and events and that atrophies his moral sensibilities. That academic milieu has long produced the conventionally accepted perception of Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. As is well known, during the critical years that led to Mao's 1949 conquest of the Chinese mainland, a coterie of American intellectuals insisted that the Chinese Communists weren't really Communists at all, but were social democrats and "agrarian reformers. " (John K. Fairbank, after whom the Fairbank Center at Harvard is named, was among them.) The result is that when Taylor undertakes to write a biography of Chiang, his conscientious narrative is sprinkled, here and there, with perversities of judgment that have been formed in this crucible, even though in various connections he has broken free of the conventional views.Taylor speaks of himself as a "moderate liberal and foreign policy pragmatist. " This means that in the context of today's intellectual culture his views would be seen as eminently reasonable. It is necessarily jarring to its "moderate" consensus to observe, as we must, that its understanding, not just of Mao but of Communism much more broadly, has been colored by a reality-denying condonation. Consider, for example, the passage in which Taylor describes a dichotomy as having existed in the 1940s between "the rational and secular humanist strains of both the Western and Chinese enlightenments," on the one hand, and "the ultra-nationalism, racism, and absolutism of atavistic fascism," on the other. Whom does he place on the "rational and secular humanist" side of this dichotomy? - "the liberal democratic, the pragmatic authoritarian, and the Jacobin totalitarian. " Thus, we are given to believe that the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, in the latter of these categories, stood on the "rational and secular humanist" side of the ledger. It is no doubt this orientation that prompts Taylor to give his readers a much understated description of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" in the late 1950s. Unless otherwise informed, a reader would have no idea that from 26 to 30 million people were starved to death in the largest atrocity in history. …