Madame Chiang Kai-shek Dies; Chinese Chief's Powerful Widow
By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2003; Page B06
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 106, one of the world's most powerful, best-known and controversial women during the 1930s and 1940s and a major influence on United States policy toward China in those decades, died Oct. 24 at her apartment in New York. She caught a cold earlier in the week and then developed symptoms of pneumonia. She also had been treated for cancer.
Madame Chiang was the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist Chinese forces during both the civil war against the Chinese Communists and World War II against Japan. In that capacity, she was one of her husband's leading propagandists and a vital force in winning vast amounts of money and equipment for his cause.
Educated in the United States, she was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College, and she was said to have observed shortly after her graduation that she was "Chinese only in looks." Since Chiang did not speak English, she became his primary means of communication with the West.
Born Soong Mei-ling in Shanghai, Madame Chiang was the youngest and the last survivor of the legendary Soong sisters, each of whom played a vital role in China during the first half of the last century. Her eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling, married H.H. Kung and was said to have been a figure of immense power and influence during his career as a financier and later finance minister and premier of China.
The third sister, Soong Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, the architect of the 1911 Chinese revolution. She was one of the leading women in China before he died in 1925. Later, she broke with Chiang and sided with the Communists, who won over mainland China in 1949.
Their brother, T.V. Soong, was a Chinese businessman and financier who had also been foreign minister, finance minister and premier and by the late 1940s was thought to be one of the richest men in the world.
After Sun's death, Chiang took control of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party founded by Sun, but he was soon at war against Communist dissidents within the party and later with the Japanese. He had married Soong Mei-ling in 1927, and she became a top adviser with the authority to determine high policy in Chiang's war efforts. There was a well-known and widely repeated saying about the Soong sisters that "one loved money, one loved power and one loved China." Soong Mei-ling was said to have been the one who loved power.
She attracted wide coverage, much of it adulatory, in the Western press, especially Time, Life and Fortune magazines. Henry R. Luce, the founder and guiding force of the publications, was born in China to American missionary parents. Luce maintained a special interest in China all his life.
Supporters of the Chiangs tended to see them as the embodiment of all that was good in China and as the leaders in a valiant struggle against the forces of evil. They appeared on the cover of Time's first issue of 1938 as "Man and Wife of the Year," for 1937.
To their enemies, the Chiangs were the opportunistic overseers of a corrupt and decadent political apparatus that had little or no regard for human life or the well-being of China. Madame Chiang was the "Dragon Lady," imperious, hard-boiled and calculating.
She was widely perceived in the United States to have been one of the major figures of the so-called "China Lobby," a loose-knit but influential collection of Chinese nationals and their supporters who enjoyed great success in winning U.S. aid for China.
In the late 1930s, as the war with Japan escalated, Madame Chiang wrote dozens of articles for U.S. newspapers comparing the Japanese invaders to Genghis Khan and attacking the West for standing by while China was being overrun. She made worldwide radio broadcasts pleading for support for a "Free China" and in 1940 wrote two books, "China in Peace and War," and "This Is Our China," to argue her case.
In 1943, with the United States by then in the war, she made a triumphal tour of the United States, appearing before a joint session of Congress to ask for more U.S. aid, then later addressing a cheering "Free China" rally at New York's Madison Square Garden. Luce once again put her picture on the cover of Time. She spoke English with a southern accent -- acquired as a schoolgirl in Georgia -- but she dressed and acted like an empress. The media found her enchanting.
She stayed at the White House during that visit, but she did not enchant Eleanor Roosevelt, who observed later in her memoirs that Madame Chiang "can talk very convincingly about democracy . . . but she hasn't any idea how to live it."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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Madame Chiang Kai-shek, widow of the Nationalist Chinese president who used her charm and fluent English to become a driving force for nationalism, shown in 1950 in New York.
(AP)
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