Chiang Ching-kuo (, 27 April 1910 – 13 January 1988) was a Chinese and Taiwanese statesman and diplomat. He served as the president of the Republic of China from 1978 until his death in 1988, and acted as a de facto leader of the country by serving as Premier from 1972 to 1978. He was also the chairman of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party from 1975. During his presidency, Taiwan ended martial law and began political liberalization.
Chiang was born in Fenghwa, Chekiang as the eldest and only biological son of Chiang Kai-shek, the commander of National Revolutionary Army and KMT leader. He attended school in Shanghai and Beijing, where he became interested in socialism and communism. As a teenager in 1925, when the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were allied in the First United Front, he was sent to the Soviet Union (USSR) to attend university; he spoke Russian fluently. In 1927, due to the KMT's White Terror against the CCP, the Soviets sent Chiang to work in a steel factory in the Ural Mountains where he met and married Faina Vakhreva. In 1937, the Soviets returned the couple back to China shortly before the Second Sino-Japanese War. He entered the Nationalist government and served as the administrative commissioner of Gannan Prefecture in Jiangxi province from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. In 1948, Chiang went to Shanghai to enforce strict economic controls and fight inflation. He tried to freeze prices and force wealthy merchants to turn in Chinese gold yuan, but the campaign ultimately failed amid severe economic collapse. In 1949, he moved to Taiwan when the KMT lost the Chinese Civil War.
Chiang held successively powerful government posts on Taiwan. Initially he was director of Taiwan Garrison Command, the military secret police organization which used arbitrary arrests and torture to support the White Terror. He became Minister of Defense in 1965, vice-premier in 1969, premier in 1972, and then president for two terms starting in 1978 and 1984 respectively. He became KMT chairman after Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975. As president, the authoritarian state became more tolerant of political dissent, eventually relaxing restrictions to media and speech and permitting Democratic Progressive Party candidates to stand for election. Chiang increased the political representation and participation of local Taiwanese (benshengren) over post-World War II migrants from the mainland (waishengren) who had typically been favored; his successor, Lee Teng-hui, was benshengren. Chiang is credited with Soviet-inspired city planning policies, economic development with the Ten Major Construction Projects, anti-corruption efforts and Taiwan's democratic transition.
Biography
Early life
The son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife, Mao Fumei, Chiang Ching-kuo was born in Fenghua, Zhejiang, with the courtesy name of Chien-feng (). He had an adopted brother, Chiang Wei-kuo. literally means , while means ; in his brother's name, literally means . The names are inspired by the references in Chinese classics such as the Guoyu, in which "to draw the longitudes and latitudes of the world" is used as a metaphor for a person with great abilities, especially in managing a country.
While the young Chiang Ching-kuo had a good relationship with his mother and grandmother (who were deeply rooted to their Buddhist faith), his relationship with his father was strict, utilitarian and often rocky. Chiang Kai-shek appeared to his son as an authoritarian figure, sometimes indifferent to his problems. Even in personal letters between the two, Chiang Kai-shek would sternly order his son to improve his Chinese calligraphy. From 1916 until 1919 Chiang Ching-kuo attended the Grammar School in Wushan Temple, an important temple in Xikou Town. Then, in 1920, his father hired tutors to teach him the Four Books, the central texts of Confucianism. On 4 June 1921, Ching-kuo's grandmother died. What might have been an immense emotional loss was compensated for when Chiang Kai-shek moved the family to Shanghai. Chiang Ching-kuo's stepmother, historically known as the Chiang family's "Shanghai Mother", went with them. During this period Chiang Kai-shek concluded that Chiang Ching-kuo was a son to be taught, while Chiang Wei-kuo was a son to be loved.
During his time in Shanghai, Chiang Ching-kuo was supervised by his father and made to write a weekly letter of 200–300 Chinese characters. Chiang Kai-shek also underlined the importance of classical books and of learning English, two areas he was hardly proficient in himself.letter of 4 August 1922 On 20 March 1924, Chiang Ching-kuo was able to present to his now-nationally famous father a proposal concerning the grass-roots organization of the rural population in Xikou.Wang Shun-ch'i, unpublished article, 1995. The letter is in the Nanking archive
In early 1925, Chiang entered Shanghai's Pudong College, but Chiang Kai-shek decided to send him on to Beijing because of warlord action and spontaneous student protests in Shanghai. In Beijing, he attended the school organized by a friend of his father, Wu Zhihui, a renowned scholar and linguist. The school combined classical and modern approaches to education. While there, Ching-kuo started to identify himself as a progressive revolutionary and participated in the flourishing social scene inside the young Communist community. The idea of studying in Moscow now seized his imagination.Cline, Chiang Ching-kuo remembered, p. 148 Within the help program provided by the Soviet Union to the countries of East Asia, there was a training school that later became the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. The participants to the university were selected by the CPSU and KMT members, with a participation of CPC Central Committee.
Chiang Ching-kuo asked Wu Zhihui to name him as a KMT candidate. Wu did not try to dissuade him, even though Wu was a key figure of the right-leaning and anti-Communist Western Hills Group of the KMT. In the summer of 1925, Chiang Ching-kuo traveled south to Whampoa Military Academy to discuss his plans for study in Moscow with his father. Chiang Kai-shek was not keen, but after a discussion with Chen Guofu he finally agreed. In a 1996 interview, Ch'en's brother, Chen Li-fu, recalled that Chiang Kai-shek accepted the plan because of the need to have Soviet support at a time when his hold over the KMT was tenuous.Ch'en Li-fu, interview, Taipei, 29 May 1996.
Moscow With or without his father's enthusiastic approval, Chiang Ching-kuo went on to Moscow in late 1925. He stayed in the Soviet Union for nearly twelve years. While there, Chiang was given the Russian name Nikolai Vladimirovich Elizarov () and put under the tutelage of Karl Radek at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Noted for having an exceptional grasp of international politics, his classmates included other children of influential Chinese families, most notably the future Chinese Communist party leader, Deng Xiaoping. Chiang Ching-kuo joined the Communist Youth League under Deng.俄國檔案中的留蘇學生蔣經國. Jiang Jingguo's Student Years in the Soviet Union as Reflected in the Russian Archives. 余敏玲(Miin-Ling Yu). 近代史研究所集刊； 29期 1998 p.121 Soon Ching-kuo was an enthusiastic student of Communist ideology, particularly Trotskyism; though following the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin privately met with him and ordered him to publicly denounce Trotskyism. Chiang even applied to be a member of the All-Union Communist Party, although his request was denied.
In April 1927, however, Chiang Kai-shek purged KMT leftists, had Communists arrested or killed, and expelled his Soviet advisers. Chiang Ching-kuo responded from Moscow with an editorial that harshly criticized his father's actions but was nonetheless detained as a "guest" of the Soviet Union, a practical hostage. The historiographic debate still continues as to whether he was forced to write the editorial, but he had seen Trotskyist friends arrested and killed by the Soviet secret police. The Soviet government sent him to work in the Ural Heavy Machinery Plant, a steel factory in the Urals, Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), where he met Faina Ipat'evna Vakhreva, a native Belarusian. They married on 15 March 1935, and she would later take the Chinese name Chiang Fang-liang. In December of that year, their son, Hsiao-wen was born.
Chiang Kai-shek refused to negotiate a prisoner swap for his son in exchange for a Chinese Communist Party leader. He wrote in his diary, "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son." In 1937, he maintained that "I would rather have no offspring than sacrifice our nation's interests", since he had no intention of stopping the war against the Communists.
Return to China and WWII
Stalin allowed Chiang Ching-kuo to return to China with his Belarusian wife and son in April 1937 after living in the USSR for 12 years.
By then, the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong had signed a ceasefire to create the Second United Front and fight the Japanese invasion of China, which began in July 1937. Stalin hoped the Chinese would keep Japan from invading the Soviet Pacific coast, and he hoped to form an anti-Japanese alliance with the senior Chiang.
On Ching-kuo's return, his father assigned a tutor, Hsu Dau-lin, to assist with his readjustment to China.Taylor 2000. Chiang Ching-kuo was appointed as a specialist in remote districts of Jiangxi where he was credited with training of cadres and fighting corruption, opium consumption, and illiteracy. Chiang Ching-kuo was appointed as commissioner of Gannan Prefecture () between 1939 and 1945; there he banned smoking, gambling and prostitution, studied governmental management, allowed for economic expansion and a change in social outlook. His efforts were hailed as a miracle in the political war in China, then coined as the "Gannan New Deal" (). During his time in Gannan, from 1940 he implemented a "public information desk" where ordinary people could visit him if they had problems, and according to records, Chiang Ching-kuo received a total of 1,023 people during such sessions in 1942.
In regard to the ban on prostitution and closing of brothels, Chiang implemented a policy where former prostitutes became employed in factories. Due to the large number of refugees in Ganzhou as a result from the ongoing war, thousands of orphans lived on the street; in June 1942, Chiang Ching-kuo formally established the Chinese Children's Village () in the outskirts of Ganzhou, with facilities such as a nursery, kindergarten, primary school, hospital and gymnasium. During the last years of the 1930s, he met Wang Sheng, with whom he would remain close for the next 50 years.
The paramilitary "Sanmin Zhuyi Youth Corps" was under Chiang's control. Chiang used the term "big bourgeoisie", in a disparaging manner to call H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong.
While in mainland China, Chiang and his wife had a daughter, Hsiao-chang, born in Nanchang (1938), and two more sons, Hsiao-wu, born in Chongqing (1945), and Hsiao-yung, born in Shanghai (1948).
Relationship with Chang Ya-juo and her death Chiang met Chang Ya-juo when she was working at a training camp for enlistees and he was serving as the head of Gannan Prefecture during the war. The two had a relationship that brought twin sons: Chang Hsiao-tz'u and Chang Hsiao-yen, born in 1942. In August 1942, Chang felt sick at a dinner party, and died the next day in a Guilin hospital. The circumstances of her death raised speculation that it was murder. Over the years, many of her relatives, including her sons and highly ranked ex-security personnel, insisted that KMT's security apparatus orchestrated her murder to keep a lid on CCK's marital affair, and to protect CCK's political career.
Hostage claim