Chiang Kai-Shek Quotes

Chaing Kai Chek seemed to have the Red Army on the run with far more guns, planes & men. However while Chaing thought he was chasing the Communists, the Red Army traveled through 11 major Chinese provinces, helping the peasants to harvest their crops, build their homes, care for their sick & get indoctrinated in Communist political philosophy. In comparison, the Chaing forces abused the peasants, corruptly stole from them & brought no improvement in their living standard, sense of hope or fairness. Massive retreat became massive victory as so much of China had a Chance to compare the communists with the Kuomintang & unfortunately chose communism as Chaing and the Kuomingtang was such a poor example of capitalism-corrupt, ineffectual and heartless. At the same time, Mao and the other communist leaders were brilliant in their use of the retreating army to improve the lot of the peasants and left their biggest supporters as they were driven to the next province and repeated the process.

The early revolutionary Chinese Communists had a much more democratic and civil-liberties oriented view of government than after the had won and gained control of China. Then the problems were so enormous with such meager resources that the insecurity of the party government let to a civil rights flip flop and a politically authoritarian government. Stability is today the most important priority for the Chinese Communist party so that free speech, protests and other civil liberties are curtailed. Economic development is the more important activity and political development is lagging, but while economic development is racing ahead, Chinese political development improves only slowly. Dissidents like Liu Xiaobo are pushing the process.

Nguyen Ai Quoc was early pseudonym. In 1945 at the end of World War II, the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek invaded Vietnam instead of attacking the Japanese. 200,000 Chinese troops occupied Vietnam when the war ended. Ho Chi Min and other Vietnamese nationalists diplomatically worked to restore the order of things before the war and have the French return to Vietnam. Many were very critical of Ho for enabling the French Colonials to return with 15,000 troops, as they replaced the Chinese forces. After he made this statement, the Vietnamese then ousted the French and gained their independence but are continuously wary of China, their neighbor to the North and traditional enemy. To this day, Chinese maps refer to Vietnam as “The South-East China Province.”

Before American entry into the War with Japan, Chiang Kai-shek and the Soongs maintained that they were fighting the Japanese but it was not generally true. They were fighting Mao and his Communists while Mao was fighting the Japanese. By 1942, under pressure from the United States and Russia, the Nationalists and Communists agreed to a truce so that they could both fight against Japan. Based on the promises made to President Roosevelt by Madam Chiang, the Soongs, and Chiang himself, there was an expectation of extensive military attacks against the Japanese. The U. S. then sent a large amount of military aid to Chiang Kai-shek, but there did not appear to be any significant attacks against the Japanese other than those mounted by the Communists. Magruder, General Marshall’s emissary to Chiang Kai-shek was instructed to investigate. When the war ended, Chiang Kai-shek used the assets he was saving in to attack Mao and his communists just as he had done before the truce. Magruder had been right. However, just as Chiang could not defeat the militarily inferior Communists before the truce, he could not do so after. Soon Mao turned the tables and drove Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists out of Mainland China. President Roosevelt had brilliantly judged the ability of England, Russia, and Yugoslavia to fight the Germans, but as this quotation and {641677} shows, he listened to the wrong people. He had been sold a “bill of goods” by the China Lobby, the Soongs and Chiang Kai-shek.

Referring to involvement of Chiang Kai-Shek in the Korean War:

This was just a month after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Anyone at that time, who promised to attack Japan would get a serious hearing, and Chiang Kai-shek and the China Lobby were making extraordinary promises. FDR wanted to give Chiang’s Nationalist government an extraordinary $½ Billion in aid. One interesting aspect of this quotation is the wording. Note that the President used the word “invent”. He realized that there was no existing mechanism whereby they could simply send such a huge block of money to a foreign country on the promise that they would use it for fighting the Japanese. If there were, he would have had the War Department or the State Department to do it. So he asked his most trusted and creative cabinet member to “invent” a way to do it. Morgenthau came through with a very complicated, elaborate scheme that Congress approved the following week. The money was sent, but Chiang Kai-shek did not spend it all for fighting the Japanese—his idea was to let the Chinese Communists under Mao wear themselves down fighting the Japanese, and Chiang could use the American military assets to then wipe out the communists, his only political opponents. See {641676}.

In World War II, all the Chinese political organizations united to fight the Japanese invaders. The Communists however did most of the fighting and took the heaviest casualties. He proposed turning on their weakened allies and that was accepted by Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader. They attacked the Communists under Mao and Cho En Lai and forced them to flee across the country in the “Long March”. The Nationalists and their warlords were hated by the majority of the Chinese, especially the peasants who provided help and support to the Communists while they made their escape. They then regrouped and attacked the Nationalists in the Chinese Revolution and this time Chiang Kai-shek, Bai Chongxi and the other Chinese Leaders fled. With few people to help them, they had to flee to Taiwan, and the Communists took over China. Some historians believe that it was Chiang Kai-shek’s strategy all along to hold his soldiers back and let the Communists bear the casualties with the intention of turning on then when the Japanese were expelled. Others claim that Chiang’s relatively unaggressive military action against the Japanese reflected his typical conservatism and avoidance of risk and there was no intention to attack the Communists after the war and the alliance was made in good faith. Note that the leading Muslims in China (where they are a significant minority) were allied with the Chinese Christians against the Communists. Bai Chongxi had a special Muslim newspaper which regularly published religious quoted from the Koran and the Hadith purporting to support and justify Chiang Kai-shek, a Christian, as the rightful leader of China. This was another example of Islam being hijacked for a narrow political purpose. Also, note his use of the word “bandits”. This is a huge insult in the Chinese language culture. So of course the Nationalists used it to refer to the Communists—See {613286} .

The warlord flipped back and forth between the Communists and the Autocrat, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government fending both off so that he could rule his province as he wished. It illustrates that when the Kuomintang and the Communists accused each other of allying themselves with brutal warlords, they were both right. In the quest for victory in the Chinese Civil War, both sides made a mockery of their “principles”.

The Communists under Mao won the Civil War easily as the Nationalists were not only corrupt and very unpopular, but they were not very interested in the welfare of the Chinese peasants. Further Chiang was a ruthless dictator. At the time there was great pressure for America to support any faction that was anti Communist regardless of how bad they were themselves. Davies and others who thought that we should have communications with the Communists who would soon control China, were viciously attacked by Senator McCarthy who accused Davies of “loosing China” and the Senator and some other Americans thought that the Nationalists could win the Civil War. We now know that they never had a chance, but at the time they did a very good job of promoting their cause and capability in the United States and especially in Washington. None the less, in the Red Scare, Davies was fired, only to thereafter be awarded the highest civilian award in the nation in recognition of his great and patriotic work.

He was a virulent anti communist and an opponent and foe of Chiang Kai-shek who he regarded as too moderate.