Word: chiangs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mainland since he left with his family at the age of 10 in 1946. The meeting inevitably kindled memories of the last time the KMT and the Communist Party joined forces?in 1937 to fight the Japanese?and the 1945 meeting in which Mao Zedong and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek reached a shaky agreement, which collapsed into the final four years of civil war that forced the KMT to Taiwan...
...state, which he isn't. Taiwan's President is Chen Shui-bian, and he and his supporters want to stand up to China, not cozy up. Chen actually endorsed Lien's trip at the last minute. But the phoniness of that rapprochement was on display at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport the morning Lien boarded the plane. Hundreds of pro-independence supporters, accusing Lien of "selling out Taiwan," clashed with his well-wishers. Fists, stones and eggs were thrown. Old men were beaten to the ground. One man was struck with a nunchaku, the martial-arts fighting weapon...
...past: the uprooted Charlie living off the kindness of Southern strangers and being fed, on antebellum verandas, heavy doses of the Bible and the idea of America as the Promised Land; his return to the revolutionary cells of Shanghai, where his daughters drifted into circles crowded with apprentice brigands; Chiang's internecine battles with the Communists, followed by his perilous rule under the sway of swindlers and drug peddlers like "Big-Eared Tu" and "Pock-marked Huang"; and, finally, the tragic consequences of a war during which the Soongs sometimes regarded China as their private property...
Often, however, Seagrave's thesis tyrannizes his judgment, and his narrative tapestry reveals too insistent a design. Chiang's anti-Communist policy was in large part an act of self-defense. Had Mao's forces won in the '30s, Chiang and his colleagues would surely have been executed. Estimates of those killed in the famine vary widely, Seagrave acknowledges, but Chiang's pro-Communist antagonist Edgar Snow places it at a million, so a million it is. Seagrave's enemies' enemies are invariably his friends: thus Ching-ling, the family's black sheep, is portrayed as a "transcendent beauty...
Below all, Seagrave's bright irreverence in portraying Sun Yat-sen as a character from opera bouffe and Chiang as an "ill-tempered bravo" almost contradicts the charges of Machiavellian villainy he wishes to press. The Soong Dynasty brings much pungent material to light; in the end, however, it works less well as an argument with history than as a crackling, made-for-TV story unraveled with fluency and flair. --By Pico Iyer