Word: kai-shek
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...Even the heavens are weeping for President Chiang." That was the poetic phrase used by many Chinese in Taipei last week to describe the incessant downpour that accompanied the paying of respects to the late President Chiang Kai-shek (TIME, April 14). For many-especially the veteran Nationalists who followed Chiang to Taiwan after the Communists took control of the mainland in 1949-his passing was a wrenching emotional experience...
...people in Taiwan expected Chiang's passing to have much effect on the country's future. Real power had already been given to the Generalissimo's eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo, 65, who became Premier three years ago (Vice President C.K. Yen, who succeeds Chiang Kai-shek as President, is expected to be little more than a figurehead). Chiang Ching-kuo is unlikely to change his father's adamant refusal to negotiate any land of political settlement with the Communists in Peking...
...early 1940s, at the height of the Japanese invasion of China, Chiang Kai-shek wrote a book about China's past "humiliation" and future "reconstruction." He titled it China's Destiny, but Chiang might have called it My Destiny. He saw little distinction between his own fate and that of the giant, sprawling, poverty-stricken land that he ruled for just over 20 years. All his life, the lean and ambitious soldier fought bravely, though in the end vainly, to shape history to his personal specifications. When he died of a heart attack last week...
Clear-eyed, strong-jawed, supremely self-assured, Chiang Kai-shek (the name means "firm rock") was one of the century's major figures. As a revolutionary and ardent nationalist, he had an epic career embracing both triumph and tragedy. Sixty years of his life were consumed by bitter uphill struggles: first against the crumbling Manchu dynasty, then against the warlords who flourished in its ruins, next against invaders from imperial Japan and finally against the Communist peasant army that foreclosed his dream of dominance in China and chased him to an unhappy exile on Taiwan...
...Chiang's China as a unified nation with an effective central government, even idealizing it as a breeding ground for an American-style democracy. But it was none of these. Just before his death, Sun Yat-sen had described China as "a heap of loose sand." Chiang Kai-shek tried to build on that sand the foundations of a modern and united country. But during Chiang's entire tenure as China's leader, the country remained beset by outside aggression, deep internal divisions, corruption and inefficiency in Chiang's ruling party and, not least, his intractable...