Word: kaies
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...China it had been an era of feverish surface progress. "Westernization" had brought plumbing, the beginnings of legislative government and mass education; it had also brought machine guns and Christianity and Karl Marx. Chiang Kai-shek had been a part of all of it; the era's story was his story...
...next ten years, until Chiang Kai-shek threw himself against the Japanese, most of his military strength was spent harrying the Communists from province to province. Chiang made the south too hot for the Communists, but in 1934, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, they marched 6,000 miles from the farthest point in Fukien Province to the red loess hills of Shensi, and set up a Communist capital at Yenan...
Part of the price the U.S. had paid Joseph Stalin at Yalta was a promise that the U.S. would support Russia's bid for a "special position" in Manchuria: control of the South Manchurian Railroad, Dairen and Port Arthur. Told about this deal months later, Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly accepted. Further, when the Russians marched into Manchuria, three days after the atom bomb on Hiroshima, they disarmed the Japanese, then handed the arms to the Chinese Communists. Chiang was not surprised. Even when both he and the Reds were arrayed against the Japanese, Chiang used to say: "The Japanese...
...difference between Chiang Kai-shek and a Western European, such as the late Jan Masaryk, was that Chiang never believed that his Communists were "different." He had known them too long, had sensed better than many men in the West that there was no position of neutrality one could take with Communists. Mao Tse-tung had put it very well: "To use the word 'neutral' is to do nothing but cheat oneself...
...Chiang Kai-shek is a man of principle, not an opportunist, not a warlord, not (his enemies finally admitted) a grafter. His principles, however, are not always clear or consistent. The conflict between the old and new, unresolved in China, is also unresolved in China's Chiang. He had been right so often, when those around him were wrong, that taking advice did not come easily to him. Three times-from Canton, from Sian, and from Chungking-he had fought his way out of hopeless situations. Such an experience might breed arrogance, and many believe that Chiang is arrogant...