Word: soong
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...Minister of War-young, able General Chen Cheng (TIME, Nov. 27). Just as important, Chiang had reorganized his civil administration. To China's No. 2 job, Acting President of the Executive Yuan, he appointed China's ablest administrator, his brother-in-law, Foreign Minister Tse-veng ("T.V.") Soong. The crisis - military, economic and political - was now at hand. On its outcome rested not only the future of Chiang Kai-shek's Government, but the future of China's 400,000,000 people. The crisis had brought T.V. his biggest, hardest task, for which all others...
...Soong was born the year (1894) of the Sino-Japanese war in which Japan took the Liu Chiu Islands and Formosa from China. His father, of Hainanese trader stock, was Charlie Jones Soong, who as a boy (9) came to the U.S., be came a Christian and returned to China to father one of the world's most distinguished broods of children. T.V. is the brother of the famed Soong sisters, China's three first ladies— Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), Ailing (Madame H. H. Kung), Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek). Of Soong...
...conditioned the rest of T.V. Soong's life. The Soong children called Dr. Sun Yat-sen "uncle." But they were too busy climbing garden walls, studying Confucius, learning Chinese nursery rhymes, Jesus Loves Me, and the story of George Washington to know what the little revolutionist would mean to China and to them. T.V. was a weedy adolescent (he outgrew his clothes every three months, and Sister Mei-ling wore his hand-me-downs) when the Revolution of 1911 broke out. "Uncle" Sun was not even around. He was in a Denver, Colo. restaurant, collecting funds from Chinese sympathizers...
Exile's Education. But the new Republic died practically in its swaddling clothes. Within a year, ambitious Yuan Shih-Kai, a former Manchu general, had taken over. Again Dr. Sun fled abroad. This time the Soongs, who were deeply involved in his political schemes, went with him. For almost two years they lived the life of fugitive revolutionists, under assumed names, in Japan. But even in exile Charlie Soong and his wife never gave up one ambition: a U.S. education for their children...
They succeeded in sending "Scholarly Son" to St. John's (missionary) School in Shanghai. Then he went off to Boston-but unlike Charlie Soong, T.V. went on to Harvard. A tall, slender undergraduate, he majored in economics, earned a B average. From Cambridge, T.V. went down to New York, for further study at Columbia. On the side he clerked for the National City Bank, then suddenly chucked it all for a business career in China. He was 29, a middling success as a coal-&-iron merchant, a young family man married to a former missionary-school belle...