Word: soong
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...five years, excepting one short interval, Finance Minister T. V. Soong has found the money for the bigger-and-better conquests of his brother-in-law Marshal (now President) Chiang Kai-Shek. Last week President Chiang was so distressed by the resignation of Finance Minister Soong that he dropped all official business at Nanking, rushed to Shanghai, and day after day argued, pleaded...
...week, peered keenly through tortoise rimmed glasses at a respectful group of correspondents, read in flawless English a crisp, resolute announcement. He was sick and tired, he said, of raising the scores of millions of dollars which Nationalist China has been squandering annually on bootless wars. He, T. V. Soong, scion of the great "Soong Dynasty" of Shanghai bankers, would no more be a party to China's orgy of military waste. In fine, he announced his resignation as Finance Minister of the Nationalist Government. "I prefer to retire," concluded Banker Soong, "rather than face the just censure...
...there had been no Soong scion, if he had not learned sound banking and business principles at Harvard, the course of modern Chinese history would have run in a profoundly different rut. In 1922 the Nationalists, who have since conquered all China, were an insignificant group of zealots dominating only the region of Canton. On an income from local taxes of only one million dollars per month they could not finance a China-conquering expedition. Two years later young T. V. Soong was called to the Nationalist Finance Ministry...
Without increasing taxes Banker Soong magically increased the Canton tax yield from one to ten million dollars per month. He has said that he did it by cutting down graft, by rigid Harvard budgeting. On ten million dollars per month the Nationalists launched their successful war of conquest, financed additionally for a time by grants from Soviet Russia, a state with which they soon quarreled, are still quarreling...
...thrashed out between Soong and Chiang, the banker's principal grievance had to do with the conqueror's reluctance to cut down Nanking's stupendous military forces. Today Nationalist China has the largest standing army in the world, though by no means the most effective. A rabble nearly 1,500,000 strong are the soldiers of Nationalism, nondescript, ill-drilled, often ragged. Some of their commanders are hired bandit chieftains, others are feudal "War Lords" left over from previous regimes. The cream are spruce, young, "intellectual" Nationalist generals. But the whole motley gang have costly appetites...