* List of Maps * Acknowledgments * Note on Romanization * Prologue * I. Revolution *1. A Neo-Confucian Youth *2. The Northern Expedition and Civil War *3. The Nanking Decade * II. War of Resistance *1. The Long War Begins *2. Chiang and His American Allies *3. The China Theater *4. Yalta, Manchuria, and Postwar Strategy * III. Civil War *1. Chimera of Victory *2. The Great Failure * IV. The Island *1. Streams in the Desert *2. Managing the Protector *3. Shifting Dynamics *4. Nixon and the Last Years * Epilogue * Notes * Index
The story of Chiang Kai-shek is so big, so interwoven with the story of modern China, and so complex, that it has defied a good biographical treatment. Now, Jay Taylor has provided us with a strong, vivid, and eminently readable biography of this major twentieth-century leader that captures his 'life and times' better than any previous work in English. -- William C. Kirby Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University This splendid biography far surpasses previous scholarship on Chiang Kai-shek, providing new insights into the savage international and civil wars in China that raged for almost thirty years as well as Chiang's quarter century on Taiwan where he laid the predicate for democratic governance on the besieged island. -- David Lampton, Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Following his masterful account The Generalissimo's Son, Taylor has fully tapped Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries and a comprehensive range of sources to provide the most authoritative assessment of this towering figure in the Chinese revolution and global politics of the 20th century. -- Robert Sutter, Visiting Professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Chiang Kai-shek rivaled Mao as a dominant figure in the history of modern China. Taylor has taken a fresh look at his long, eventful life based on new sources, and suggests a controversial but persuasive new reading of Chiang's motives and actions. This vividly realized account will be the authoritative work for a long time to come. -- Andrew J. Nathan, author of China's Transition
Jay Taylor is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
Taylor succeeds in recovering a complicated man who was responsible
for military and economic success as well as stunning failures… The
Generalissimo is now the best English-language biography available.
Taylor has considerable narrative skills, and is the first Western
biographer to have drawn on Chiang Kai-shek’s handwritten
diaries.
*Times Literary Supplement*
This enthralling book by Jay Taylor of Harvard University shows
that [the] conventional views of both Chiang and the Chinese civil
war are caricatures. It is the first biography to make full use of
the Chiang family archive. This includes Chiang’s own diary, in
which he wrote at least a page of classical Chinese daily from 1918
to 1972. The picture that emerges is of a far more subtle and
prescient thinker than the man America’s General Joseph Stilwell
used to refer to as ‘peanut,’ and Britain’s chief of staff,
Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, dismissed in Cairo as ‘a cross
between a pine marten and a ferret.’
*The Economist*
Chiang Kai-shek has long been viewed as a failure for having lost
mainland China to Mao’s People’s Liberation Army in a stunningly
short span of time. This richly detailed biography argues that
Chiang’s neo-Confucian vision for a modern China may yet win…
Drawing on a revelatory cache of newly available diaries and
records, Taylor reveals the complexities of the soldier and
statesman, showing him to be shockingly brutal at times, oddly
passive at others, naïvely earnest, quick to tears, and always
surrounded by intrigue.
*New Yorker*
Jay Taylor’s new biography, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and
the Struggle for Modern China, challenges the catechism on which
generations of Americans have been weaned. Marshaling archival
materials made newly available to researchers, including about four
decades’ worth of Chiang’s daily diaries and documents from the
Soviet era, it torpedoes many of that catechism’s cherished tenets.
This is an important, controversial book… Chiang emerges as a
flesh-and-blood man rather than the buffoonish cardboard-cutout
figure he has generally been portrayed as.
*Washington Post Book World*
Even in the rapidly widening field of modern Chinese history, it is
unusual and gratifying to read a book that upsets not only the
reader’s previous views but even those of the author himself… Now a
different Chiang stands before us. Drawing on new material, years
of interviews with the dwindling number of those with first-hand
memories of the Chiang family, and scrutiny of Chiang’s voluminous
diaries, Taylor reveals a much more interesting and despite his
stiff exterior, frequently adaptable Chiang… The book is a huge
advance on our knowledge of what happened in China from the early
twentieth century to the present day, when an updated version of
Chiang’s Kuomintang is again in power in Taipei… There will be no
oblivion [for Chiang]. Jay Taylor has seen to that… A substantial
and comprehensive contribution to our knowledge of China.
*Literary Review*
Taylor shows in great detail that Chiang and his often-maligned
troops fought more effectively against Japan’s heavily armed and
well trained war machine than is generally realized. He also
depicts in a mostly positive light Chiang’s performance during a
quarter of a century in exile at the head of the Nationalist
government on Taiwan, where he set the stage for the island’s shift
from dictatorship to democracy… Generalissimo is well-written, and
takes on an epic quality as Taylor guides us through many turning
points in modern Chinese history. He draws on new materials, but
his greatest strength is the fairness of his approach.
*Christian Science Monitor*
More than three decades after his death, Chiang is still the most
controversial and polarizing figure in Taiwanese politics. In his
new biography, Jay Taylor attempts to weave a life out of
historical fact and rescue one of the central figures of modern
Chinese history from the emotional effervescence of both supporters
and detractors… Taylor does much to overturn the popular reading of
[Chiang] and to illustrate Chiang’s contributions to the Allied war
effort. While his scholarship presents a more nuanced view of
Chiang, it also uncovers a darker narrative for the Allies, who
repeatedly failed to honor their commitments to Chiang… Judging by
his stated goal of challenging assumptions and rounding out
cardboard characterizations of Chiang, Taylor succeeds admirably.
He uncovers a man devoted to reversing a century of humiliation in
China.
*Far Eastern Economic Review*
The traditional view of ‘General Cash-My-Check’ as a corrupt and
incompetent bit-part player in the story of modern Chinese history
is overturned here. Taylor suggests that far from being an
incompetent dictator he was actually a shrewd and even noble man,
making the best out of a bad hand.
*Financial Times*
A new and apparently exhaustive biography… This could well be one
of the more important non-fiction books of the year.
*Marginal Revolution*
[An] important book… Coming closer to Chiang than previous
biographers, Taylor provides new insight on his character—a
combination of unwavering physical bravery and discipline with a
sense of martyrdom and shame… Taylor’s long section on Chiang’s
years in Taiwan is one of the most masterful parts of his book,
opening up a subject that no one else had seriously
investigated.
*New Republic*
This careful culling and quoting of Chiang’s diaries is a device
Taylor uses effectively to show Chiang’s personal qualities. Taylor
rejects the commonly held notion that these diaries deserve to be
ignored, as being devoid of historical interest; instead, by
juxtaposing quotations from Chiang’s diaries with vivid and
detailed descriptions of the major political and military events
unfolding in the wider world, he gives a kind of intimacy to what
otherwise might be merely inchoate reflections. Thus, to some
extent, Taylor has been able to construct a series of more
emotional linkages between Chiang and the world within which he
worked.
*New York Review of Books*
Now that Jay Taylor has written his comprehensive book The
Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China,
we are able to see Chiang as a man of considerable cunning,
brutality and patience who skillfully played a weak hand against
the Japanese and Mao’s forces while extracting huge sums from the
Americans.
*New York Times Book Review*
Reading [Taylor’s] excellent, scholarly work, the fruit of five
years’ research, one does not warm to Chiang but comes to
appreciate the emotional complexity of his character, and to admire
his fortitude in the face of colossal odds.
*The Tablet*
Through using newly available archival materials dating back some
40 years, including Chiang’s daily diaries, Kuomintang and ROC
government documents, Russian records and interviews with key
figures, [Taylor] has produced a deeply researched book that
follows the generalissimo from his days on the mainland until his
death in Taiwan. But what makes Taylor’s work so special are the
numerous in-depth and eminently readable accounts of Chiang’s life.
For the first time, the grandiose layers of appearance and reality
that the generalissimo built up around him are stripped back to
reveal the man behind the myth. Taylor’s epic book is a landmark
tome in Chinese studies because it shows that the generalissimo,
far from being a sham Caesar who lost the mainland to Mao Zedong
and communism in a surprisingly short period of time, gave the
nation its best government in the 20th century. This revisionist
take, which is told with a flair befitting the subject, shows
Chiang to be an honorable and talented man who was subject to
ungovernable fits of temper that often led to impetuous decisions…
[This] excellent biography…should be mandatory reading for those
seeking to garner a better understanding of the mainland and its
political and social direction in the 21st century.
*Taiwan Today*
Master of his material, [Taylor] provides excellent in-depth
accounts of episodes such as Chiang’s kidnapping by Zhang Xueliang,
the Manchurian exiled warlord, at Christmas 1936, the negotiations
over the years between Nationalists and Communists and the old
man’s later years in Taiwan… This is the most thorough inquest on
the Generalissimo so far.
*Times Higher Education*
What makes Taylor’s biography unique is his use of documents from
the Guomindang Party’s archive and Chiang’s recently released
diaries, which span the entirety of Chiang’s adult life and offer
intimate insight into his inner world, particularly his
relationships with his sons and his struggle to reconcile
Confucianism and Christianity… In describing each period, Taylor is
always careful to situate Chiang in the context of domestic and
international politics, thus making this book an accessible
introduction to modern Chinese politics.
*Choice*
American historians tend to portray Chiang Kai-Shek (1887–1975) as
an inept dictator who mismanaged China until Mao Zedong expelled
him in 1945 and he finished his life ruling Taiwan under the
protection of the U.S. military. But this…lucid biography by
Taylor, a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for
Chinese Studies, describes an impressive figure who left China a
greater legacy than he has been given credit for… Taylor does not
conceal Chiang’s brutality and diplomatic failures, but he is an
admirer who makes a good case that Chiang governed an almost
ungovernable country with reasonable skill and understood his
enemies better than American advisers did.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
The story of Chiang Kai-shek is so big, so interwoven with the
story of modern China, and so complex, that it has defied a good
biographical treatment. Now, Jay Taylor has provided us with a
strong, vivid, and eminently readable biography of this major
twentieth-century leader that captures his ‘life and times’ better
than any previous work in English.
*William C. Kirby, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard
University*
This splendid biography far surpasses previous scholarship on
Chiang Kai-shek, providing new insights into the savage
international and civil wars in China that raged for almost thirty
years as well as Chiang’s quarter century on Taiwan where he laid
the predicate for democratic governance on the besieged island.
*David Lampton, Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies,
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies*
Chiang Kai-shek rivaled Mao as a dominant figure in the history of
modern China. Taylor has taken a fresh look at his long, eventful
life based on new sources, and suggests a controversial but
persuasive new reading of Chiang’s motives and actions. This
vividly realized account will be the authoritative work for a long
time to come.
*Andrew J. Nathan, author of China’s Transition*
Following his masterful account The Generalissimo’s Son, Taylor has
fully tapped Chiang Kai-shek’s personal diaries and a comprehensive
range of sources to provide the most authoritative assessment of
this towering figure in the Chinese revolution and global politics
of the twentieth century.
*Robert Sutter, Visiting Professor of Asian Studies, School of
Foreign Service, Georgetown University*
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