Chiang Kai-shek

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Chiang Kai-shek : biography

October 31, 1887 – April 5, 1975

Notes

Wartime leader of China

Chinese Civil War: 1927–1937

After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chiang resigned as Chairman of the National Government. He returned shortly afterwards, adopting the slogan "first internal pacification, then external resistance". However, this policy of avoiding a frontal war against the Japanese was widely unpopular. In 1932, while Chiang was seeking first to defeat the Communists, Japan launched an advance on Shanghai and bombarded Nanjing. This disrupted Chiang’s offensives against the Communists for a time, although it was the northern factions of Hu Hanmin’s Guangzhou (Canton) government (notably the 19th Route Army) that primarily led the offensive against the Japanese during this skirmish. Brought into the Nationalist army immediately after the battle, the 19th Route Army’s career under Chiang would be cut short after it was disbanded for demonstrating socialist tendencies.

In December 1936, Chiang flew to Xi’an to coordinate a major assault on the Red Army and the Communist Republic that had retreated into Yan’an. However, Chiang’s allied commander Zhang Xueliang, whose forces were used in his attack and whose homeland of Manchuria had been recently invaded by the Japanese, did not support the attack on the Communists. On December 12, Zhang and several other Nationalist generals kidnapped Chiang for two weeks in what is known as the Xi’an Incident. They forced Chiang into making a "Second United Front" with the Communists against Japan. After releasing Chiang and returning to Nanjing with him, Zhang was placed under house arrest and the generals who had assisted him were executed. Chiang’s commitment to the Second United Front was nominal at best, and it was all but broken up in 1941.

Second Sino-Japanese War: 1937–1945

The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, and in August of that year Chiang sent of his best-trained and equipped soldiers to defend Shanghai. With over 200,000 Chinese casualties, Chiang lost the political cream of his Whampoa-trained officers. Though Chiang lost militarily, the battle dispelled Japanese claims that it could conquer China in three months and demonstrated to the Western powers that the Chinese would continue the fight. By December, the capital city of Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese, and Chiang moved the government inland, first to Wuhan and later to Chongqing. Having lost most of China’s economic and industrial centers, Chiang withdrew into the hinterlands, stretching the Japanese supply lines and bogging down Japanese soldiers in the vast Chinese interior. As part of a policy of protracted resistance, Chiang authorized the use of scorched earth tactics, resulted in many civilian deaths. During the Nationalist’s retreat from Nanjing, the dams around the city were deliberately destroyed by the Nationalist army in order to delay the Japanese advance, killing 500,000 people in the subsequent 1938 Yellow River flood.

After heavy fighting, the Japanese occupied Wuhan in the fall of 1938 and the Nationalists retreated farther inland, to Chongqing. While en route to Chongqing, the Nationalist army intentionally started the "fire of Changsha", as a part of the scorched earth policy. The fire destroyed much of the city, killed twenty thousand civilians, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Due to an organizational error (it was claimed), the fire was begun without any warning to the residents of the city. The Nationalists eventually blamed three local commanders for the fire and executed them. Newspapers across China blamed the fire on (non-KMT) arsonists, but the blaze contributed to a nation-wide loss of support for the KMT.Barnouin, Barbara and Yu Changgen. . Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. ISBN 962-996-280-2. Retrieved on March 12, 2011. pp.74–75

In 1939 Muslim leaders Isa Yusuf Alptekin and Ma Fuliang were sent by Chiang to several Middle eastern countries, including Egypt, Turkey, and Syria, to gain support for the Chinese War against Japan, and to express his support for Muslims.