# Chiang Kai-shek **Chiang Kai-shek** (1887–1975) led the [[Kuomintang]] and the Republic of China through the [[Chinese Civil War]], lost the mainland to [[Mao Zedong]]'s Communists in 1949, and ruled the rump Nationalist state on [[Taiwan]] as an authoritarian anticommunist until his death. Successor to [[Sun Yat-sen]], he nominally reunified China in the late 1920s, turned violently on his Communist allies, and spent two decades fighting them — a war suspended only for the joint resistance to the Japanese invasion. ## Rise and the mainland years Trained at a military school in Japan and later commandant of the Soviet-assisted Whampoa Military Academy (1924), Chiang inherited [[Sun Yat-sen]]'s movement and led the Northern Expedition (1926–28) that nominally reunified China under a Nationalist government in Nanjing. In April 1927 he turned on the Communists, his partners in the first United Front, with the Shanghai massacre. A decade of anti-Communist "encirclement" campaigns drove the Communists on the [[Long March (China)]]. In December 1936 his own generals kidnapped him in the Xi'an Incident and forced a second United Front against Japan. He led China through the war with Japan (1937–45), sat with Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo in 1943, and emerged as a nominal great-power leader. His government was by then hollowed out by corruption, inflation and military losses. ## Defeat and Taiwan The renewed [[Chinese Civil War]] ended with Communist victory on the mainland. Chiang's government retreated to Taipei in December 1949 with an estimated one to two million soldiers and civilians. He ruled [[Taiwan]] until his death on 5 April 1975 as president of a Republic of China that still claimed all of China. His rule there was a police state. Martial law, declared on 19 May 1949, lasted until 15 July 1987, one of the longest in the modern world. It followed the February 28 Incident of 1947, a Nationalist crackdown on a Taiwanese uprising, with estimated deaths of 18,000–28,000. The White Terror that followed saw roughly 140,000 people imprisoned and some 3,000–4,000 executed. His son Chiang Ching-kuo, who took over the party in 1975 and the presidency in 1978, lifted martial law in 1987. A Transitional Justice Commission created in 2018 has since vacated thousands of political convictions. ## The American right's Chiang For the American right, Chiang was the great Cold War cause célèbre: the [[China Lobby]] and figures of the early anticommunist movement treated his 1949 defeat as the "loss of China," a betrayal by American elites that fed the [[McCarthyism]] purges. His exile state on Taiwan became, and remains, the unfinished business of the civil war and the central flashpoint in U.S.–China rivalry. See the [[Chinese History Hub]]. The lobby's core included publisher Henry Luce, Congressman Walter Judd and the Committee of One Million, and its most effective advocate was Chiang's wife Soong Mei-ling, who addressed both houses of Congress in 1943. It kept Washington recognizing Taipei as "China" until 1979 and Beijing out of the UN until 1971. When [[Richard Nixon]] opened to the PRC, its remnants secured the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Chiang's other contribution to the global right was organizational. With South Korea's Syngman Rhee he sponsored the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (1954), which grew into the [[World Anti-Communist League]], the transnational network that later brought together Latin American death-squad figures, European neo-fascists and the private supply effort for the Contras. ## See Also - [[Kuomintang]] · [[Chinese Civil War]] · [[Taiwan]] · [[Sun Yat-sen]] · [[Mao Zedong]] - [[China Lobby]] · [[McCarthyism]] · [[World Anti-Communist League]] · [[Anti-Communism]] - [[Chinese History Hub]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]] · [[Martial Law]]