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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Nov-03 07:01 AM
The sorceress
She was beautiful, bewitching and ambitious. Not content with ruling China with her husband she dreamt of ruling the world - even if it meant seducing a would-be American president. Here, for the first time, Jonathan Fenby reveals the extraordinary secret of Madame Chiang Kai-shek
Wednesday November 5, 2003
The Guardian
Today the woman Ernest Hemingway once called "the Empress of China" will be celebrated in a memorial service at St Bartholomew's Church in Manhattan which her family hopes will be attended by 1,000 people. Sixty years ago, in the same city, she dreamed of ruling the world in association with one of America's most prominent politicians.
Meiling Soong, aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek, once famous round the world as the beautiful and extremely powerful Dragon Lady wife of China's autocratic ruler, lived the last years of her life in seclusion in a large apartment overlooking Gracie Park on the Upper East Side before dying on October 23 at the age of 106. The seclusion was not simply a matter of age and health. The Kuomintang Nationalist party, which had ruled the island of Taiwan after she and her husband fled there from mainland China in 1949, is trying to reinvent itself as a modern democratic party, and had no wish for this figure from its authoritarian past to emerge from the shadows.
So, as the obituaries put it, this last survivor among leading figures of the second world war, who worked at her husband's side trying to rule China for two decades, took her secrets to the grave. But, while writing a biography of Generalissimo Chiang, I came across long-buried evidence of one secret which showed the extent of her ambitions, and how she sought to use her ability to seduce westerners to realise an extraordinary dream.
The story began in the grey, isolated city of Chongqing, China's capital for most of the eight-year war with Japan that began in 1937. The time was October 1942. The occasion was the visit of leading American politician Wendell Willkie, who had run against Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940 and was planning a second bid in 1944.
Despite their political differences, Roosevelt had sent Willkie on a goodwill mission to China, and the exuberant Republican waded into the crowds as if he was electioneering. Like many westerners, he was particularly struck by the Generalissimo's wife. Her perfect English made her the regime's principal go-between with its American ally. Daughter of one of China's richest and most powerful families, she epitomised modernity in a country steeped in tradition as she drove to the war front in Shanghai in slacks, argued about arms supplies with American generals and pushed for the development of China's air force.
Then 45, she appeared at a tea party for the visitor with the cloak of an air marshal thrown dashingly over her shoulders. She told the 50-year-old Willkie she found him a very "disturbing influence", a remark which visibly gratified him.
That evening, a large reception was held. Willkie asked his companion on the trip, an American publisher called Gardner Cowles, to replace him on the greeting line. The politician then disappeared - as did Meiling. When the reception ended, Cowles went back to a house where he and Willkie were staying. After a while, Chiang strode in with three bodyguards. He asked where Willkie was. Cowles said he did not know. The Generalissimo stormed through the house, peering under beds and opening cupboards. Not finding anybody, he left.
Willkie eventually arrived at 4am. According to a private memoir by Cowles which I unearthed in an American archive, he looked "very buoyant... cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl". After giving "a play by play" account of what had happened between him and Meiling, he said he had invited her to return to Washington with him.
"Wendell, you're just a goddam fool!" Cowles exclaimed. He acknowledged that Meiling was "one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and sexy women either of us had ever met", but the politician had to be discreet. Mrs Willkie would probably be waiting at the airport in Washington: if he wanted to run again for the presidency, flying in with Madame Chiang would be a considerable embarrassment.
Willkie stomped off to bed, but was up a few hours later for breakfast. Since he had a speech to make, he asked Cowles to go to see Meiling to tell her she could not accompany him to the US. When the publisher delivered the message, Meiling scratched her long fingernails down his cheeks so deeply that the marks remained for a week.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Nov-03 07:01 AM
Two months later, Madame Chiang flew to the US on a barnstorming tour to raise support for China in its fight with Japan. She addressed both houses of Congress, and stayed at the White House, bringing her own silk sheets. When they met, Roosevelt had a card table set between them, to avoid being "vamped", as he put it.
Back in New York, she invited Cowles to a tête-à-tête dinner in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, where she took a whole floor. She informed him that, on their wedding night in 1927, Chiang had told her he believed in sex only for procreation and, since he had a son by an earlier marriage, they would not sleep together. Cowles was not sure he believed her - the story seemed designed to be relayed to Willkie.
Next, she said Cowles should spend whatever was needed to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie. "She would reimburse me for all expenditures," he added in his memoir. The cash would, presumably, have come from US loans to China sitting in American bank accounts.
"If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world," she went on. "I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the western world." Though Cowles considered the proposal crazy, he was "so mesmerised by clearly one of the most formidable women of the time that this evening I would not have dismissed anything she said."
Returning to China, Meiling led a palace coup to block her equally ambitious eldest brother, and talked of becoming China's war minister. Then, 60 years ago this month, she flew with her husband to meet Churchill and Roosevelt at a war summit in Cairo.
Instead of visiting the pyramids, as Churchill wanted her to do, she walked into the conference chamber, wearing a black satin dress with a yellow chrysanthemum pattern, the skirt slit up the side. Since the Generalissimo spoke no English, she took over on the Chinese side, constantly correcting the interpreters and setting policy as she chain-smoked British cigarettes. At one point, according to the British chief of staff, she aroused a "rustle" and a "neighing" from men in the room when she shifted position and showed "one of the most shapely of legs" through the slit in her skirt.
But her plans to co-rule the world fell apart when Willkie failed to get the Republican nomination, and then died of a heart attack. Nor were matters smooth at home. The Generalissimo was congenitally suspicious of anybody around him who amassed power, including his wife. He was said to be having an affair with his nurse, and Meiling was reported to have thrown a vase at him, causing such injuries that he could not go out in public for several days.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Nov-03 07:02 AM
Trying to reassert herself, she made another trip to the US, but things were not what they used to be. Washington was cooling on the Chiang regime, finally recognising its inefficiency and corruption, and Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, refused to receive her at the White House.
From then on, it was a downhill path that stretched over six decades as Chiang was forced out of mainland China and Meiling lost out in power struggles in Taiwan after his death in 1975. But, for a time in the early 1940s, she had been the most powerful woman on earth, and could dream of ruling the world with an American consort.
· To order a copy of Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost, by Jonathan Fenby, for £22 plus p&p (rrp £25), call 0870 066 7979. Published by Simon & Schuster.
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| KaleKrishna |
Posted
on 05-Nov-03 04:57 PM
IFji, thanks for sharing some hidden aspects in the life of the lady who definitely proved that "behind every successful man there is a woman". If it was not for her CKS would not be what he became. I had the opportunity to read (probably some facts were distorted) early life of the great lady, it was filled with compassion, high ambition and far-sightedness. There were lucks, risks and everything that needs to make life a challennge and worth living. The later half is not pleasent, with all those tragedies and scattered dreams, however one reason of her downfall was her rapid rise and over ambition.
Overall, having got the opportunity to read and see pics of her rise and fall, I have admired her inteligence and quick thinking ability, not to say her enchanting beauty.
KK
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| suva chintak |
Posted
on 05-Nov-03 06:04 PM
IF bhai,
Very interesting story on the enchantress of the Orient! She definitely came from a very ambitious family, her elder sister had marrided none other than the father of the Chinese republic Dr. Sun Yat Sen! However, after the Dr. Sen's death, the two sisters were on the opposite poles of the Chinese politics: her widowed sister joined Mao's communists and rapidly rose to a powerful position in the central committee. The bahini was to rule Taiwain!
After I left you in Beijing, I ended up travelling to Chongquing, the war-time capital of General Chang Kai Shek. It is a lovely hilly city on the banks of the great Yangtze river. You can see many of the buildings and forts from the Japanese war, and older residents still remember the daily bombardment by the Japanese imperial air force. This city is so beautiful, almost seductive. I think you should definitely take a train to the south west for your next holidays.
To the Chinese women!
SC
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| Lalupate*Joban |
Posted
on 06-Nov-03 03:06 PM
Interesting read.
Here is another eulogy for the Wellesley alum, from the latest edition of "Time" (Asia Edition).
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A Singular Woman
Madame Chiang Kai-shek won the West but lost the battle for control of China
BY PICO IYER
Jonathan Fenby: 'She Wanted to Rule the World'
Her temperament and the times were well matched. It was 1942: Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Republic of China was struggling to resist the invading forces of imperial Japan. Soong Mei-ling, then 45 and the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, happened to be in the U.S. for medical reasons. Seizing the opportunity to champion her country's cause, she summoned all her energy and flashing-eyed eloquence to the task of urging the U.S. to side with her embattled land. For seven months, Madame Chiang, as she was best known in the West, seemed to be everywhere: speaking at Madison Square Garden, traveling to San Francisco, talking on the radio. In an address to Congress, she was what one commentator called "the personification of free China." Slim and graceful, clad in a black cheongsam, she wooed, wowed and chastised her spellbound listeners with a blend of compliments, barbs and pungent assertions. "We in China are convinced that it is the better half of wisdom not to accept failure ignominiously but to risk it gloriously," she said. After she sat down, a Congressman confessed, "I never saw anything like it. Madame Chiang had me on the verge of bursting into tears." At the age of 106, Soong Mei-ling died last week in New York City.
A charmed, glamorous destiny seemed to await Mei-ling from the moment she was born into a remarkable family. (Her sister Soong Ching-ling would marry Sun Yat-sen, modern China's founder.) Their father, C.V. "Charlie" Soong, who had been virtually adopted by a group of kindly Methodist evangelists in North Carolina, returned to China intending to be a missionary but instead became an entrepreneur. Mei-ling, at the age of 11, entered high school in Macon, Georgia. Nine years later, she returned home armed with a degree in English literature from Wellesley College, the vestiges of a Southern drawl and so little Chinese that she had to be re-educated in her native tongue by a tutor. ("The only thing Oriental about me," she once wrote, "is my face.") In the early 1920s, she was a flower of Shanghai's intellectual community when she caught the eye of Chiang Kai-shek. He was then chairman of the Supreme National Defense Council. Neither minded that he already had a childhood bride and a son tucked away in the provinces. In 1927, Mei-ling and Chiang were married in Shanghai by a YMCA functionary, and in the years that followed, Madame Chiang became her husband's interpreter, confidante and chief propagandist. Not only did she try to save his soul (by converting him from paganism to Christianity), she also helped save his life. In 1936, on an inspection tour in Xi'an, Chiang was detained by troops of disaffected warlord Zhang Xueliang. Mei-ling flew to the rescue and challenged Zhang so eloquently that he released his captive and agreed to return to Nanjing as a prisoner of the Chiangs. Mei-ling then devoted her energies to tidying up her disheveled country.
In 1934, she joined her husband in launching their most famed drive: the New Life Movement, which directed the Chinese to be dutiful, disciplined, loyal and clean. Toward the grander end of curbing the spread of communism, men were told not to wipe their noses in public, soldiers not to spit, pedestrians not to urinate in the street. Everyone was required to forswear opium.
Fame in America came to Mei-ling in a more serendipitous fashion. In late 1942, a painful skin disease brought her to a New York hospital. Upon her release, she was invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, to stay at the White House for a week. Yet even as his guest was enthralling his nation, Roosevelt was wary of Mei-ling's formidable charm. One night at dinner, the President asked in passing how she would deal with a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Without missing a beat, Madame Chiang passed her hand across her throat. Eleanor Roosevelt later said: "Those delicate, little petal-like fingersyou could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung."
At home, Mei-ling preserved the same balance, sometimes scrambling over the ruins of heavily bombed ChongqingChina's wartime capitalto tend the wounded, sometimes burnishing Chiang's image with her social poise. It was Mei-ling's great and abiding gift to remain equally at home with the silvery pleasantries of the social world and with the adamantine realities of the political. That powerful combination, fired by an implacable distrust of communism, enabled her to remain a central figure in Chiang's government even after the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan when the Communists triumphed in 1949. Upon the 1975 death of her husband, who in 1978 was succeeded as President by her stepson Chiang Ching-kuo, Mei-ling returned to the U.S. She twice served as Taiwan's unofficial spokeswoman in rebuffing China's reunification overtures and spent her final years in a Manhattan apartment at Gracie Square. It seems only right that she died in the land where she had enjoyed her greatest moments and won her most fervent admirers.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 07-Nov-03 08:46 AM
hmm
Suva Chintak dai, KK and LJ,
Its good to see people getting interested in the history of our northern neighbor.
Madame Chiang was quite a lady. I guess 3 in one pacakage- intelligent, beautiful and a born leader. The only thing that I don't udnerstand is: Why didn't she push for the unification of Taiwan with the mainland? She would have lived and died as a hero in China, justa s her sister.
anyway, here's a popular Chinese toast-phrase from the 60s: Women Yinggai Yao Jie Fang Taiwan! Gan Bei!
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