Man of the Single Truth

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. --Fable of Archilochus

The cool veranda, with its silvery curtains and pale green furnishings, is always a quiet and tranquil place. There is a soft, slurring sound of slippered feet from within, and an aide comes to attention: "The President." The man who steps onto the veranda is all in black--black skullcap, black Chinese gown, black felt slippers. As the President of Nationalist China stands bowing and smiling politely, the visitor notices the thin, angular face and skull, to which the years of adversity and self-discipline have given a sculptural distinction. It might be the head and face of a monk. He waves his visitor to a sofa, then takes a straight chair beside him. Barking his comments at the interpreter in his staccato, rough Mandarin, he fixes his dark eyes on his visitor, brightening with interest at a comment on Indo-China. turning grave as he states his unshakable determination to return to the mainland. Tea is served, and at exactly 6 o'clock an indescribable look comes over the President's face. The visitor instinctively rises and takes his leave. Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, frail and formidable in his black gown and skullcap, bows his visitor out without moving from his place.

The Bitter Grapes. Many of the U.S.'s top officials have come to this cool veranda, worried, harassed, urgent. Chiang's visitors emerge with no pronouncements made, no decisions taken, but with the sensation that Chiang imparts--that they are men of like mind on the issues that really matter, and that to be of like mind with the Generalissimo is a thing of importance. In a time of confused issues and uncertain men, his sureness is so intense that he diffuses an air of tranquillity.

For among the foxes of the world, Chiang Kai-shek long ago found the hedgehog's one big thing: the world's primary and implacable enemy was and is the Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow. It was a single-mindedness that in the 1930s exasperated his countrymen (who wanted him to fight Japanese instead of Communists), in the 1940s, General Joseph Stilwell (who wanted him to arm Communist troops to fight in Burma) and President Harry Truman (who insisted that he coalesce with what Secretary of State Byrnes termed "the so-called Communists"). While many bright young foxes were finding that the grapes were bitter, Chiang Kaishek, who himself has erred grievously in other things, both by omission and commission, clung to his hedgehog truth.

Because of both the single truth and the errors over the years, no name among the world's leaders strikes such fierce sparks of antagonism or praise as the name of this austere, remote man on the cool veranda. To some he is a "discredited dictator'' who lost China through his own shortcomings; to others he is a "gallant ally" who was let down by the U.S. Left-wing Britons like Bertrand Russell call him a "ruffian, a totalitarian, a bad man altogether." and Labor's Clement Attlee would "pension him off" and send him into exile. Bevanites refer to "the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek gang," and Indians call him "a U.S. puppet." One U.S. general (Stilwell) called him "The Peanut" and one U.S. Ambassador (Leighton Stuart) "a devotedly patriotic, incorruptible, resourceful leader."

The Plighted Word. In the U.S., once itself deeply divided, the Congress recently approved all but unanimously a pledge of U.S. forces to the defense of Chiang's Formosa. Much of the rest of the world, if it had not changed its mind about Chiang, had changed its mind about the nature of the regime that overthrew him. Whatever some may think of Chiang personally--and most personal estimates are frozen, sometimes in grotesque postures, by the memory of the disastrous postwar years when his government disintegrated and his armies were shattered--there is now wide agreement that Formosa should and must be saved as a bastion in the free world's defense. Said Australia's Prime Minister Robert Menzies in Washington a fortnight ago: "There are far too many people who have taken the easy course of thinking about these things in terms of some man or some name. We don't defend a man, we don't defend a system of government--we defend a nation against tyranny from abroad."

In the eyes of many anti-Communist Asians, what the U.S. does about Formosa is the touchstone of their own future security. Said an Englishman in Bangkok: "Your policy out here has been full of enough lunacy as it is--and so has ours, no doubt--but to scuttle Chiang now, or even to give the impression of scuttling him, would be the last one." Added a Filipino columnist: "Formosa has come to mean to the free peoples of Asia one thing: the worth of America's plighted word to little nations."

The Last Retreat. Last week Communist artillerymen on the mainland dropped shells onto the rice fields of Quemoy, splashed other shells among the Matsus' fishing boats. Facing the Communists were three well-trained and well-dug-in Nationalist divisions on Big and Little Quemoy, another division in the Matsus, 150 miles to the north. While the U.S. wrestled with itself over the problem of intervening, and the U.S.'s allies wrung their hands in dismay at the prospect, Chiang insisted calmly that the offshore islands would be defended by him to the last man--whatever his ally might do.

"Our army must not be asked to abandon another front," says Chiang, "or voluntarily participate in another retreat. To abandon another front without a fight would betray [my soldiers'] confidence and endanger their loyalty. Our government could sustain a defeat on a single front, and maintain its morale and will to fight. But we might not do so if we retreat without a fight. We can and will fight on, even without assistance of allies, so long as morale remains high. Should our morale be destroyed, even our friends would be unable to help us."

As for all the hopeful talk of an agreed ceasefire, Chiang is equally composed. "It does not disturb me, because I know that the Communist bloc can never accept it, and will never permit it. Therefore I do not trouble myself with an impossibility."

While the world's radios, newspapers and parlors resound with his name and argue his intentions, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek pursues his intent way. Said his wife last week: "He lives each 24 hours as if they were his last, as if in them he had to accomplish the return to the mainland."

Chiang is highly conscious that his governance of Formosa can establish his best claim to, and justification for, a return to the mainland--or blight that hope forever. In his 22 years as head of the Nationalist government on the mainland, Chiang never had a year when he was not fighting either war lords, Communists or the Japanese. In the last four years on Formosa, he has had a chance to show what the Nationalists might have done if they had had peace.

Self-Examination. Chiang Kaishek, whose name means "Firm Rock." has come a long way round to this testing place. Born the son of the local salt merchant in a small village in Chekiang Province, just opposite the abandoned Tachen islets, Chiang Kai-shek jumped from military training school into the ranks of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's revolution against the decaying Manchu power and its heirs. Though in the early days Russia was the revolutionaries' only ally, Chiang was quickly disillusioned when Dr. Sun sent him to Moscow for training. He returned commenting brusquely: "What they call 'internationalism' and 'world revolution' is nothing but Kaiser imperialism." Soon after Dr. Sun's death, in the midst of the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, which established the Nationalist government, Chiang turned on the Communists, purged many, and drove out the Russian advisers. Chiang had declared the war he was to fight all his life.

In the next ten years he fought war lords, bargained with those he could not defeat, stalled off the Japanese, chased the Communists out of Kiangsi on their famed Long March, and forged a nation. Although many liberals around the world, infatuated with the heady reports of the fine new Communist world in Russia, were already denouncing Chiang as "counter-revolutionary," in those ten years China made more progress than it had in the previous hundred. Chiang broke the economic shackles which the foreign concessions had fixed on dismembered China. For the first time, Chinese felt themselves a modern nation; there was order and purpose. Magazines flourished, students went abroad in droves to learn modern techniques, and travelers who used to go by boat to avoid train robbers could now take the train from Shanghai to Peking in safety. Road mileage was tripled, the student population doubled, a national currency was established, the practice of farming out tax collection ended.

In those years, Chiang took to wife the beautiful Mei-ling of the famed Soong sisters (one sister was the widow of Sun Yatsen, another the wife of Financier H. H. Kung, longtime member of Chiang's Cabinet). Chiang was a revolutionist of unity, not upset. His mission was to weld a nation out of many pieces, not to overthrow a monolithic government in the name of individual liberty. Dr. Sun Yat-sen used to argue that, unlike Europe, China had not too little but too much liberty without organization, "and we have become a heap of sand." What was needed was the cement. Chiang's Kuomintang tried to provide it. Slowly, while tirelessly expounding Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles, Chiang forged his own philosophy of rule. Deeply imbued with Confucian thought, it was a theory based on precept, on the loyalty of subject to ruler, of son to father. "If the ruler is virtuous, the people will also be virtuous," Confucius taught.

Chiang made his decisions by introspection amounting almost to spiritual flagellation. Daily he set aside a time for meditation (he was converted to Christianity and became a Methodist, at the urging of his wife, in 1932). He kept a diary with a page at the end of every week for rigid self-examination, instructed his chief officials to do likewise. He quoted the famed Confucian sage, Mencius: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am not upright, shall I not be in fear even of a poor man in his loose garments of hair cloth? If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands."

The inner certainty this gave him was Chiang's strength, and the force that for 22 years held China together. Threatened with death when the Young Marshal kidnaped him in Sian in the famed 1936 incident, Chiang refused to make any concessions: "If I should try to save my life today and forget the welfare of the nation . . . the nation will perish while I live," he told the Young Marshal. When the Japanese attacked in full assault in 1937, Chiang retreated behind the Yangtze gorges to Chungking, and fought with no help from the U.S. or any ally, doggedly sure that eventually the West would stand at his side. His stubbornness tied down more than 1,000,000 Japanese troops who might otherwise have swept over Asia--a feat that established China's claim to greatness as a modern nation, and won Chiang recognition, at Franklin Roosevelt's insistence, as one of the West's Big Five.

But Chiang's certainty was also the source of his weakness. His inner conviction led him to confuse criticism of his actions with a threat to the nation's welfare, and he could be cruel to opponents. He thought in moral, not social, terms. Too often, while the unrest loosed by the very revolution he had set loose seethed around him. Chiang exhorted and scolded his people like a Savanarola, when the times called for vigorous social reforms.

When corruption was rife, when top officials piled up vast fortunes in unexplained transactions, when officers defected, Chiang instinctively turned his thoughts inward to reproach himself for failure to inspire with his own standards. After his final retreat to Formosa, he told the National Assembly: "I must put the blame on myself . . . The disastrous military reverses on the mainland were not due to the overwhelming strength of the Communists, but due to the organizational collapse, loose discipline and low spirits of the party members."

The New Home. The Formosans had no cause to love the 2,000,000 defeated Nationalists who descended on them at the bitter end of 1949. The first Nationalist governor to take over from the Japanese at war's end had arrived with a retinue of carpetbaggers and incompetents. In 1947 a rebellion flared which lasted three days, was bloodily put down by General Peng Meng-chi, then commander of the Nationalist garrison and now acting chief of the general staff. Thousands were killed.

Chiang moved swiftly to restore Formosan morale. He installed as governor frail, ulcer-ridden Chen Cheng, a general turned civilian who had been with Chiang since student days. Chen simultaneously tightened police control and initiated basic reforms, notably land reform. Chiang had learned his lesson on the mainland: "The consensus is that our party failed during the past four years because we failed to enforce the principle of the people's livelihood."

Laws were passed limiting rents, which had ranged as high as 70% of the year's crop, to 37.5%. The government broke up and sold off the big landholdings inherited from the Japanese; it bought land from the landlords and resold it to tenants on easy terms. In four years of Chiang's rule, tenancy has been reduced from 40% to 20%, and thousands of Formosans built "37.5% houses" and took "37.5% brides."

Chiang's new land is no mean property. With the 2,000,000 Nationalists added to its native population of 8,000,000 (most of them descended from Chinese refugees from the Manchus in the 17th century), Formosa is about as big in area and population as either Belgium or The Netherlands. Before the war, its standard of living was second only to Japan's in the Orient; it was the world's second largest exporter of sugar, and its total exports (rice, tea, fruits) exceeded Turkey's or Yugoslavia's. With big help from U.S. experts and greenbacks, Formosa's economy has thrived. Electric power has been doubled, production of fertilizer increased sixfold, textiles twelvefold. The Formosan dollar has proved more stable than the Japanese yen, has been nearly stable since 1950. Nine out of ten Formosan children are now in schools (v. 71% under Japanese), and public schools were established in the mountainous regions where Formosa's 150,000 aborigines dwell.

Politically, Formosans are getting a bigger and bigger hand in their own government: four years ago, elections were instituted for local posts. Last year the provincial assembly itself was elected by popular vote. In many elections, "independents" opposed the Kuomintang's candidates, and recently in some important instances, e.g., mayor of Taipei, the independents have won.

There are still difficulties. The Nationalists crowd the island, they have an air of superiority, they find it hard to understand the Fukienese dialect the Formosans speak, and Formosans dislike having to learn Mandarin just a few years after having to learn Japanese. Formosans and Nationalists still tend to have different clubs, live in different sectors (the Nationalists largely moved into the quarters the Japanese evacuated), seek different diversions. But intermarriages are on the increase. Most significantly, beginning last year native Formosan boys were drafted into the army to replace the Nationalists' aging veterans. There was no trouble, and the Nationalist army now has 90,000 such troops.

Would Chiang Kai-shek win a plebiscite on the island?--a favorite British Laborite proposal. The answer is probably, though not certainly, yes. But as London's Spectator recently pointed out: "Why stop with Chiang Kaishek? [Why not] call for the exile of Mao Tse-tung and a plebiscite in China; the exile of Khrushchev and a plebiscite in Russia?"

The One Man. Chiang Kai-shek still runs a one-party national government, and in many respects a one-man government. He is President of China, director-general of the Kuomintang, and commander in chief of the armed forces. But primarily, his power rests on the reverence, respect and fear which he inspires and commands in his own person.

Chiang cannot always have his way. Often he must cajole and buy his way. Sometimes he must submit to pressures, as he did in 1950 when the younger Nationalist generation forced him to retire hundreds of old Kuomintang wheelhorses to sinecures. Chiang accepted and compelled the evacuation of the Tachen Islands only over the violent protests of many of his ministers.

The national government has been progressively diminished as the provincial government of Formosa has increased its independence, until today there are only 12,000 employees in the national government v. 113,000 in the provincial government. Except for Foreign Affairs and the Defense Ministry, most of the national ministries, their functions duplicated by provincial departments, are only skeleton organizations with nothing to do but plan for the day of The Return.

Chiang has isolated himself from most day-to-day routine, and from direct contact with all but a selected few (some ministers concerned only with domestic affairs may see him once a year, if that). Daily, Chiang rises before 6. At that hour, the house on the lower slopes of Grass Mountain, just north of Taipei, is quiet; outside, the ever-present armed guards stand silently among the trees. Chiang's day begins with an hour of prayer and meditation. Often Madame Chiang joins him, and they may sit silently together for the whole hour.

"It is then that he gets his strength for the day," explains Madame Chiang. Comments a Westerner who knows him well: "He is a very spiritual person, almost a mystic. One of the reasons people sometimes find him stubborn is that he tries to find the answer not only in himself, but in the God he serves." Commented a Western-educated Chinese scholar more tartly: "He is a saintly man. But saintly men are also impossible men."

After breakfast and a careful scanning of Formosa papers and others flown in from Hong Kong, Chiang dons his khaki cape, enters his 1949 Cadillac, and makes the 25-minute drive to his office in the Ministry of National Defense in downtown Taipei (pop. 500,000). Soldiers of the security force appear as if by magic along the route, then as magically melt away after he has passed. Past a dark bronze bust of himself on the stair landing, he walks quickly and alone to his third-floor office, where the blue velvet curtains are always drawn for security.

His first caller is always portly, poised General Chang Chun, secretary-general of his 240-man secretariat, and a friend of 50 years. The previous secretary, Wang Shih-chieh, was fired by the Generalissimo in a fit of temper two years ago--some say for saying no too sharply and too often, some say because the Generalissimo thought he was hiding things from him. Chang avoids this accusation by passing along any problem that might conceivably interest his unpredictable boss.

At 1 p.m. Chiang returns home for lunch alone with his wife. Quite often, Fanina, the Russian wife of his son Chiang Ching-kuo, is there with his two younger grandchildren, with whom he romps delightedly. He naps briefly in the afternoon, works on papers, then summons favorite ministers in the late afternoon. After dinner Chiang often watches a movie or reads Chinese philosophers and poetry. A favorite is Confucian Wang Yang-ming, who taught that "to know and yet not to do is in fact not to know."

Chiang has no taste for the recreations, hobbies or frivolous interests that make for intimate friends, and he has none. He lives the life of an ascetic. He drinks only water (boiled and lukewarm) and sometimes tea. He never smokes. He eats sparingly. On the mainland his regime was always a coalition of old enemies, jealous friends and potential defectors, and Chiang always rated personal loyalty to himself above efficiency. With an armed opposition party in the land, he had to. He still does.

Chief among those who have his confidence, and often summoned to his official residence at Shihlin, is Vice President Chen Cheng, 57, whom he has designated as his successor. A small man whose delicacy of talk and manner conceals a capacity for decisive, even ruthless action, Chen is a smaller, less commanding version of Chiang himself in appearance--a circumstance that led to a historic blunder when General MacArthur flew to Formosa in 1950, stepped from his airplane, seized then-Premier Chen and kissed him on both cheeks, exclaiming: "I have been waiting all my life for this moment." Generalissimo Chiang, standing near by, was not pleased.

Closest of all Chiang's advisers is still Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang. She is not as influential as she once was, and her patronage is no longer regarded as the sure road to preference. She repairs every day to her office of her "Chinese Women's Anti-Aggression League," to which she can and does summon ministers at will. "My role is very simple," she explains. "I assist my husband."

And there is his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, by an earlier marriage. The son's formal title is Deputy Secretary-General of the National Defense Council, but his real duties are as his father's troubleshooter. As head of the secret police and boss of the political officers in the armed forces, the son is chief guardian of the island's political security. As such, he is the most widely feared man on the island. A burly man of 46, Ching-kuo explains : "You must always remember that we have an enemy."

The danger is real: the Communists have tried hard to subvert Formosan loyalty. Three years ago a vice chief of staff was discovered to be a Communist spy. A few months ago two student pilots flew off to the Chinese mainland with an air-force trainer. But Chiang Ching-kuo insists that security cases are now down to two or three a month.

Formosa is not as politically free as the Philippines or Japan, but it is freer than South Korea. The press can and does criticize, so long as it does not appear to Chiang Kai-shek as obstructing the national effort or damaging the prestige of the government. After all, Chiang reminds critics, "we are at war."

The Armed Strength. The biggest immediate question mark is Chiang's armed forces. His army of 20-plus divisions has been brought up to full strength by energetic Defense Minister David Yu. It has 300,000 well-trained men. Most of them are, in a very real sense, picked men--picked by themselves when they made the decision to follow Chiang to Formosa rather than remain under the Communists. But the U.S. has not yet delivered equipment to the levels projected in 1951, although arms are now pouring in faster than the Chinese soldiers can be trained to use them.

The Chinese air force (two wings of F-84 Thunderjets and the beginnings of a wing of F-86 Sabre jets) is equipped to the bare level of a minimum defense. Its new commander, General "Tiger" Wang, is rated one of China's best military men. It has been held down, and is still being held down, by the U.S. decision that the Nationalists should not have any offensive capability of their own. This has applied even to fuel and ammunition supply. The small Nationalist navy (corvettes, destroyer escorts, LSTs) is adequate for blockade purposes, but would be negligible in an all-out fight.

Greatest doubt lies in the capability of Chinese command. Always haunted by the memory of defecting commanders on the mainland, Chiang makes it clear to commanders that his first requirement is unquestioning loyalty to himself. Thus, despite four years of U.S. effort, two major reorganizations and countless smaller ones, the primary requirement for responsible Chinese command is still personal. The determining characteristic of Chinese commanders is too often a paralyzing fear of taking any initiative without the Generalissimo's direct sanction.

If the Communists want simply to take Quemoy and the Matsus, they have plenty of troops, artillery and small craft for the job. What they do not have is air cover. Last week the Reds completed a jet air base at Luchiao (opposite the Tachens) and promptly moved 40 MIGs onto it. Far to the south, Nationalists detected another base abuilding near Swatow, which may not be complete for perhaps six months. But when it is, it will provide Communist jet air cover, not only for Quemoy and Matsu, but over the whole Formosa Strait. Then it would not be the offshore islands which were in danger; it would be Formosa itself.

Would the U.S. meet that challenge? Chiang thought he had had a pledge that the U.S. would defend Quemoy and the Matsus. But last week Secretary of State Dulles reiterated, as he has been doing lately, that "there has been no commitment, of any kind, sort or description, expressed or implied," to defend anything but Formosa and the Pescadores. "We have the jitters," admits one high Nationalist.

For the U.S., the answer is crucial not only to Formosa. It is also crucial to the whole area of Southeast Asia. Scattered from clattering, neon-bright Hong Kong to Saigon's gaudy Chinese city of Cholon, from stilt houses and river boats along Bangkok's green canals to high-walled compounds in Djakarta and Siantar in Sumatra, from bamboo slums to sleek modern apartments in Singapore, live 12 million Chinese. For them, Chiang and Formosa are the only counter to the pull of Communist China on their loyalty.

Already the Communists are energetically proselytizing among them. Said an old Chinese, sadly, in Bangkok: "Our young people are full of pride at what they think the Communists have done in China. They laugh at Chiang and at the corruption of his government when it was on the mainland. They do not know what real corruption means. The Communists, the incorruptible Communists, have extorted their savings and killed their families. Before, we took our strength from our families. Now, when you go down to the quay, you see the mothers and fathers weeping while their sons go off to China. None of them has come back yet, except as a spy, an agent or a corrupter."

If the Communists can finally capture, by default, the loyalty of the overseas Chinese, they will have been presented with the largest fifth column in world history.

On Formosa, some have lost all faith in The Return. They recognize that they are not going back to the mainland unless the U.S. helps put them there. They argue that the government should concentrate on making Formosa a viable place, that the hope of return, constantly frustrated, leads to nothing but despair.

But the President of Nationalist China will hear no talk of settling down on a neutralized Formosa. Chiang Kai-shek does not believe this is one of the possibilities open to him or to the world, no matter how much well-intentioned diplomats try to bring off a settlement. On this basic point he and his Communist enemy (to judge by the enemy's words) are in complete agreement.

Does this mean that Chiang accepts--and would even wish to bring on--World War III? Today's world might not be prepared to accept Chiang's answer, for it runs counter to accepted habits of thought. His "counterattack" on the mainland, says Chiang Kaishek, will not bring on a general war: in fact, it is the only way World War III can be avoided, for so long as the mainland of China is in Communist hands, a third world war will always be possible and perhaps likely.

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