Dr. Paul H. Tai gave a talk on Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong at the Chinese Seniors' League in San Diego on July 27. Tai provided an interesting analysis of these two great men. Below is a summary of his talk:
"Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong: Uncanny Similarities" by Paul H. Tai
Never in contemporary China were there two personalities engaged in a greater, more dramatic clash than Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. In gigantic battles that dragged on for decades and involved millions of soldiers, they fought to reign supreme over one quarter of the mankind. Yet they surprisingly displayed many things in common in their life.
Chiang and Mao were born only seven years apart, in 1886 and 1893--in times of great turmoil. The war with Japan came in 1894 and left China with an unsettling problem lingering on to more than a century later: the conflict over Taiwan. Then the Boxer Rebellion, the invasion of eight foreign powers, the Republican revolution, and the chaotic period of warlordism came in quick succession. Thus, from birth to adolescence, the two aspiring political leaders had to agonize over their beloved country in the throes of debilitating internal decay and ferocious foreign aggression.
Chiang and Mao lived a long life, to 89 and 83, and they died without realizing what they had been living for. Chiang never returned to the mainland; Mao never set foot on Taiwan. If you believe in geomancy, or something like that, you'd say their wrenching disappointment at the end of their lives had invoked the wrath of the Old Heavenly God. Violent storms in the Taiwan Strait and thunderous rains throughout the island marked Chiang's death on April 5, 1975. The Tangshan earthquake, the most devastating in Chinese history, accompanied Mao's passing on September 8, 1976.
Both Chiang and Mao were southerners--a fact of some historical significance, for all the greatest rulers in the thousands-of-years-old Chinese history came from the north. These two men had to break a new path to power. One led an expedition from Canton; the other marched from Jiangxi; and both ended up in Beijing before they became China's crown-less emperors.
Chiang's and Mao's ancestral homes were located in the countryside with abundant water resources. The river-bordered Chiang family derived its income from a lucrative salt trade and was housed in a splendid mansion of traditional style. The Chiang hometown, Xikuo, is cradled by several scenic sites such as Miao Gao Tai (The Wonderful High Terrace), Qian Zhang Yan (Thousand-foot Waterfall), and Wen Chang Ge (Literature Promotion Pavilion). Together they make up an attractive tourist spot. Mao's parents, in comparison, were not as well to do but possessed enough fertile fields around a huge fishpond to qualify as, in the Communist jargon, a middle-class farm family. The village they lived in--Shaoshan, Hunan--is not graced with beautiful scenery, but because of Mao's prestige, it draws a steady stream of visitors as well.
Chiang and Mao were educated in tutor-led private schools, but both were as indolent in their studies as they were diligent in their naughty activities. Chiang liked to play "big knives and swords," acting as a general in command of his friends as soldiers. In an official biography, he chastised himself for being "extraordinarily unscrupulous." Similarly, Mao was defiant of social conventions by being disobedient to his father, once causing the senior Mao to chase him around for spanking. When cornered, Mao came to his own rescue by threatening a suicidal jump into the pond. As a rebellious teenager, Mao, along with a friend, once roamed in the countryside as "beggars." He commissioned himself to find out how his fellow Hunanese lived in misery and poverty.
Records show that neither Chiang nor Mao had a college education; certainly they had never received any advanced degree like a Ph. D. In retrospect, the lack of such a degree seems a blessing rather than a hindrance to the career they were determined to pursue. With its emphasis on rational thinking rather than bold action, a doctoral training would have led them to technical or academic pursuits, away from their single-minded drive to become the ruler of the most populous nation of the world.
Moreover, the lack of advanced education does not prevent Chiang and Mao from becoming influential thinkers. Here, Mao's achievement is nothing short of spectacular. Following his principle of "lively study and lively application," he laid down the theoretical foundations for accomplishing two monumental tasks: making the workers-based Marxist revolution applicable to the massive Chinese peasantry and crafting a grand strategy for his splinter guerrilla bands to defeat Chiang's hundreds of modernized army divisions. As a poet, he set himself apart from all the greatest poets China has produced. His poems do not belong to the genre of "moaning without being sick" or "spring flowers and autumn moon." They gush forth words of force, destiny, and hope. They do occasionally use weather as a backdrop and evoke feelings and sentiments. When they do, the verses are powerful, direct, and invariably inspiring.
Chiang's writings are not as profound, nor as widely influential. His Destiny of China, however, made a valid and commendable attempt at bridging the Confucian culture with modernity. Had he not been confronted with Mao's intellectual challenge, his book would have a broader following than it actually did. Chiang also made a nearly lifelong inroad into neo-Confucianism, particularly the theory of one of the most important disciples of that school, Wang Yang-ming. And his studies in Wang provided him with an abiding guide to his personal and political behavior.
One more commonality of Chiang and Mao relates to their married life. Both are known to have four wives. Chiang's original spouse, Mao Fu-mei, was a family-chosen fellow native of Xikou; his second mate, Yao Yeh-ch'eng, was more of a concubine than of a wedded wife; his third, Ch'en Chieh-ju, a prominent persona in the early Whampo Military Academy years, was cajoled to study in Columbia University to make room for Chiang's marriage to Mei-ling Soong, the American-educated international celebrity. One remarkable feature of Chiang's marital life is that his wives, perhaps with the exception of the bitterly disappointed Ch'en Chieh-ju, were totally loyal to him. Mao Fu-wei lived and died in the Chiang family in Xikou in spite of the divorce she was imposed upon; Yao Yeh-ch'eng followed Chiang to Taiwan and died in Taichung; Soong Mei-ling, now a New York City resident having passed her 100th birthday, never wavers her devotion to her husband ever since she married him seventy-five years ago.
Mao's first spouse, a family-chosen native of Shaoshan, ended in separation when he married his second wife, Yang Kaihui, a neophyte Marxist. Yang was shot dead by an anti-Communist governor of Hunan Province while Mao roamed the hills in the neighboring Jiangxi Province to initiate his guerrilla war. Mao fell in love with a young fellow revolutionary, He Zizhen, and their union lasted into the late 1930s when He, suffering schizophrenia, went from Yenan to the Soviet Union for treatment. In the meantime, an upstart-movie-actress-turned revolutionary, Jiang Qing, beguiled Mao with such charms and devotion that he could not resist consorting with her. Likewise, Mao's wives were fiercely loyal to him. Yang died in his cause. He Zizhen passed her old age in Shanghai, with the memory of her revolutionary and romantic pursuits in the Jiangxi days still gripping her sickly mind. And, of course, Jiang Qing was the case célèbre of all. She shouted "Long life the Revolution" during the Gang of Four trial when the last spark of the Cultural Revolution had died out with her husband's death. She apparently committed suicide in the infamous Qin Cheng Prison, without ever regretting being "the Chairman's devoted student."
Finally, Chiang and Mao shared a common fate in a sad, lonely, petered-out posterity. Chiang had two sons, Ching-kuo and Wei-kuo, who died while their stepmother was still alive, and who had to witness their father's painstakingly built Taiwan enterprise in inglorious and precipitous decline. And Ching-kuo's three sons, Hsiao-wen, Hsiao-wu, and Hsiao-jun, all lost battle to illness while, in an unbelievable repetition, their mother was still alive. Their tragedy is summed up in the saying, "the silver-haired mother sends off her black-haired sons." Mao's offspring fared no better. He had three sons: one was killed in the Korean War; one suffers a decades-long mental derangement, and one disappeared during the civil war days in the 1930s. He had two daughters, Li Min and Li Na, with He Zizhen and Jiang Qing as their respective mothers; they live in obscurity in China, without ever assuming Mao's family name. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Chiang and Mao, the two tempest-like personalities of twentieth-century China, seem to have vanished like a breeze.