Jonathan Spence reviews Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost, by Jonathan Fenby, in Sunday’s New York Times.
[quote]What separates Fenby’s book from most of the others is that he attempts to present this story as a coherent series of insights into Chiang’s character and motivations. Why have academic historians not been tempted to try the same thing? The main reason, surely, is not ignorance of original Chinese and Western sources, but the fact that those sources are themselves so profoundly fragmented, ambiguous and often doctored by the principal actors or their self-appointed surrogates. Thus, despite the intrinsic fascination of the times in which Chiang lived, reliable materials on the man are extremely rare…
Chiang himself left no undoctored paper trail… With the exception of his second wife, Jennie … , Chiang’s close relatives … remained closelipped. That has left much of Chiang’s story in the hands of Chinese composers of the kind of unofficial histories that the Chinese call yeshi (literally ‘‘wild’’ or undocumented histories)…
Fenby has developed a strategy on three fronts to overcome these limitations. First, he has combed through a wide swath of the available secondary materials on China’s history in the first half of the 20th century, and the diplomatic documents of the time, so as to extract the nuggets that seem to illuminate some facet of Chiang’s character. This is a time-consuming task in itself, but one that yields a great deal of relevant material. (It was a piece of bad luck for Fenby that ‘‘Spymaster,’’ Frederic Wakeman’s powerful and richly documented study of Chiang’s secret police chief, Dai Li, came out just as Fenby’s own book was going to press.) Second, Fenby has scoured the English-language newspapers and press agency reports of the time, along with those of some of the Chinese press agencies. Third, and perhaps most important in terms of the flavor of the book, he has pored through scores of the vignettes written by Western travelers and journalists who visited China during these eventful years…
These vignettes are often vivid and entertaining, even insightful, but they tend to share the disturbing trait one finds in the Chinese yeshi writings: they are unverifiable…
Ultimately, despite the range of his explorations and the detail of his story line, Fenby cannot break away from the kind of contradictory portrayal that emerged 60 years ago in the Stilwell/ Chennault discussions. Chiang did have courage and determination, and an apparently unshakable belief in his own historic role as China’s leader. He did wish to be his country’s moral pole star. He was temperate in his physical needs, unostentatious and not personally corruptible. On the other hand, he was wooden in speech and manner, aloof, unimaginative. Despite his courage he was a poor commander in chief, constantly meddling in his senior officers’ plans, ignorant of logistics, heedless of casualties and battlefield agonies. He surrounded himself with corrupt cronies, and allowed terrible cruelties to be perpetrated by his omnipresent secret agents. Fenby adds nuances to our received picture, but ultimately does not alter it. The generalissimo remains an enigma. It may well turn out that Chiang covered his tracks so well – or had so little to cover – that we are doomed never really to know him.[/quote]
An excerpt from the first chapter of the book is available (for a time) here:
www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/books/chapte … fenby.html
I came across a copy at Page One on Saturday. (You’ll probably need luck to find anything in that store, though!) The book, however, was shrinkwrapped, so I didn’t get to browse through it.