biography
| name: |
Jiang Jieshi
|
| |
or *Chiang Kai-shek* [chang kiy shek]
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pronunciation:
[jiang jieshee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1887–1975)
|
| biography:
| Revolutionary leader of 20th-c China, the effective head of the Nationalist Republic (1928–49), and head thereafter of the emigré Nationalist Party regime in Taiwan, born into a merchant family in Zhejiang. He interrupted his military education in Japan to return to China and join the Nationalist revolution. In 1918 he joined the separatist revolutionary government of Sun Yixian (Sun Yatsen) in Canton, where he was appointed commandant of the new Whampoa Military Academy. After Sun's death (1925), he launched an expedition against the warlords and the Beijing government, entering Beijing in 1928, but fixed the Nationalist capital at Nanjing (Nanking). He proclaimed loyalty to Sun's principles, which he built into his Confucianist New Life Movement (1934). Marriage to Sun's US-educated sister-in-law (1927) involved Jiang with international businessmen, and he also became a Methodist. During the ensuing decade the Nationalist Party steadily lost support to the Communists. When Japan launched a campaign to conquer China (1937), the Nationalists were able to provide strong resistance, which continued throughout World War 2, thereby making an important contribution to the Allied victory. Defeated by the Communist forces, Jiang was forced to retreat to Taiwan (1949), where he presided over the beginnings of Taiwan's ‘economic miracle’, and where, under US military protection, he maintained unyielding hostility to the new People's Republic. His son, Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo, 1918–88), became prime minister in 1971 and president in 1978. |
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