CHINA: You Shall Never Yield...

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Double Mission. The machine guns fascinated Chiang first; from his youth in Chekiang Province, he wanted to be a soldier. At China's Paoting Military Academy in 1906, he got high marks, though he was the only student who did not wear a queue; in those days queuelessness was a sign of dangerous, republican thoughts. The high marks got him a chance to study at a military school in Tokyo. And here, with other young Chinese, he met Sun Yat-sen on the eve of the October 1911 revolt against the Manchu dynasty. Once the revolution began, Chiang hurried back to China, joined Sun's new Kuomintang (National People's Party). There was plenty of soldiering to be done. Chiang became Sun's trusted lieutenant. He also found time to marry the girl his mother had picked out for him, and to have a son whom he named Chiang Ching-kuo.

Sun Yat-sen put what he was fighting for into his "three principles": Min Tsu (national unity), Min Chuan (political democracy) and Min Sheng (people's livelihood). By 1923, Sun Yat-sen accepted Soviet Russia as an ally because Communist Russia had renounced all the old imperial claims to special "rights" in Manchuria and North China. (Nevertheless, Sun Yat-sen explicitly rejected Marxism for China.) The Russians sent bright young Comintern legmen like Michael Borodin to "cooperate" with Sun Yat-sen at Canton while organizing the Communist Party of China at the same time.

Chiang, too, accepted the Russians at first. He went to Moscow in 1923 to study Russian military setup. He learned enough to organize China's own Whampoa Military Academy when he got back. That was not all he had learned. Chiang wrote:

"I admired in those days the whole revolutionary attitude of the Communists . . . When I arrived in Russia, after making a careful investigation of conditions there, I must admit that all my hopes about the revolution were blasted. I was convinced, that the aims which the Communists struggled for could not be attained through the methods they used."

More Than a Soldier. After Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Chiang, leading the Kuomintang army, resolved to break out of the Canton pocket and overthrow the government at Peking. The Nationalist revolution rolled north, defeating one warlord after another. In the Northern Expedition, one of the great military exploits of the century, Chiang showed himself much more than a soldier. Skillfully, he played one warlord off against another. He won the confidence of the commercial class, traditionally distrustful of soldiers; the bankers backed Chiang-as the stabilizing force in China. In July 1928, Chiang triumphantly entered Peking; he was master of China except for a few pockets of resistance.

The chief pocket was the Communists at Hankow. They had started north with Chiang, but got orders from Moscow in 1927 to become the Kuomintang's master instead of its ally. Through his agents, Chiang learned of the Moscow orders to Borodin almost as soon as Borodin himself. Chiang moved first. His army scattered the Chinese Communists into the hills of Kiangsi and Fukien Provinces. Michael Borodin escaped to Moscow.