CHINA: You Shall Never Yield...

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The Sian generals demanded that he fight Japan. When he refused to listen to "demands," they made him a prisoner. For two weeks, while the world wondered if he were dead, Chiang stonily refused to deal with his captors. "If you want to shoot me," he said, "do so at once." He raged because his government in Nanking did not blast Sian from the air. "Why don't they bomb us!" he repeated over & over.

When shooting broke out the night of his arrest, Chiang leaped from a rear window in his underwear. He scaled a ten-foot wall, stumbled into a deep moat and wrenched his back but climbed out and ran until he fell again, tripped by brambles in the darkness. He lost his false teeth. When overtaken, he once more insisted on being shot or sent back to Nanking.

The mutineers read Chiang's private diary; there, it appeared, Chiang showed as much determination to fight Japan as they had themselves. A consultation took place among the captors. Communist General Chou En-lai was invited over from the Red positions nearby. His instructions from Moscow: Chiang was to be returned to Nanking.

The Sian generals released the Gimo, but not before he had read them a remarkable lecture: "You have not understood the principles of a revolution ... On the day that I sacrifice my life for the sake of principle, the revolution will be a success . . . and my spirit will live forever. Then multitudes of others will follow me . . . Though I die, the nation will live."

Pledges in Cairo. When the Japanese invaded China proper the following year, multitudes did indeed follow him. They followed him for eight years.

The Japanese captured Nanking, Chiang moved the government upriver to Hankow and fought on; they captured Hankow, he moved to Chungking. When the ports were gone, Chinese coolies carved a Burma Road across the mountains. When the Japanese cut off Burma, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. flew amounting load of war supplies "over the Hump."

The Japanese offered Chiang peace terms a dozen times; he never accepted. For Chiang's constancy, there was one notable acknowledgment: at Cairo in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promised the Generalissimo to crush Japan and restore all Chinese territory lost in half a century of struggle with the Japanese. Formally, China became one of the "Big Five." When the war ended, China drew a long breath and turned to reconstruction. The spearhead of Chiang's planned reconstruction of China was Manchuria, with its coal and iron and factories. At the last moment, it was snatched from China's hand.

Part of the price the U.S. had paid Joseph Stalin at Yalta was a promise that the U.S. would support Russia's bid for a "special position" in Manchuria: control of the South Manchurian Railroad, Dairen and Port Arthur. Told about this deal months later, Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly accepted. Further, when the Russians marched into Manchuria, three days after the atom bomb on Hiroshima, they disarmed the Japanese, then handed the arms to the Chinese Communists. Chiang was not surprised. Even when both he and the Reds were arrayed against the Japanese, Chiang used to say: "The Japanese are like a terrible skin disease; but Communism is a cancer."