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The revolutionary doctor was no longer "uncle." He was T.V.'s brother-in-law. At the age of 48 he had married earnest Ching-ling Soong, then 21. In Canton he and the general of his revolutionary army, brilliant young Chiang Kaishek, struggled with a problem that T.V. and Chiang were to struggle with the rest of their lives—finances. Revolutions are expensive. Chiang wanted funds for a march north. Who could raise the silver bullets for him? Young Madame Sun Yat-sen suggested her "kid brother—he knows something about money." In two years, T.V. upped revenues from one million to ten million dollars, filled Chiang's war chest.
When Dr. Sun died (1925), Chiang Kai-shek became the leader of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Revolution. As he moved up from Canton on his famed Northern Expedition, the young general was accompanied by his young financier. A lean, brusque, owlish revolutionary, T.V. brought his monetary reforms into every captured city. He had become China's Alexander Hamilton.
Education in Communism. On the brink of success, the Revolution threatened to fall apart. A rift developed between Chiang and the Kuomintang's Communist wing, guided by Russian Advisers Michael Borodin (an ex-Chicago dentist named Mike Gruzenberg who now edits the Moscow Daily News) and General Galen (the late, purged General Vasili Bluecher). To Shanghai, financial heart of China, hurried T.V. There he talked long and earnestly with the city's worried bankers, won their unstinted support for the Kuomintang's right wing. Then Chiang broke with the Communists, set up a new Nationalist Government in Nanking. T.V. had played a crucial role in steering China from a Communist revolution.
That year General Chiang and his financier became brothers-in-law. In the resplendent ballroom of Shanghai's Hotel Majestic, a western orchestra played Here Comes the Bride. Under a portrait of Sun Yatsen, Mei-ling Soong and Chiang Kai-shek were married. T.V. gave the bride away.
Financial Reformer. In the following years, T.V. labored over China's finances. He undertook solid, long-needed reforms: a standardized currency, a revamped tariff and tax collection, a centralized banking system and even (in 1932) a balanced budget. All Asia began to speak of T.V.* as Asia's most promising and competent, as well as its most irascible, statesman.
As treasury watchdog and implacable foe of "squeeze," T.V. antagonized innumerable silk-clad officials, angrily upset innumerable cups of green tea. He snorted at circumlocution and the flowery approach. He believed in plain talk, a minimum of red tape. He had American ideas on efficiency. He was determined that his cycle of Cathay should be a motorcycle. One of his favorite tactics was to order his subordinates to "stand by for an emergency," which meant that they could not leave their desks for China's traditional dawdling lunches or social chitchat, or other timehonored, Celestial varieties of the slowdown.