Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek
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Chiang Conquers AIL The marriage of General Chiang was important because it made him the post-mortem brother-in-law of the Kuomintang's late sainted Sun; brother-in-law of Big Banker T. V. Soong; and brother-in-law of Dr. H. H. Kung, famed descendant of China's greatest sage Confucius, who also married a Soong girl. Chiang returned to China to head the Kuomintang Government at Nanking. He was soon styled the Generalissimo, and headed a campaign to conquer northern China. In this war there was by normal Chinese standards some fairly heavy fighting. Most fortunate for the Generalissimo, however, was the assassination at Mukden of the doughtiest fighter among China's War Lords, the great Marshal Chang Tso-lin, famed bibber of tiger's blood and keeper of a harem of white women.
The Marshal's son & heir, Chang Hsueh-liang, "The Young Marshal," blamed the Japanese for his father's somewhat mysterious assassination, and allied himself with Chiang. Six years ago the Japanese drove The Young Marshal out of Manchuria and reorganized it as their puppet state Manchukuo, but the rest of China had been brought under the flag of the Nanking Government, that is, of Generalissimo Chiang (TIME, Oct. 26, 1931).
Progress, From then until this year's Japanese invasion the material progress of Chiang's China has been phenomenal. He called in Professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer of Princeton to give China the plan for its first sound currency, and the first ever accepted on a nation-wide basis. Roads and busses to run on them were sent stabbing far into China from her ports, and the more busses the fewer bandits. Flood control and famine-fighting agencies which had functioned piecemeal in China were given coordination. In a land which has existed for centuries in a state of complete disorganization such elementary progress was revolutionary. The armies or bandit hordes of Chinese Communists who tried to harass Nanking from the hinterland were turned by Generalissimo Chiang into an excuse for not fighting the Japanese. He used them as a football coach uses a scrub team to train the regular army of New China—the first Chinese War Machine, complete with European artillery, German military advisers, U. S. and Italian war planes.
New Life. In China no great moral stigma had commonly attached to graft. It was the custom of nearly every official who could to collect it. For the colossal purchases Chiang had to make, he could not afford the normal luxury of graft. To find someone he could trust to purchase war planes the Generalissimo turned at last in desperation to his own wife. She it was who pored over aircraft catalogs, dickered with hard-boiled white salesmen, and is reputed to have had several Chinese officials of her Air Ministry shot to reduce thieving.