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"Our army must not be asked to abandon another front," says Chiang, "or voluntarily participate in another retreat. To abandon another front without a fight would betray [my soldiers'] confidence and endanger their loyalty. Our government could sustain a defeat on a single front, and maintain its morale and will to fight. But we might not do so if we retreat without a fight. We can and will fight on, even without assistance of allies, so long as morale remains high. Should our morale be destroyed, even our friends would be unable to help us."
As for all the hopeful talk of an agreed ceasefire, Chiang is equally composed. "It does not disturb me, because I know that the Communist bloc can never accept it, and will never permit it. Therefore I do not trouble myself with an impossibility."
While the world's radios, newspapers and parlors resound with his name and argue his intentions, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek pursues his intent way. Said his wife last week: "He lives each 24 hours as if they were his last, as if in them he had to accomplish the return to the mainland."
Chiang is highly conscious that his governance of Formosa can establish his best claim to, and justification for, a return to the mainland—or blight that hope forever. In his 22 years as head of the Nationalist government on the mainland, Chiang never had a year when he was not fighting either war lords, Communists or the Japanese. In the last four years on Formosa, he has had a chance to show what the Nationalists might have done if they had had peace.
Self-Examination. Chiang Kaishek, whose name means "Firm Rock." has come a long way round to this testing place. Born the son of the local salt merchant in a small village in Chekiang Province, just opposite the abandoned Tachen islets, Chiang Kai-shek jumped from military training school into the ranks of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's revolution against the decaying Manchu power and its heirs. Though in the early days Russia was the revolutionaries' only ally, Chiang was quickly disillusioned when Dr. Sun sent him to Moscow for training. He returned commenting brusquely: "What they call 'internationalism' and 'world revolution' is nothing but Kaiser imperialism." Soon after Dr. Sun's death, in the midst of the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, which established the Nationalist government, Chiang turned on the Communists, purged many, and drove out the Russian advisers. Chiang had declared the war he was to fight all his life.