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In the next ten years he fought war lords, bargained with those he could not defeat, stalled off the Japanese, chased the Communists out of Kiangsi on their famed Long March, and forged a nation. Although many liberals around the world, infatuated with the heady reports of the fine new Communist world in Russia, were already denouncing Chiang as "counter-revolutionary," in those ten years China made more progress than it had in the previous hundred. Chiang broke the economic shackles which the foreign concessions had fixed on dismembered China. For the first time, Chinese felt themselves a modern nation; there was order and purpose. Magazines flourished, students went abroad in droves to learn modern techniques, and travelers who used to go by boat to avoid train robbers could now take the train from Shanghai to Peking in safety. Road mileage was tripled, the student population doubled, a national currency was established, the practice of farming out tax collection ended.
In those years, Chiang took to wife the beautiful Mei-ling of the famed Soong sisters (one sister was the widow of Sun Yatsen, another the wife of Financier H. H. Kung, longtime member of Chiang's Cabinet). Chiang was a revolutionist of unity, not upset. His mission was to weld a nation out of many pieces, not to overthrow a monolithic government in the name of individual liberty. Dr. Sun Yat-sen used to argue that, unlike Europe, China had not too little but too much liberty without organization, "and we have become a heap of sand." What was needed was the cement. Chiang's Kuomintang tried to provide it. Slowly, while tirelessly expounding Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles, Chiang forged his own philosophy of rule. Deeply imbued with Confucian thought, it was a theory based on precept, on the loyalty of subject to ruler, of son to father. "If the ruler is virtuous, the people will also be virtuous," Confucius taught.
Chiang made his decisions by introspection amounting almost to spiritual flagellation. Daily he set aside a time for meditation (he was converted to Christianity and became a Methodist, at the urging of his wife, in 1932). He kept a diary with a page at the end of every week for rigid self-examination, instructed his chief officials to do likewise. He quoted the famed Confucian sage, Mencius: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am not upright, shall I not be in fear even of a poor man in his loose garments of hair cloth? If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands."