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The inner certainty this gave him was Chiang's strength, and the force that for 22 years held China together. Threatened with death when the Young Marshal kidnaped him in Sian in the famed 1936 incident, Chiang refused to make any concessions: "If I should try to save my life today and forget the welfare of the nation . . . the nation will perish while I live," he told the Young Marshal. When the Japanese attacked in full assault in 1937, Chiang retreated behind the Yangtze gorges to Chungking, and fought with no help from the U.S. or any ally, doggedly sure that eventually the West would stand at his side. His stubbornness tied down more than 1,000,000 Japanese troops who might otherwise have swept over Asia—a feat that established China's claim to greatness as a modern nation, and won Chiang recognition, at Franklin Roosevelt's insistence, as one of the West's Big Five.
But Chiang's certainty was also the source of his weakness. His inner conviction led him to confuse criticism of his actions with a threat to the nation's welfare, and he could be cruel to opponents. He thought in moral, not social, terms. Too often, while the unrest loosed by the very revolution he had set loose seethed around him. Chiang exhorted and scolded his people like a Savanarola, when the times called for vigorous social reforms.
When corruption was rife, when top officials piled up vast fortunes in unexplained transactions, when officers defected, Chiang instinctively turned his thoughts inward to reproach himself for failure to inspire with his own standards. After his final retreat to Formosa, he told the National Assembly: "I must put the blame on myself . . . The disastrous military reverses on the mainland were not due to the overwhelming strength of the Communists, but due to the organizational collapse, loose discipline and low spirits of the party members."
The New Home. The Formosans had no cause to love the 2,000,000 defeated Nationalists who descended on them at the bitter end of 1949. The first Nationalist governor to take over from the Japanese at war's end had arrived with a retinue of carpetbaggers and incompetents. In 1947 a rebellion flared which lasted three days, was bloodily put down by General Peng Meng-chi, then commander of the Nationalist garrison and now acting chief of the general staff. Thousands were killed.
Chiang moved swiftly to restore Formosan morale. He installed as governor frail, ulcer-ridden Chen Cheng, a general turned civilian who had been with Chiang since student days. Chen simultaneously tightened police control and initiated basic reforms, notably land reform. Chiang had learned his lesson on the mainland: "The consensus is that our party failed during the past four years because we failed to enforce the principle of the people's livelihood."
Laws were passed limiting rents, which had ranged as high as 70% of the year's crop, to 37.5%. The government broke up and sold off the big landholdings inherited from the Japanese; it bought land from the landlords and resold it to tenants on easy terms. In four years of Chiang's rule, tenancy has been reduced from 40% to 20%, and thousands of Formosans built "37.5% houses" and took "37.5% brides."