EVERY year, the old man orders that his birthday be officially ignored, and every year it is celebrated as a national holiday. Early this week, in the wake of a stinging repudiation by the assembled nations of the world, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was to observe his 84th birthday, and so the presidential office building in Taipei was decorated with pine trees and long noodles, both symbols of longevity. An army chorus of 10,000 men gathered to sing Long Live the President. Some 20,000 others prepared to chant the same message from the mountains of southern Taiwan.
Slightly stooped, bald, armed with a cane, the granitic old man still gets up early every morning for an hour of prayer and meditation. At his age, any man would have much to reflect on. He has more than most. Perhaps he remembers the wartime meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, the great victories and the shattering defeats. Perhaps he also recalls one of his favorite lines from the Confucian scholar Mencius, which he used to quote to his aides: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands."
He was the son of a salt merchant, but he always wanted to be a soldier —and a revolutionary. At the Paoting Military Academy, he was the only cadet who cut off his pigtail, that symbol of submission to imperial rule; seven years passed before an obscure Changsha student named Mao Tse-tung made a similar gesture of revolt.
After Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang revolution finally overthrew the corrupt Manchu empire in 1911, Chiang served as one of Sun's best young officers, then went to Moscow for further training. "I admired in those days the whole revolutionary attitude of the Communists," Chiang said later. "When I arrived in Russia, all my hopes about the revolution were blasted."
Back in China after Sun's death, Chiang shrewdly used Communist forces to help rout various warlords and establish his command over Peking in 1928. But in the course of the campaign, he turned on the Communists and eventually drove them into the remote hills of Kiangsi. From that day to this, the two have been at war. In 1936, when Chiang was kidnaped by a group of Nationalist officers who wanted to stop the anti-Communist campaign and unite against the Japanese invaders, he refused to bow. "If you want to shoot me," he said, "do so at once." He was finally released at the behest of a young Communist, Chou Enlai.
World War II ended, after a loss of 22 million Chinese lives, with Chiang nominally the ruler of all China, one of the world's Big Five, and a founding father of the U.N. But the generalissimo soon proved unable to govern his ruined country. Corruption reigned, abetted by hoarding, inflation, hunger —and, as Chiang himself later admitted, "organizational collapse, loose discipline and low spirits of [our] party members." When Mao's Communist forces besieged Peking, early in 1949, Chiang's defenders defected to the enemy and Chiang himself resigned the presidency. For six months, while city after city fell to Mao, Chiang seemed in a kind of trance. He retired to his native village and took long walks in the woods; he cruised idly up and down the China coast, inspecting fortifications.