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Not until the end of that year did he arrive in Taiwan. He summoned whatever Kuomintang remnants could reach his side, and proclaimed the "holy task" of reconquering the mainland. The U.S., by this time, had lost all confidence in its wartime ally; President Truman announced that the U.S. would send no aid to Chiang and did not support his claims. Six months later came the Korean War and the sudden re-emergence of Chiang's regime as "Free China."
In recent years, age has won some skirmishes from the generalissimo. The daily briefings are much shorter than they used to be, and Chiang does not always read them. He no longer supervises such details as the promotion of every officer above the rank of colonel. His son and heir, Vice Premier Chiang Ching-kuo, 62, takes care of all that. But the old man is still at war.
Last week he spoke out again as though the past 20 years of exile and erosion had never happened. The U.N. had "become a den of iniquity," he said, and its vote of expulsion was "illegal" and "shameless." The "Mao Tse-tung bandit regime" was "the common enemy of all the Chinese people," he went on, whereas he, Chiang, would continue the "unalterable national purpose" of reconquering the mainland. "The Republic of China is not a weakling of Asia or the world, which can be arbitrarily sold out by anyone. As long as we ourselves are strong, no force in the world can shake us."
Chiang does indeed have one of Asia's better fighting forces—an exile army of about 400,000 men, rejuvena'ed by local conscripts, an American-trained air force of 80,000 men and 385 warplanes. But virtually nobody—perhaps not even Chiang himself—believes that he will ever set foot on the mainland again.
What Chiang has achieved instead is the transformation of Taiwan from an agricultural colony of Japan into a prosperous industrial state. Starting with land reform, and continuing with some $4 billion of U.S. aid, Taiwan's economy has been growing at an average of 10% a year for the past decade. Cheap wages (an average of $1.80 a day) have inspired both U.S. and Japanese entrepreneurs to build plants for the manufacture of computers, TV sets, electric generators. Taiwan now boasts a G.N.P. of $6 billion, and its thriving export trade ($2 billion) is as great as that of the entire mainland. "With the head of steam they've developed," says an American executive in Taipei, "being barred from the U.N. should make no more difference than it does to West Germany."
Even before the U.N. vote, Chiang's government had hung the streets with banners that said: "Don't be shaken. Maintain your self-respect. Be self-reliant." Quiet anger seemed to be the mood of Taipei last week. When Government Spokesman James Wei spoke bitterly of the U.N. vote, he treated it as a consequence of Nixon's changing policy on China. "The Nixon trip to the mainland is a big slap in the face to us," he said. "What have we done to cause our friend to almost disown us?"