In the early 1940s, at the height of the Japanese invasion of China, Chiang Kai-shek wrote a book about China's past "humiliation" and future "reconstruction." He titled it China's Destiny, but Chiang might have called it My Destiny. He saw little distinction between his own fate and that of the giant, sprawling, poverty-stricken land that he ruled for just over 20 years. All his life, the lean and ambitious soldier fought bravely, though in the end vainly, to shape history to his personal specifications. When he died of a heart attack last week at the age of 87 in his exile capital of Taipei, he was still clinging to the sacred fiction that it was he and nobody else who was the legitimate father of all of modern China. His death could hardly have been more dramatically timed. To Chiang, the rout of anti-Communist forces in Indochina must have seemed the inevitable continuation of the long and losing Asian struggle against Communism, in which he was the principal casualty.
Clear-eyed, strong-jawed, supremely self-assured, Chiang Kai-shek (the name means "firm rock") was one of the century's major figures. As a revolutionary and ardent nationalist, he had an epic career embracing both triumph and tragedy. Sixty years of his life were consumed by bitter uphill struggles: first against the crumbling Manchu dynasty, then against the warlords who flourished in its ruins, next against invaders from imperial Japan and finally against the Communist peasant army that foreclosed his dream of dominance in China and chased him to an unhappy exile on Taiwan.
Paradoxically, the generalissimo cast a longer shadow on the century than on China itself. At the peak of his international prestige, he was a smiling, greatcoated member of the wartime Big Four, along with Roosevelt (his great champion in the West), Stalin and Churchill. He was a founder of the United Nations, gaining for China a permanent seat on the Security Council. It was in America that his image was most exalted. "To American eyes," said Churchill, "he was one of the dominant forces in the world. He was the champion of 'the new Asia.' " But when he failed to live up to his image as China's man of destiny, and the new Asia so ardently expected by Americans failed to materialize, Chiang found himself abandoned by the Truman Administration. That placed Chiang at the center of an unhappy chapter in postwar U.S. history: the hate-filled witch hunt for those who "lost China."
In fact, China was never really "lost": it had never been won. The U.S. tended to see Chiang's China as a unified nation with an effective central government, even idealizing it as a breeding ground for an American-style democracy. But it was none of these. Just before his death, Sun Yat-sen had described China as "a heap of loose sand." Chiang Kai-shek tried to build on that sand the foundations of a modern and united country. But during Chiang's entire tenure as China's leader, the country remained beset by outside aggression, deep internal divisions, corruption and inefficiency in Chiang's ruling party and, not least, his intractable insistence on shortsighted, ineffective policies.