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Ready to Fight. But in 1937 Chiang Kai-shek failed to act in his old character. Chiang is a strange thing, a grey-eyed Chinese. Willowy, wiry and methodical, he is a combination of disinterested patriot and pietistic Y.M.C.A. secretary. Like his wife, the Wellesley-schooled Soong Meiling (sister of Sun Yat-sen's widow), who is his active political aide, tough soldier Chiang is a Methodist; and together the Chiangs have sponsored China's New Life Movement, which is a uniquely Chinese combination of Christian idealism and traditional ethical Confucianism.
Part of Chiang's temporary placation of Japan had consisted of "chasing" the Chinese Red Army from Kiangsi south of Shanghai back through the immensity of hither China on a vast circuitous sweep over mountain ranges, deserts and rivers to Shensi, in the great bend of the Yellow River—the birthplace of China's 4,000-year-old civilization. The Red Army marched 6,000 miles in their retreat, fighting 15 major battles and some 300 skirmishes. Nothing like this movement had been seen since the escaped Czech legionnaires, who had been prisoners in Russia, fought their way to freedom across Siberia to the Pacific in 1918.
As it turned out, the escape of the Chinese Communists was the precipitating factor in the chemistry of recent Chinese history. For the Chinese Reds, who kept saying "Japan is the enemy," eventually pushed the sharp-nosed, slack-lipped young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, son of Chang Tso-lin, the old warlord of Manchuria, to the supreme effrontery of kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek in northwestern Sian in 1936. Long conversations with the generalissimo convinced young Marshal Chang and the Communists of something that Chinese patriots now accept as fact: that Chiang was determined to resist the Japanese. All his placation was only to gain time to organize his nation, strengthen his army, build roads, prepare for the inevitable retreat into the interior once war was joined.
When the kidnappers became convinced of Chiang's patriotism, the kidnapping turned into a fantastic game of Face-saving and counter-Face-saving. Kidnapper Chang was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, reprieved and placed under "disciplinary observation." Kidnapped Chiang apologized to the Chinese people for the whole incident. But the practical upshot of the curious affair was Chiang's decision that the time had come for a United Front of all Chinese, Reds included, to resist Japanese pressure.
The Chinese currency has been stabilized, and two remarkable brothers-in-law (of each other and of Chiang*), the solid, wistful Yale-trained, Dr. H. H. Kung, and the glossy, competent Harvardian, T. V. Soong, had at last succeeded in teaching their countrymen the art of central banking.
Chiang was ready to fight because during the years between 1932, when Japan set up her stooge empire in Manchukuo and the kidnapping at Sian in 1936, China had matured politically and grown stronger economically. And for the same reason, fearing a United Front of all Chinese, the Japanese struck two years ago this week.