Read China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice for Free Online

Christmas, Zhou went to see the Gimo, the first thing he did was salute him—“the Red Army’s first sign of obedience to the united front commander,” Chiang’s biographer Jay Taylor has written. In exchange, the Communists got a kind of de facto legalization, or at least Chiang would give up his efforts to destroy them. They would keep their own army; indeed, they’d now have a chance to substantially expand it; and they’d be able to send their representatives to the national capital at Nanjing so resistance to Japan could be coordinated.
    News ofChiang’s capture and the formation of theUnited Front quickly spread through all of China, with the result that when he left Xian and returned to his capital in Nanjing, Chiang was no longer just a popular leader; he was, as Taylor has put it, “a national hero,” propelled to new heights of popularity and power. China was still poor, weak, and fragmented, but it was stronger, more orderly, more united, and more economically vigorous than it had been at any time since theoverthrow of the Qing dynasty a quarter century before, and Chiang was given a lot of the credit for this. The new determination to forge unity in the fight against Japan made him globally and locally recognized as China’s man of destiny, the sole figure who could lead his country in its hour of peril. And the luster endured for nearly the entire duration of the Sino-Japanese War, the four years when China resisted alone and the four years after Pearl Harbor when its chief and only real ally was the United States.
    For all that time, Chiang enjoyed the almost universal conviction that he was valiantly resisting the naked aggression of a nefarious invader. This image was supported in the United States most of all by Henry Luce, the China-born son of missionaries and the founder of Time and Life , which were the most influential magazines in America. Over the years, Chiang was on the cover of Time ten times, more than Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, or anyone else.
    Luce was far from the only passionate observer of the scene in China who saw greatness in Chiang’s character and leadership.Hans von Seeckt, who had effectively commanded the German army during the Weimar Republic and was Chiang’s chief adviser during theNorthern Expedition, called him “a splendid and noble personality.”Owen Lattimore, the scholar of China who would later be accused, falsely, of being a Communist agent, called him a “genuine patriot,” a “highly nationalistic” figure who was “certainly responsible for holding China together at the critical moment.” Claire Chennault, the commander of the Flying Tigers, told Roosevelt in 1943, in Stilwell’s presence, that Chiang was “one of the two or three greatest military and political leaders in the world today.”
    Han Suyin, the novelist who would later become an unabashed acolyte of Mao, was just as unabashed in her admiration forChiang in the early years of the war. The reunification of China was “due to the genius of one man, a slim, unassuming young Chinese officer” who had realized the goals of the Chinese revolution after “sixteen years of the struggle in the dark,” she wrote. Chiang, she continued, in her many-splendored prose, possessed “a will as stern as the Great Wall, as irresistible as the flood of China’s rivers.” He was “the man in whose hands the fate of our four hundred millions still is laid.” In the face of the Japanese onslaught, she continued,
    he is there, Chiang Kai-shek, directing the war with steady, unshaken resolve never to yield, in weakness andcowardice, to armed force. We are strengthened, reassured.… Here is the determination that has stirred the whole country, willed China to rise from her torpor, given her consciousness of her past glory and future dignity and greatness. One man, yet not one man alone. A spiritual force, a symbol, an inspiration to us all.
    Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek in one of his many