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was, Wedemeyer felt,more gallant and resolute than Churchill’s famous “blood, sweat and tears” speech after Dunkirk. And China did resist, in complete international isolation, for the four long years before Pearl Harbor, during which the United States, supposedly neutral, continued to supply Japan with such vital materials as oil and iron.
    Chiang’s American allies supported him in the very areas where he was most criticized by his American detractors, in his military strategy and in his undemocratic rule, which made FDR think about getting rid of him and Stilwell apoplectic. Chiang’s military philosophy seemed reasonable to some highly qualified observers who believed that Chiang simply could not do what the Americans like Stilwell were asking of him and also survive in power. “China could hope for victory only by hanging on against superior forces in the expectation that Japan would sooner or later become embroiled in war with the Western powers,” Wedemeyer concluded. “The Generalissimo adopted the sound strategy of endeavoring to dissipate Japanese strength and forcing the enemy to overextend his lines.” FDR’s cousin,Joseph Alsop, who was an aide to Chennault, believed that American policymakers did not understand Chiang’s dire situation, in which a domestic force that wanted to overthrow him was growing stronger by the day even as his sole foreign ally demanded that he do nothing about it.

    In many ways , Chiang’s kidnapping and the united front agreement that resulted from it were a genuine historical watershed for him and for China. Seen at the time as a sort of apotheosis, it was actually the beginning of his decline, the point after which he could no longer be the ultimate victor in China’s domestic strife, leading his country down a path of political reform and change strongly influenced by western liberal-democratic ideas. Had it not been for the Xian kidnapping, Chiang would almost surely have completed the “last five minutes” of the campaign to defeat the Communists. His army was not of international caliber, but it was larger, better equipped, and more effective under its German advisers than it had been earlier, while theCCP’sRed Army was still a ragged and poorly armed force of perhaps thirty thousand men. Had Chiang undertaken a new campaign against the Communists in late 1936 and 1937, before the Japanese embarked on their full-scale effort to conquer China, Mao and his followers would have taken refuge in Mongolia or the Soviet Union. There, Stalin would have kept them alive, but, needing to confront the great danger to Soviet survival that a Japanese victory in China represented, he would have had little choice but to support China’s central government, and he would not have backed the CCP in any effort to overthrow it. Dislodged from their base in northern Shaanxi and chased across the border, the Communists would not have been able to expand their army and territory in the way they did during World War II, growing in those years into a force of more than a million soldiers governing some nineteen “liberated” areas.
    But that is not how events unfolded. Under extreme duress, Chiang broke a fundamental rule of civil conflict, which is never to allow an armed force that you do not control into your camp, because surely, when the conditions are ripe, that force will oppose you. The story is told that when he got back to Nanjing from Xian, Chiang was advised by an old friend and senior KMT official, Chen Lifu, to organize a large force and wipe out the Communists in their Shaanxi refuge, but Chiang, as Taylor has written, “bent his head and did not answer.”
    And with that decision to keep to his word, Chiang helped to establish the conditions that, in the long run, would destroy him.
    For the entire war , Chiang remained a hero to many people, both Chinese and foreigners, but for many others a slow disillusionment set in, and in the later stages of the war, no place