The Generalissimo

The Generalissimo PDF Author: Jay Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674033388
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Book Description
One of the most momentous stories of the last century is China’s rise from a self-satisfied, anti-modern, decaying society into a global power that promises to one day rival the United States. Chiang Kai-shek, an autocratic, larger-than-life figure, dominates this story. A modernist as well as a neo-Confucianist, Chiang was a man of war who led the most ancient and populous country in the world through a quarter century of bloody revolutions, civil conflict, and wars of resistance against Japanese aggression. In 1949, when he was defeated by Mao Zedong—his archrival for leadership of China—he fled to Taiwan, where he ruled for another twenty-five years. Playing a key role in the cold war with China, Chiang suppressed opposition with his “white terror,” controlled inflation and corruption, carried out land reform, and raised personal income, health, and educational levels on the island. Consciously or not, he set the stage for Taiwan’s evolution of a Chinese model of democratic modernization. Drawing heavily on Chinese sources including Chiang’s diaries, The Generalissimo provides the most lively, sweeping, and objective biography yet of a man whose length of uninterrupted, active engagement at the highest levels in the march of history is excelled by few, if any, in modern history. Jay Taylor shows a man who was exceedingly ruthless and temperamental but who was also courageous and conscientious in matters of state. Revealing fascinating aspects of Chiang’s life, Taylor provides penetrating insight into the dynamics of the past that lie behind the struggle for modernity of mainland China and its relationship with Taiwan.

The Generalissimo's Son

The Generalissimo's Son PDF Author: Jay Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 556

Book Description
Chiang Ching-kuo, son and political heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was born in 1910, when Chinese women, nearly all illiterate, hobbled about on bound feet and men wore pigtails as symbols of subservience to the Manchu Dynasty. In his youth Ching-kuo was a Communist and a Trotskyite, and he lived twelve years in Russia. He died in 1988 as the leader of Taiwan, a Chinese society with a flourishing consumer economy and a budding but already wild, woolly, and open democracy. He was an actor in many of the events of the last century that shaped the history of China's struggles and achievements in the modern era: the surge of nationalism among Chinese youth, the grand appeal of Marxism-Leninism, the terrible battle against fascist Japan, and the long, destructive civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his father and two million Nationalists. He led the brutal suppression of dissent on the island and was a major player in the cold, sometimes hot war between Communist China and America. By reacting to changing economic, social, and political dynamics on Taiwan, Sino-American rapprochement, Deng Xiaoping's sweeping reforms on the mainland, and other international events, he led Taiwan on a zigzag but ultimately successful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Jay Taylor underscores the interaction of political developments on the mainland and in Taiwan and concludes that if China ever makes a similar transition, it will owe much to the Taiwan example and the Generalissimo's son.

Chiang Kai Shek

Chiang Kai Shek PDF Author: Jonathan Fenby
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0786739843
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 704

Book Description
With a narrative as briskly paced and vividly detailed as an international thriller, this definitive biography of Chiang Kai-shek masterfully maps the tumultuous political career of Nationalist China's generalissimo as it reevaluates his brave but unfulfilled life. Chiang Kai-shek was one of the most influential world figures of the twentieth century. The leader of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist movement in China, by 1928 he had established himself as head of the government in Nanking. But while he managed to survive the political storms of the 1930s, Chiang's power was continually being undermined by the Japanese on one side and the Chinese Communists on the other. Drawing extensively on original Chinese sources and accounts by contemporaneous journalists, acclaimed author Jonathan Fenby explores little-known international connections in Chiang's story as he unfolds a story as fascinating in its conspiratorial intrigues as it is remarkable for its psychological insights. This is the definitive biography of the man who, despite his best intentions, helped create modern-day China.

The Last Empress

The Last Empress PDF Author: Hannah Pakula
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439154236
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 850

Book Description
With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan. An epic historical tapestry, this wonderfully wrought narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China -- the superpower we are inextricably linked with -- the way its people think and their code of behavior, both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century. Brilliantly narrated, this fierce and bloody drama also includes U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell; Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tigers; Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; murderous warlords; journalists Henry Luce, Theodore White, and Edgar Snow; and the unfortunate State Department officials who would be purged for predicting (correctly) the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the representative of an Eastern ally in the West, Madame Chiang was befriended -- before being rejected -- by the Roosevelts, stayed in the White House for long periods during World War II, and charmed the U.S. Congress into giving China billions of dollars. Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.

Generalissimos of the Western Roman Empire

Generalissimos of the Western Roman Empire PDF Author: John M. O'Flynn
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888640314
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
John Micheal O'Flynn traces the development of the position of the generalissimo, or emperor's commander of the military forces, in the western part of the Roman Empire during the first century AD. From the arrogant barbarian Arbogast, who treated the youthful emperor Valentinian as his puppet, to Odovacar, who dismissed the last western emperor and was pronounced king of Italy in 476, the generalissimos' seizure of power led to dissolution and chaos from which would emerge the political patterns of medieval and modern Europe.

Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang Kai-Shek PDF Author: Emily Hahn
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504016270
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
An in-depth biography of the towering 20th-century Chinese military and political figure who led the government, first on the mainland and then in exile in Taiwan, from the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent who lived in China when he was head of state In 1911, 24-year-old Chiang Kai-shek was an obscure Chinese student completing his military training in Japan, the only country in the Far East with a modern army. By 1928, the soldier who no one believed would ever amount to anything had achieved world fame as the leader who broke with Russia and released the newly formed Republic of China from Communist control. Emily Hahn’s eye-opening book examines Chiang’s friendship with revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and chronicles his marriage to the glamorous, American-educated Soong May-ling, who converted him to Christianity and helped him enact social reforms. As the leader of the Nationalist Party, Chiang led China for over two decades: from 1927 through the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the civil war that ended with a Communist victory in 1949. After defeat, he retreated with his government to Taiwan where he continued to lead as president of the exiled Republic of China until his death in 1975. Famous for forging a new nation out of the chaos of warlordism, he was an Allied leader during the Second World War, only to end up scorned as an unenlightened dictator at the end of his life. Casting a critical eye on Sino-American relations, Hahn sheds new light on this complex leader who was one of the most important global political figures of the last century.

The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947

The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 PDF Author: Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
An Economist Best Book of 2018 New York Times Book Review Editor’s Pick “Gripping [and] splendid.… An enormous contribution to our understanding of Marshall.”—Washington Post At the end of World War II, General George Marshall took on what he thought was a final mission—this time not to win a war, but to stop one. In China, conflict between Communists and Nationalists threatened to suck in the United States and escalate into revolution. Marshall’s charge was to cross the Pacific, broker a peace, and prevent a Communist takeover, all while staving off World War III. At first, the results seemed miraculous. But as they started to come apart, Marshall was faced with a wrenching choice—one that would alter the course of the Cold War, define the US-China relationship, and spark one of the darkest-ever turns in American political life. The China Mission offers a gripping, close-up view of the central figures of the time—from Marshall, Mao, and Chiang Kai-shek to Eisenhower, Truman, and MacArthur—as they stood face-to-face and struggled to make history, with consequences and lessons that echo today.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek

Madame Chiang Kai-shek PDF Author: Laura Tyson Li
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802198732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Book Description
The first biography of one of the most controversial and fascinating women of the twentieth century. Beautiful, brilliant, and captivating, Madame Chiang Kai-shek seized unprecedented power during China’s long and violent civil war. She passionately argued against Chinese Communism in the international arena and influenced decades of Sino-American relations and modern Chinese history. Raised in one of China’s most powerful families and educated at Wellesley College, Soong Mayling went on to become wife, chief adviser, interpreter, and propagandist to Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. She sparred with international leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, and impressed Westerners and Chinese alike with her acumen, charm, and glamour. But she was also decried as a manipulative Dragon Lady,” and despised for living in American-style splendor while Chinese citizens suffered under her husband’s brutal oppression. The result of years of extensive research in the United States and abroad, and written with access to previously classified CIA and diplomatic files, Madame Chiang Kai-shek objectively evaluates one of the most powerful and fascinating women of the twentieth century. “Li brilliantly analyzes a fearless and profoundly conflicted woman of extraordinary force.” —Booklist

Zhang Xueliang

Zhang Xueliang PDF Author: A. Shai
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230348912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
The first book to tell the strange and fascinating story of General Zhang Xue-liang, the Chinese-Manchurian 'Young Marshall' - a man who left an indelible mark on the history of modern China, but few know his story. Unlocking the mystery of this man's life, Aron Shai helps to shed light on 20th-century China.
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