Early life (left) and father
Chiang Kai-Shek (right), taken in 1910 The son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife,
Mao Fumei, Chiang Ching-kuo was born in
Fenghua, Zhejiang, with the
courtesy name of
Jiànfēng (). He had an adopted brother,
Chiang Wei-kuo. literally means , while means ; in his brother's name, literally means . The names are inspired by the references in Chinese classics such as the
Guoyu, in which "to draw the longitudes and latitudes of the world" is used as a metaphor for a person with great abilities, especially in managing a country. While the young Chiang Ching-kuo had a good relationship with his mother and grandmother (who were deeply rooted to their Buddhist faith), his relationship with his father was strict, utilitarian and often rocky. Chiang Kai-shek appeared to his son as an authoritarian figure, sometimes indifferent to his problems. Even in personal letters between the two, Chiang Kai-shek would sternly order his son to improve his Chinese calligraphy. From 1916 until 1919 Chiang Ching-kuo attended the Grammar School in Wushan Temple, an important temple in Xikou Town. Then, in 1920, his father hired tutors to teach him the
Four Books, the central texts of
Confucianism. On 4 June 1921, Ching-kuo's grandmother died. What might have been an immense emotional loss was compensated for when Chiang Kai-shek moved the family to Shanghai. Chiang Ching-kuo's stepmother, historically known as the Chiang family's "Shanghai Mother", went with them. During this period Chiang Kai-shek concluded that Chiang Ching-kuo was a son to be taught, while Chiang Wei-kuo was a son to be loved. During his time in Shanghai, Chiang Ching-kuo was supervised by his father and made to write a weekly letter of 200–300 Chinese characters. Chiang Kai-shek also underlined the importance of classical books and of learning English, two areas he was hardly proficient in himself. On 20 March 1924, Chiang Ching-kuo was able to present to his now-nationally famous father a proposal concerning the grass-roots organization of the rural population in
Xikou. Chiang Ching-kuo planned to provide free education to allow people to read and to write at least 1000 characters. In his own words: In early 1925, Chiang entered Shanghai's
Pudong College, but Chiang Kai-shek decided to send him on to Beijing because of warlord action and spontaneous student protests in Shanghai. In Beijing, he attended the school organized by a friend of his father,
Wu Zhihui, a renowned scholar and linguist. The school combined classical and modern approaches to education. While there, Ching-kuo started to identify himself as a progressive revolutionary and participated in the flourishing social scene inside the young Communist community. The idea of studying in Moscow now seized his imagination. Within the help program provided by the Soviet Union to the countries of East Asia, there was a training school that later became the
Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. The participants to the university were selected by the CPSU and KMT members, with a participation of CPC Central Committee. Chiang Ching-kuo asked Wu Zhihui to name him as a KMT candidate. Wu did not try to dissuade him, even though Wu was a key figure of the right-leaning and anti-Communist Western Hills Group of the KMT. In the summer of 1925, Chiang Ching-kuo traveled south to
Whampoa Military Academy to discuss his plans for study in Moscow with his father. Chiang Kai-shek was not keen, but after a discussion with
Chen Guofu he finally agreed. In a 1996 interview, Ch'en's brother,
Chen Li-fu, recalled that Chiang Kai-shek accepted the plan because of the need to have Soviet support at a time when his hold over the KMT was tenuous.
Moscow With or without his father's enthusiastic approval, Chiang Ching-kuo went on to Moscow in late 1925. He stayed in the Soviet Union for nearly twelve years. While there, Chiang was given the Russian name
Nikolai Vladimirovich Elizarov () and put under the tutelage of
Karl Radek at the
Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Noted for having an exceptional grasp of international politics, his classmates included other children of influential Chinese families, most notably the future Chinese Communist party leader,
Deng Xiaoping. Chiang Ching-kuo joined the
Communist Youth League under Deng. Soon Ching-kuo was an enthusiastic student of Communist ideology, particularly
Trotskyism; though following the
Great Purge,
Joseph Stalin privately met with him and ordered him to publicly denounce Trotskyism. Chiang even applied to be a member of the
All-Union Communist Party, although his request was denied. In April 1927, however, Chiang Kai-shek purged KMT leftists, had Communists arrested or killed, and expelled his Soviet advisers. Chiang Ching-kuo responded from Moscow with an editorial that harshly criticized his father's actions but was nonetheless detained as a "guest" of the Soviet Union, a practical hostage. The historiographic debate still continues as to whether he was forced to write the editorial, but he had seen Trotskyist friends arrested and killed by the
Soviet secret police. The Soviet government sent him to work in the
Ural Heavy Machinery Plant, a steel factory in
the Urals,
Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), where he met Faina Ipat'evna Vakhreva, a native
Belarusian. They married on 15 March 1935, and she would later take the Chinese name
Chiang Fang-liang. In December of that year, their son,
Hsiao-wen was born. Chiang Kai-shek refused to negotiate a prisoner swap for his son in exchange for a Chinese Communist Party leader. He wrote in his diary, "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son." In 1937, he maintained that "I would rather have no offspring than sacrifice our nation's interests", since he had no intention of stopping the war against the Communists.
Return to China and WWII Stalin allowed Chiang Ching-kuo to return to China with his Belarusian wife and son in April 1937 after living in the USSR for 12 years. By then, the
National Revolutionary Army (NRA) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under
Mao Zedong had signed a ceasefire to create the
Second United Front and fight the
Japanese invasion of China, which began in July 1937. Stalin hoped the Chinese would keep Japan from invading the Soviet Pacific coast, and he hoped to form an anti-Japanese alliance with the senior Chiang. On Ching-kuo's return, his father assigned a tutor,
Hsu Dau-lin, to assist with his readjustment to China. Chiang Ching-kuo was appointed as a specialist in remote districts of
Jiangxi where he was credited with training of cadres and fighting corruption, opium consumption, and illiteracy. Chiang Ching-kuo was appointed as commissioner of
Gannan Prefecture () between 1939 and 1945; there he banned smoking, gambling and prostitution, studied governmental management, allowed for economic expansion and a change in social outlook. His efforts were hailed as a miracle in the political war in China, then coined as the "Gannan New Deal" (). During his time in Gannan, from 1940 he implemented a "public information desk" where ordinary people could visit him if they had problems, and according to records, Chiang Ching-kuo received a total of 1,023 people during such sessions in 1942. In regard to the ban on prostitution and closing of brothels, Chiang implemented a policy where former prostitutes became employed in factories. Due to the large number of refugees in Ganzhou as a result from the ongoing war, thousands of orphans lived on the street; in June 1942, Chiang Ching-kuo formally established the Chinese Children's Village () in the outskirts of Ganzhou, with facilities such as a nursery, kindergarten, primary school, hospital and gymnasium. During the last years of the 1930s, he met
Wang Sheng, with whom he would remain close for the next 50 years. The paramilitary "Sanmin Zhuyi Youth Corps" was under Chiang's control. Chiang used the term "big bourgeoisie", in a disparaging manner to call
H. H. Kung and
T. V. Soong. While in mainland China, Chiang and his wife had a daughter,
Hsiao-chang, born in Nanchang (1938), and two more sons,
Hsiao-wu, born in
Chongqing (1945), In August 1942, Chang felt sick at a dinner party, and died the next day in a
Guilin hospital. The circumstances of her death raised speculation that it was murder. Over the years, many of her relatives, including her sons and highly ranked ex-security personnel, insisted that KMT's security apparatus orchestrated her murder to keep a lid on CCK's marital affair, and to protect CCK's political career.
Hostage claim Jung Chang and
Jon Halliday claim Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Communists to escape on the 1934–1935
Long March because he wanted Stalin to return Chiang Ching-kuo. This is contradicted by Chiang Kai-shek's diary, "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son." Again in 1937 he stated about his son: "I would rather have no offspring than sacrifice our nation's interests." Chiang had absolutely no intention of stopping the war against the Communists. Chiang Ching-kuo used his own agents to make arrests in Shanghai, rather than the Shanghai city police. Chiang Ching-kuo relied on two relatively new organizations which answered directly to him. The major impact of Chiang Ching-kuo's campaign was to cause the flight of prominent capitalists from Shanghai to Hong Kong and elsewhere. Chiang Ching-kuo, educated in the Soviet Union, initiated Soviet-style military organization in the Republic of China Military, reorganizing and Sovietizing the
political officer corps, surveillance, and KMT party activities were propagated throughout the military. Opposed to this was Sun Li-jen, who was educated at the American
Virginia Military Institute. at the
White House, 11 September 1963 Chiang orchestrated the controversial court-martial and arrest of General
Sun Li-jen in August 1955, allegedly for plotting a coup d'état with the American
CIA against his father. General Sun was a popular Chinese war hero from the
Burma Campaign against the Japanese and remained under house arrest until Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988. Ching-kuo also approved the arbitrary arrest and torture of prisoners. with U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, 23 September 1965 From 1955 to 1960, Chiang administered the construction and completion of Taiwan's highway system. Chiang's father elevated him to high office when he was appointed as the ROC Defense Minister from 1965 until 1969. He was the nation's Vice Premier between 1969 and 1972. Afterwards he was appointed the nation's Premier between 1972 and 1978. In 1970, Chiang was the target of an assassination attempt in New York City by
Peter Huang. As Premier Chiang organized a
people's diplomacy campaign in the United States in an effort to mobilize American political sentiment in opposition to the PRC through mass demonstrations and petitions. Among these efforts, the KMT worked with the
John Birch Society to launch a petition writing campaign through which Americans were urged to write their local government officials and ask them to "Cut the Red China connection." In an effort to bring more Taiwan-born citizens into government services, Chiang Ching-kuo "exiled" his over-ambitious chief of General Political Warfare Department, General
Wang Sheng, to
Paraguay as an ambassador (November 1983), and hand-picked
Lee Teng-hui as vice-president of the ROC (formally elected May 1984), first-in-the-line of succession to the presidency. Chiang emphatically declared that his successor would not be from the Chiang family in a Constitution Day speech on 25 December 1985: Chiang Wei-kuo, Chiang's younger brother, would later repudiate the declaration in 1990 after he was selected as a vice-presidential candidate. On 15 July 1987, Chiang finally ended
martial law and allowed his family to visit the
mainland. The ban on tourism to Hong Kong and
Macau was also lifted. His administration saw a gradual loosening of political controls and opponents of the Nationalists were no longer forbidden to hold meetings or publish political criticism papers. When the
Democratic Progressive Party was established on 28 September 1986, President Chiang decided against dissolving the group or persecuting its leaders, but its candidates officially ran in elections as independents in the
Tangwai movement. Chiang Ching-kuo also increased the political representation of
Taiwanese people to certain degree under his rule, allowing them to have various positions, which paved the way for
Lee Teng-hui to come to power and further democratize Taiwan.
Death and legacy Chiang Ching-kuo died at
Taipei Veterans General Hospital on 13 January 1988, aged 77, from a heart attack. He used a wheelchair during the last months of his life, and also had diabetes, alongside vision and heart problems. He was interred temporarily in Daxi Township, Taoyuan County (now
Daxi District,
Taoyuan City), but in a separate
mausoleum in
Touliao, a mile down the road from his father's burial place. The hope was to have both buried at their birthplace in
Fenghua once mainland China was recovered. Composer
Hwang Yau-tai wrote the
Chiang Ching-kuo Memorial Song in 1988. In January 2004,
Chiang Fang-liang asked that both father and son be buried at
Wuchih Mountain Military Cemetery in
Hsichih,
Taipei County (now New Taipei City). The state funeral ceremony was initially planned for Spring 2005, but was eventually delayed to winter 2005. It may be further delayed due to the recent death of Chiang Ching-kuo's oldest daughter-in-law, who had served as the de facto head of the household since Chiang Fang-liang's death in 2004. Chiang Fang-liang and Soong Mei-ling had agreed in 1997 that the former leaders be first buried, but still be moved to mainland China. Murray A. Rubinstein called Chiang Ching-kuo more of a civilian leader than his father, whom Rubenstein refers to as a "quasi-
warlord." Jay Taylor has described Chiang Ching-kuo as a figure who was ideologically inspired by a mix of
Soviet communism,
Chinese nationalism,
Taiwanese localism, and
American democracy, who became the helmsman of the democratization of Taiwan. ==Memorials==