CHIANG KAI-SHEK

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 119, 15 November 1929, Page 9

CHIANG KAI-SHEK

CHINA'S PRESIDENT A PEN-PORTRAIT By Lady Drummond Hay. (Copyright.) ' General Chiang Kai.shek, President of the Eepublic of China with its mora than 400,000,000 population, and Com-mander-in-Chief of the Chinese Na. tional Army, again has been thrust mto the foreground of the Far East, crn political stage by the Kusso-CMnese war cloud. I found him to be the most talked of and least known of public men ii' China Envied, hate-d, called in the same breath "mere figurehead" and "DieYriMw Khhi ambitions t0 become a rellow Napoleon, attributed to him-bv Chinese and foreign enemies, the rear Chiang Kai-shek remains somewhat of an enigma to the objective, observer ofW n lnv ST,- n-P hf a- His ievsonaiity, his work, his ideals,, are obscured by a fo°. , of gossip and conjecture.about him...Shanghai, that is,-.a large part of.it, both foreign, and Chinese, professes U '• despise him, credits Mm with no ability, '; whatever, leaves Mm notan honest hair on his head. Pekm hates Mm. Canton : is jealous of him. Mukden is fearful of aim. The Japanese, whose military, rapil he was, are uncertain about him triends he has almost none. All of which does not explain how from lowly °?*K n \- climbea to the chairmanship' of the .National Government by virtue of which he is .President of the Eepub- ■ he. And all that before he was forty years of age. Chiang Kai-shek is now torty-two, but looks ten years younger Shanghai cannot forgive the fact that' he was a broker's clerk there not so many years ago, and now rules the country. That is human, Prom General, tssimo of the Nationalist Army which pok Pekin and overthrew Chang TspUn, Dictator of the North, he became the keystone of the National Government at Nanking A POLITICAL MIND. . There must be something in the man who drove Borodin and his Communist staff from China, who" suppressed the Kwangsi revolt, <juicklv won the Hankow campaign this spring" succeeded in. eliminating Marshal7 Feng"" Yu-hsiang .without civil war,-arid-whoiix • the Kuomintang Party-^iiot always iii accord with their' Presidents-seems however, unable to replace. My impres-' sion of General Chiang Kai-shek, -a fleeting one it is true, was that.he- is a man who in his heart ia military, adept in the tactics and diplomacy of Chinese politics, especially in reconciling antagonistic elements", Tvith' such, ideals as his limited /education- and knowledge of the world can give him.His aim—a unified China; his ambition. • —-to China strong,; Tespeeted, feared if necessary. '. ' . '.'-"'• The National Government of China is a tangle of Councils, Commissions, Committees, executive, central supervisory control, and •what-not, very] much on the Moscow plan. Chiang Kaishek often has to fight his way through, these impediments. He has extraordinary common-sense, a quick, mind and nimble tongue; his eloquence is appeal-' ing and successful, so that his opponents would rather meet him. in battler, than in debate, that is what I was told again and again'in China. His power " to convince and turn the argument in his favour is universally known and keenly feared. ' LEADS SIMPLE LIFE. The Busso-Chinese crisis was none, of his making. It was passed on to him, by' the Mukden Provincial Govern;ment of General, Chang ■ ■Hseuli-Hang. The late Colonel Max. Bauer, his Chief Military Adviser, declared .that:, General Chiang Kai-shek "has"an"extraordinary grasp on" military problems." Major Baron yon Wangenheim, who was temporarily military adviser after the death of Colonel Bauer, spoke to me in similar strain about Chiang Kaishek 's quick comprehension of things military. He does not hesitate to ask questions, even simple ones, at the risk of being considered simple, if he> wants to know something, he asks.. -.■"'■'' The Chinese-President lives in extra- ; ordinary ; simplicity in Nanking.- in a low flat bungalow of six or seven rooms. Just outside the ancient city walls, he. he haß a little place under the shadow of Purple Mountain, called "The Garden, "•where I visited Madame Chiang Kai-shek. "We just toldthe carpenter - to build something and this is that 'something,' " laughingly she remark-! Ed to me. There the General] likes to;! go in the heat of. the day. He is a; hard. ■worker, a non-smoker, and has f orWdden smoking in the army. The National Army, its reorganisation and modernisation, claims his chief attention. The: Eusso-CMneße crisis will be ariothertest of. Chiang Kai-shek's1 sagacity and capacity for meeting difficult; situations. "-"-■.. •.'-.■' ;1: