The Sisters Soong Of China

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 174, 26 July 1939, Page 14

The Sisters Soong Of China

Three Remarkable Women

/"'•HINA has produced some of the most remarkable women in the world. The late Dowager Empress might have handed down a modem empire to her

successors, but she lacked imagination. She could not understand the West, so she under-estimated the power of Europe and America- The strength of the Soong sisters is that they neither exaggerate nor i minimise the forces and the influence of occidental civilisation. Madame VTellington Koo, a maid of honour accustomed to sleeping across j the door of her imperial mistress’ chamber, who might have been the wife of j the last Son of Heaven but married ; China’s great ambassador, her representative at the League of Nations, is the | political equal of the Soong sisters, I though she is hampered by the centuries of autocratic authority in her blood. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, in tune with modern democracy, is adept at making allowances for other points of view. She is a sensible and intelligent patriot, and her genius consists in an ability to take pains. Japanese women are apt to adopt European dress and consider their transformation complete; it is rare to find them talking foreign languages. The daughters of modern China generally wear their own extremely becoming dress though it may be made of the latest plaid taffetas, but they talk the languages of Europe. So their information is first-hand. Powerful Dynasty. When the Japanese started conquering the mainland of Asia they were up against two powers: China’s National Army, and what they themselves rapidly learned to call the “Soong Dynasty.” Of the two, they seem to be more afraid of the latter—three mere women, sisters brought up in a family of peaceful Chinese merchants. China in 1931, when the first Japanese attack was launched with a view to conquering her vast north-eastern border provinces, Manchuria and Jehol, was a decaying Empire. Civil war raged; “tuchuns,” self-styled war-lords little better than bandits operating on a large scale, made war on one another and plundered the impoverished and exhausted peasants. New political creeds struggled for the soul of the gigantic country. Bolshevism in the south and west which had craftily insinuated itself by adapting its teachings so as to appear a natural evolution of the age-old Chinese guild and family system, was offering its help to the leaders of the Chinese Republic established in 1912. A new-born Chinese Nationalism preached by the Kuomintang Party was rearing its head, together with variations of the time-honoured feudalism. Sun Yat-sen, the Father of the Republic, had died in 1925. But a Central Government, set up on the lines of his teachings and led by a man who was his former adversary and subsequently a most fervent adherent. General Chiang Kai-shek, was trying hard to collect and to concentrate what constructive elements survived. Provided with a new symbol for the new republic—the flag of the ten-rayed Sun Chung-hua minkuoh, the "Popular State of the Flourishing Country of the Centre,” as the Chinese Republic was officially styled—the Central Government called upon her women as well as her men. And the first to answer that call were the wives of her leaders: Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen; Soong Mei-

[ling, General Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, I and Soong Eling, wife of Dr. H. H. Kung, the Finance Minister. American Education. Their upbringing did not. predestine them for political leadership, but it was widely different from that of the Chinese ' girl of yesterday—the illiterate “Lady . Precious Stream,” with crippled feet, j and long and carefully-tended fingernails in silver sheaths. For these daughters of a Cantonese merchant were sent [to America at the beginning of the cen- • tury. At the Wesleyan College of Macon, I' Georgia, and later at the University of Massachusetts, they received a modem education and were imbued with AmeriI can efficiency. It was at Massachusetts University that Mei-ling, the youngest of the trio, was the first undergraduate to win the Willesley Prize. The second sister, Ching-ling, returned to China shortly before the outbreak of the 1912 Revolution and became the confidential secretary of its leader, Sun Yat-sen, and an active supporter of his extreme leftwing views. When he was forced to take refuge in Japan after a first frustrated effort to carry through his radical reforms. Soong Ching-ling shared his exile and there became his wife.

After the premature death of her husband in 1925, and the collapse of the “Red Government” in the following year, Mrs. Sun Yat-sen once more went into exile, to watch from afar the rise of the “usurper,” her own brother-in-law, Gen- j eral Chiang Kai-shek. Meanwhile, Meiling, seven years her junior, had, in 1928, married the rising young soldier who ever since has held the reins of what Central Government power could be established. After some years in Russic? 1 ,and Germany, Sun Yat-sen’s widow made her peace with China’s new leader and | went to live in comparatively luxurious | retirement at Shanghai, where she owns ; a beautiful house in the French settle:ment. Accomplished Women. I Meanwhile, her sisters Mei and Eling, have become completely conversant with their country’s aspirations and its economics. Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek—"Madame” i as she is often referred to just as were the Bourbon Queens of France—was the first woman to sit in the Legislative Yuan, China’s Republican Parliament. She prepares her husband’s notes and speeches, as well as her own, and she acts as his deputy whenever he is unable, on account of military duties, to appear in the political arena; she is seen motoring, flying, on horseback and—for she is very feminine and attractive in person—in beautiful silk dresses of her own design, and wearing jade ornaments 'from her famous collection. She was the intellectual power behind the “New Life Movement,” with its principles Li, I, Lien and Chih, which originated during her husband’s anti-Communist campaign launched in 1927 from his then headquarters at Nanchan against the Red Government of Hankow. The “Squeeze” Problem. What Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek—and, indeed, her husband and all the new China’s reformers—are up against is. in l the main, the system called “squeeze.” Together with a certain hypocritical ' veneer in all walks c p life adopted for the purpose of saving one’s own face, or that of one’s neighbour, guild, town or j country, squeeze is perhaps tie most

striking feature of Chinese life. It is bribery and graft, heretofore considered as right and proper, and practised alike by the highest officials and by one’s cook or houseboy. It is squeeze that has made reforms impossible, that has kept the toiling peasant population famished, that has deprived China of effective armaments and of public works which could have saved millions from the everrecurring ravages of flood, drought, locusts and epidemics. Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek had just taken up arms against it when her husband, in 1931, was confronted by a report about i the hopeless inefficiency of the aeroplanes which he wanted to send against the invading Japanese. She, a keen airwoman, took the reconstruction of the new air force in hand. Dismissing the Chinese commanders, she appointed foreign controllers and advisers. Then she looked into everything herself, making unexpected visits to aerodromes; and it can be said that if, in the present SinoJapanese war, the Chinese Air Force has been able to hold its own and even perform deeds of great it is due, before all, to the unremitting energy and loyalty of that one patriotic woman. “Peace of the Poppy.” Mrs. Chiang was bom in 1898, while her eldest sister, Mrs. Kung, is 10 years older. The latter, though not so much in the public eye as the wife of the Generalissimo, is neither less active nor less noteworthy. For it is said that it is the wife of the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister who prepares the Budget—perhaps with the advice of her brother, who holds the less conspicuous , but extremely important office of Presi- ! dent of the Bank of China. Chinese I economics and finance are not yet what they ought to be. There are old and heavy obligations granted by the customs receipts, the salt and other monopolies, to fulfil; and the Japanese have not only j been at pains to spread once more the i “Peace of the Poppy,” the vice of opium against which the new China had put up i a valiant fight, but have opened the 1 frontier, wherever they hold it, to largescale smuggling of contraband goods. But, even so, the unrelenting fighting spirit of the sisters Soong has prevailed against defeat. Mrs. Kung is deeply religious. The first task she undertook after the war of 1931-32 was the reconstruction of the Chapei Mission Church in Shanghai, de- * stroyed during the first Japanese in--1 vasion. It was razed to the ground once more during the fierce battle raging around the same spot in 1937. But, like that chapel, the whole of this old and unconquerable country refuses to give in, patiently biding her time for her resurrection. Her old customs and beliefs have rotted away—Taoism degenerating into a form of diabolism still practised in remote parts of the country, and Buddhism into a mere ritual, while Confucianism, based upon ancestor-worship, was never a religion in the proper sense but merely an ethical moral code observed even by atheists. ! China’s vitality, longevity, and fatalist contempt of death, and the extreme adaptability of her people, who can live anywhere and under any conditions, may j finally prove the most powerful assets in the fearful contest now going on in the Far East. The “Rising Sun” may find f at the ancient Dragon still has vigour enough in its gigantic limbs, for in them resides a spirit which nobody • foresaw until the recrudescence of the Sino-Japanese War—a spirit which the “Prussians of the East” fear more than they fear the 400 or 500 millions composing the loose-knit, apathetic, passive Empire of yesterday: the spirit such as | inspires the Three Sisters Soong.