Chiang Shek Quotes

We become what we do.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

We write our own destiny; we become what we do.

During the Second World War, China, briefly united under Chiang Kai-shek, was split into pieces controlled by the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the Communists, the Tibetans, and the Muslims.

He lost that command because he made clear that he thought the commander of the America-backed Kuomintang, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, was simply a corrupt warlord fighting not the Japanese but his great rival the Communist Mao Tse-tung. In the end, Washington sided with Chiang and Stilwell was recalled.

The American citizen is so lost he doesn't realize he's a factory pig. Drugged and poisoned from the cradle to the grave. Chained to impossible debts. Never ever free. Liberty? Bah! This is a land of invisible fences, we're all prisoners watching Capra on movie night. But nothing lasts forever. Europe's monarchies sent their sons to die in the trenches of the Somme just as surely as we drove Chiang Kei-shek into the sea. You think America will be different? You think this era, one not of consumption but of gluttony, will last forever? It will not...

A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind. Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.fn6 In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The realignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened.

If you comrades here already know materialism and dialectics, I would like to advise you to supplement your knowledge by some study of their opposites, that is, idealism and metaphysics. You should read Kant and Hegel and Confucius and Chiang Kai-shek, which are all negative stuff. If you know nothing about idealism and metaphysics, if you have never waged any struggle against them, your materialism and dialectics will not be solid. The shortcoming of some of our Party members and intellectuals is precisely that they know too little about the negative stuff. Having read a few books by Marx, they just repeat what is in them and sound rather monotonous. Their speeches and articles are not convincing. If you don’t study the negative stuff, you won’t be able to refute it. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin was like that. They made great efforts to learn and study all sorts of things, contemporary and past, and taught other people to do likewise. The three component parts of Marxism came into being in the course of their study of, as well as their struggle with, such bourgeois things as German classical philosophy, English classical political economy and French utopian socialism. In this respect Stalin was not as good. For instance, in his time, German classical idealist philosophy was described as a reaction on the part of the German aristocracy to the French revolution. This conclusion totally negates German classical idealist philosophy. Stalin negated German military science, alleging that it was no longer of any use and that books by Clausewitz should no longer be read since the Germans had been defeated.” -Mao Zedong

The Honourable Lady confuses the American people with American policy.... It is the very generosity of the American people which makes it possible for their policy-makers to confuse the trick them into believing that American is the God-father of the world. That is nonsense, and the American people should know it. If they don't get to know it, then the continuation of their present policy will make them the most despised people on earth. I know the Americans are generous. I know American policy is 'generous'. But there you have two different things. What the policy-makers expect in return for their dollar bounty is political co-operation against Russia and any other nation they like to call Red! I would remind the Honourable Lady that it is their anti-Red benevolence that is universal. In China, American capital is still spending more to create the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek than it did to assist China against Japan. With so many other nations in Europe and Asia broken by the war, American assistance with money and machinery almost means life itself. For national existence however, American policy has a price. It offers unconditional money, machinery, and arms to any nation that will denounce Russian and Communism and pronounce American as the God of all free nations. Even in defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan, American policy supports any sect that is anti-Red and anti-Russian. There is no end to this white American morality, it has its wide wide arms across the globe, its long fingers in every nation, and its loud voice in every ear,... Why talk about Russia!... If we must talk here about interference by one nation in another's affairs, let us talk of this American interference in every nation's affairs. Is there a nation on the face of the earth to-day except Russian and her so-called satellites which can hold up its head and say it is independent of the American dollar? We are all on our knees, and we won't admit it. Our American masters do not need arms and occupation; capital is enough. Capital is enough to strangle the earth if only it has the support of its victims. We are asked to support it—to bring others to their knees: France, Jugo-slavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, all of Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and Iran. The world over, we are asked to replace so-called Communism with the dollar. That dollar means governorship by those who will sell themselves and their nation for a smell of wealth and a grip of power. Such men are international. American has no monopoly on evil and stupid men. American simply has the wealth for bigger evil. The rest of us follow her according to our own evil and our own stupidity. British policy to-day is as bad as America's despite our Socialist Government.

The old man was packing his bags as fast as he could. Other people had done this for him for decades, so he was out of practice. As the “dragonhead,” or boss of the 14-K Triad, he had thousands of enforcers, dealers, and politicians who followed his orders, but none of them could help him tonight. Word had been sent to all of the triad leadership in Hong Kong that they would have to cooperate with the new “regime” or face the consequences. The other dragonheads laughed at the ultimatum. There were always people trying to play games with the Triads. Any future leader of the country knew that he could not succeed without dealing with them. Chiang Kai Shek co-opted them; Mao Zedong suppressed them. The old man didn’t worry until he heard about the disappearance of the head of the Wo Shing Wo Triad. Two nights ago, the Wo Shing Wo “dragonhead” and his entire family simply disappeared. The next night, the head of another Triad, the San Yee On, fled the territory as fast as he could. Now he would do the same. He finished stuffing his bag and headed down to the waiting cars. He was in such a hurry that his mistress and his wife might have to be put in the same car. They would hate it, but he didn’t care. This was no time to worry about proprieties.

My friends and I had grown up with the stories of the brave revolutionaries who had saved China. We were proud of our precious red scarves, which, like the national flag, were dyed red with the blood of our revolutionary martyrs. We had often been sorry that we were too young to have fought with Chairman Mao against the Japanese invaders, who tried to conquer China; against the dictator Chiang Kai-shek, who ruthlessly oppressed the Chinese people; and against the American aggressors in Korea. We had missed our chance to become national heroes by helping our motherland.

Chiang Kai-shek tried to drive out Japanese influence from China.

我曰：「中山先生之三民主義，乃集世界各種主義之所長，而又合乎我國文化道統之精神，經其融會創造而成者，故對外可以多方面因應，對內足以增長自信而自立自強，不依賴任何帝國主義，而自成一獨立思想體系，以增強次殖民地之中國之自信與共信最為適當；而共產主義來自侵略吾國之蘇聯帝國主義者，須知文化思想之侵略，較之任何其他種種侵略為最危險，不可不慎也。其實此種思想，在我國二千四百餘年前之戰國時代，已早有之，許行、陳相之徒，信仰之，而孟子則以勞心與勞力同為重要，分工而已，告之，而視之為異端而攻其妄。毛先生如讀過四書，當能記憶及之，中國人民，已受三民主義之賜，獲得了自由平等之幸福，國家已列為五強之一，不平等條約除蘇聯外，均已取消，絕不會再願意去做蘇俄的順民，所以我敢斷言，共產主義，絕不容於中國人民，而終被埋葬，而且中國歷史之外患，大都來自北方，北極白熊兇狠殘暴，不容輕視，不好玩的，

Growing up I had been ambivalent about being Chinese, occasionally taking pride in my ancestry but more often ignoring it because I disliked the way that Caucasians reacted to my Chineseness. It bothered me that my almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair struck people as “cute” when I was a toddler and that as I grew older I was always being asked, even by strangers, “What is your nationality?”—as if only Caucasians or immigrants from Europe could be Americans. So I would put them in their place by telling them that I was born in the United States and therefore my nationality is U.S. Then I would add, “If you want to know my ethnicity, my parents immigrated from southern China.” Whereupon they would exclaim, “But you speak English so well!” knowing full well that I had lived in the United States and had gone to American schools all my life. I hated being viewed as “exotic.” When I was a kid, it meant being identified with Fu Manchu, the sinister movie character created by Sax Rohmer who in the popular imagination represented the “yellow peril” threatening Western culture. When I was in college, I wanted to scream when people came up to me and said I reminded them of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a Wellesley College graduate from a wealthy Chinese family, who was constantly touring the country seeking support for her dictator husband in the Kuomintang’s struggles against the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Even though I was too ignorant and politically unaware to take sides in the civil war in China, I knew enough to recognize that I was being stereotyped. When I was asked to wear Chinese dress and speak about China at a meeting or a social function, I would decline because of my ignorance of things Chinese and also because the only Chinese outfit I owned was the one my mother wore on her arrival in this country.

The Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking - a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy' of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of the nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was `Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.

De Oval Office, waar Allan tegenover zijn drinkmaatje uit Los Alamos zat terwijl hij naar diens uiteenzetting luisterde, was bijna net zo ovaal als Allan gedacht had. De president vertelde dat hij werd lastiggevallen door een vrouw die hij om politieke redenen niet kon negeren. Ze heette Song Meiling, had Allan misschien al eens over haar gehoord? Nee? Hoe dan ook, ze was de vrouw van Chiang Kai-shek, de leider van de Kwomintang, oftewel de Chinese Nationalistische Partij. Ze was beeldschoon, had in Amerika gestudeerd, was de beste vriendin van mevrouw Roosevelt, trok duizenden toeschouwers als ze ergens verscheen en had zelfs een toespraak voor het congres gehouden. Nu maakte ze president Truman echter het leven zuur omdat ze wilde dat hij alle mondelinge beloften nakwam die ze volgens haar van president Roosevelt had gekregen wat betreft de strijd tegen het communisme. 'Ik wist wel dat het weer met politiek te maken zou hebben', zei Allan. 'Het is een beetje moeilijk om dat te ontwijken als je president van de VS bent', zei Harry Truman.

To get round limits placed on the number of dishes that should be ordered, restaurants served several at the same time on large plates, with alcohol brought to the table in teapots.51

You people sit in your yamen [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. `You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!

There were flurries of concern in the West when shells landed on foreign concessions or threatened ships. But, as in Manchuria, nobody would take practical steps to hold back Japan even when its army landed at the end of February and marched in to bolster the lacklustre marines.

The May Fourth movement profoundly influenced a generation of Chinese and was the genesis of communism in China.

This is not war but merely an incident." All treaties and structures to outlaw war and to regularise the conduct of war appear to have crumbled, and we have a reversion to the day of savages.' Was Western silence `a sign of the triumph of civilisation', she wondered, or `the death-knell of the supposed moral superiority of the Occident'?18

The Republic of China, founded in 1912, was supposed to modernize the country and regain sovereignty. But by the beginning of the 1930s, China had degenerated into a fragmented country. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists and heir to the Republic of China, was fighting both warlords and Communists. In 1931, the Japanese seized control of Manchuria, where a substantial part of China’s industry was located, and breached the Great Wall.

If and when the war starts, whenever or whoever you are, all have the responsibility to protect our home and repel our enemy, all must have the will to achieve ultimate sacrifice!

put away during an evening, the more personal was the tone of her everlasting political ramblings. What Allan quite effortlessly learned during the dinners on the Pacific Ocean was, for example, that the clown Mao Tse-tung and his communists could very well win the civil war and that such an outcome would essentially have been caused by Chiang Kai-shek. Soong Mei-ling’s husband was incompetent as commander in chief. At this very moment he was partaking in peace negotiations with Mao Tse-tung in the south Chinese city of Chongqing. Had Mr. Karlsson and the captain heard anything

On July 24, Stimson made a last-ditch attempt to reinsert a provision offering to retain the Japanese monarchy. According to a diary entry he made later that day, Stimson met with Truman and “spoke of the importance which I attributed to the reassurance of the Japanese on the continuance of their dynasty and I had felt that the insertion of that in the formal warning was important and might be just the thing that would make or mar their acceptance.”102 Truman declined on practical grounds, explaining that a draft of the declaration had already been sent to Chiang Kai-shek for his signature.

The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.

The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.

Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Mao Zedong battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s influence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.

The fervor of the Kuomintang’s youth had passed to the Communists leaving Chungking with history’s most melancholy tale: that every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. Madame Chiang Kai-shek in a rare moment left a brief acknowledgement. When a number of journalists returned from Yenan with enthusiastic reports, she invited them to tea, though disbelieving, to hear what they had to say in person. After listening to their glowing tales of the Communists’ integrity, idealism and sacrifice for a cause, she said it was impossible for her to believe them. Walking to the window she stared out across the river in silence for several minutes and then turned back to the room and spoke the saddest sentence of her life: “If what you tell me about them is true, then I can only say they have never known real power.

Feeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the `imperial way'.

If when I die, I am still a dictator, I will certainly go down into the oblivion of all dictators. If, on the other hand, I succeed in establishing a truly stable foundation for a democratic government, I will live forever in every home in China.” —Chiang Kai-shek

We write our own destiny; we become what we do.

As soon as the Japanese were vanquished, the Generalissimo and Mao went right back to their civil war. In 1949, using the same guerrilla tactics they had used against the Japanese, Mao’s troops drove Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland to the island of Taiwan. Soon after, the Communist high command claimed victory and rode into Peking to take up residence at the Forbidden Palace. In South China, lesser troops took over the Fatsan Grand Hotel to use as that city’s Communist Commission Office.