Wednesday, October 30, 2013
The China Post

Few will remember Chiang Kai-shek tomorrow, his 125th birthday. The day used to be a national holiday, proclaimed by his filial son President Chiang Ching-kuo, but just like Confucius' Birthday and Taiwan's Retrocession Day, it was annulled by President Chen Shui-bian, who is doing time for corruption and graft as well as money laundering.

It's totally unnecessary for the nation to mark Generalissimo Chiang's birthday, like that of Confucius', but the Chinese people have to remember he saved China. The people of Taiwan, in particular, should be thankful that he spared them the massacre which Mao Zedong had promised. Of course, it's the Korean War which prompted President Harry S. Truman to make an about-face in China policy, neutralizing the Taiwan Strait to prevent Mao's People's Liberation Army from “washing Taiwan with blood.” Nonetheless, it's the Generalissimo who, backed by his 600,000 troops routed in the Chinese Civil War, saved Taiwan and paved the way for it to work the economic miracle of the 20th century.

Japan created the Mukden Incident on Sept. 18, 1931 to seize Manchuria. When Manchukuo was founded with Puyi, the last emperor of China, as its puppet emperor, Generalissimo Chiang couldn't do anything because his Republic of China was too weak to fight Japan. China wasn't ready for war with Japan when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred on July 7, 1937. That's why General Hajime Sugiyama, chief of the General Staff at Japan's High Command, told Emperor Hirohito that China would sue for peace in three months' time.

The first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 between the Great Qing Empire and a much smaller Meiji Japan ended just half a year later in victory by Japan, after Asia's then-best navy of Li Hongzhang was annihilated in the Battle of the Yellow Sea and Weihaiwei near Beijing fell. So, Sugiyama was more than sure that Chiang would surrender if Nanjing fell in half that time.

But General Sugiyama had miscalculated. Generalissimo Chiang wasn't the Empress Dowager. She was so afraid of foreign armies marching on Beijing that China surrendered in 1895, ceding Taiwan to Japan under the Peace Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chiang didn't surrender when Nanjing, his capital, fell at the end of 1937. There was pressure on him to sue for peace, but he persisted without any help or support from abroad except that from Joseph Stalin's Soviet Russia at the initial stage of what is known as China's eight-year War of Resistance.

Chiang didn't sue for peace, but Japan made Wang Jingwei surrender. Wang set up his government in Nanjing to rival Chiang's in Chongqing. Chiang had to fight on without help from anyone until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war on Japan and made Chiang's China an ally in the anti-Axis war. While the war was still going on, Chiang took part in the Cairo Conference of 1943. In the Cairo Declaration, he secured the promises of President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain to make Japan restore Formosa and the Pescadores — Taiwan and Penghu — to the Republic of China. After the war, on Oct. 25, 1945, Taiwan was formally restored to the Republic of China as a province. That day was designated as Taiwan's Retrocession Day.

After his defeat in the Chinese civil war, Generalissimo Chiang moved his Kuomintang government to Taipei from Nanjing at the end of 1949. The move changed Taiwan's identity from an island province to the center of an independent sovereign nation-state, albeit one officially recognized by only 23 small countries around the world. This is the legacy of President Chiang Kai-shek. The celebrated New Encyclopedia Britannica, however, dates Taiwan's independence to Oct. 25, 1945, the day Japan formally terminated its rule over Taiwan.

In the Lincoln Memorial, on the wall behind the giant statue of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, is an inscription: “In this temple as in the heart of the people for whom he saved the Union the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” On the wall behind the giant statue of President Chiang in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, there should be a similar inscription thanking him for saving China.