12 The Husband and Wife Team

The Japanese invasion in September 1931 brought Chiang Kai-shek an external enemy and an opportunity to break out of his political isolation. He pleaded for national unity and invited opponents to join his government. (The invitation did not include the Communists, who were regarded as ‘bandits'.) Some responded – on condition that he resign as government chairman. Chiang did so – though not before seeing to it that two lightweights were made the chairman and the prime minister. The latter was Sun Yat-sen's son, Fo, who lacked his late father's killer instinct. Chiang would claw back these posts later. For now, he called the shots as the military chief, the Generalissimo.

Chiang relaxed repression and won over many critics. The leading liberal, Hu Shih, was invited to be the minister of education. Although he declined, he became better disposed towards Chiang. The Generalissimo, Hu observed, had grown ‘considerably more tolerant of dissent than before'. In this shift, one could detect the influence of May-ling and Big Sister.

Red Sister Ching-ling inadvertently helped push Hu into Chiang's arms. Hu had joined her League for Civil Rights, as he shared its ostensible goal to fight for freedom of speech and human rights. One day in 1933, the league arranged for him to visit a prison and afterwards published a letter implicitly in his name, charging the government with using gruesome forms of torture. Hu Shih was alarmed. He had not found signs of torture in the prison and nor had he written the letter. He wrote to Ching-ling asking for a correction, and then gave frank interviews to the press. Ching-ling denounced him and expelled him from the league. Hu Shih realised that the league was a front for the Communists, who were trying to use him. He began to think that Chiang was the only acceptable leader around and, moreover, the Nationalists had the potential to move from dictatorship to democracy. His criticisms of Chiang became noticeably restrained.

Yet some die-hard dissenters continued to plot against the Generalissimo; in 1933 another breakaway government was declared in the coastal province of Fujian. Chiang defeated it. He also waged ‘extermination campaigns' against the ‘Communist bandits' who held huge hunks of land in China's rich south-east, and drove them out in 1934.

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May-ling had been in the depth of depression following her mother's death in 1931. Her husband was determined to pull her out of it, and had a special gift made for her in 1932. It was no ordinary present – it was a necklace made out of a mountain. The gemstone of the pendant is actually a beautiful villa with emerald-green glazed roof tiles, nestling in the midst of the Purple Gold Mountain. The chains of the necklace are long rows of French plane trees that line the driveway from the villa to the entrance gate. Their leaves are a different colour to the surrounding native forest, and in autumn, the contrast is particularly spectacular when they become a unique shade of yellow-red. Taking a ride in a private plane, May-ling could have a magnificent view of her present, with the brilliant green roof tiles of her villa shining and sparkling like a giant emerald.

A large portion of the Purple Gold Mountain, the pride of Nanjing, was now the mausoleum for Sun Yat-sen's corpse. Chiang had the villa built as ‘the residence for the chairman of the Nationalist government' – when he was the chairman. After he left office, it did not house the next chairman, but remained at the Generalissimo's disposal. When he presented it to May-ling, it was adorned with dozens of carved phoenixes, the symbol for an empress. It became known as the ‘May-ling Palace'.

With this ‘necklace', Chiang also hoped that his wife would stay more often with him in Nanjing. May-ling had been reluctant to come, preferring to stay in Shanghai. The capital seemed to her to be ‘nothing but a little village with one so-called broad street', and primitive, uncomfortable houses. But Chiang needed to be in the capital, and would miss her. He said that he only felt ‘reassured' waking up in the middle of the night with her sleeping next to him.

As the 1930s unfolded, May-ling spent increasingly more time with her husband. When Chiang drove the Reds out of their territory in south-east China in 1934, she went with him to some of the recently vacated areas. The Reds' occupation had lasted several years, and together with their battles against Chiang's army, had created a vast wasteland. She wrote at the time: ‘thousands of li of fertile rice fields are now devastated ruins; hundreds of thousands of families have been rendered homeless'. In the villages, empty houses ‘stood with doors gaping wide. Inside mutilated pieces of furniture sprawled in confusion. The walls were scorched and blackened from hurried attempts to destroy them … Everything that could be carried away had been damaged. Devastation and death silently pervaded the whole hamlet.' Once she stubbed her toe on a human skull. Another time, she passed by a small pagoda and saw a young man lying in its shadow, his eyes open, looking ill and emaciated. She told one of her guards to go and see what they could do to help; the guard returned and said, ‘He is already dead!' In her sleep, May-ling was ‘haunted by the deserted farms and ravaged villages I saw during the day'. There were more shocking scenes. One day, Chiang's army surrounded a Red unit that had been ordered to stay behind to fight a guerrilla war. The Red soldiers offered to surrender and, to prove that they meant it, killed their commander, severed his head and brought it to Chiang.

May-ling had several brushes with death. In the middle of one night at Chiang's field headquarters in Nanchang – capital of the province of Jiangxi, which had housed the centre of the Red state – she was woken up by gunshots from the direction of the city wall. Communist guerrillas had staged a surprise attack. She threw on her clothes and started to sort out ‘certain papers which must not fall into enemy hands. I kept them within reach to be burnt if we had to leave the house. Then I took my revolver and sat down to wait for what might come. I heard my husband giving orders for all available guards to form a cordon, so that we could shoot our way out if we were actually surrounded by Communists.' She was not frightened. ‘I had only two things on my mind: the papers giving information of our troop movements and positions, and the determination, should I be taken captive, to shoot myself.' As it happened, the attack was repelled, ‘and we went back to sleep'.

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Little Sister was jolted back to life. She yearned to help her husband, and searched for an answer about what she should do. She had always looked to her mother for guidance; Big Sister Ei-ling now stepped into that role after their mother's death. Ei-ling had been trying for years to persuade May-ling to become more religious, sometimes to Little Sister's irritation. Now she carried on with their mother's weekly prayer group sessions in the old family home, and encouraged May-ling to join in as a way to mourn their mother. The effect on May-ling was miraculous. She wrote, ‘I was driven back to my mother's God. I knew there was a power greater than myself. I knew God was there. But Mother was no longer there to do my interceding for me. It seemed to be up to me to help the General spiritually.' She decided ‘to try with all my heart and soul and mind to do the will of God', and prayed hard ‘that God will make His will known to me'. And God, she felt eventually, spoke to her. ‘God has given me a work [sic] to do for China.' That work was to champion the New Life Movement.

The idea had come to her husband when he was travelling in the former Red territory. There, Communist ideology, especially the concept of class struggle – which had so repelled him during his visit to Moscow a decade before – had been the order of the day. The poor were told it was right to rob the rich; employees were encouraged to betray or even kill their employers; children were urged to denounce their parents. To Chiang, these ‘struck at all the fundamental principles' of traditional Chinese ethics. He took it upon himself to resurrect the ethics of old China, in which loyalty and honour were essential. The Generalissimo launched the New Life Movement in spring 1934 in Nanchang.

May-ling threw herself into the project, although to her the movement meant something else. During her travels with her husband in the heartland, she saw real China for the first time in her life. Like a Westerner who had just strayed outside the gilded screens of Shanghai, she found the place filthy, smelly, chaotic and aggressive. Men walked around half naked. Boys, even grown-ups, urinated at street corners. To her as to many foreigners, China appeared ‘old, dirty, and repulsive'. May-ling found herself ‘more disturbed as I traverse the crowded, dirty streets of an interior city than I am by the hazards of flying with poor visibility'. She longed to change her country into a place of which she could feel proud. For Little Sister, making the whole population adopt good manners was essentially what the New Life Movement was about.

Husband and wife put their heads together and agreed that the ‘Movement should start from the simple and proceed to the complex, advance from the practical to the idealistic'. First of all, they attempted to tell the population how to behave. May-ling asserted that ‘if a man were sloppy and careless about his personal appearance, about his bearing … he would also be untidy in thought'.

So, from the ruins of the ravaged former Red land, the land that had been through so much terror and slaughter, the Generalissimo told the Chinese that a better future lay in injunctions like: ‘Do not make noises while drinking and chewing'; ‘Do not shout and laugh loudly in restaurants and tea houses'; ‘Correct your posture'; and ‘Do not spit'. Coolies were forbidden to bare their torsos. And all should button up their shirts. Pedestrians were told to ‘walk on the left-hand side of the street' (to which some wags replied ‘Won't the right-hand side of the streets be empty?').

The New Life Movement became the Chiangs' pet project, and the regime's signature domestic policy. It was promoted as the cure for all ills, guaranteeing a glorious future for the country. This grand claim was patently untrue, even though nobody would deny that decorum, orderliness and good manners were essential to a civilised society. Commenting on a government pamphlet that laid down fifty-four rules and forty-two hygienic requirements, Hu Shih, the leading liberal, wrote that mostly they were ‘a basic common sense way of life for a civilised person; there is neither any panacea to save the country nor will there be any miracle cure to revive the nation'. He pointed out that many bad habits were ‘the products of poverty. The average people's living standard is so low that it is impossible for them to develop good manners.' ‘When children were scouring rubbish dumps to find half a burnt-out coal, or a bit of filthy rag, how could you accuse them of dishonesty if they pocketed a lost item they had picked up?' asked Hu Shih. (One of the New Life rules was to ‘return lost items you found'.) ‘The first responsibility of the government is to make sure the average man can live a decent life … To teach them how to lead this so-called new life can only be the last thing.'

Hu Shih's sensible voice was drowned by vilification from Chiang's propaganda machine. May-ling would ‘refute this argument' with what she called ‘the very evident fact that, if everyone from the highest official to the lowest wheelbarrow coolie would conscientiously practice these principles in everyday life, there would be food for all'. Although this was plain wishful thinking, Hu was not able to argue back. He was not persecuted either. Little Sister just indignantly dug in with her assertion that the movement was her husband's ‘greatest and most constructive contribution … to the nation'. As for herself, her action was directed by God and could not be questioned. ‘I seek guidance, and when I am sure, I go ahead, leaving the results with Him.' Energetically, she selected foreign missionaries as advisers, wrote rules and tried to enforce them, ‘like the president of a really first-rate American women's club', observed one American. At her disposal were paid staff and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The couple's efforts solved few real and urgent problems and petered out – even though they did produce some civilising effects.

But for May-ling the movement was life-changing: ‘despondency and despair are not mine today. I look to Him who is able to do all things.'

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This joint venture brought May-ling and her husband closer than ever, and they felt a new degree of affection for each other. On Christmas Day 1934, they travelled over 500 kilometres south and flew to Fujian province. There they were driven into the most mountainous region of eastern China, on a new military road. Thousands of men had sliced whole sides off high cliffs with primitive hand tools. Sometimes the Chiangs ‘motored along the edge of a plateau where the least swerve would have flung us over the precipice'. At journey's end, ‘my husband began to reproach himself for submitting me to such hazards'. May-ling reassured him that personal danger meant nothing to her, and that she was actually absorbed by the beauty along the route. Range upon range of mountains were covered with fir trees ‘in their Christmas green, brightened here and there … by a single candleberry tree of flaming red'. ‘It was gorgeous, unlike anything I have ever seen.'

On New Year's Eve, the couple took a walk in the mountains. They paused to admire a young tree heavy with white plum blossom. In Chinese literature the winter plum is the symbol of courage: it flowers in the coldest weather. Chiang carefully broke off a few twigs with clusters of blossom and carried them back. That evening, when candles were lit and they sat down to supper, he had the twigs brought to the table in a little bamboo basket. In the candlelight, the shadows of the branches on the wall made large bold strokes, while the blossoms spread their delicate scent. Chiang presented the basket to May-ling as a New Year present. She was moved, and wrote, ‘My husband has the courage of the soldier, and the sensitive soul of the poet.'