13 Getting Chiang's Son Back from Stalin's Clutches
In the days after his baptism in October 1930, Chiang Kai-shek had travelled to his birthplace at Xikou to supervise the expansion of his mother's tomb. Having built a vast mausoleum for the Father of China, he now felt he could give his own late mother a more fitting resting place. Though not nearly as big or grand as Sun's, this mausoleum would nevertheless comprise a whole hill, commanding a magnificent panoramic view of the east China countryside. The entrance was at the top of a climb of nearly 700 metres through pine trees.
May-ling and Ei-ling went with him. On the first day of the trip, they bought up a subject that was the closest to his heart: how to get his son Ching-kuo back from Russia. Ching-kuo, the Generalissimo's son with his first wife, had been held hostage by Stalin for the past five years.
Born on 27 April 1910, Ching-kuo was fifteen when Chiang sent him to a school in Beijing. The young man's dream was to learn French and then study in France. But as his father's star rose among the Nationalists, the Russians were eager to get their hands on Ching-kuo, and diplomats in the embassy quickly befriended him. According to Ching-kuo's own account of his life (which at his request was made public after his death in 1988), they ‘persuaded' him that he ‘should go to Russia to study'. Stalin kept children of foreign revolutionary leaders in Russia as potential hostages, while giving them an education. The impressionable boy was keen to go. And Chiang, who was pretending to be pro-Russian at the time, could not object.
Within only months of arriving in Beijing, Ching-kuo was taken to Moscow by a Red mole working inside the Nationalist party, Shao Li-tzu. Shao had been a founding member of the CCP in 1920, but had been told by Moscow to keep his identity secret and to operate as a Nationalist. He brought along his son, who was the same age as Ching-kuo. When Ching-kuo completed his studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow in April 1927 and asked to return to China, he was not allowed to leave. His father had just broken with the Communists and Stalin was holding him hostage. Moscow told the world that the young man refused to go home, since his father had ‘betrayed the revolution'.
The seventeen-year-old was ‘isolated completely from China', and was ‘not even allowed to mail a letter'. He missed home day and night: ‘I did not know how to stop thinking of my parents and my native country.' He felt he was ‘in the mire of distress and homesickness'. Many times he asked to be allowed to go home, or just to send a letter; each time the request was turned down. Sometimes, he feverishly wrote letters to his father, only to destroy them later. He did keep one letter and managed to give it discreetly to a fellow Chinese to take to China (after he sold some belongings to help raise funds for the journey); but the man was arrested near the border.
In captivity, and with no hope of breaking out, the young man developed a tough resolve and bided his time. He withdrew from a Trotskyist organisation which he had joined in his student days and volunteered to be a member of the Russian Communist Party. He enrolled into the Red Army and proved himself to be a brave soldier. As a result, he was allowed to live in Russian society rather than a prison cell, but Moscow decided where he should live and how.
In October 1930, at the time May-ling and Ei-ling talked to his father about getting him back, Ching-kuo was sent to work in a power plant as a labourer, working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. non-stop except an hour's break for lunch. As he was unaccustomed to heavy manual labour, his arms swelled, his back was so sore that he could not stand up straight, and he suffered from constant pain and exhaustion. Food was in great shortage and very expensive; his pay was not enough to feed himself, and he was permanently half starved. ‘I often went to work on an empty stomach,' he recalled. He had to take on an extra job to earn more money, so his working day was extended to 11 p.m. He gritted his teeth and told himself that ‘hard work would be a good way to discipline myself'.
After the factory, he was sent to do ‘labour reform' in a village outside Moscow. There he learned to plough the fields and slept in a hut that even a peasant found unfit for the night. The fields he was working in reminded him of the green rice paddies around his native town, and tears ‘rolled down my cheeks'.
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Chiang Kai-shek missed his son acutely, particularly as he knew that life for his son in Stalin's hands must be hell. Over the years, in his diary, he described his yearning for Ching-kuo time and again. Ching-kuo was Chiang's only blood offspring. May-ling was unable to conceive after her miscarriage and, although Chiang adopted another son, Wei-go, Ching-kuo was his real son and heir. To have a male heir was the most important thing for a Chinese man. One of the worst curses in China was: ‘May you have no heir!' ‘Heirlessness' (jue-hou) was also deemed to be the greatest hurt one could inflict on one's parents and ancestors, and Chiang's obsessive love and mourning for his late mother made his agony about his son all the more intense.
When May-ling and Big Sister began talking to Chiang about seeking Ching-kuo's release in 1930, China and Russia were still in dispute over the Chinese Eastern Railway. This had been such a hot issue that Russia had invaded China a year before and diplomatic relations had been broken. Ei-ling made a suggestion: perhaps Chiang could make some compromise over the railway in return for his son Chiang was touched by the sisters' concern and wrote in his diary on 1 November, ‘Big Sister and my wife would not forget about my son Ching-kuo. I am so moved.' But he decided not to take the advice. Moscow was demanding something that was an infringement of China's sovereignty. To give in would cause a public outrage. But the idea of doing a deal for his son with Moscow germinated. He decided he needed to think and plan carefully. ‘We should not try to solve this matter in haste,' he wrote in his diary.
A year later, Moscow itself proposed a swap. The head of Comintern operations in the Far East, going by the pseudonym Hilaire Noulens, had been arrested and imprisoned in Shanghai together with his wife. As they knew so many secrets, Moscow was eager to get them out fast. A host of international stars, including Albert Einstein, were mobilised to pressure Nanjing for their release. Red Sister added her voice. And it was she who brought Moscow's plan for a hostage exchange to Chiang in December 1931. Chiang turned it down. The swap was quite impossible. The imprisonment of the two agents was a high-profile public affair; they had been openly tried and sentenced to death (commuted to life imprisonment). Any horse trading would be exposed and would wreck Chiang's reputation.
But Moscow's offer unleashed a torrent of anguish in the Generalissimo. It was now clear that Ching-kuo was a hostage and could return only at an extremely high price. The Russians might well demand something else in the future. Day after day, Chiang wrote in his diary. ‘In the past few days, I have been longing to see my son more than ever. How can I face my parents when I die?' ‘I dreamed of my late mother and cried out to her twice. After I woke up, I missed her so much. I have committed a great sin to her.' ‘I am unfilial to my mother and unloving to my son. I feel I am a worthless man and I wish the ground would open up and swallow me.'
It was at this time that the Red mole, Shao, who had taken Ching-kuo to Moscow, lost his son. Shao had brought his own son to the Red capital with Ching-kuo. His son had since returned to China, and later went to Europe. He was shot dead in a hotel room in Rome. Shao and his family were convinced that he had been murdered by Chiang's agents.
With its offer rebuffed, Moscow threw Ching-kuo into the gulag in Siberia in 1932. In a gold mine he did back-breaking labour, always hungry, always cold. Among his fellow labourers were ‘professors, students, aristocrats, engineers, rich farmers and robbers. Each of them had had an unlooked-for, unexpected misfortune which had sent him into exile.' Sleeping on his left side was a former engineer; he would say to Ching-kuo before retiring at night, ‘A day is over. I am moving one day nearer the recovery of my freedom and the return to my home.' Ching-kuo held tight to the same hope.
In December 1932, Chiang's government resumed diplomatic relations with Russia. A mutual enemy, Japan, made an amicable relationship imperative. Japan had attacked Shanghai; the Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo, had been set up in Manchuria; and the Japanese were encroaching further south. A full-scale conflict looked unavoidable. China needed Russia. Russia, the historical rival of Japan in the Far East, needed China: Stalin's most dreaded scenario was that Japan would take over China and then use its resources and a porous 7,000-kilometre border to attack the Soviet Union. He wanted the Chinese to fight and bog down the Japanese so they would not turn on Russia. As the foes were gingerly becoming friends, Chiang started to plan in earnest about getting his son back. He knew he had to offer the Russians something that mattered to them dearly, and his thoughts turned to the Chinese Reds.
At the time, the Generalissimo was waging wars against the breakaway Red state in south-east China. He had surrounded the Reds, and had been determined to stamp them out. Now he began to think that instead he could just drive them out of the rich south-east near Shanghai, then herd them north-west into barren and sparsely populated North Shaanxi on the Yellow Earth Plateau. He could deplete them along the way, while taking care to preserve the Communist leadership. At the destination, he could box them in, let them hover on the edge of survival, and make sure they could not expand. He reckoned that when the war with Japan started, they would go into battles (Stalin would want them to do so), and there would be a strong chance that the Japanese would wipe them out. Meanwhile, because he had let the Chinese Communists survive, Stalin, who cared very much about them, would release his son.
Such was the Generalissimo's calculation.
In autumn 1934, Chiang drove the Reds out of China's rich south-east. Their flight came to be known as the Long March. It is generally recognised that the Reds were defeated and were fleeing, but few realise that the fact that the journey took place at all, and that the Reds were able to survive it, was fundamentally thanks to Chiang Kai-shek's design to have his son released.
The Long March took a year and covered 6,000 miles (far longer in both time and distance than Chiang had intended – thanks to Mao's machinations on the March*1). The Marchers went through tremendous hardships and were much diminished. At its end, Chiang told himself that the CCP was ‘showing signs of willingness to surrender' – whereas in fact the opposite was true. Desperate to get his son back, the Generalissimo was deluding himself.
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Chiang's ‘Reds for Son' deal could not be spelt out, even to Moscow, and Chiang had to send Moscow implicit but unambiguous signals. At each moment of the Long March when the Reds accomplished a key objective, he would let Moscow know that it was he who was responsible for it and he would ask for the return of Ching-kuo. Just before the start of the Long March, Chiang sent the first formal request for Ching-kuo's release through diplomatic channels, which he recorded in his diary on 2 September. After the Reds had successfully passed through layers of his painstakingly constructed blockades, Nanjing repeatedly asked for Ching-kuo. There were many documents in Russian Foreign Ministry files reporting: ‘Chiang Kai-shek requests the return of his son.' Each time, Moscow pretended that Ching-kuo did not wish to go home. ‘There is no end to the Russian enemy's revolting deceit,' Chiang wrote in his diary.
The Generalissimo accomplished another goal through the Long March. To the west of the emptied Red base were two provinces, Guizhou and Sichuan, which kept their own armies and paid Nanjing lip service. Chiang wanted to bring them under firm control. To achieve this he had to have his own troops on the spot, but the provinces did not welcome them. Now the Generalissimo pushed the Red Army into the provinces. The local chiefs were frightened of the Reds settling in their territory and allowed Chiang's army in to chase the Reds out; so Chiang was able to establish control over the provinces. Sichuan, in particular, would become his base in the war against Japan, with its biggest city, Chongqing, serving as the wartime capital.
This scheme of Chiang's was easy to spot. In case Moscow missed his more important goal, Chiang let the Reds escape after he had conquered the two provinces, and, moreover, let Mao's group join forces with another Red branch in June 1935. Right after this, Ei-ling's husband H.H. Kung, at the time vice premier (Chiang had taken back the post of prime minister), called on the Russian ambassador, Dmitri Bogomolov, and told him that Chiang wanted his son back. His visit made Chiang's horse-trading intention clear.
On 18 October 1935, the day the Long March ended for the CCP leadership, Chiang saw Bogomolov himself for a friendly meeting. He did not mention Ching-kuo, but immediately afterwards sent Chen Li-fu, nephew of Godfather Chen, to the ambassador to make the request. That Chiang intended to exchange the Reds for his son was all but spelt out.
Because the deal was still implicit (and not agreed on beforehand), Moscow played deaf and dumb. Stalin now knew about the Generalissimo's weakest spot, and held onto his hostage in order to get more out of Chiang. Bogomolov and everyone else contacted by Chiang's emissaries gave the same old lie that Ching-kuo did not want to leave Russia.
Meanwhile, thanks to his incredible value, Ching-kuo was given better treatment. He was released from the gulag and assigned a job as a technician in a machinery plant in the Urals. There, he led a more or less normal life, studying engineering in an evening school, and even rising to be the assistant director of the plant. He fell in love with a Russian technician called Faina Vakhreva. ‘She understood my situation best and was always there to sympathize and help me whenever I had difficulties. When I felt sad for not being able to see my parents, she tried to soothe me.' They were married in 1935. The first of their four children was born in December that year, into the same captivity that Ching-kuo would continue to endure.
*1 For details of Mao's machinations on the Long March, see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao, the Unknown Story, Chapters 12–14.