PART IV The Sisters in Wars (1937–1950)

15 Bravery and Corruption

In July 1937, Japan occupied Beijing and Tianjin. In mid-August, all-out war broke out in Shanghai. The Chinese army fought bravely, but suffered catastrophic defeat. Over 400,000 men were wiped out, along with virtually all of the country's nascent air force and most of its warships. At this critical moment, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek called on the nation to resist Japan at any cost.

To set an example and to raise the morale of the troops, Mme Chiang and her sisters went to the front, made rousing public speeches, and mobilised women to train as nurses and care for orphaned children. They wrote to the foreign press, gave interviews to journalists flocking to China, and delivered broadcasts to America in perfect English.

Ei-ling focused on setting up hospitals, one of which was in the Lido Cabaret, formerly a popular dance hall which Big Sister converted into a well-equipped ward of 300 beds. With her own money, she also bought ambulances and trucks for transferring the wounded.

For the first – and perhaps only – time, Red Sister put aside her loathing for Chiang Kai-shek and asked the public to rally round the Generalissimo. She declared that she was ‘extraordinarily excited, extraordinarily moved', indeed ‘moved to tears' when she read Chiang's speech that called for unity with the Communists so the country could fight Japan together. She promised to ‘leave behind all past grievances and grudges'.

Little Sister May-ling visited wounded soldiers devotedly. One day she was driven to a hospital in an open-top car, accompanied by her Australian adviser Donald. It was a dangerous trip as the roads were pockmarked with shell craters and Japanese planes looked out for cars, which were used only by bigwigs. Dressed in blue slacks and a shirt, May-ling was chatting to Donald animatedly when the car hit a big bump and the rear tyre blew. The car ran off the road and overturned. May-ling was hurled out over Donald's head. She landed in a ditch some twenty feet away and was knocked unconscious. When she came to, looking sick and complaining that her side hurt, Donald asked her, ‘Do you want to go on and visit the soldiers?' She thought for a moment and answered, ‘We'll go on.' They made the rounds of a few camps. Later doctors found that she had a broken rib and concussion.

In mid-December, Nanjing, the capital, was lost, and the conquerors carried out a massacre. The Japanese army then took all China's seaports and most key cities on the railways. Its reputation for brutality to civilians preceded it, and 95 million people fled in panic – the biggest number of refugees in history. Chiang was forced to move his government to Wuhan, 600 kilometres up the Yangtze, before settling further west in Chongqing, the ‘City of Mountains' in Sichuan province. Surrounded by high peaks, with the Yangtze at its feet, navigable only to small boats, the capital of unoccupied China was well protected from the invaders. The Generalissimo ran the war from here for the next seven years.

The relocation of the government from Nanjing to Chongqing went amazingly smoothly. Under constant Japanese bombardment, hundreds of thousands of people – office workers, hospital staff, teachers and students – trekked some 2,000 kilometres, having patiently packed their precious equipment, machinery and documents into crates. The goods were then transported by (valuable) trucks when absolutely necessary, by carts when any could be found, but mostly by labourers. Machines were pulled by manpower over wooden rollers onto boats to travel up the Yangtze. In the Central University, one piece of equipment weighed seven tons, and there was no crane. By hand the students moved it inch by inch and loaded it onto a boat. The boats then had to pass through the perilous Yangtze Gorges, where the river was squeezed into a raging funnel by perpendicular cliffs bearing down from both sides, obscuring even the sky. The water seethed and roared as it was forced into whirlpools around submerged rocks. In some places, the boats had to be pulled up the rapids by boat-pullers, who worked with superhuman effort, bent double with thick ropes taut on one shoulder. To coordinate and sustain them, they grunted a hard, monotonous tune in unison.

In this manner the university managed to transfer all its movable possessions, including its substantial library – along with two dozen corpses for anatomy lessons. Its agricultural college shipped one animal from each species they owned in a boat, nicknamed by students Noah's Ark. The rest of the farm animals were herded by staff overland, like a nomadic tribe. The journey took a year, as the precious cattle, introduced from Holland and America, moved at their own leisurely pace, occasionally objecting angrily at having to carry chickens and ducks in bamboo cages on their backs. At the end of the trek, not one animal had been lost; there was even an addition: a calf had been born on the way.

Arriving at various stages in Chongqing, over 1,000 students and teachers found welcoming accommodation and classrooms – all dug out of the cliffs of a mountain. The new campus had been completed by 1,800 labourers in twenty-eight days, with the supervision of engineering professors who had flown there ahead.

Although the war brought great upheaval and privation to their lives, people endured stoically, and supported Chiang's decision to fight. The Generalissimo was absolutely unwavering. Although he had no idea exactly how he would win, he made it his strategy to ‘outlast the enemy'. China's immense size, its mountainous terrain without roads made it impossible for Japan to occupy the whole country and gave him enough room to retreat and tough it out. Fierce nationalist sentiments sustained him. He was also bitterly upset by the death of his first wife, Ching-kuo's mother, who was killed in a Japanese bombing raid in December 1939.

The Generalissimo's hatred of Japan, where he had learned some of his martial craft, was visceral and longstanding. In May 1928, the Northern Expedition he had conducted was blocked by the Japanese at Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. After some unsuccessful protests, Chiang had to accede to Japanese demands, which included him apologising, and took another route to Beijing. In the eyes of the country, he was caving in to the Japanese. From then on, Chiang nursed a profound grievance which lasted throughout his life. That month, he started the extraordinary practice of beginning each day's diary entry with the words ‘avenge shame' (xue-chi). He did this every day for more than four decades. There was no way Chiang would ever kowtow again.

Now, Chiang's uncompromising stance won him great prestige. In the spirit of national unity, all the provinces surrendered control of their armies to him so they could fight the war as one force. This was when Chiang Kai-shek came the nearest to uniting the country in essence as well as in name. The only force that kept itself outside his control was the Red Army, which maintained its own separate command and only nominally took orders from him. They were able to do so thanks to Stalin, who had signed a treaty with Chiang as soon as all-out war broke out, becoming literally Chiang's sole source of arms. Another concession Chiang made was to agree to the Red Army only fighting a guerrilla war behind Japanese lines rather than at the front. These privileges made a world of difference to the Reds. By the time the war ended in 1945, Chiang's other challengers had seen their armies destroyed by the Japanese. Mao would emerge as the Generalissimo's only rival.

—

May-ling arrived in Chongqing with Chiang in December 1938, after two months' touring war fronts from the north to the south. She acted as a true wartime first lady, dealing with a million matters, exhausted but stimulated. Writing to her American friend Emma Mills, she exclaimed, ‘What a life! When the war is over I think my hair will turn white, but there is one comfort: I am working so hard I am not in danger of ever becoming a nice, fat, soft, sofa cushion, or having a derriere.' In another letter, again, ‘What a life! But we will not stop resisting.'

Chongqing was a hard place to live in. It was well known as the ‘Furnace of China' for its oppressive humidity and heat. Vapour from the Yangtze below was trapped by the mountains, shrouding the city like a suffocating damp towel. In the long summer months, it was like a pressure cooker. Winter brought little relief, with a heavy mist hanging over the city, giving it another nickname: the ‘City of Fog'. The fog was so thick that sometimes one could not see one's own hand. To go about in the city involved trudging up and down hundreds of steep stone steps. Those who could afford rode in chairs, carried by coolies, and there were only a few relatively new roads in downtown Chongqing where one could use rickshaws and motor cars. Everything was in short supply, and the whole infrastructure was groaning under the burden of the millions of extra people who suddenly crowded into the city. Dysentery and malaria were rampant.

The Japanese started bombing in May 1939, when the fog lifted. There were only primitive air-raid shelters dug into the cliffs. Ventilation was almost non-existent; when an air raid lasted a long time, the air inside became foul and suffocating. One night, after hours of bombing, hundreds of people rushed out of a crammed tunnel for fresh air, when suddenly another wave of planes flew over, dropping bombs indiscriminately. In panic, people tried to force their way back to the dugouts; over 500 were killed in the stampede.

May-ling suffered from the skin allergy hives, or nettle rash, which was made much worse by Chongqing's extreme humidity. Sitting for hours in the bomb shelter was torture. ‘I am covered with water blisters which itch like Job's old sores!' she wrote to her brother T.V.

She witnessed horrendous suffering all around her. The city was densely packed with timber houses, some perching on long poles on the sides of cliffs. Each bomb would detonate an avalanche of fire which raged for hours. One day after a raid, May-ling went out to see what rescue work was being done. Large sections of the city were like ‘raging infernos', she wrote to Emma. As there was little open space, it was hard to escape the fire and smoke. People tried to climb up the old city wall, but the flames caught many of them. Thousands died. Burnt bodies were pulled from the smouldering piles. ‘Relatives and friends are still digging furiously.' ‘The cries and shrieks of the dying and the wounded resounded in the night…the stench is increasing and living in the vicinity is impossible.'

She herself had a narrow escape from a bomb. In the air-raid shelter, to keep her mind occupied she was taught French by a Belgian priest, Father Weitz. One day, after spending most of the day cooped up in the dugout, she said to him, ‘Let us continue our lesson outside.' Minutes later the emergency alert sounded again and Chiang called out for them to return to the shelter. Just as they entered the tunnel, a bomb dropped near the place where they had been sitting. They were hurled forward onto their faces, their bodies covered with rubble. The French-grammar book she had left on the spot was sliced through by a piece of shrapnel.

The first lady was thrown together with the average men and women and she started to refer to them as ‘our people'. When winter descended, she would think how this ‘intensifies the suffering of our homeless and wounded people'. She was moved and inspired by the morale: ‘It is to the credit of our people that they were uncowed, for after each bombing, scarcely had the all-clear siren trailed off its last thin echo before the surviving householders returned to their burned shops and homes and began to salvage whatever they could. A few days later, temporary shacks and building would make their appearance on the old sites.' ‘Our women were wonderful…. when they would justifiably be allowed to succumb to hysteria and nervous prostration, they have held out and have been cheerful and indefatigable…'

May-ling wrote to Emma: ‘we shall fight on.' Chiang Kai-shek's high prestige at the time was substantially due to his wife's brave presence.

—

May-ling carried the grand title of ‘Secretary-General of the Aviation Commission': she had helped build the Chinese air force in the mid-1930s. It was she who scouted and invited Captain Claire Chennault to China in 1937, who then founded the American Volunteer Group or ‘Flying Tigers', a crack force of over a hundred American pilots. They destroyed hundreds of Japanese planes. Chennault was a brilliant fighter pilot with imagination and daring; his flair entered legend after a stunt he performed in the early 1920s near El Paso, Texas. A large crowd had gathered to watch the Fort Bliss Air Force manoeuvres, when an old woman in a long dress tottered onto the airfield, her bright headscarf fluttering in the wind. The loudspeaker announced that Grandma Morris, aged eighty, was eager for a ride in a plane, and that the air force had decided to grant her wish. The crowd cheered. Grandma Morris was hoisted into the cockpit. The pilot, standing outside, buckled her up and started the engine. She waved to the crowd. Just as the pilot was about to climb in, the plane jerked forward, throwing him onto the ground. The crowd, terrified, shouted for Grandma Morris to jump out. But the plane started taxiing and soon took off unsteadily, narrowly missing rooftops. In the air it rose and dipped and turned wildly, finally plummeting in a nosedive. The crowd screamed and yelled. The plane brushed past the field and again rose to loop and roll in the air, before it tailspun earthward again – only to make a perfect landing. Out of the cockpit leapt Grandma Morris, peeling off her wig and headscarf and dress to reveal a laughing, uniformed Captain Chennault.

The captain had a very craggy face, possibly from having spent so many hours flying in an open cockpit. Apparently Winston Churchill muttered about him, ‘My God, that face; glad he's on our side.' Chennault was definitely on May-ling's side. ‘She will always be a princess to me,' he wrote in his diary. ‘Madame Chiang repeatedly risked her life by coming to the airfield – always a prime target – to encourage the Chinese pilots, for whom she felt responsible. It was strong medicine even for a man – the grim and hopeless manner as they went off to face ever lengthening odds, the long nerve-racking waiting, and the return of bloody, burned, and battle-glazed survivors. It always unnerved her, but she stuck it out, seeing that hot tea was ready and listening to their stories of the fighting.'

The American airmen admired her too. One, Sebie Biggs Smith, recalled driving to the airfield after an ugly air battle:

We get out there to survey the damage, but before we get out of the auto we see Madame Chiang out walking around an airplane that had been severely damaged. She had beaten us to the airport. Again I have to say she was a mighty brave woman. She was taking chances all the time during the war, as if she was one of the soldiers herself. After each air raid she seemed to hasten to the airport to count the boys when they came back in, and she insisted on there being coffee for them and was trying to do what she could to make it as easy as possible for these brave boys that were fighting against odds and without replacements, and each one knew every morning when they'd go to the airport that it might be their last trip.

Donald worked closely with May-ling. Together they unearthed a ‘squeeze' involving exorbitant commissions on government purchases of aircrafts and aviation equipment. The middleman was an American called A.L. Patterson. US ambassador Nelson T. Johnson wrote in a memorandum after a conversation with a member of his staff: ‘Wing Commander Garnet Malley…was satisfied that Patterson had doubled, and in some cases trebled, the price of American aircraft sold to the Chinese Government.' In one case, the price was ‘four times the right price'. May-ling was horrified and gave orders ‘to sift the matter to the bottom'. But quickly it was discovered that Big Sister was implicated. A ‘General Tzau had been mentioned for some time as the agent of Mrs H.H. Kung in collecting “squeeze” on the purchase of airplanes,' wrote the American ambassador in the memo.

In mid-January 1938, May-ling flew to Hong Kong for treatment of her injury from the recent car accident. But she was also there to have a word with her sister. Ei-ling lived in Hong Kong much of the time, where she managed her large array of businesses from her house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The neighbourhood consisted of terraced gardens and well-tended tennis courts. Her evenings were often spent playing bridge. May-ling stayed longer than planned. She cabled her husband that Ei-ling had had a fall and hurt herself. Then she herself took to her bed. Chiang sent solicitous wishes, asking May-ling specifically ‘not to worry about that business of the Aviation Commission'. But in mid-February he sent two urgent cables: ‘I expect you have recovered.' ‘The Aviation Commission is being reorganised. Important. Please return at once.'

During her lengthy stay, May-ling was persuaded by Big Sister that her business practice would make no difference to the outcome of the war, but would be vital for the personal and political life of Little Sister and her husband. Her argument was that she had to meet the Generalissimo's political needs, provide for Little Sister, and, especially, prepare for the first couple's rainy day. Ei-ling had to look after the future of her whole family. As the war wore on and years progressed, May-ling would see her sister's logic. Right now, even if she was not fully convinced, she bowed to Big Sister's authority. When she returned to the temporary capital, she resigned her post as the Secretary-General of the Aviation Commission. Her husband halted the investigation of the scandal.

—

Ei-ling's reputation as someone who took advantage of China's war to line her pockets had already been doing the rounds. All agreed that she was the brain behind key financial decisions by her husband, H.H. Kung, who held the key to the country's coffers. As he later told the Oral History Project of Columbia University, New York, the real budget of the country (which he called the ‘secret budget') was decided by two people: himself and Chiang Kai-shek: ‘only two signatures were required for the secret budget'. This position gave the Kungs a tremendous financial advantage. In 1935, H.H. reformed the Chinese currency by creating the fabi; when the war started two years later and he knew there would be inflation, the family changed all their fabi into gold and kept their wealth intact, while the average Chinese saw the value of their assets plummet. During the war, as the government was spending large sums of money buying arms, the Kungs took significant kickbacks. H.H. appointed their son, David, a graduate barely in his twenties, the joint managing director of the Central Trust Company, the purchasing agent for government supplies. As the army's appropriation was mostly in Chinese dollars and the munitions had to be bought with foreign currency, the purchase involved currency exchanges from which large sums of money were made – by David. In addition, the young man set up his own import and export company, the Yangtze Trading Corp., which functioned as the agent in China for major Western manufacturers. When America joined the war in 1941 and American supplies began to arrive, the Kungs and their cronies inserted themselves as intermediaries, and made fortunes. Even the Chinese banknotes, which were printed by foreign companies designated by H.H.'s ministry, brought the Kungs commissions.

John Gunther, an American journalist, wrote of Ei-ling in 1939: ‘She is a first-rate financier in her own right, and takes a fierce joy in business manipulations and enterprises. To her shrewdness, her financial ability, the growth of much of the great Soong fortune is attributed.' ‘There is talk of malign influence of “squeeze”. Efforts to abolish corruption in office have at times been unaccountably blocked. The Kungs are of great importance to the Generalissimo, and they know it. So does he…they control the national finances.'

These and similar descriptions annoyed Ei-ling so much that in spite of her dislike for publicity, she agreed to the request of the writer and journalist Emily Hahn to write her biography, in an effort to clear her name. (‘Mme Kung's voice shook' when she talked about Gunther, Hahn noted.) Ei-ling spoke to Hahn of her contributions to the war: she had bought three ambulances and thirty-seven military trucks for the army, donated a further twenty trucks to the Aviation Commission (when it was headed by May-ling), and paid for 500 leather coats for airmen. Out of her own pocket, she had converted the Lido Cabaret into a field hospital of 300 beds and set up a children's hospital with a hundred beds. There were other charitable activities, but these paled in comparison with the huge hoard generated by her ‘squeeze'. Eventually, the wealth amassed by the Kungs may have reached, or even surpassed, $100 million.

People knew about the colossal corruption at the centre of power, even if they did not know the detail. They even coined a phrase for the practice: ‘making fortunes out of national catastrophe' (fa-guo-nan-cai). The Kungs were constantly under fire from the press, the public, the Nationalist grandees, and the American government. But Chiang kept his brother-in-law on as his ‘financial tsar' and declined to do anything. H.H. did much to ensure that unoccupied China's finances held up under the monumental strain of the war when it was cut off from virtually all its economic bases. He felt, justifiably, that he had done ‘wonders keeping the war going and maintaining the currency'.

The main trick, he revealed in his memoirs, was that he ‘made the Land Tax a national rather than a provincial tax', with the result that ‘receipts covered more than fifty per cent of the expenditure'. Taking what was traditionally an income for the provinces and putting it into the central government coffers, from which his family could help themselves, H.H. Kung made many sworn enemies for the regime among the provincial chiefs. He blithely dismissed them: ‘Some provinces were of course more difficult to deal with than others. This was due to self-interest or plain ignorance.' But the fact was that many an embittered foe would later clandestinely help the Communists bring down Chiang Kai-shek.

To the Generalissimo, H.H. was his faithful and obedient servant – and also his convenient lightning rod. Anger about corruption focused on the Kungs, leaving Chiang to enjoy the reputation of a spartan soldier. In fact, the money in the Kungs' pockets was effectively money for the Chiangs. Big Sister particularly had her sister's welfare in mind. The first lady was unafraid of death but could not stand discomfort. Indeed she was addicted to a grand style of living. She toughed it out in the first few years of the war, but the hardship tested her endurance to the limits, and whenever possible she would escape to the luxury of Hong Kong and America, where she would stay for months at a time. Her trips were extremely costly. On one occasion she stayed in the New York Presbyterian Hospital for months and took an entire floor for her staff. It was impossible for the Chinese government to pay all her expenses, and Ei-ling footed a big portion of the bill. For the rest of her life, May-ling continued to depend on her sister financially. Later, outliving Chiang for nearly three decades, she lived in New York and was sumptuously provided for, partly by the Kungs.

May-ling was grateful to Big Sister and always defended her vehemently. William Donald, close to May-ling, was once rung up by the president of a missionary university. ‘Someone has to tell the Soongs and the Chiangs to put a stop to this nonsense. Some of their official family are making money hand over fist in the exchange market. Lord, haven't they any sense of decency!' Donald decided he had to have a word with the first lady. One day in 1940, he gently took her arm, walked her into the garden, and asked her to do something about the Kungs. May-ling turned on him in a blaze of anger and told him in so many words, ‘Donald, you may criticize the government or anything in China, but there are some persons even you cannot criticize!' This made up Donald's mind to leave the Chiangs' service. He said goodbye to the country where he had lived and worked for thirty-seven years.

—

May-ling had a very special bond with Big Sister and her family. Their home was her home, where she felt more relaxed than with Chiang. Unusually, Ei-ling brought up her children to be as close to May-ling as possible, even closer than to herself. Two of them, David and Jeanette, were truly like May-ling's own children, the children she was unable to have. They called her niang (‘mother'), and made sure that every wish of hers, however tiny, was catered to. Their devotion to her was exceptional. Neither of them married, and their lives revolved around her. Ei-ling had given Little Sister a family, and filled the childless void that might otherwise have left her dissatisfied (a dissatisfaction Red Sister suffered most of her life).

Ei-ling's daughter Jeanette managed May-ling's household, and was addressed by the staff as ‘General Manager'. She was blunt and overbearing with them, and they disliked her. May-ling, who cared about good manners, turned a blind eye to her niece's rudeness and even worse behaviour. One night in Chongqing Jeanette drove to her parents' country house during a blackout. All cars had to drive slowly according to regulations; but Jeanette drove fast. When a traffic policeman stepped into the street to try to stop her, she accelerated right at him, swearing ‘Fuck off!' The car brushed past the policeman and there was blood on the street. Her aide-de-camp got out and arranged for the policeman to be carried to the hospital, while she stayed in the car apparently unperturbed.

(Jeanette was fiercely strong-willed. She was a lesbian and defiantly flaunted it by always wearing a masculine haircut and men's clothes, which was most unusual in those days. Either in a Western suit or a traditional men's gown, the white silk lining of its long sleeves turned out, with a man's hat posed at an angle, she looked like a young man. She made no concession for an official visit to Washington with her aunt, and caused President Roosevelt to address her as ‘my boy'. At least two women were well known to be her live-in partners. Only she did not present them to her aunt, and May-ling looked the other way, never raising the subject.)

David was at the centre of the corruption charges against the Kung family. But the ire against him did not stop at money matters. Neither he nor his younger brother, Louis, went anywhere near the battlefield in China – in common with the offspring of most of the elite. That the rich and powerful refused to risk their lives in the fighting was a constant source of revulsion and resentment. One day at a dinner party, when a toast was proposed to the ‘Old Hundred Names' – the ordinary people – who bore the brunt of the war, US Ambassador Johnson, who was present, felt that the general attitude was ‘Let us fight to the last drop of coolie blood' while ‘in the midst of it all the Soong family carries on its intrigues which sometimes disgust me completely'. A favourite retort among Hong Kong foreigners when asked for relief funds was: ‘Why aren't all these young men we see at the swimming pools and the movies doing something for their own country?' President Roosevelt's personal representative, Lauchlin Currie, complained to the Chinese government about the Kung children.

Louis was a graduate from Sandhurst military academy, and was a captain in the British Army. When Britain was at war with Nazi Germany, he was about to be sent to the front. But H.H. cabled the Chinese ambassador and told him to speak to the British government. According to H.H.'s memoir, ‘I told him I was not thinking of my son's safety but of those seven hundred men under his care. He was quite young. I was worried about his having to take command of seven hundred men. I said I would prefer that they gave him another job…Later, he was assigned the task of training soldiers in England.'

Of Ei-ling's children, the one people found most likeable was Rosamonde, her first child, who grew into a quiet and gentle woman. She fell in love with a man of whom Ei-ling disapproved, because his father was a ‘lowly' conductor in the orchestra of a dance hall. The young couple went to America and married there. Belatedly, Ei-ling accepted their marriage and airfreighted them large quantities of luxury goods as Rosamonde's ‘dowry'. The plane crashed and the silks were found, exposing Ei-ling once again to public outrage at her widely perceived wartime extravagance and corruption.

Over the years, Ei-ling developed a conviction that it was her mission in life to look after and provide for her illustrious sisters, especially Little Sister. This was what God wanted her to do, she believed; and making money was her way to fulfil this role. Having this conviction gave her a purpose in amassing a fortune and fortified her against the incessant accusations. Later, on the eve of the collapse of Chiang's regime in mainland China, Ei-ling was ill and thought death was imminent. She saw this as God calling her to His side, because there was no more she could do for Him on earth. She felt peaceful and was ready to die.