The troubled times and varied ambitions of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
There was a time in the history of modern China when one of Mao Zedong’s favorite proverbs, “women hold up half the sky,” could have been amended to the singular: “A woman holds up half the sky.” That woman, Soong May-ling, was the wife of Mao’s bitter rival and better known by her married name, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. To virtually everyone in her orbit, she was simply “Madame.”
In 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek’s influence as the leader of China’s Nationalist government was at its peak, Life magazine called Madame the “most powerful woman in the world.” Liberty magazine described her as “the real brains and boss of the Chinese government.” Clare Boothe Luce compared her, without a hint of hyperbole, to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale. Ernest Hemingway, who had lunch with Madame in 1941 in the wartime capital Chongqing, called her the “empress” of China. That’s the appellation that Hannah Pakula has appropriated for the title of her entertaining, though overlong, biography, “The Last Empress.”
Soong May-ling was born in Shanghai in 1898, the youngest of what came to be known as the “fabled” Soong sisters. The girls were educated in the U.S.—Madame majored in English at Wellesley—and all married well. Ai-ling became the wife of financier H.H. Kung; Ching-ling’s husband was Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China; and May-ling in 1927 wed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the man who would soon unify a fractious China but ended up losing the country to the Communists and decamping to Taiwan in 1949. The usual rap on the sisters is that Ai-ling loved money, Ching-ling loved China and May-ling loved power.
To judge from “The Last Empress,” that’s about right, though Ms. Pakula is not without empathy for her subject. In her telling, the young May-ling was a woman in search of herself in a traditional society that valued women only as wives and the mothers of sons. Back home in Shanghai after Wellesley, Ms. Pakula writes, May-ling was “part society belle, part would-be reformer,” attending all the chic parties and using her charm to raise funds for the YMCA and other charities. But May-ling “had not been given a Western education in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.” She decided to re-invent herself by hooking onto the star of Chiang Kai-shek.
Madame had a ruthless streak, and Ms. Pakula describes how she managed to “compartmentalize” her mind, overlooking facts that she would prefer not to face when they stood in the way of a cherished goal. In the case of her marriage, Madame, a staunch Methodist, had to convince herself (and her mother) that Chiang, who already had two wives when they met in 1926, was free to marry her. (Chiang obliged by sending his second wife to America and denying the validity of his first marriage.) During their life together, Madame overlooked the generalissimo’s numerous faults as a military and political leader, such as his preference for fighting the Communists instead of the invading Japanese and his tendency to ignore the suffering of the Chinese people, who ultimately revolted against him. She overlooked, too, the immense corruption of his Nationalist Party, whose fortunes were based in part on the opium trade.
Over time, Madame became Chiang’s closest foreign-policy adviser and translator. She took care to soften the messages delivered by Washington emissaries during World War II, many of them seeking a level of support in the war against Japan that Chiang was unwilling to provide. “The Last Empress” is also the story of how Americans went ga-ga over Madame during the war. Her eight-month visit to the U.S. in 1943 to raise aid for her homeland would be the envy of any modern-day PR person. She wrote countless articles, addressed both houses of Congress, and wowed crowds at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. Her greatest achievement was as a propagandist, persuading Congress and the American public that her husband could deliver a democratic China.
Ms. Pakula doesn’t stint on stories about Madame’s opulent lifestyle—the diamond buttons, trunkloads of furs and scores of servants. “The Last Empress” also offers examples of Madame’s “near-hypnotic effect on men,” including FDR’s 1940 challenger for the presidency, Wendell Willkie, with whom Ms. Pakula believes she had an affair. It may have been true love, but then again, maybe not. Willkie’s friend, Mike Cowles, reports that Madame once told him that if Willkie had won the presidency in 1944 (she believed that he would be nominated again), then “he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world.” Ah, romance.
“The Last Empress” has one almost-unforgivable fault: a canvas so vast that it dwarfs its subject. The book’s subtitle is “Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China,” but it really ought to be phrased the other way around. There are chapters-long digressions about Sun Yat-sen, warlords, the Japanese, the Communists. Ms. Pakula writes like a dream, and her narrative is certainly a pleasure to read; anyone who wants to learn about China in the first half of the 20th century will find “The Last Empress” a good guide. But it is really two books in one.
Ms. Pakula also ducks the central question about Madame: Was she a Dragon Lady, interested mainly in increasing her power and enriching her family’s fortunes? Or did she, like her left-wing sister Ching-ling, love China and believe that the best way to show that love was to save her country from the evils of communism? Was she “God’s masterpiece,” as the family minister described her at the time of her death in 2003 at the age of 106? Or was she “the most evil woman to wield power” in the 20th century, as one Taipei paper put it? After nearly 800 pages, “The Last Empress” doesn’t say. Madame Chiang Kai-shek remains as enigmatic as ever.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page.
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