Chiang finally unleashed

New for 2009: Chiang Kai-shek revisionism. Granite Studio lays out, without endorsing, the case:

For example, today’s CCP, like the KMT of the 1930s, emphasizes modernization, a strong military, and urban development often at the expense of rural areas. Like the 1930s, today there is a fair amount of personal freedom and autonomy…so long as individuals don’t challenge the political leadership or threaten ’social stability,’ and as is in the PRC today, the secret police under Chiang’s government were always ready to squash dissent in the name of ‘national unity’ lest that personal freedom and autonomy get a bit too bumptious.

Even the CCP’s recent ‘Harmonious Society’ campaign bears more than a passing resemblance to Chiang’s New Life Movement in that both advocate a kind of Confucian neo-traditionalism in the service of social stability/political loyalty alongside campaigns against “uncivilized/backwards” habits of hygiene and personal deportment.

I think there is a tendency in Chiang revisionism to project backwards and view China in the light of what Guomindang policy should have been if it was more coherent. Chiang is certainly on the record as wanting these things, but then he’s also on the record as wanting lots of things, many of them mutually incompatible. At different times he was a democrat, a Methodist, a neo-Confucian, a modernist, a traditionalist, a fascist, an anti-imperialist, a constitutional politician and a warlord. He was successively, with some alarming overlaps, pro-Japanese, pro-Soviet, pro-Nazi and pro-American. Observers then and now were left to pull something out of this mess and eventually settled on the uncontentious: that he wanted a strong, authoritarian, industrially modern and nationalist minded China.

I’m not sure it’s helpful to view Chiang in an overly ideological light. The figure he most reminds me of is Mobutu in Zaire. His overwhelming conviction was that he should be in charge. Everything else was a matter of rewarding friends, punishing enemies, juggling warlords, tricking rivals and telling whoever could be of help to him whatever they wanted to hear. Chiang ran a tight little small-f fascist ship on Taiwan, but he just wasn’t up to running a country of China’s size and population. Dictatorship, amongst other things, is a talent.

Chiang revisionists usually compare him with Mao, which tends to conceal the fact that a lot of senior communists didn’t agree with Mao’s policies until they were forced to. It seems to me that there’s a much more straightforward lineage from the Deng Xiaoping – Liu Shaoqi – Chen Yun – Peng Dehuai axis of the CPC to the present day. After all it was the inheritors of this tendency which actually took over the country, headed by Deng himself. What if Deng Xiaoping had taken a different turning and ended up in charge of the Guomindang? Now there’s your counterfactual.