Editing Chiang Kai-shek (section)

==Biography==
Chiang Kai-shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi) was born on 31 October 1887 in Zhejiang, an eastern coastal province of China. His father was a merchant. At the age of 18 he went to military training college in Japan. He returned to China in 1911 to take part in the uprising that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established a Chinese republic. Chiang became a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (known as the [[Kuomintang]] or KMT), founded by Sun Yat-sen.

After the takeover of the Republican government by [[Yuan Shikai]] and the failed Second Revolution in 1913, Chiang, like his KMT comrades, divided his time between [[exile]] in Japan and the havens of the Shanghai International Settlement. In Shanghai, Chiang cultivated ties with the city's underworld gangs, which were dominated by the notorious Green Gang and its leader Du Yuesheng.

From 1928 to 1948, Chiang served as the generalissimo of the National Government of the Republic of China (ROC). Chiang was a nationalist, promoting traditional Chinese culture in the New Life Movement. Unable to maintain Sun Yat-sen's good relations with the [[Communist Party of China]], Chiang tried to purge them in the [[1927 Shanghai Massacre]] and repressed uprisings at Kwangtung ("Canton" region) and elsewhere.

Chiang oversaw a modest programme of reform in China but the government's resources were focused on fighting internal opponents, including the Communists. From 1931, Chiang also had to contend with a Japanese invasion in Manchuria, in the north-east of China.

At the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which later became the Chinese theater of [[World War II]], Marshal Zhang Xueliang kidnapped Chiang and obliged him to establish a Second United Front with the CCP. 

The Japanese, controlling the puppet-state of [[Manchukuo]] and much of China's eastern seaboard, appointed [[Wang Jingwei]] as a Quisling-ruler of the occupied Chinese territories around Nanjing. Wang named himself President of the Executive Yuan and Chairman of the [[Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China]] and led a surprisingly large minority of anti-Chiang/anti-Communist Chinese against his old comrades. He died in 1944, within a year of the end of World War II.

After the defeat of [[Imperial Japan]], the American-sponsored Marshall Mission, an attempt to negotiate a coalition government, failed in 1946. The Chinese Civil War resumed, with the CCP led by Mao Zedong defeating the KMT and declaring the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Chiang's government and army retreated to Taiwan, where Chiang imposed martial law and persecuted critics in a period known as the "White Terror". After evacuating to Taiwan, Chiang's government continued to declare its intention to retake mainland China. Chiang ruled Taiwan securely as President of the Republic of China and Director-General of the Kuomintang until his death in 1975, just one year before Mao's death.

He is regarded as a controversial figure. Supporters credit him with playing a major part in the Allied victory of World War II and unifying the nation and a national figure of the Chinese resistance against Japan as well as his staunch anti-Soviet and anti-communist stance. Detractors and critics denounce him as a dictator at the front of an authoritarian autocracy who suppressed and purged opponents and critics and arbitrarily incarcerated those he deemed as opposing to the Kuomintang among others. Critics estimate that the Nationalist government was responsible for between 6 and 18.5 million deaths.

In recent years, there has been an attempt to find a more moderate interpretation of Chiang. Chiang is now increasingly perceived as a man simply overwhelmed by the events in China, having to fight simultaneously Communists, Japanese, and provincial warlords while having to reconstruct and unify the country. His sincere, albeit often unsuccessful attempts to build a more powerful nation have been noted by scholars such as Jonathan Fenby and Rana Mitter. Mitter has observed that, ironically, today's China is closer to Chiang's vision than to Mao Zedong's. He argues that the Communists, since the 1980s, have essentially created the state envisioned by Chiang in the 1930s. Mitter concludes by writing that "one can imagine Chiang Kai-shek's ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao's ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision". Liang Shuming opined that Chiang Kai-shek's "greatest contribution was to make the CCP successful. If he had been a bit more trustworthy, if his character was somewhat better, the CCP would have been unable to beat him."