Chiang Kai-shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi) was born on October 31, 1887. His family was from the upper class and was wine merchants. At 18, he attended a military college in Japan. Chiang had four wives during his life. His first wife died in the Second Sino-Japanese War. His second wife contracted gonorrhea from Chiang (a known womanizer) soon after they married. His most famous wife lived to 106 and died in 2003. Before one marriage, he converted to Christianity as a condition to marry.
After training in Japan, he went to Russia to study the Soviet government and decided he did not care for the Communists. Returning to China, Sun Yat-sin appointed Chiang to command a military academy
Under Sun Yat-sen the Communists and the Nationalists worked together to rule China, and Soviet advisers provided the help needed to increase their power since most of China was ruled by warlords.
However, when Sun died in 1925, Chiang led the Kuomintang army north to defeat the warlords and destroy the Communists.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the Communist Party had organized labor unions to improve working conditions in the low paying sweat-shop factories. During Communist organized labor strikes, these factories were shut down.
When Chiang Kai-shek army reached Shanghai, he joined forces with gangsters then went on a killing spree known as the White Terror. Tens of thousands of workers, who belonged to the labor unions organized by the Communists, were hunted down and killed along with their Communist leaders. One of the few to escape was Mao Zedong.
For the next few years, Chiang would rule China unchallenged until 1931, when Japan invaded. During the early months of the war, Chiang ignored Japan and continued hunting for the Communist survivors, who had fled into the countryside.
In 1949, when Mao won the civil war, Chiang Kai-shek took the survivors of his nationalist army to Taiwan where, protected by the US military, he declared brutal martial law and ruled as a dictator until he died on April 5, 1975 at the age of eighty-seven.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Why haven’t we heard more about this monster?
I think because after he lost China to Mao, his global stage in Taiwan was too small to be the focus of the Western media in addition to the fact that the United States has supported Taiwan with the US military even to this day.
In fact, in a discussion with my wife, she says that Chiang Kai-shek learned a lesson from losing China and didn’t want it to happen in Taiwan so he did all he could to develop Taiwan’s economy and he had his own money, because his troops emptied China’s treasury; banks and the Imperial treasures as Chiang fled China with most of his surviving army along with many of China’s most wealthy people.
All that wealth went to Taiwan leaving mainland China all but bankrupt and an outcast on the global stage. To start, all the Communists under Mao had were people and land.
Before “Made in China”, there was “Made in Taiwan” and “Made in Japan” and this was what many American’s complained about when it came to lost jobs until the 1980s when China opened its doors to the world and started to export products made there. Then the complaints shifted to China.
My wife also said that Chiang told his son, who would rule Taiwan after him, that Taiwan needed to become a democracy after his death. Chiang died in 1976, the same year Mao died. It took a few years before Taiwan had its first democratic elected government.
With having so much content, do you ever run into any problems of plagiarism or copyright violation? My site has a lot of completely unique content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it appears a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my authorization. Do you know any solutions to help reduce content from being stolen? I’d certainly appreciate it.
I’m sorry to say that I can’t be much help. I do know that there is software or programing of some sort that makes it difficult or impossible for anyone to copy and paste from a Website if this hidden coding is included in a post, and that your work is protected in the United States under copyright laws but that won’t stop someone from copying your work and using it as his or her own. To deal with that, you would have to discover the theft and see a lawyer and explore your legal options and that could be really expensive.
Another option is to discover who the host or provider is for the Website where your material was plagiarized and then contact that company. For example WordPress or Blogger and ask them to take the illegal version down. I’ve read that this is an option and should probably be the first step.