The woman in the photo is the remarkable Soong Ch’ing-ling, who became secretary to the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen during his second exile in Japan before the events of May 4th 1919 when, not for the last time, Chinese students protested in Tiananmen Square. On this occasion, the protest was not against the government but against the decision of the peacemakers in Paris to give former German imperial territories in China to Japan. The Tiannanmen protests of 1919 sparked the creation of a new Chinese Republic, under Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), in the midst of the Warlord era, as well as the creation of the Chinese Communist Party (secretly founded at a girls’ school in Shanghai in 1921). China’s future would be shaped by these events, but also in part by the Soong sisters, well known in China but less well known to westerners today.
Sun Yat-sen was revolutionary in Chinese history because he wanted not merely to utilise or to reject western technology, but to adopt western values like democracy, free speech and welfare. (Though evidently, there were some western values – such as monogomy – that Sun Yat-sen found inconvenient, given that he was already married when began his affair with Soong Ch’ing-ling, 27 years his junior.) Understandably, news of the affair and subsequent marriage, brought an end to the friendship between Sun Yat-sen and Ch’ing-ling’s father, Charlie Soong, until then Yat-sen’s most devoted follower, and whose children, educated in America, had been brought up to call Yat-sen ‘uncle’. Following the emergence of the new republic, Ch’ing-ling became the First Lady until Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925. The story of this remarkable rise to prominence, thrust into the heart of Chinese politics in part because of an affair, might be expected to end right there. But this is not the end of the story – far from it.
The Soong family alignment with the nationalist cause brought Charlie Soong’s younger daughter, Soong Mae-ling, into contact with the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the man chosen by Yat-sen and the communist military adviser, Mikhail Borodin, to lead the New Republican Army. When Chiang succeeded Yat-sen as leader of the Guomindang, it was Mae-ling’s turn to be First Lady. Her sister, Ch’ing-ling, however, became disillusioned by what she saw as Chiang’s betrayal of Sun Yat-sen’s three principles of nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. Ch’ing-ling left the Guomindang party and joined with the Communists. This Civil War that divided China from 1945-9, but whose roots went back to the massacre of communists in Shanghai in 1927, was therefore, in some sense, an extension of a family feud.
Soong Mae-ling, pictured on the left, played a key part in winning American support for Chiang Kai-shek during WWII. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, America’s position of neutrality came to an end and Washington poured billions of dollars of military aid into China. In order to keep Roosevelt’s support and win American hearts for the Civil War that would inevitably follow Japan’s defeat, Chiang sought an invitation for his American educated wife to visit the United States. Educated in America, Mae-ling was the perfect ambassador, with her flawless English and Christian missionary background. During the course of her coast-to-coast speaking tour, in which she told audiences of the horrors of the rape of Nanking, she raised tens of millions of dollars in private donations for her charitable fund, the United China Relief. More importantly, she won the hearts of the American people and of the US Congress. In the end, however, it was the People’s Liberation Army that benefitted most from the conflict with Japan. American money was squandered by the Guomindang. The underpaid Republican Army suffered mass desertions and the inflationary pressures caused by the Japanese invasion were exploited by nationalist Guomindang industrialists and financiers – the Soong family among them – to reap profit through the monopolisation of scarce commodities. By contrast, the discipline of the People’s Liberation Army, its kind treatment of the rural population and its willingness to take the fight to the Japanese invaders, won the hearts and minds of those that would really matter in the long run – the Chinese peasants. Between 1937 and 1945, CCP membership increased from 50,000 to 1.2 million, whilst the PLA increased from 80,000 to more than 900,000 troops.
When the Civil War came to an end, with Guomindang defeat in 1949, Mae-ling, fled with Chiang to Taiwan where she once again played the role of First Lady, until Chiang’s death in 1975. Remarkably, Mae-ling lived on until 2003 (dying at the age 105!). Even more remarkably, her elder sister, Ch’ing-ling, went on to become Vice Chairman of the Communist Government. Not only did she live through all the changes of the Maoist regime, and survive the Cultural Revolution, she remained in high office until her death in 1981. She was evidently a politically astute operator, acting as an ambassadord for China throughout these years. A clue to her political survival, whilst so many of her contemporaries fell foul of the Cultural Revolution, lies in ideology. The Communist party could no more do without Soong Chi’ing-ling than it could do without Mao: she represented a direct connection with Sun Yat-sen, the original revolutionary, with the revolution of 1911 and with the May 4th movement of 1919. It is a connection that the Communist party today continues to maintain: in 2011, 30 years after her death, a 24 meter statue was erected in Zenghzou, the capital of Henan province, in her honour.
RGS History 