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Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is despised by socialists worldwide for his purge of communists in what was referred to as the “Shanghai Massacre” of 1927, as well as for the atrocities committed by his troops on communists during the Chinese Civil War. Before he turned on the communists, Chiang was actually referred to as the “Red General” in the West. In 1925, his 15-year old son Chiang Ching-kuo went to study in Moscow.
Ching-kuo would enroll at the Sun Yat-sen University in the Russian capital. Chiang Kai-shek was then Joseph Stalin’s “darling,” Hannah Pakula wrote in her book titled The Last Empress: Madam Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China. “Whenever Ching-kuo went to the movies in Moscow, he saw newsreels of his father, and when he read Russian newspapers, they were full of admiration for Chiang.”
In his biography of Ching-kuo titled The Generalissimo’s Son, Jay Taylor wrote, “Every Chinese student at Sun Yat-sen University knew that the youngest one among them was the son of the famous General Chiang.” At 15, Ching-kuo was even made editor of the university’s bulletin board, which was called the ‘Red Wall.’
Two years later, when the news of Chiang Kai-shek’s purges of the communists became known in Moscow, Chiang-kuo denounced his father. “Chiang Kai-shek was my father and a revolutionary friend,” Ching-kuo told fellow students, according to Pakula’s book. “He has now become my enemy…Down with Chiang Kai-shek, down with the traitor!”
When ordered by the Chinese government to return home, Ching-kuo refused.
As a student in Moscow, Ching-kuo was given the Russian name Nicholai Vladimirovich Yelizarov. Among his classmates was future Chinese leader and reformer Deng Xiaoping. Curiously enough, when Ching-kuo became Taiwan’s president, he carried similar reforms to what Deng oversaw in China.
Ching-kuo excelled as a student and was selected to be trained in advanced studies at the prestigious Military and Political Institute in Leningrad. His file described him as “the best student in the academy,” according to Pakula.
Although Ching-kuo wanted to return to China after his studies in Leningrad, he was forced by the Soviets to stay.
After graduating from the Leningrad institute, Ching-kuo was an apprentice at the Dynamo Electrical Plant in Moscow. He was asked to take up a manual job “to learn about the life of the proletariat,” Pakula wrote in her book.
He then worked in the Ural Heavy Machinery Plant in Yekaterinburg, where he would meet his future wife Faina Vakerevich, a Belarusian.
Ching-kuo’s biographers largely agree that he was a Trotskyite and was fearful of Stalin, who kept a tab on his movements. The two would meet after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931-2.
According to Jay Taylor, Stalin asked Ching-kuo whether China and the USSR could cooperate against the Japanese. (This was years before the Soviet-Japan neutrality pact was signed). Ching-kuo’s aunt visited Moscow in 1931 and the USSR proposed to exchange her nephew for the former head of the Chinese Communist Party, who was imprisoned in Shanghai. Such an exchange did not take place, as Chiang Kai-shek opposed the idea.
The generalissimo wrote in an entry in 1931 that he missed his son, but was not to exchange a prisoner for hime “Alas! I am neither loyal to the nation and the Party nor filial to my mother or kind to my children. I feel ashamed,” he wrote. “I would rather let Ching-kuo be exiled or killed in Soviet Russia than exchange a criminal for him. God decides whether you will have an heir…It is not worth to sacrifice the interest of the country for the sake of my son.”
Ching-kuo married Vakerevich in 1935 and lived in Yekaterinburg for another two years. After Chiang Ka-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists agreed to put up a united front against the Japanese, Stalin allowed Ching-kuo, his wife and their son to move back to China.
After his return to China, Ching-kuo patched up his relationship with his father. When the Chinese Nationalists lost control of Mainland China to the Communists, Ching-kuo left with his father for Taiwan. He would become the premier of the country in 1972, a title he would hold till 1978, when he was elected president. He remained the head of the state until his death in 1988.
Ching-kuo is widely believed to have applied tactics that he learned in Russia, both when he was a fighter during the Chinese Civil War, and when he headed Taiwan’s secret police in the 1950s. Yet his greatest legacy remains that of an economic and political reformer who ended martial law, loosened political controls, and started a process of rapprochement with Mainland China.
