Chiang Ching-kuo

Biography

Chiang Ching-kuo was born in 1910 in Fenghua, Zhejiang, the son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife, Mao Fumei. After schooling in Shanghai and Beijing he went to Moscow in 1925 to study at Sun Yat-sen University and joined the Communist Youth League there. When his father turned on the Communists in 1927 he was kept in the Soviet Union as a virtual hostage and sent to a heavy-machinery plant in the Urals, where he married Faina Vakhreva. Stalin allowed the family to return to China in 1937.

During the war against Japan he administered Gannan prefecture in Jiangxi from 1939 to 1945. In 1948 he led a campaign in Shanghai against hoarding and inflation that failed amid economic collapse, and in 1949 he followed his father to Taiwan. There he ran the secret police that enforced the White Terror until 1965 and reorganised political control of the armed forces. He became minister of national defense in 1965, vice premier in 1969 and premier in 1972.

After his father died in 1975 he took the chairmanship of the Kuomintang, and the National Assembly elected him president in 1978 and again in 1984. As premier and president he pushed large infrastructure programmes, including the Ten Major Construction Projects, during a period of rapid growth, and he steered Taiwan through the loss of United States diplomatic recognition in 1979.

In his final years he allowed the newly formed Democratic Progressive Party to operate, lifted martial law on 15 July 1987 and let residents visit relatives on the mainland. He brought more Taiwan-born officials into government and chose Lee Teng-hui as vice president; Lee succeeded him when he died in Taipei in January 1988.