Chiang Kai-shek

Biography

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 in Xikou, Zhejiang. He trained as an officer at the Baoding Military Academy and at the Tokyo Shinbu Gakko in Japan, where he met Sun Yat-sen and joined the Tongmenghui in 1908. He returned to fight in the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and spent the following decade in the revolutionary movement around Sun.

In 1924 Sun made him commandant of the new Whampoa Military Academy, which gave him a loyal officer corps. After Sun's death he took control of the Kuomintang and its army, led the Northern Expedition of 1926-1928 that unified much of China under a Nationalist government in Nanjing, and in 1927 broke with the Communists in the Shanghai massacre. Through the following decade he gave priority to fighting the Communists over resisting Japan, until the Xi'an Incident of 1936 forced a united front.

He led China through the war against Japan from 1937 to 1945, much of it from Chongqing, and met Roosevelt and Churchill at the Cairo Conference in 1943. His forces' breaching of the Yellow River dikes in 1938 and the suppression of the 1947 February 28 uprising in Taiwan are among the most criticised acts of his rule.

Defeated by Mao Zedong's Communists in the renewed civil war, he withdrew the government to Taiwan in 1949. There he ruled as president under martial law, with the political persecution known as the White Terror, while overseeing land reform and rapid economic growth. He died in Taipei in 1975.