Free Republic

Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic on October 1, 1949, as Chiang Kai-shek (CKS) "moved" the Nationalist Chinese government from Nanjing to Taiwan. Chiang's regime continued to rule the island “province” of Taiwan for the Americans... The peace Treaty of San Francisco was signed in 1951 at the height of the Korean War. President Harry S. Truman, declaring the neutralization of the Taiwan Strait at the onset of the war in Korea… Neither the People's Republic (Mao) nor the Republic of China (CKS) on Taiwan participated in the San Francisco peace conference. They did not sign the peace treaty.

Chiang Kai-shek ranks as one of the most despised leaders of the 20th century. Famously derided as "Peanut" and "General Cash-My-Check," the leader of China's Nationalist government bedeviled the Allied war effort in World War II with his lackluster defense of his country. His corrupt and brutal regime squandered billions of dollars in American aid and drove the Chinese into the arms of the communists. He died in exile a deluded despot, relegated to a footnote in modern Chinese history. Or so the conventional story goes. Now, however, Jay Taylor's new biography, "The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for...

Kuomintang heavyweights and supporters yesterday marked the 32nd death anniversary of President Chiang Kai-shek at venues that could no longer be dedicated to their late leader by next year. KMT Honorary Chairman Lien Chan led incumbent and former party officials, including former party chief Ma Ying-jeou, to pay tribute at Chiang's mausoleum in Taoyuan. While the ceremony in Taoyuan was more like an annual routine, another KMT group performed in Taipei an elaborate ritual in defense of Chiang's name against what they considered a government campaign to deny his contribution to the nation. The group, including former Premier Hau Pei-tsun,...

Belated burial for Gen. Chiang TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Nearly 30 years after his death, relatives of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek wanted a belated burial for the late Taiwanese leader, officials said on Thursday.Chiang's body will be taken out of a mausoleum and buried in an army cemetery in the capital, Taipei.Chiang and his Nationalist government fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war in China to Mao Zedong's Communists in 1949. He built Taiwan into an anti-communist bastion and vowed to recapture the mainland.

Claire Chennault, the American founder of China’s air aces, the Flying Tigers, met his new boss on June 3rd 1937. “A vivacious young girl clad in a modish Paris frock tripped into the room, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm,” he recalled. It was “an encounter from which I never recovered”, and, whatever happened, that “young girl” would “always be a princess to me”. Thus, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, half-dragon lady, half-Georgia peach, and an encounter from which many who should have known better never recovered. Her life is a monument to the power of personality in the great sweep of history....

Graham Halksworth's neighbours knew him as a pillar of his community: a family man and a trustee of the local golf club. They didn't realise that he was quietly plotting one of the most audacious scams in history. Every Monday morning, 69-year-old Graham Halksworth would bid farewell to his wife Margaret, and leave his home at the top end of the little town of Mossley, high on the shoulder of the Pennines. Smartly dressed and carrying a briefcase, he would negotiate the steps down from their unprepossessing brick-built semi, whose only sign of pretension was its windows, leaded with an...

Editorial: Politically Incorrect By SAM GRIFFIN JR., Publisher October 24, 2003 On Friday, May-ling Soong, 106, died in New York City. And for whatever reason, the press and people of the United States accorded her passing little notice: Ignorance, oversight, embarrassment or the conceit of political correctness—none of it reflected graciously upon us. Older generations of Americans will recognize May-ling Soong as Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, wife of Nationalist China’s leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. In circles of academia and liberal intelligentsia—and thus in the press and in subsequent textbooks—it has been gauche to make complimentary remarks about the generalissimo. Chinese bandit,...

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the widow of the Nationalist Chinese president who used her charm and fluent English to lobby Washington and become a driving force in Taiwan's Nationalist government, died Thursday in New York. She was 105. The cause of death was not immediately available, Taiwan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Richard Shih said Friday. Madame Chiang had been treated for cancer and other ailments. She lived in semi-seclusion after her husband's death in 1975, spending most of the time in her Manhattan apartment or at her family's 36-acre estate in Lattingtown, an exclusive Long Island suburb 35...