Free Republic

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....

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...