Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

With a narrative as briskly paced and vividly detailed as an international thriller, this definitive new biography of Chiang Kai-shek masterfully maps the tumultuous political career of nationalist China’s Generalissimo as it reevaluates his brave but unfulfilled life. Chiang Kai-shek was one of the most influential world figures of the twentieth century. The leader of the Kuomintang, the nationalist movement in China, by 1928 he had established himself as head of the government in Nanking. While he managed to survive the political storms of the 1930s, and although he was the only Chinese statesman of sufficient stature to attend the Cairo conference with Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II, Chiang’s power was continually being undermined by the Japanese on one side and the Chinese Communists on the other. Once Japan met its unequivocal defeat in 1945, civil war again erupted in China, and four years later Mao Zedong claimed victory for the Communists. Featuring pages of photographs, and drawing extensively upon original Chinese sources and accounts by contemporaneous journalists, Jonathan Fenby unfolds a story as fascinating in its conspiratorial intrigues as it is remarkable for its psychological insights.