Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History by Richard Shenkman

Author:Richard Shenkman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1993-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHIANG KAI-SHEK

Chiang Kai-shek is remembered as a dictator, but not as a really bad one. He went around killing people, but they were the wrong kind of people, so it didn’t really matter.

Like most aimless young people the world over, he started out in life by joining a gang. This was an exciting experience for him, except he got a little more used to murdering and robbing people than was altogether good for his moral development. By the time he was thirty, says Sterling Seagrave, British authorities in Shanghai had indicted Chiang countless times for robbery and extortion, and once for murder.

How many people he actually killed as a gang member, no one knows. Seagrave guesses at least three. Each time, though, he had his reasons. Take the time he killed a patient in the hospital who’d been recuperating from a painful illness. The man had dared to get into an argument with Chiang, so Chiang, naturally, pulled out a gun and killed him. And he had a perfectly good reason for killing a rival gang member. Doing so made it that much easier to frame the fellow for another murder Chiang himself had committed.

Chiang showed so much promise as a gang member that he quickly became the favorite of the leader of the Green Gang, Big Eared Tu, a colorful opium addict with a shaved head. Together they proceeded to conquer China and become rich and powerful.

You don’t hear much about Big Eared Tu in the standard biographies of Chiang Kai-shek. Biographers must want readers to believe Chiang rose to the top all by himself, I guess.

But who, for instance, do you think got Chiang his first big break, his appointment as head of Whampoa Military Academy in 1924? Why, it was Big Eared Tu, of course.

Some have expressed their disappointment that Chiang turned out to be corrupt. I think they miss the point. He never could have gotten where he was in life by being honest. It’s not like he started out pure and became corrupt. He was always corrupt.

Having a guy like Big Eared Tu on his side proved exceedingly helpful through the years. Like when the bankers in Shanghai threatened to depose Chiang. Who “persuaded” the bankers to keep Chiang in power? Big Eared Tu.

And in the 1930s, when Chiang was in need of airplanes for the government, who reached into his own pockets to buy them? Big Eared Tu. In all, Tu purchased 120 planes.

And when Chiang needed money to pay for the army, who helped him out? Big Eared Tu.

Where Tu got the money to help out his pal Chiang has never been gone into in any great detail, as Tu wasn’t the type to file annual reports. But I think it’s safe to say he made most of his money selling drugs.

Which reminds me of a little joke Chiang played on the Americans. The Americans had demanded that Chiang put a stop to the opium trade, as it was leaving the Chinese in a bad stupor, and as Americans were no longer making a buck off the darn thing.

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