On February 10 China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, accompanied by his wife and 15 military aides, having crossed the border of his native land for the first time since 1931, arrived at New Delhi, India.
There, that evening, he attended a large formal banquet given by the Marquis of Linlithgow, India's Viceroy, who in his address of welcome quoted Confucius to the effect that it is "delightful to have men of kindred spirit come to one from afar."
Always practical, Chiang replied with an even more appropriate Chinese proverb: "To have one look at things is a hundred times more satisfactory than hearsay."
The day after the banquet, Chiang and General Sir Alan Fleming Hartley, Commander in Chief in India, reviewed Indian troops from a Rolls-Royce on which a Union Jack fluttered from the radiator cap like a raccoon tail on a college boy's Ford.
After the review Chiang mounted a dais to be cheered by a large crowd.
At New Delhi, Chiang and his party stayed in villas specially provided for them, within view of the lofty blue dome of the Viceroy's palace.
In contrast to Chungking, where conveniences are makeshift, they were waited on by servants in red coats and gold braid.
During his stay Chiang got word from London that His Majesty's Government had seen fit to make him an Honorary Knight of the Bath, Military Division, in honor of outstanding achievements in the Allied cause."
Chiang Kai-shek's visit to India was not, despite its pleasant appurtenances, a vacation.
Its true purposes were: 1) to see how munition factories, from which arms have been moving to China across the Burma Road were functioning and how they were being defended;
2) to talk of the new ersatz Burma Road, from Assam into China and find out what the Indian Government had done to make the new road function;
and 3) to investigate India's general military potential, including relations between his British friends and the Indian Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
Chiang covers ground rapidly
Between formalities, Chiang attended to business. This took the form of an air inspection of border fortifications and a series of momentous conferences with both British authorities and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, whose Party believes that India must be guaranteed full independence as a reward for a full war effort.
Starting his trip back to Chungking, Chiang, accompanied now by Nehru as well as his own party, stopped off at Calcutta to see the shriveled old Mahatma himself.
The conference with Gandhi resulted in nothing so grand as a :people's alliance," but it seemed extremely possible that Chiang had at least made his point that passive resistance might prove to be a hopelessly feeble weapon against Jap aggression.
That the more immediate objectives of his visit had been accomplished at least in part was indicated by an announcement while he was staying at Calcutta that Rangoon harbor had been mined and that henceforth his armies would be supplied by rail and river over the route from Assam.
Alternatives to sound co-operation between India and China are fairly obvious.
If the Japs can persuade India to feel that India fighting for England would be like a fish fighting for the frying pan, Asia will be taken over by the Axis in short order.
On the other hand, if India's 390,000,000 souls become convinced that their interests, like those of Chiang's 450,000,000 will be served best by defeating Japan, Chiang's excursion last week may be as far-reaching in its consequences as Winston Churchill's recent one to Washington.
It might mark the beginning of an era in which China will emerge as one of the world's top powers and Chiang as Asia's greatest man since Genghis Khan.
Five years ago Chiang Kai-shek was practically unknown outside China.
He first emerged on the world stage in December 1936, while lying sick and captive in a war lord's lair at Siam.
Announcers at American radio stations, which issued frequent bulletins on his kidnapping, were puzzled by the name of China's leader.
CHIANG, MME. CHIANG AND NEHRU AT CHUNGKING, 1938
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They referred to him consistently as "Kai-shek," unaware that, since Chinese surnames come first, that this was as inappropriate as calling Stalin "Joseph."
Many young Americans, twisting the dials in search of swing music, must have twirled the misused name into hearing and then flicked it out.
They might have lingered to hear more if they had known Chiang was the man who, five years later almost to the week, would be placed in complete command of their lives and personal destinies, as Supreme Commander of Allied land and air forces in the Chinese theater of war.
By the end of the first month of America's war, Chiang had turned up in American headlines with the only Allied land victory in the campaign against Japan: the smashing of the Changsha thrust which cost the enemy up to 50,000 men.
Even more significantly Chiang Kai-shek sent into action over Burma a handful of American volunteer pilots recruited from every walk of American life.
In continuous swift battles Chiang's Americans shot down more than 120 Japanese planes, lost only about ten of their own and proved that man for man, plane for plane, Americans could shoot Japanese out of the sky at will.
Last week, Chiang's land forces were successfully pushing the Japs across the Siam border to Chengmai.
These operations were carried out efficiently, with a minimum of waste motion.
If U.S. soldiers in training at home gave thought to the possibilities of later service under Chiang, it must have encouraged them to reflect that he was a military technician of surpassing skill.
Chiang Kai-shek led his first unit into fire in 1911. Of the past 17 years of Chiang Kai-shek's life, not one has failed to include some war, great or small.
He wrung the title Generalissimo out of Chinese history by winning over or destroying completely, over the course of 20 years, a group of generals, marshals, comrades and variously designated free-booting adventurers who were tearing China to bits.
All his mature life Chiang Kai-shek has been using force as habitually as some other leaders have used words.
The habit has made him cold, relentless, slow to give confidence.
It has also made him a first-class fighting man, and the men who serve under him or with him are content with that.
The most important single fact about Chiang Kai-shek is, of course, that he is a soldier.
This obscures the fact that he is also the shrewdest politician in China. Chiang's talents for both war and politics were developed in the violence of the Chinese civil wars.
Now, as his greatest war rises to climax with new allies, new problems and new frictions pressing for attention, Chiang is probably serene in one of the basic convictions the Chinese civil wars made clear to him:
a good common hate can be the strongest bond between two allies.
Chiang Kai-shek has been hating the Japs early and late for a good five years.
Sometimes his tenacity in this direction has puzzled not only the outside world but some of his own weaker-willed associates as well.
"Ni men ta suan pan!"
In the summer of 1940 the spirit of the Chinese reached one of its all-war lows.
The Japanese had taken the Yangtze port of Ichang, putting their bombers within 300 miles of Chungking.
Raids went on day and night. The same clear sky that brought the raiders burned rice in the stalk and famine was in prospect. The French Army had blown up, the Japanese were in Indo-China,
America was in a state of nervous hysteria. To top things, the British, alarmed by Japanese threats, announced that they were closing the Burma Road for three months.
With the Burma Road closed, the sole remaining link of China with America and the West was gone.
During this period of unrelieved gloom Chiang Kai-shek called a meeting of his councilors.
The Japanese - unofficially - had made known what they required for a settlement.
Peace was in the air. What would Chiang say to his dispirited advisers?
Chiang's speech was characteristic.
"Ni men ta suan pan (You people are counting beads on a counting board)," he burst out, going on to explain.
"You count how many troops we have, how many rounds of ammunition, how many gallons of gasoline are left.
But I don't count. I don't care. When I started 15 years ago I had only 2,000 cadets in a military school.
And America was against me, and France, and England, and Japan.
And the Communists were more powerful than they are today. And I had no money.
And I marched north and I licked the war lords. I united the country.
Today I have 3,000,000 men and half of China and the friendship of America and England.
Let them come, let them drive me back into Sikong [part of Tibet].
In five years I will be back here and I will conquer all of China again."
On his desk Chiang keeps a holder for writing brushes and a flat inkwell. He brushes a curt "yes" or "no" on papers.
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That was the end of peace talk for that summer.
Chiang has only one emotion: China. He looks at the war map with a sense of dispassionate detachment, moves his armies and men about like pawns on a continental chessboard.
In 1938, Japanese armies were wheeling down out of the plains of Shantung on what was then the most strategic rail junction in the country, Chengchow.
There was only one way to stop them - blow up the dikes on the south bank of the Yellow River so that the turbulent muddy current would cut across their path.
To give the order meant that thousands of Chinese peasants would drown along with the enemy, that thousands more would be driven into the interior on a mad, disease-cursed trek.
But it was the only way. Orders were given - with Chiang Kai-shek's consent - and the dikes blew up.
The map was changed, but the Japanese were stopped.
The stubbornness of Chiang is reflected in the map of China today: the battle fronts, soggy with blood, stretch almost exactly along lines held for three full years. Chiang Kai-shek has simply refused to retreat farther.
Chiang's stubbornness is military virtue
It is unlikely that American officers and men who serve with Chiang will find his stubbornness unpleasant.
Friction, however, is sure to develop when tough Chinese Burma Road truckies find that American standards of road practices differ from theirs and thats the American standard must prevail, and when Chinese mechanics find that American aviators will curse and complain until they learn to handle delicate machinery with American care.
It will go on too until Americans learn that barefoot Chinese soldiers know more about fighting Japanese than the best infantry divisions in the U.S.A.
Tough Chinese top sergeants will show scant courtesy to spick-and-span American officers as they explain how Japanese machine-gun posts are laid out, how a Japanese charge can best be met, how a depth-defense position can be embroidered in 48 hours to mousetrap an overwhelming enemy. Both Chiang Kai-shek and the American command probably discount such difficulties in advance.
Chiang is an astute horse trader and a first-class swap is possible: American technical and administrative standards for China's five-year-old skill in Jap killing. Chiang will make his subordinates see that the deal works.
For more than 10 years it has been almost impossible for Chinese journalists, even when they wanted to, to write honestly of Chiang.
In enemy territory it was unhealthy to praise; in Kuomintang territory, unhealthy to detract.
In any case, the facts were little known, partly because Chiang's origins were obscure and partly because his activities have been complex.
Chiang was born in 1887 to a farming family in the village of Chikow, near Fenghua, in the province of Chekiang.
He still speaks with a crisp Chekiang accent that irritates Chinese intellectuals who affect the liquid syllables of North China, Mandarin.
Chiang still loves his native village.
The Chiangs have an Irish setter called Hami from the servants' attempts at "Come here." Note Roosevelt behind them.
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In peacetime he retires there as often as he can for vacation and lavishes money on its beautification.
It is mountain country, incised with the crescent slivers of rice paddy fields, the slopes of the hills bamboo-covered, and the streams clear, thin and fast.
Chiang's father was a man of dignity and standing who had, successively, three wives.
Chiang was born of the third mating and the love he bears his mother is sincere and deep.
On his 50th birthday he said:
". . . Now that the trees by her grave have grown tall and thick, I cannot but realize how little I have accomplished and how I have failed
to live up to the hopes that she had placed in me . . . My father died when I was 9 years old . . . My family, solitary and without influence, became at once
the target of insults and maltreatment . . . It was entirely due to my mother and her kindness and perseverance that the family was saved from utter ruin.
For a period of 16 years - from the age of 9 till I was 25 years old, my mother never spent a day free of domestic difficulties . . ."
Chiang was born at a moment when powerful neighbors were trampling on China.
China's humiliation was based on one thing - she was simply unable to organize men and machines into military and industrial patterns as efficient as those the
Western nations had taught themselves. Out of China's weakness came Chiang Kai-shek's determination to become a soldier.
He placed high in his provincial examinations for admission to the first Chinese military academy at Paoting.
He was an outstanding member of its first class and chosen to go on to Tokyo for further instruction.
In Japan, Chiang first met Sun Yat-sen, China's George Washington, who won him to the cause of revolution.
The first military action in which Chiang took part was an insurrection against the Manchu Empire in 1911.
When this putsch was finally betrayed by its own Dictator-President Yuan Shih-ai, Chiang slipped back into obscurity.
For a while he was connected with the sinister Green Gang of Shanghai - a semi-mystic, violent society that flourished in the underworld
of the mud-flat metropolis of northern China.
Chinese are careful to point out that the revolutionary movement in China was so persecuted that it had to draw support from any and all groups
who wanted to overthrow the Manchu regime. Chiang during this period lived on a limited budget except for a brief interval when he was a prosperous stockbroker
on the Shanghai exchange.
China's civil wars were complex
The period that followed the revolution against the Manchus was one of confusion for China.
For people outside China, the confusion indeed was such that it seemed impossible to understand at all and most intelligent newsreaders wisely made no effort to do so.
What actually happened was that by 1921 China had been carved up into a patchwork of satrapies run by war lords who were usually both colorful and vicious.
W\Each war lord had an army, each army its district.
Pock-marked, syphillic soldiers, often wolfish with hunger, often looting for sustenance, marched back and forth over the map of China, establishing chaos as the normal state of civil affairs.
China's multiple civil wars had little in common with properly organized civil wars - like those for instance of the U.S., Russia or Spain.
Since the Chinese had a profound contempt for soldiering in general - which it took Chiang years to uproot - no more than a minute percentage of the population was ever engaged in all the wars put together at any given moment.
At lunch they use chopsticks for oriental, silver for occidental food. The oranges are no longer obtainable in Chungking.
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Inured or accidental disasters like floods and famine, which were far more inclusive in their effects, the majority of the population seemed to go about its business as if the struggle for power between the war lords did not concern it at all.
Consequently this period of the civil wars also included a surprising amount of progress in civil affairs like roadbuilding, transportation, education and industry.
Out of the wars themselves, moreover, there eventually evolved the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, fathered by Sun Yat-sen and staffed with such men as Chiang Kai-shek, which has run China ever since.
Sun Yat-sen, wanting as much as any human could to establish democracy in China, knew that words alone were not enough.
There was only one man whom Sun Yat-sen knew to have both ability in the field and a fidelity to China that transcended his fidelity to force.
That was Chiang Kai-shek. From 1921 on, Chiang was always by the side of Sun, fighting to whip together an army for the revolution.
The Chinese Nationalists in 1923 were offered the political and military support of the Soviet Union.
In 1923 Chiang went to Moscow to visit and came away unfavorably impressed.
His antipathy to Communism as an influence in Chinese government has lasted ever since.
Chiang came back to Canton in the spring of 1924 to perform a profoundly important act - the organization of the Whampoa Military Academy.
This academy became the West Point of new China. To Chiang the young officers gave the personal devotion that exists only between a Chinese student and his teacher.
The Whampoa Academy differed from its predecessors in that it had a political motif: the lives of its students were important only to make China strong and united.
As they graduated from their hurried courses, Chiang made his students officers in the new armies of Nationalist China.
Chiang's generals were drawn from every stratum of Chinese war lordism, but the brave young captains and lieutenants were his own Whampoa boys.
As the boys grew to maturity in days of later civil war, they fought their way to the command of regiments, brigades, divisions and army corps.
Always, ever since, no matter who has ruled the Government of China nominally, the young officers of the Chinese Army have been Chiang's own men.
Chiang's agents organized revolution
While Chiang organized the academy - getting up a 5 in the morning, making up his own room, drilling students, inspecting equipment and planning - his agents were sneaking off to the north, organizing peasants and workers for the great day of insurrection.
By July of 1926 the revolutionists were ready. Chiang gave the signal to the troops he had assembled.
As they marched north, the ground seemed to heave in welcome to them. Moving swiftly, Chiang cut down one war lord after another.
In three months his armies had occupied Hankow. Five months later they were in Nanking. By the middle of 1028 North China had been entirely conquered.
But Chiang was not yet through with war. In 1929 began a second series of civil wars which Chiang undertook to establish the authority of his government.
Two campaigns in 1929, two more in 1930, brought further victories. Gradually war lords learned that the "Central Government" meant to govern.
Chiang ruled with an iron hand. When his autocratic conduct of the government and arrest of political opponents brought cries of "dictator" from every part of the country,
Chiang simply resigned again and returned with Madame Chiang to his native village.
It was the Japanese who underlined how ill China could spare Chiang on this occasion. They had seized Manchuria in the fall of 1931, three months before Chiang was forced out of the Government.
As the conflict spread, Shanghai erupted in the first Shanghai war of 1932. The Chinese realized that only Chiang Kai-shek could supply the necessary leadership during crisis.
They made haste to call him back.
The years from 1931 to 1937 were, for Chiang, mostly years of preparation and domestic progress. He pushed his anti-Communist campaigns but he knew that the civil wars were only preliminaries and that eventually,
in the main event, he would have to fight Japan. As Chiang's Central Government grew in strength the currency system throughout the country was unified, railroads were pushed through, the Army modernized and a stable basis of commerce and industry laid down.
By the spring of 1937, Chiang had made of China one nation for the first time in a generation.
The Japanese could not wait to see China become powerful - and so, in July 1937, they struck. Chiang's armies could not match the mechanized Japanese.
Slowly he retreated, trading space for time. A year and a half after the war's outbreak he had finally reached a stable line - and that line he has held almost changeless for the past three and a half years. From his rocky, uncomfortable mountain capital Chungking,
Chiang today looks out on 2,800 miles of battle front, guarded by three million and more soldiers and the war goes on.
Lean and shaven-pated, Chiang is, by Chinese standards, a handsome man. He stands always as if there were a ramrod of steel in his back.
When seated, rarely talking, frequently stroking his smooth chin with a nervous gesture. Chiang has a terrific temper. In anger, his naturally high-pitched voice shoots up till it is almost falsetto and the blunt harsh words come rumbling out, sparing no one.
In such fury he has been known to demote the highest-placed generals without a second thought.
Chiang's favorite form of assent is the single one-word grunt, "hao" (good) or "ko ye" (can do).
Two important Americans in China talk with Chiang at a Chungking tea.
Colonel Claire L. Chennault (left) is head of the American Volunteer Group which has covered itself with glory in the fighting over Burma.
Owen Lattimore (center) was hand-picked by President Roosevelt, at Chiang's request, to be the Generalissimo's economic advisor.
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With such a grunt he may set in motion half a million men. Chiang rarely composes the smoothly eloquent declarations that appear over his name.
They are the products, usually, of his old secretary Ch'en Pu-lei, a former journalist who joined Chiang's staff many years ago.
Chiang's widely published diary of the Sian kidnapping consists of Chiang's original, curt, staccato jottings, polished up to a bright gloss for popular consumption.
Chiang declaims his speeches in a high falsetto that is quickly absorbed and lost in great mass meetings. He finishes his speeches with an abrupt gesture,
a flat sweeping motion of the hand, a short bark, "wan le" (finished). In off-the-record conversations with his ministers, he is pithy, picturesque or profound
but his public pronouncements rarely reveal his personality. His niggardly, grudging use of the spoken word is the despair of visiting journalists who may be granted an audience of ten or 15 minutes with the great man.
They usually spend two or three minutes outlining long involved questions to which Chiang listens in quiet patience.
When the question is over and translated Chiang usually murmurs softly, "yes" or "no" or "very difficult."
Chiang is Generalissimo of the Armed Forces, Chairman of the National Military Council, Chairman of the Supreme National Defense Council, President of the Executive Yuan (Premier), Chairman of the Presidium of the People's Political Council,
Chairman of the Joint Board of the four Government banks, Director-General of the Kuomintang, President of the National New Life Movement, Director General of the San Min Chu I Youth Corps, Principal of the Central Military Academy, of the Central Political Institute and the Central Aviation Academy -
in addition to his United Nations job as Supreme Commander.
His favorite job is the Army. Most distasteful to him is probably the premiership. He appeared at meetings of the cabinet, it is said, only four times in the first 18 months after he assumed the post.
Chinese usually refer to Chiang as "Wei Yuan Chang" - a title meaning "The Committee Head" (National Military Council). When his old comrades, the buccaneering, colorful, roistering crew of old soldiers who have fought with and against Chiang for the past 20 years, speak of him they say simply "lao chiang" - "old chiang" - with a reminiscent affection.
Chiang today is an ascetic - he neither smokes, drinks, plays cards nor gambles. The turbulence of his youth, the gay parties and long nights in Suchow for which he was famous, are over.
He is rather humorless - which is odd in a nation noted for its highly developed sense of humor. Chiang's only personal relaxation now is picnicking.
He likes long walks in the country with Madame Chiang and a few personal friends. While the children of many lesser Government ministers are safe in America or in soft jobs, Chiang's own children - two sons - are working hard in unimportant posts far from their father.
His younger, Ching-kuo, is a lieutenant at the northern front. The elder, Wei-kuo, is a prefectural superintendent in South Central China.
Chiang lives in a ten-room house in a Chungking suburb, surrounded by a 40-ft. stone wall, whose driveway is guarded by two fully armed soldiers.
Within the compound, the grounds are most carefully patrolled by plain clothesmen and uniformed guards.
Chiang rises at 5 in the morning, does Chinese physical exercises in his own room, prays in silence. At 7 he eats a light meal of fruit, toast, coffee.
Madame and the Generalissimo used to have specially selected foods (including Sunkist oranges, Knox's gelatin, apples), flown up to them from Hong Kong.
After breakfast he reads reports, petitions, mail sifted to him through the army, the Party and the civilian Government, marking the documents with one simple Chinese character in blue ink "yes" or "no."
He and Madame Chiang usually lunch alone, except on Fridays. On Fridays, Chiang has about 20 important people in to discuss problems of state.
After lunch he has a short rest, then more reports and conferences. In the afternoons he is likely to drive downtown, in one of his enormous American-built limousines, to the National Military Council for a conference.
On such drives Chiang is preceded and followed by cars of bodyguards dressed in gray or black.
Chiang's bodyguard, organized by Germans and highly efficient, is with him constantly.
Chiang has lived in constant danger of death since the first assassination attempt against him in 1914. Many attempts have been made to kill him since, but during the war years in Chungking all such incidents have been immediately shushed.
Chiang's personal courage is unquestioned. During air raids he is the constant worry of his subordinates who urge him to shelter long before he himself is ready to go.
Occasionally, after the alarm is sounded, he will decide to sit the air raid out across the river in his mountain cottage.
With all the streets deathly still, Chiang will race through the empty, dusty roads in his limousine, shoot across the swiftly swirling Yangtze in his private launch and then unhurriedly stroll into the waiting car on the other side.
The Chiangs dine at 7:30, usually in private, although there may be entertainment for important visiting foreigners or generals later in the evening.
When Chiang spreads himself on a banquet, the food is superlative, but normally the table is quite simple for a Chungking official.
After dinner Chiang reads, wearing simple rimless reading glasses. He has a fondness for history and almost never reads fiction.
Before going to bed he writes in his diary - briefly, simply. The last thing he does before turning in is to plug a phone call through to the National Military Council asking for the latest reports from the front.
These being all right, he goes to sleep.
Chiang has aged greatly during the war. His mustache has begun to show flicks of gray. His back was injured during the Sian kidnapping and he has never fully recovered since.
He used to suffer badly from toothaches, but is now quite satisfied with his new false teeth made by a Canadian dentist at the mission-supported West China Union University School of Dentistry.
Chiang is always immaculately dressed. He usually appears on public occasions in a simple khaki uniform, trussed in a Sam Browne belt.
For pictures he sometimes appears in his epaulets. At other times he likes to wear simple Sun Yat-sen suits - a popular pajama-like garment, buttoning high at the neck.
At home, he often wears his long Chinese gown and a dark jacket over it.
Chiang's chief joy and delight in life is his wife, Mei-ling, whose career and accomplishments are probably better known to most U.S. newsreaders than her husband's.
Chiang first met Mei-ling Soong in Canton during the early days of the revolution. As the outstanding military figure of the Nationalists, Chiang had as associates such leaders as Sun Yat-sen and H. H. Kung, both of them married to Soong sisters,
daughters of the celebrated Bible salesman Charles Soong. Promptly, and conveniently, the handsome young general and the beautiful daughter of what was to become the most distinguished family in the nation fell genuinely in love.
Chiang was already married to an old fashioned Chinese girl from whom he had separated. His divorce, courtship and conversion to Methodist Christianity took place over a period of eight years.
Romance with Mei-ling was dramatic
He and Mei-ling were married in 1927. Chiang Mei-ling is almost more American than Chinese. She came to the States at the age of 9 and lived here till she was 21, rounding off her education at Wellesley.
Madame Chiang's almost legendary charm overwhelms even the most sophisticated Westerners. She is not, however, as some Americans believe, the power behind the throne but rather Chiang's confidante and close companion.
Although the Generalissimo speaks no English, he has learned one word from his Americanized wife: "darling."
During their honeymoon, he called her "darling" so often that the chair bearers thought
it was her official title and addressed her as Mrs. Darling themselves.
She fondly calls him "Chieh-hsiung" - and untranslatable term of respectful affection.
Chiang's wedding in 1927 to Mei-ling Soong united China's most powerful man to its most influential family.
Wedding was a splendid event at Shanghai's Hotel Majestic.
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During the United China Relief Campaign in America, certain Americans wanted her to come to the U.S. to help in the drive.
Madame wanted to go, but Chiang was firm. "But she will be worth a division of troops to you in America," one American expostulated. "Ah," said the Generalissimo, "she is worth ten divisions of troops to me in Chungking."
Chiang's Christianity is something foreigners find very difficult to understand. Madame Chiang's mother did not wish her daughter to marry a heathen.
Chiang replied that he would be a poor Christian if he adopted the faith only because he wanted to marry Mei-ling, but he promised to reflect on the matter after they were married. His conversion occurred three years later.
A man of Chiang's iron will does not easily doff or don a creed; nor does he adopt a religion for the sake of publicity.
And yet Chiang's life of violence, his ruthless treatment of Communist students during the white reaction of 1931-34, seems to cut directly across the rather gentle faith which he professes. Missionaries in China explain the contradiction by saying that Chiang as an "Old Testament Christian."
Chiang's is a life that spans two worlds - the ancient world of feudalism in China, the revolution that broke it, the new world of force and machines into which he is leading his country via the war.
Military prospects, despite the current threat to the Burma Road, last week seemed reasonably bright, in the light of his new alliance with the U.S. and England and with the aid of India in prospect.
Chiang's thoughts, as he flew back to Chungking must have been in part somewhat also on the role China will have to play in the post-war world, a role that will be totally different from that of her past.
An Allied victory would make China one of the four great powers of the world. Hers then will be the leadership of the restless masses on the world's greatest continent.
In the fashioning of that leadership Chiang Kai-shek may have greater influence than any other single human being of our age.
