Soong on the battle front (at right in spectacles and fur hat) tried to encourage the Manchurian and Mongol chieftains who fought Japan's drive through Jehol in 1933. Later that year the Japanese successfully seized the province which is now part of Manchukuo.

He has the direct approach

  T.V.'s success was achieved by his own method: the frontal attack. His behavior in Washington, none too characteristic of the Chinese, was entirely characteristic of T.V. In China, it is considered bad manners to approach a subject directly. If you want to interest Mr. Bigwig, whose nephew is a friend of your cousin's, in a business proposition, the usual procedure is to invite him to dinner, talk about the weather throughout the first dozen courses, and then, after the dessert, mention business as an afterthought. T.V. himself has often recommended this time-honored routine to ambitious young men who asked his advice. As for himself, he has always been above it. He talks business when, and with whom, he pleases.
  Directness makes it easy for Washington officials to get along with him. T.V. (who prefers to be addressed as Dr. Soong) presents his subject

On China's vital financial front, Soong with Occidental directness came last month to Federal Load Administrator Jesse Jones, left with $100,000,000 for Chinese aid. But when Money Wizard Soong plays poker with Money Wizard Jones, he usually loses.

in short, brisk sentences, speaking English with a sonorous Boston accent. He seldom smiles; he remains tense, poised and circumspect. Suddenly, when an agreement has been reached, his face melts into a smile and he may start telling funny stories. Soong likes to prove his mastery of English by snapping out wisecracks and puns so rapidly that people have trouble catching them. Throughout months of long drawn-out meetings and complicated negotiations in Washington, Soong sometimes even managed to create the illusion that he was really not a foreigner at all. After attending a press conference held by Soong and Jones, who comes from Houston, Texas, one reporter who comes from New England said that he had considered asking Soong to act as interpreter for the Administrator of the Federal Loan Agency.
  In Washington, Soong and his pretty wife have spent most of their time close to home - a two-room suite at the Shoreham Hotel from which they have now moved to a small shingled house in Chevy Chase. Contacts with the outside world were arranged by a secretary, who, in addition to answering the telephone, borrowed up-to-date best-sellers from the hotel library for T.V. to read. Hotel guests rarely saw Soong except when he went swimming in the pool, wearing borrowed blue trunks embroidered with a large "S," for Shoreham, or when he lunched with his wife in the hotel dining room. Madame Soong wears Chinese dresses, split above the knee, and fancy wedgies. New York shopgirls took her for a Chinese movie star when she first went shopping on Madison Avenue. The Soongs' three children, all girls, are staying in California where the climate more closely resembles that of Hong Kong.
  Soong has had a small stove put up in his office in the Chinese Embassy so he can brew tea for himself and his visitors. His collection of rare Chinese paintings, which he brought with him, is stored in the attic in a large vacuum box. From time to time the Soongs entertain friends like Jesse Jones, the Morgenthaus or Warren Lee Pierson of the Export-Import Bank at elaborate Chinese dinners, with a crisp Peking duck as the pi ce de r sistance.

Taxes: paid up to 2000 A.D.

  To evaluate T.V. Soong and his importance to the world, it is necessary to have a clear picture of the pre-revolutionary China where he grew up. On this huge, loosely governed 1/13 of the world's land area, the passage of centuries has had almost as little effect as that of invading armies. Four hundred million peasants, sweating in their rice paddies, spent their lives as their ancestors had done in a doomed but good-humored attempt to buck poverty, disease, the misrule of a somewhat mythical government and the cruelty of eminently unmythical moneylenders. Politics consisted largely of negotiations whereby elegantly robed officials farmed out to their friend's franchises for collecting taxes, much as a U.S. nightclub proprietor may farm out the hat-check concession. There were taxes on everything from gambling to human manure. Many farmers had been persuaded to pay up in full as far ahead as the year 2000. The only signs of the new world observable in this ageless China were to be found in the treaty ports where some of the profits which West gained by meeting East tended to seep down into native hands. In cosmopolitan Shanghai, a group of Chinese merchants had filled in the gap between the white merchants and the 400,000,000 customers. They were the compradors, the middlemen, and they earned their keep out of the white man's profits.
  Into this picture, old Charlie Soong, T.V.'s father, fitted perfectly. He was as much at home in Confucian temples as in Western drawing rooms. He had seen America and made a fortune but, unlike the compradors, he had also absorbed a religion he saw a way to use his money and his prestige to better the lot of the 400,000,000. When Dr. Sun Yat-sen began preaching the message of revolution, the printer of Bibles took to printing revolutionary literature. His house became the meeting place of hunted intellectuals. When the revolution overthrew the Emperor in 1912, old Charlie Soong had a generous share of the rewards. His fortune multiplied and his three daughters married the revolution's three top heroes.
  In the powerful Soong clan, T.V. was brought up as strictly as a young Rockefeller. None of the Bible printer's children were allowed to drink, dance or play mah-jongg. After attending St John's, the famous missionary university at Shanghai, he was sent to the U.S. and Harvard where, entering

In braided silk robe, Soong served as Finance Minister of revolutionary China in 1926, soon straightened its finances.

as a second-semester sophomore, he was elected vice president of the Cosmopolitan Club and became the leader of the Chinese students on the campus. Soong majored in economics and when he graduated in 1915, found a job with the International Banking Corp., at the same time taking post-graduate courses at Columbia. Soong had bigger things in mind. Dissatisfied with his clerical job, he wrote a terse note to Mark D. Currie, his boss, asking for "more varied work." He got it, with one of the company's subsidiaries in the Whitehall Building where he learned about foreign currencies a first hand, but soon felt that he had exhausted the potentialities of this line also. He drifted back to China where he tried his luck with a coal and iron form at Hankow, a trading company and a new bank which failed soon after he helped found it. Clearly, T.V. Soong had not found his niche but by this time his elder sister, Madame Sun Yat-sen, was China's first lady and the Revolution in Canton was about to solve T.V.'s financial problem almost as dramatically as he later solved the Revolution's.
  One day in 1924 Chiang Kai-shek, the brilliant young general in charge of China's revolutionary army, was airing his disgust to Madame Sun Yat-sen. He was desperately trying to establish an administration good enough to expand over all China. The vast country had been in ferment for more than a decade now, with war lords and racketeers in control of most of the provinces and multiple civil war consuming the energies of a large percentage of the population. Trying to build up a crack army to carry the Revolution into the hostile north, Chiang Kai-shek found his mission on the brink of failing for lack of funds. How, the general asked Madame Sun Yat-sen in Canton, could he pay and equip his army if taxes never came in and Canton bank notes were worth a pitiful 40¢ at the Shanghai Exchange? "My kid brother has just returned from America," said Madame Sun Yat-sen. "You might see if T.V. could help you. I think he knows something about banking."
  The general called in T.V. and looked him over. The young man in front of him was unusually tall and stocky for a Chinese. His eyes, behind horn-rimmed glasses, looked clear and confident. He did not bow and scrape, like Chinese politicians. He was a man of few words, like Chiang himself. Chiang decided to take a chance.
  It worked. Soong abolished unreasonable taxes and consolidated reasonable ones under Government control. He collected directly, without any "farming out." He fired middlemen and corrupt officials by the score. He hired spies and had his subordinates watched day and night. Taxes, instead of evaporating before they reached the coffers of the treasury, came rolling in. Revenue jumped from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 a year and Canton bank notes soared in the Shanghai market. After two years as treasurer of the revolutionary government, T.V. had put aside enough money to finance a major war. And, one hot day in the summer of 1926, the city gates of Canton swung open and Chiang Kai-shek's army marched out to conquer the rest of China for the Revolution.
  Chiang Kai-shek won all the military victories. But T.V. fought a blitzkrieg of his own which, less spectacular, was equally important. He went from one provincial capital to another, with the vanguard of the generalissimo's army, closeted himself with local bankers and provincial governors, and whenever he left the conference room, there was an organized financial system instead of monetary chaos. The credit of the Canton Government became, in effect, the personal credit of young T.V. Soong.

He saves the Shanghai bankers

  Soong's amazing performance in financing Chiang's conquests was capped by the historic finesse which prevented Chiang's Chinese revolution from going down in history as Act Two of the Communist World Revolution. Chiang, the peasant's son, stubborn as a Mongolian pony and wholly inexperienced in political diplomacy, was surrounded by Soviet advisors who urged him to swoop down upon Shanghai, to take the vast stores of silver piled up in the vaults of its banks, defying British, French and American soldiers who had been rallied for its defense. T.V. saw that such a venture, whether it succeeded or not, would mean the end of a free China. On his own hook, he ventured into Shanghai and persuaded the Shanghai bankers - the compradors who were the captains of a billion-dollar business - to support Chiang Kai-shek against the Reds. He, a Shanghai lad and banker himself, could speak to them in their own language. He promised them, in return for their support, a normal economic system.
  When this deal was closed, T.V. triumphantly reported to Chiang that he did not have to take Shanghai - he had it already! All he had to do was to shake off his Red affiliations. Chiang listened. When he grasped the situation, he turned against his Communist bosses and denounced the Red Government. With the first $3,000,000 check that T.V. got from the Shanghai bankers, Chiang set up a brand-new Nationalist Government of his own, standing for democracy and peace. That was in 1927. It is today that same government which is fighting, with its back to the wall, against

At London Economic Conference in 1933, dapper Dr. Soong wrung the idealistic hand of Cordell Hull. Soong's scheme at the moment was to boost U.S. Senator Pittman's campaign for higher silver prices and thereby increase the purchasing power of China.

Japanese aggression. T.V.'s position in wartime China is a twofold one. He is still the man behind China's dollars, just as his famous brother-in-law is the man behind China's bayonets. But his role has also been political - from the beginning. In 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by "Young Marshal" Chang Hsueh-liang, who (with the blessing of the Communists) was trying to force his victim into a strong attitude toward Japan. T.V. took his own life into his hands to save the life of his brother-in-law. He jumped into a plane and flew straight into the rebels' headquarters where he obtained Chiang Kai-shek's release by convincing his captors that he and Chiang had never meant to appease Japan and that efforts to prevent them from doing so were therefore superfluous.
  It was in that hour that China's united front of merchants, coolies, soldiers and students was born. T.V. emerged as the father of that united front and his formidable personality has held it together. The Red Armies, which keep the Japanese busy with their well-trained guerrilla bands, might have turned against the conservative officialdom of Chungking long ago if it had not been for T.V. They bowed to him because they remembered that he, the "capitalist," had stood for resistance against Japan at a time when his brother-in-law had, in actuality, shown many inclinations toward appeasement. The conservative government officials in Chungking are sometimes difficult for T.V. to handle but they need him today more than ever. As Governor of the Bank of China he rules one of the world's great financial organizations, whose tentacles reach into the distant corners of the globe. His subsidiaries in Singapore, Rangoon, London, New York and Batavia collect the sorely needed pounds and dollars which enable his country to go on fighting. The day T.V. stops collecting those pounds and dollars - and no one else seems able to collect them - Japan will triumph over Asia.

The Mikado's envoys try to lure him

  More than once, the Japanese have baited a hook for China's biggest fish. They have worked laboriously to gain T.V.'s "co-operation" in the building of "Greater East Asia." Personal envoys of the Emperor of Japan, among them the persuasive General Matsui, have found their way to his Hong Kong drawing room, where they have talked Pan Asia and Sino-Japanese friendship to him by the hour. T.V. has always listened courteously, but he has always maintained his own position: there is no point in discussing friendship while Japanese soldiers are on Chinese soil and Japanese bombs are killing Chinese men, women and children.
  In the ten years of comparative calm that followed China's civil war, T.V., as Minister of Finance, was the vital link between the money-spending machinery of the Government, and the money-making machinery of Shanghai. To please his banker friends, he abolished old-fashioned and awkward monetary standards. He introduced a national currency which, for the first time in history, was accepted all over Chiba. To protect the mule caravans that brought the tax money from the remote interior, he created a special Soong's Brigade which fought off attacking bandits and greedy war lords. The silver got through and T.V., who had to pump most of it into the armies of the Generalissimo, found enough left to surprise the world with China's first balanced budget in 1932. There was hardly a finance minister in the world in those days who could match that feat and Chinese Government bonds jumped 40% on Wall Street. Equally unprecedented was Soong's feat in 1931, when the worst Yangtze flood in modern times drove 25,000,000 people from their homes. With no apparent effort, he produced $70,000,000 and 1,400,000 coolies for reconstruction work and repaired the damages in record time.

Sporting crisp wing collar, Soong attended London Conference in 1933 while family plot at home nearly cost him his power.

  In view of T.V.'s achievements in his post, the cabinet shake-up whereby the Ministry of Finance was taken away from him in 1933 naturally mystified the outside world. The governmental upheaval was, significantly, the result of a domestic crisis in the fabulous Soong family whose only two obscure members are T.V.'s younger brothers, Tse-liang, an executive with the Bank of China, and Tse-an, now a branch office executive of the Bank of Canton in San Francisco. Shortly after his victory in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek had divorced his first wife and married T.V.'s younger sister, Mei-ling.
  This marriage completed the final stage in the Soong clan's rise to prominence. Father Charlie had died in 1919, and Madame H. H. Kung, the oldest of the three sisters, had taken the helm. Madame Sun Yat-sen, the second sister, widow of the "Father of the Revolution," added the monumental background of bygone days of strife. And charming Mei-ling, on the side of the Republic's leading soldier, formed the living link between military and financial power. T.V., the greatest organizing genius of them all, carried in his pocket the key to the silver coffers of the treaty ports. Among them, they held a complete monopoly of power.
  Mei-ling's marriage to Chiang Kai-shek strengthened T.V.'s hand. He and his little sister had always been pals. Years before, when she was at Wellesley, while T.V. was at Harvard, she used to ask him to the proms, preferring her brother to other escorts. But not everything was peace and harmony among the Soongs. Madame Sun Yat-sen used to tell her sisters that the Soongs were made for China - not China for the Soongs. And H. H. Kung, the suave YMCA Secretary who, in addition to being one of the 75th lineal descendants of Confucius, was a graduate of Yale, was ambitiously nursing his own career in politics. T.V. and H. H. got along together badly. Their relations were not improved when, on his return from the London economic conference, T.V. found that a family council had put Dr. Kung at his desk in the Finance Ministry. In practice, the change has worked out for the best. As head of the Bank of China, T.V. was better than ever equipped to deal with China's currency problems and, as a Government official, Kung has supplied some of the tact which T.V. so conspicuously lacks. The family breach, however, has endured. T.V. and H. H. (now in Chungking with the rest of the family) are currently not on speaking terms.

He introduces efficiency to China

  T.V.'s squabble with his brother-in-law was only one of a series which have helped to create the legend that he is irascible, aloof and hard to get along with. To some extent justified, the legend is also due in part to the unrivaled competence with which T.V. ran first the Ministry of Finance and now the Bank of China. As an efficiency expert, T.V. employs methods which would be unusual anywhere and are unique in a nation where simple competence has been practically unknown for the past 4,000 years. It was his habit in the Ministry, for example, to telephone every one of hundreds of employees at 11 o'clock in the morning to "stand by" for the next four hours. This meant that no one was supposed to leave his office, even for five minutes, without notifying T.V.'s secretary. Everyone had to cancel his luncheon engagements and to stay in his cubbyhole, a prisoner of T.V., until released by another phone call later in the day. Orders of this kind usually went out only under the pressures of emergencies. They produced rich dividends in work accomplished but, like his antipathy toward "the squeeze," they did not tend to increase T.V.'s popularity among his colleagues.
  T.V. never gives explanations and never expects them. If a subordinate reports that an order cannot be carried out "because, etc.," T.V. cuts him short and gets another man to do the job. The decoding experts who worked in his house in Hong Kong, finally brought their toothbrushes and asked him for cots and a midnight snack, saying they had decided to stay for a 24-hour day. Smilingly, he complied and took to sitting around their desks in his pajamas at odd hours of the night, urging them to work faster.

The Sisters Soong, in Westernized coolie hats, puzzle even Chinese onlookers. From left, they are Ai-ling ("Pleasant Mood"), Mme. Kung; Mei-ling ("Beautiful Mood"), Mme. Chiang Kai-shek; Ching-ling ("Happy Mood"), widow of the great Sun Yat-sen.

  If T.V.'s disciplinary methods have made him few friends at home, they have made him valuable ones abroad. When, for instance, Secretary Morgenthau wants to know what has happened to a Chinese tung-oil shipment overdue for six months, he may radio the Chinese Government authorities and receive a polite answer only after another six months have elapsed. On the other hand, he may cable Soong and have the answer on his desk the next morning.
  Occasionally, of course, the whole business becomes confused with the old Chinese question of "Face." On these occasions T.V.'s system is apt to backfire as it did in 1938 when, after the first setbacks of the current war, his younger sister, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, resigned as head of the Chinese Air Force. T.V. took over, determined to reorganize China's only weapon of attack. He went through the files and found that aviators had been hired not because they were good aviators, but because they were somebody's nephew or son. He asked what had happened to 50 Curtiss Warhawk planes which he himself had bought in 1936, and was told that the pilots had refused to take them off the ground because they had not been given their customary "squeeze." In patriotic anger, T.V. felt obliged to resign.
  Soong's extraordinary house on Hong Kong's Repulse Bay, which he bought at the beginning of the war, soon became the great listening post of fighting China. There, protected by his own bodyguards and by British secret police, he directed the intricate economy of a country at war until he crossed the Pacific by Clipper last summer. Politicians, financiers, generals, foreign and Chinese diplomats who came to see him found an immense living room full of rare knick-knacks, jade, rich brocades and massive furniture on a dazzling dragon carpet. In one corner is a large, new American radio, complete with short-wave dial. On top of the radio is a slightly faded photograph of the President of the U.S., with a dedication "to my friend T.V. Soong. Franklin D. Roosevelt." Above the radio and above the photograph hangs a streamlined and extremely modernistic terra-cotta head of the Virgin Mary.
  The heterogeneous Western paraphernalia in the Soong drawing room is less an expression of Mme. Soong's taste in interior decor than of T.V.'s political philosophy. Molded, even more than his father, by the influence of two hemispheres, T.V. believes with bitter sincerity that in the world's present confusion, China's place is on the side of the democracies of the West. "As the wars in Europe and in Asia drag on," he says, "it becomes more evident every day that they are parts of one great struggle - the struggle of democracy against totalitarian aggression. In this struggle China fights on the side of the democracies. Her fight is not of secondary importance; it is as vital to the cause of freedom as the battle of Europe." T.V., who once prevented China from falling prey to Soviet intrigues, spares no effort today to keep her from falling prey to the Axis, and T.V.'s person is still the greatest single asset behind China's credit.
  Recovering from grippe in New York last week, T.V. Soong hoped to finish up the details of his Washington mission as soon as possible and start back to Chungking. Getting $100,000,000 from the U.S. was a big job but there may be bigger ones waiting for him in the near future. Last fortnight, Japanese units raided the South China coast, temporarily closing to international traffic heretofore neglected ports. Transportation over the two remaining arteries, the often-bombed Burma Road and the sea-rail-truck route through Vladivostok and Mongolia, remain, at best, precarious. And last week Chiang Kai-shek publicly admitted that, as he was having trouble with the Communists, some doubt had arisen about the United Front remaining united. T.V., it seemed, was needed once more in his old role as promoter and peacemaker.  ♦

Soong sisters inspect the good earth. The reunion of all three sisters is a symbol of united, embattled China, since Mme. Sun Yat-sen long exiled herself, convinced that her sisters' husbands had betrayed Sun's revolution by breaking with Communism.

Adapted by Carl W. Weidenburner from the March 24, 1941 issue of LIFE

Portions copyright 1941 Time, Inc.


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