Chiang Kai-shek (October 31, 1887 – April 5, 1975) was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He was an influential member of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Sun Yat-sen's close ally. He became the commandant of Kuomintang's Whampoa Military Academy and took Sun's place in the party when the latter died in 1925. In 1928, Chiang led the Northern Expedition to unify the country, becoming China's overall leader. He served as chairman of the National Military Council of the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 to 1948. Chiang led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, during which the Nationalist Government's power severely weakened, but his prominence grew.

Chiang's Nationalists engaged in a long standing civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). After the Japanese surrender in 1945, he attempted to eradicate the CCP. Ultimately, bolstered by support from Soviet Russia, the CCP defeated Chiang, forcing the Nationalist government to retreat to Taiwan, where martial law was continued while the government still tried to take back mainland China. Chiang ruled the island with an iron fist as the President of the Republic of China and Director-General of the Kuomintang until his death in 1975. Feelings towards Chiang are mixed in Taiwan. While some still view him as a hero, others consider him with disdain; subsequently, hundreds of Chiang's statues have been dismantled across the island.

Chiang Kai-shek was born in Xikou, a town approximately 30 kilometers southwest of downtown Ningbo, in Fenghua County, Ningbo Prefecture, Zhejiang Province. However, his ancestral home, a concept important in Chinese society, was the town of Heqiao in Yixing County, Wuxi, Jiangsu (approximately 38 km (24 mi) southwest of downtown Wuxi, and 10 km (6.2 mi) from the shores of the Lake Tai). His father, Chiang Zhaocong, and mother, Wang Caiyu, were members of an upper to upper-middle-class family of salt merchants. His father died when Kai-shek was only eight years of age, and he wrote of his mother as the "embodiment of Confucian virtues." In an arranged marriage, Chiang was married to a fellow villager by the name of Mao Fumei. Chiang and Mao had a son, Ching-Kuo and a daughter Chien-hua.

Chiang grew up in an era in which military defeats and civil wars among warlords had left China destabilized and in debt, and he decided to pursue a military career. He began his military education at the Baoding Military Academy, in 1906. He left for a preparatory school for Chinese students, the Rikugun Shikan Gakko, in Japan in 1907. There he was influenced by his compatriots to support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and set up a Chinese republic. He befriended fellow Zhejiang native Chen Qimei, and, in 1908, Chen brought Chiang into the Tongmenghui, a precursor of the Kuomintang organization. Chiang served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.

Returning to China in 1911 after learning of the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising, Chiang intended to fight as an artillery officer. He served in the revolutionary forces, leading a regiment in Shanghai under his friend and mentor Chen Qimei, one of Sun's chief lieutenants. The revolutionary aims of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty ultimately succeeded and Chiang became a founding member of the Kuomintang. After the takeover of the Republican government by Yuan Shikai and the failed Second Revolution, Chiang, like his Kuomintang comrades, divided time between exile in Japan and the havens of the Shanghai International Settlement. In Shanghai, Chiang also cultivated ties with the underworld gangs dominated by the notorious Green Gang and its leader Du Yuesheng. On February 15, 1912, several KMT members - including Chiang -, murdered Tao Chengzhang, the leader of the Restoration Society, in a Shanghai French Concession hospital, thus ridding Sun Yat-sen of his chief rival. (There is no evidence that Sun Yat-sen himself was involved in the affair.)

On May 18, 1916 agents of Yuan Shikai assassinated Chen Qimei. Chiang succeeded Chen as leader of the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen's career was at its lowest point then, with most of his old Revolutionary Alliance comrades refusing to join him in the exiled Chinese Revolutionary Party. In 1917, Sun Yat-sen moved his base of operations to Guangzhou and Chiang joined him in 1918. At this time Sun remained largely sidelined and, without arms or money, was soon expelled from Guangzhou and exiled again to Shanghai. He was restored to Guangzhou with mercenary help in 1920. However, a rift had developed between Sun, who sought to militarily unify China under the KMT, and Guangdong Governor Chen Jiongming, who wanted to implement a federalist system with Guangdong as a model province. On June 16, 1923 Chen attempted to assassinate Sun and had his residence shelled. During a prolonged skirmish between the troops of these opposing forces, Sun and his wife Soong Ching-ling narrowly escaped heavy machine gun fire and were rescued by gunboats under Chiang's direction. The incident earned Chiang Sun Yat-sen's trust.

Sun regained control of Guangzhou in early 1924, again with the help of mercenaries from Yunnan, and accepted aid from the Comintern. Undertaking a reform of the Kuomintang, he established a revolutionary government aimed at unifying China under the KMT. That same year, Sun sent Chiang Kai-shek to spend three months in Moscow studying the Soviet political and military system. During his trip in Russia, Chiang met Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, but quickly drew to the conclusion that the Bolshevik's way was not suitable for China. Chiang Kai-shek returned to Guangzhou and in 1924 was appointed Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy by Sun. Chiang resigned from the office for one month in disagreement with Sun's too close cooperation with the Comintern, but returned at Sun's demand. The early years at Whampoa allowed Chiang to cultivate a cadre of young officers loyal to both the KMT and himself. Throughout his rise to power, Chiang Kai-shek also benefited from membership of the nationalist Tiandihui fraternity, to which Sun Yat-Sen also belonged, and which remained a source of support during his leadership of China and later Taiwan.

Sun Yat-sen died on March 12, 1925, creating a power vacuum in the KMT. A contest ensued between Chiang, who stood at the right wing of the KMT, and Sun Yat-sen's close comrade-in-arms Wang Jingwei, who leaned towards the left. Although Wang succeeded Sun as Chairman of the National Government, Chiang's relatively low position in the party's internal hierarchy was bolstered by his military backing and political maneuvering following the Zhongshan Warship Incident. On June 5, 1926, Chiang became zong si ling (Commander-in-Chief) of the National Revolutionary Army, and on July 27 launched a military campaign known as the Northern Expedition, to defeat the warlords controlling northern China and unify the country under the KMT. The National Revolutionary Army branched into three divisions: to the west was Wang Jingwei, who led a column to take Wuhan; Bai Chongxi's column went east to take Shanghai; and Chiang himself led in the middle route to take Nanjing, before pressing ahead to capture Beijing. However, in January 1927, Wang Jingwei and his KMT leftist allies took the city of Wuhan amid much popular mobilization and fanfare. Allied with a number of Chinese Communists and advised by Soviet Agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the National Government as having moved to Wuhan. Having taken Nanking in March (and briefly visited Shanghai, now under the control of his close ally General Bai), Chiang halted his campaign and prepared a violent break with the leftist elements which he thought threatened his control of the KMT.

On April 12, Chiang carried out a purge of thousands of suspected Communists and dissidents in Shanghai and began large-scale massacres across the country. Throughout April 1927, more than 12,000 people were killed in Shanghai. The killings drove most Communists from urban cities and into the rural countryside where the KMT was less powerful. Now with an established National Government in Nanking, and supported by conservative allies including Hu Hanmin, Chiang's expulsion of the communists and their Soviet advisers led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang Jingwei's National Government was weak militarily and soon overtaken by Chiang with a local warlord (Li Zongren of Guangxi). Eventually, Wang and his leftist party surrendered to Chiang and joined him in Nanking. Finally, the warlord capital of Beijing was taken in June 1928 and in December the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang pledged allegiance to Chiang's government.

Chiang attempted to cement himself as the official successor of Sun Yat-sen. In a pairing of great political significance, Chiang was Sun Yat-sen's brother-in-law: he had married Soong May-ling, the younger sister of Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen's widow, on December 1, 1927. Originally rebuffed by her in the early-1920s, Chiang managed to ingratiate himself to some degree with May-ling's mother by first divorcing his wife and concubines, and promising to eventually convert to Christianity. He was baptized in the Methodist church in 1929, a year after his marriage to Soong May-ling. Upon reaching Beijing, Chiang paid homage to Sun Yat-sen and had his body moved to the new capital of Nanking to be enshrined in a grand mausoleum.

Having gained control of China, Chiang Kai-shek's party remained surrounded by "surrendered" warlords who remained relatively autonomous within their own regions. On October 10, 1928, Chiang was named director of the State Council, the equivalent to President of the country, in addition to his other titles. As with his predecessor Sun Yat-sen, the Western media dubbed him "Generalissimo". According to Sun Yat-sen's plans, the Kuomintang was to rebuild China in three steps: military rule, political tutelage, and constitutional rule. The ultimate goal of the Kuomintang revolution was democracy, which was not yet feasible in China's fragmented state. Since the Kuomintang had completed the first step of revolution through seizure of power in 1928, Chiang's rule thus began a period of what his party considered to be "political tutelage" in Sun Yat-sen's name. During this so-called Republican Era, many features of a modern, functional Chinese state emerged and developed.

The decade 1928 to 1937 saw some aspects of foreign imperialism, concessions and privileges in China moderated through diplomacy. The government acted to modernize the legal and penal systems, attempted to stabilize prices, amortize debts, reform the banking and currency systems, build railroads and highways, improve public health facilities, legislate against traffic in narcotics, and augment industrial and agricultural production - though not all were successful or completed. Strides were made towards furthering education standards and, in an effort to unify Chinese society, the so-called New Life Movement was launched to enforce Confucian moral values and personal discipline. Standard Mandarin, then known as Guoyu, was promoted as a standard tongue, and the establishment of communications facilities (including radio) were used to encourage a sense of Chinese Nationalism that was not always possible due to the nation's fractured status.

Any successes that the Nationalists did make, however, were met with constant political and military upheavals. While much of the urban areas were now under the control of the KMT, the countryside remained under the influence of weakened yet undefeated warlords and Communists. Chiang often resolved issues of warlord obstinacy through military action, with one northern rebellion – against the warlords Yen Hsi-shan and Feng Yuxiang – occurring in 1930 during the Central Plains War. The war almost bankrupted the government and caused almost 250,000 casualties on both sides. In 1931 Hu Han-min, Chiang's old supporter, publicly voiced a popular concern that Chiang Kai-shek's position as both premier and president flew in the face of the democratic ideals of the Nationalist government. Chiang had Hu put under house arrest, but he was released after national condemnation, and went on to escape and establish a rival government in Guangzhou. The split resulted in military campaigns between Hu's Canton Government and its supporters, and Chiang's Nationalist Government. Chiang only won due to a shift in allegiance by the warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, who had previously supported Hu Han-min.

Throughout his rule, complete eradication of the Communist Party of China remained Chiang's dream. Having regrouped in Jiangxi and established a Chinese Soviet Republic, Chiang led his armies against them. With help from foreign military advisers, Chiang's Fifth Campaign finally surrounded the Red Army in 1934. The Communists, tipped-off that a Nationalist offensive was on the cards, retreated as part of the Long March, which saw Mao Zedong rise from a mere military official to the practical leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

After Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chiang resigned as Chairman of the National Government. He returned shortly, adopting the slogan "first internal pacification, then external resistance". However, this policy of avoiding a frontal war against the Japanese was widely unpopular. Especially so, when in 1932, while Chiang was seeking first to defeat the Communists, Japan launched an advance on Shanghai and bombarded Nanjing. This disrupted Chiang Kai-shek's offensives against Communists for a time, although it was the northern factions of Hu Han-min's Canton Government (notably the 19th Route Army) that primarily led the offensive against the Japanese during this skirmish. Brought into the Nationalist army immediately after the battle, the 19th Route Army's career under Chiang would be cut short after it was disbanded for demonstrating socialist tendencies.

In December 1936, Chiang flew to Xi'an to coordinate a major assault on the Red Army and Communist Republic that had retreated into Yan'an. However, Chiang's allied commander Chang Hsueh-liang, whose forces were to be used in his attack and whose homeland of Manchuria had been invaded by the Japanese, had other plans. On December 12, Chang Hsueh-liang and several other Nationalist generals kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek for two weeks in what is known as the Xi'an Incident. They forced Chiang into making a "Second United Front" with the Communists against Japan. Chang Hsueh-liang was placed under house arrest and other generals who had assisted him were executed. The Second United Front was nominal at best and was all but broken up in 1941.

The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, and in August that year Chiang sent 600,000 of his best-trained and equipped soldiers to defend Shanghai. With over 200,000 Chinese casualties, Chiang lost the political cream of his Whampoa-trained officers. Though Chiang lost militarily, the battle dispelled Japanese claims it could conquer China in three months and demonstrated to the Western powers that the Chinese would continue the fight. By December, the capital city of Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese, and Chiang moved the government inland first to Wuhan and later to Chongqing. Devoid of economic and industrial resources, Chiang withdrew into the hinterlands, stretching the Japanese supply lines and bogging down Japanese soldiers in the vast Chinese interior. However, these scorched earth policies also resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, including the 1938 Huang He flood, when dams were burst to delay the Japanese advance. Some 500,000 people are thought to have been killed.

The Japanese, controlling the puppet-state of Manchukuo and much of China's eastern seaboard, appointed Wang Jingwei as a Quisling-ruler of the occupied Chinese territories. Wang named himself President of the Executive Yuan and Chairman of the National Government (not the same 'National Government' as Chiang's), and led a surprisingly large minority of anti-Chiang / anti-Communist Chinese against his old comrades. He died in 1944.

With the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the opening of the Pacific War, China became one of the Allied Powers. During and after World War II, Chiang and his American-educated wife Soong May-ling, known in the U.S. as "Madame Chiang", held the support of the United States China Lobby which saw in them the hope of a Christian and democratic China. Chiang was even named the Supreme Commander of allied forces in the China war zone. He was created a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath by King George VI in 1942.

In 1945 when Japan surrendered, Chiang's Chongqing government was ill-equipped and ill-prepared to reassert its authority in formerly Japanese-occupied China, and asked the Japanese to postpone their surrender until KMT authority could arrive to take over. This was an unpopular move among a population that, for many, had spent more than a decade under often brutal foreign occupation. American troops and weapons soon bolstered KMT forces, allowing them to reclaim cities. The countryside, however, remained mostly out of Nationalist hands. Following the war, the United States encouraged peace talks between Chiang and Communist leader Mao Zedong in Chongqing. Due to concerns about widespread and well-documented corruption in Chiang's government throughout his rule (though not always with his knowledge), the U.S. government limited aid to Chiang Kai-shek for much of the period of 1946 to 1948, in the midst of fighting against the People's Liberation Army led by Mao Zedong. Alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by Chinese Communist agents may have also played a role in the aid suspension. Others have pointed out that American arms and weapons continued to flow into Chiang's military, even as money did not.

Though Chiang had achieved status abroad as a world leader, his government was deteriorating as a result of corruption and inflation. In his diary on June 1948, Chiang wrote that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of rot from within. The war had severely weakened the Nationalists, while the Communists were strengthened by popular land-reform, and a rural population that supported and trusted them. The Nationalists initially had superiority in arms and men; but their lack of popularity, infiltration by Communist agents, low morale, and disorganization soon allowed the Communists to gain the upper hand.

Meanwhile a new Constitution was promulgated in 1947, and Chiang was formally elected by the National Assembly as the first term President of the Republic of China on May 20, 1948. This marked the beginning of what was termed the 'democratic constitutional government' period by the KMT political orthodoxy, but the Communists refused to recognise the new Constitution and its government as legitimate. Chiang resigned as President on January 21, 1949, as KMT forces suffered bitter losses and defections to the Communists. Vice-President Li Tsung-jen took over as Acting President, but his relationship with Chiang soon deteriorated. Li fled to the United States under the pretense of seeking medical treatment. Like many other KMT officials, Li absconded with millions of dollars of government money. Unlike the others, Li was later impeached by the Control Yuan.

In the early morning of December 10, 1949, Communist troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT controlled city in mainland China, where Chiang Kai-shek and his son Ching-kuo directed the defense at the Chengdu Central Military Academy. The aircraft May-ling evacuated them to Taiwan on the same day, forever removing them from the Chinese mainland.

Chiang moved the government to Taipei, Taiwan, where he formally resumed duties as president on March 1, 1950. Chiang was reelected by the National Assembly to be the President of the ROC on May 20, 1954 and again in 1960, 1966, and 1972. He continued to claim sovereignty over all of China, which he defined as China proper and Taiwan, Mongolia, and Tibet. In the context of the Cold War, most of the Western world recognized this position and the ROC represented "China" in the United Nations and other international organizations until the 1970s. Despite the democratic constitution, the government under Chiang was a single-party state, consisting almost completely of mainlanders; the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion" greatly enhanced executive powers and the goal of retaking mainland China allowed the KMT to maintain a monopoly on power and the outlawry of opposition parties. The government's official line for these martial law provisions stemmed from the claim that emergency provisions were necessary, since the Communists and KMT were still technically under a state of war. Seeking to promote Chinese nationalism, Chiang's government actively ignored and distolerated local cultural expression, even forbidding the use of local languages in mass media broadcasts or during class sessions. He was also the head of the White Terror, where hundreds of thousands of people were jailed and executed for being perceived as threats to the ROC government.

The government offered limited civil, economic freedom, property rights (personal and intellectual), among other liberties which permitted free debate within the confines of the legislature, but also jailed dissidents who were labeled by the KMT as supporters of communism or Taiwan independence. Later, Chiang's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, and Chiang Ching-kuo's successor, Lee Teng-hui, would, in the 1980s and 1990s, increase native Taiwanese representation in the government and loosen the many authoritarian controls of the early ROC-on-Taiwan era.

Under the pretext that new elections could not be held in Communist-occupied constituencies, the National Assembly, Legislative Yuan, and Control Yuan members held their posts indefinitely. It was also under the Temporary Provisions that Chiang was able to bypass term limits to remain as president. He was reelected by the National Assembly as president four times — doing so in 1954, 1960, 1966, and 1972.

Believing that corruption and a lack of morals were key reasons that the KMT lost mainland China to the Communists, Chiang attempted to purge corruption by dismissing members of the KMT previously accused of graft. Some major figures in the previous mainland China government, such as H.H. Kung and T.V. Soong, exiled themselves to the United States. Though politically authoritarian and, to some extent, dominated by government-owned industries, Chiang's new Taiwanese state also encouraged economic development, especially in the export sector. A popular sweeping Land Reform Act, as well as American foreign aid during the 1950s, laid the foundation for Taiwan's economic success, becoming one of the East Asian Tigers.

In 1975, 26 years after Chiang fled to Taiwan, he died in Taipei at the age of 87. He had suffered a major heart attack and pneumonia in the months before and died from renal failure aggravated with advanced cardiac malfunction at 23:50 on April 5.

A month of mourning was declared. In mainland China, however, Chiang's death was met with little apparent mourning and Communist state-run newspapers gave the brief headline "Chiang Kai-shek Has Died." Chiang's body was put in a copper coffin and temporarily interred at his favorite residence in Cihu, Dasi, Taoyuan. When his son Ching-kuo died in 1988, he was entombed in a separate mausoleum in nearby Touliao. The hope was to have both buried at their birthplace in Fenghua if and when it was possible. In 2004, Chiang Fang-liang, the widow of Chiang Ching-kuo, asked that both father and son be buried at Wuchih Mountain Military Cemetery in Hsichih, Taipei County. His ultimate funeral ceremony became a political battle between the wishes of the state and the wishes of his family.

Chiang was succeeded as President by Vice President Yen Chia-kan and as KMT party leader by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, who retired Chiang Kai-shek's title of Director-General and instead assumed the position of Chairman. Yen Chia-kan's presidency was interim; Chiang Ching-kuo, who was the prime minister became President after Yen's term ended three years later.

Chiang's legacy has been target of heated debates because of the different views held about him. For some, Chiang was a National Hero that led the victorious Northern Expedition against the Beiyang Warlords in 1927 and contributed to unify China and subsequenly led China to ultimate victory against Japan in 1945. Some blamed him (often unjustly) for not doing enough against the Japanese forces in the lead-up to and during the Second Sino-Japanese War, preferring to keep his armies to fight the communists, or merely waiting and hoping that the Americans would get involved. Some also see him as a champion of anti-communism, being a key figure during the formative years of the World Anti-Communist League. During the Cold War, he was also seen as the leader who led Free China and the bulwark against a possible communist invasion. However, Chiang presided over purges, political authoritarianism and graft during his tenure in mainland China, and ruled throughout a period of imposed martial law and White Terror in Taiwan. His governments were accused of being corrupt from before he even took power in 1928. He also allied with known criminals like Du Yuesheng for political and financial gains. Some opponents charge that Chiang's effort in developing Taiwan was mostly to make the island a strong base from which to one day return to mainland China, and that Chiang had little regard for the long term prosperity and well-being of the Taiwanese people.

Today, Chiang Kai-shek's popularity in Taiwan is divided along political lines, enjoying greater support among KMT supporters. He is generally unpopular among DPP voters and supporters. In sharp contrast to his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, and to Sun Yat-sen, his memory is rarely invoked by current political parties, including the Kuomintang.

In the US and Europe, Chiang was often perceived negatively as the one who lost China to the communists. His constant demands for Western support and funding also earned him the nickname of "Generalissimo Chiang Cash-My-Cheque". Finally, he has been criticized for his poor military skills. He would often issue unrealistic orders, or persistently try to fight unwinnable battles, leading to the loss of his best troops. In recent years, this view however has started to change. He is now increasingly perceived as a man simply overwhelmed by the events in China, having to fight simultaneously communists, Japanese and provincial warlords while having to reconstruct and unify the country. His sincere, albeit often unsuccessful attempts to build a more powerful nation have been noted by scholars such as Fenby or Mitter. The latter wrote that, ironically, today's China is closer to Chiang's vision than to Mao's one. He argues that the Communists, since the 1980s, have essentially created the state envisioned by Chiang in the 1930s. Mitter concludes by writing that "one can imagine Chiang Kaishek's ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao's ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision".