What might China have been like had the KMT had won?

What if Chiang (Kai-shek) had played a slightly more offensive role than his traditional defensive game and taken the fight to Mao’s Communists instead of laying back in wait, following Bruce Lee’s famous dictum about water:

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”

Well, I’ve been delving into this kind of thinking over this past week while reading The Last Empress, by Hannah Pakula (affiliate link), a new tell-all about the life of the illustrious grand-dame Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the famous Generalissimo of the same name. It’s turning out to be one of the definitive biographical accounts of the spirit of the interwar period, in my limited reading experience of the era, and I’m enjoying every turn of the page.

Admittedly, I scooped up the book less for its rigor and verifiable historical authenticity — though indeed it has been giving me something of a workout on my familiarity with modern Chinese history — and more for insights about “Madame,” as she has come to be known over the years, a rock of a woman who could be said to be as influential as England’s Queen Mother (mother of the reigning monarch, Elizabeth) during WWII, a formidable figure in her own right who the dastardly Hitler himself even referred to as “the most dangerous woman in all of Europe” because she refused to leave London during the Blitz, visiting the pock-marked ruins of recently bombed-out buildings, thereby inspiring Londoners to resist the Luftwaffe’s continuous onslaught. Madame seems to have been similarly influential in that she successfully convinced the US Administration at the time (under President Truman) to transfer billions of dollars in aid to Nationalist China — I still haven’t discovered what became of all this cash — in an effort to resist the Communists surge, and ultimately failing effort. She was the eminence grise behind her husband in shaping the US’ approach to the country the Generalissimo was lording over at the time.

Overall, I’m a huge fan of biography, though these sorts of books, being the meisterstuecker of the people who compile them, generally come in the two- to three-ton varieties. Hardcover, bound, chock-full of scintillating photography and fresh paper-scented crisp pages, are not exactly built for portability, mind you, so it’s hard to tote them around for a quick read on the subway or bus or while in transit, therefore I’m loathe to buy one unless I know I’ll be in a given place for an extended period of time.

As I make more headway in The Last Empress, I’ll keep you posted of my gleanings — of which I’m positive there are going to be many.

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