Madame Chiang, widow of leader, at 106
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the widow of China's leader during World War II and the era's last surviving global figure, died yesterday in New York. She was 106.
According to a family friend, Madame Chiang was hospitalized for two weeks in March with flu-like symptoms and never fully recovered. Madame Chiang had been treated for cancer and other ailments. She lived in semiseclusion after the death of her husband, Chiang, in 1975, spending most of the time in her Manhattan apartment or at her family's 36-acre estate in Lattingtown, an exclusive Long Island suburb 35 miles east of New York City.
"One of the most famous and powerful women in history," as a biographer described her, Madame Chiang loomed large in two of the defining events of the 20th century, World War II and the Cold War.
During World War II, Madame Chiang was considered the great heroine of the Allied side, personifying an embattled but defiant China. "A modern Joan of Arc," the Associated Press called her. She said her husband declared her presence worth 20 divisions to the Chinese cause. It would be hard to exaggerate her role as intermediary to the West. "All I knew [about Chiang Kai-shek] was what Madame Chiang told me about her husband and what he thought," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1945.
During the Cold War, she played a similar but harsher role, presenting herself as a kind of Mother Courage of anticommunism. Some, however, who labeled Madame Chiang's US advocates "the China Lobby" and noted the dictatorship her husband imposed on Taiwan after he fled China in 1949, wondered whether her opposition to communism extended to support for freedom. "She can talk beautifully about democracy," Eleanor Roosevelt said, "but does not know how to live democracy."
Madame Chiang's life spanned three centuries and both hemispheres. She also spanned the broadest possible spectrum of responses. In 1942, the playwright Clare Boothe Luce (whose husband Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, was instrumental in creating the noble image of Madame Chiang and her husband) pronounced her "the world's greatest living woman."
A year later, the Harvard scholar John King Fairbank wrote in his diary about meeting with her: "An actress, with a lot of admirable qualities, great charm, quick intuition, intelligence; but underneath . . . a penchant for playing a part which produces falsity."
President Harry S. Truman detected more than falsity. "They're all thieves, every damn one of them," he said of Madame Chiang and her family.
At their initial encounter, Eleanor Roosevelt said, "I had a desire to help her and take care of her as if she had been my own daughter." Yet, in her autobiography, she recalled a White House dinner at which President Roosevelt described US labor troubles and asked Madame Chiang what she would do. "She never said a word," Roosevelt wrote, "but the beautiful small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat -- a most expressive gesture."
Madame Chiang, who stood 5 feet 4 inches tall, seemed larger than life, a central-casting combination of formidability and daintiness, ambition and femininity. A graduate of Wellesley College who once described herself as "Chinese only in looks," she both embodied and transcended Western stereotypes about Asians. That capacity to seem familiar as well as exotic made Madame Chiang especially alluring to the media.
It's a measure of Madame Chiang's hold on the American imagination that she not only appeared on the Gallup Organization's poll of the world's most admired women 17 times but also helped inspire the Dragonlady character in the comic strip "Terry and the Pirates."
The story of Madame Chiang's family, the Soongs, was, if anything, even more remarkable than her own. "Few families since the Borgias have played such a disturbing role in human destiny," Sterling Seagrave wrote in "The Soong Dynasty."
T. V. Soong, Madame Chiang's brother, served Chiang Kai-shek as finance minister, foreign minister, and premier. Ai-ling, her oldest sister, married one of China's richest men, H. H. Kung. Ching-ling, her older sister, married the founder of the Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen. After Sun's death, she supported the cause of Mao Tse-tung, the Communist leader who overthrew Madame Chiang's husband. She eventually became vice chairman of the People's Republic.
Their father, Charlie Soong, had been born Han Chao-shun. He received his Westernized name at 9 when brought to Boston by an uncle. Converted to Christianity, he returned to China after 15 years in the United States. He made a fortune publishing Bibles.
Soong Mei-ling was born on March 5, 1897, in Shanghai. Her mother was Soong (Ni) Kwei-tseng. At 11, Madame Chiang joined her sisters in the United States, where they were studying at Wesleyan College for Women, in Macon, Ga. She spent five years there, learning to speak English with a Southern accent.
Madame Chiang entered Wellesley in 1913, with a major in English and minor in philosophy. She graduated in 1917 and returned to China, where she became involved in charitable work.
Madame Chiang's father was among Sun Yat-sen's leading financial backers and thus in frequent contact with the leadership of Sun's party, the Kuomintang. A rising Kuomintang star was a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek. Smitten with the youngest Soong daughter, he proposed marriage -- despite the fact he was already married and not a Christian. (The latter was considered an even greater nuptial impediment in the devout Soong household). Her mother dismissed the proposal.
After Sun's death, Chiang emerged as his successor. He again proposed to Madame Chiang, this time successfully. (He had divorced his previous wife and agreed to study Christianity, to which he later converted.) They married on Dec. 1, 1927.
Madame Chiang busied herself promoting the Kuomintang's Strength Through Joy movement, a public campaign promoting the traditional virtues of courtesy, service, honesty, and honor. In 1936, Chiang named her head of the aviation ministry. Further underscoring Madame Chiang's importance was her decisive response when a rival warlord kidnapped her husband later that year. Forbidding a Kuomintang attack, she rushed to join him and was widely credited with helping secure his release.
Madame Chiang, who had injured her back in a 1937 auto accident, came to the United States for medical reasons at the end of 1942. She remained for seven months, and the visit turned into a triumphal tour.
Staying at the White House, she brought her own silk sheets and had them changed four or five times daily. She addressed both houses of Congress and held a joint press conference with FDR. "Some day they may put [the actress] Helen Hayes in the part," Time magazine said, "but she'll never do it any better than Madame Chiang."
Madame Chiang embarked on a nationwide series of speeches and public appearances. At a Symphony Hall reception in Madame Chiang's honor, Governor Leverett Saltonstall hailed her as "the most charming woman in the world."
Attending her class reunion at Wellesley, she was seen wearing trousers on a campus stroll. "Golly, what a break she gave us!" an undergraduate remarked. "Now they'll stop razzing us about the way we look in dungarees." "Anyone who can look as smart as Madame Chiang in slacks may wear them," announced Wellesley's president, Mildred McAfee.
Madame Chiang's self-assurance matched her sense of chic. Staying in New York, she received an invitation from Winston Churchill, also visiting the United States, to meet him in Washington. She "refused with some hauteur," as Churchill later put it, proposing instead the British prime minister come to New York to see her. Later that year, attending the Cairo conference with Roosevelt, Churchill, and her husband (who spoke no English), she was given to announcing, "If you allow me, I shall put before you the Generalissimo's real thoughts."
The success of her US visit masked an increasing estrangement between Madame Chiang and her husband.
Superseding the Chiangs' domestic difficulties were growing political troubles. Years of corruption and authoritarian rule made their Nationalist forces no match for Mao's Communists. When Madame Chiang visited Washington in 1948 seeking aid, she received a far different reception from the one she had enjoyed five years before. "I wouldn't let her stay in the White House like Roosevelt did," Truman later recalled. "I don't think she liked it very much."
With the Nationalists' removal to Taiwan in 1949, Madame Chiang became less prominent on the world stage, although visits to the United States in 1953 and 1965 were well publicized. She reportedly hoped to succeed her husband as Kuomintang chairman when he died in 1975. The post went to Chiang's son by his first marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo.
Over the past three decades, Madame Chiang variously lived on Long Island, Taiwan, and in Manhattan. She underwent two mastectomies, suffered from skin ailments, and relied increasingly on a wheelchair. Her last visit to Taiwan was in 1995, to visit an ailing niece. Madame Chiang will be buried beside other Soong family members in a mausoleum in New York's Westchester County. The date of the funeral has not been announced. Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.
