The Dragon Lady: poise, charm and ruthlessness
Sometimes a biography can be too exhaustive and its author too in awe of its subject, says John Hinton

5 February 2010

The Last Empress
Hannah Pakula
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £27.50

She may never have been crowned an empress but she certainly behaved like one all her days. And she knew her own mind from very early on. Daughter of a man who sold Bibles for the American Bible Society in Shanghai, May-ling (meaning "beautiful mood") elected to go to boarding school, aged five and never looked back. In a lifetime which spanned 1897 to 2003, she became Madame Chiang Kai-shek - stamping her identity forever on her native country and floating on rafts of American dollars that rolled on like the Mississipi River.

Her American-educated father, Charlie Soon, was a Methodist missionary whose wealthy family allowed him to send young May-ling to Wellesley College in the States, where she affected a Georgia accent and enjoyed the democratic way, returning to patriarchal China in 1917. The contrast shredded her nerves. She wrote to an American friend: "So much misery... everywhere! Sometimes when I look at the dirty, ragged, suffering humanity in our slums, I feel the sense of utter futility for a great and new China."

Yet, as we discover in this new biography by American writer Hannah Pakula, the Dragon Lady, as some came to call her, did not become a saint of the slums.

Attractive, powerful and promiscuous, she became a central figure in one of the great dramas of the 20th century: the founding of modern China, beginning with a revolution that swept away 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by the Second World War, and ending in eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan.

She met General Chiang for the first time in 1923, when her family had become influential power-brokers. May-ling claimed to have been attracted by Chiang's shining eyes, but more plausibly she fell for the ruthlessness that made him China's most feared warlord. They were married in 1927, and she began to exercise extraordinary influence on her country's fate.

Chiang Kai-shek was the nationalist - or rather fascist - dictator of large parts of China between the 1920s and 1949. "The most important part of fascism is absolute trust in a sagely able leader," said Chiang in 1933. And a licence to embezzle that would have made him an excellent player in Capone's Chicago or possibly an "adviser" to some modern African rulers.

In her daunting assembly of facts Pakula quotes Christopher Isherwood, who visited Madame Chiang at Wuchang in 1938, when the Japanese were intent on conquering China. His word picture could hardly have been bettered: "She is a small round-faced lady," he wrote, "exquisitely dressed, vivacious rather than pretty, and possessed of an almost terrifying charm and poise. She can become at will the cultivated, westernised woman with a knowledge of literature and art; the technical expert, discussing aeroplane engines and machine guns; the inspector of hospitals; the president of a mother's union; or the simple, affectionate, clinging Chinese wife. She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless."

She played the Americans for nearly all they were worth. President Harry Truman despised her.

"I discovered after some time," he told one of his biographers, "that Chiang Kai-shek and the Madame ... were thieves. And they stole $750 million out of the $35 billion that we sent to Chiang."

President Roosevelt avoided getting too close to her so as not to be "vamped". His wife Eleanor was dazzled. But when Madame Chiang was asked what she would do with a troublesome labour leader "she never said a word, but the beautiful small hand came up and slid across her throat". For the Chiangs did not hesitate to murder their adversaries.

And at the Cairo summit meeting in November 1943, when Chiang met Roosevelt and Churchill for the first time, where Madame was interpreter, General Alan Brooke, Churchill's military adviser, noted she was exposing her legs through her long-slitted skirt to detract from her husband's lacklustre performance. Chiang possessed a genuine vision for China's resurrection that today's Chinese acknowledge with some respect. But he allowed his regime to be crippled by institutionalised incompetence and corruption. His ill-equipped soldiers suffered privations at the hands of their own leaders almost as terrible as those inflicted by their Japanese enemies.

Much of Pakula's 638-page book is in some ways a stretched history of nationalist China. This makes up for the few original insights offered on the personality of May-ling, and fewer still on her relationship with Chiang. The most important fact about Madame was that she captivated the American people.

Henry Luce, the co-founder of Time magazine, was among those hypnotised. One of his writers said: "The trouble with Henry is that he's torn between wanting to be a Chinese missionary like his parents or a Chinese warlord like Chiang Kai-shek." Luce settled for putting Chiang and his wife on the cover of Time, and describing the dictator as "the greatest ruler Asia has seen since Emperor Kang Hsi 250 years ago".

America squandered billions in trying to make China a serious combatant against the Japanese. But Chiang and his generals were more interested in keeping their powder for the post-war struggle against Mao Tse-tung and his Communists.

Chiang and Madame moved to Taiwan in January 1949 after being defeated in the civil war. A British journalist watched in disbelief as coolies carried 500,000 ounces of gold bullion in packages on the end of bamboo poles out of the Central Bank to join the Chiangs' baggage.

She died at the remarkable age of 106. At her memorial service in a church in Park Avenue her minister for 40 years, the Rev Chow, said: "We are all God's creatures but May-ling Soong was God's masterpiece." The author thinks she would have loved that. Others may disagree with the eulogy but no doubt they will have their say in a shorter, possibly more colourful assesment.