Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling), once
First Lady of China, regally performed on the global stage across
75 years until dying at age 106 in 2003. Her latest
biography,
The Last Empress, by Hannah Pakula, debuted
this month. Madame’s marriage and political partnership with
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek elevated her into the ranks of
Churchill and FDR during World War II as her nation resisted
Japanese occupation. During the Cold War, the U.S. educated
celebrity would become an icon of resistance to communism. Her
flamboyant visits to America, accompanied by a retinue of
servants and a wardrobe of silks, commanded a joint session of
Congress, rallies at the Hollywood Bowl and Madison Square
Garden, and national radio broadcasts.
Like Laura Tyson Li’s
recent biography, Pakula’s book surmises that Madame may have
had an affair with Republican presidential candidate Wendell
Willkie, whose presidency would have allowed them jointly to
“rule the rule,” she supposedly believed. True or not, Madame was
charming, captivating, ruthless, and shrewd. Whatever her
personal morals, she was the beneficiary of classic American
Protestant idealism about China. A Methodist who helped convert
her powerful husband to Christianity, Madame persuaded American
church prelates that a century of Protestant missions in China
had finally reached fruition in their rule.
China under the Chiangs never had more than a few million
Christians. But today, even after 60 years of communist rule,
China has over 100 million Christians and ranks as perhaps the
world’s third largest Christian nation after the U.S. and Brazil.
Autocratic and largely free-market oriented, modern China in many
ways more resembles what Madame and her husband represented than
the vision of their nemesis and ostensible victor, Mao Zedong. In
1951, China’s new communist rulers compelled the Methodist pastor
who had first baptized Chiang in 1930 to expel him
from the church in a “public denunciation rally” attended by a
coerced crowd of 10,000 Chinese Christians.
That pastor, since having become a Methodist bishop, reportedly
confessed to his “grave mistake” in having baptized Chiang, while
also expelling Madame. Other Chinese Protestant ministers
denounced “American imperialists” and “counter-revolutionary”
missionaries, while supposedly demanding severe punishment for
recalcitrant church leaders deemed Chiang’s special agents. The
communists eventually shut down all the Protestant denominations
and folded them into a single government controlled church, while
also creating a puppet Catholic Church. This ploy backfired, as
house churches arose across China, even as Christians were being
shipped to internment camps during the Cultural Revolution’s most
depraved stages.
The murderous calamity of a Maoist China was unforeseen by
progressive American Protestants, who had envisioned a seamlessly
bright future of American dominance, global democracy, and
Christian evangelization. Madame’s father became a Methodist at
the near height of American Protestant confidence in the late
19th century, after service as a ship’s cabin boy took him to
North Carolina. His brand of southern Methodism instilled in
Madame’s family an aversion to strong drink, cards, and dancing.
It also emphasized education, and Madame attended Wesleyan
College in Georgia and later Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Madame’s strong-willed mother insisted that Chiang, a Buddhist,
convert to Methodism before marrying her daughter. The rising
President of China’s Nationalist republic told her he would
ponder the faith, and after reading and meditation, consented to
baptism in Shanghai by the southern branch of U.S. Methodism. “I
feel the need of a God such as Jesus Christ,” he reportedly
explained. American churches and missionaries were thrilled,
while Chinese traditionalists were distressed, though the founder
of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen, had also been a Christian.
In 1930, a Methodist college president celebrated that Chiang was
surrounded by “progressive Christians,” noting that 6 of his 11
cabinet ministers were Christians.
In 1937, after Chiang was released from a brief captivity by
opponents, he and his wife wrote several columns for the New
York Times and others about how Christianity sustained
them. In a message to Asian Methodists, Chiang likened his
suffering to Christ’s: “”In this strange predicament I distinctly
recalled the forty days and nights Christ passed in the
wilderness withstanding temptation, His prayers in the garden of
Gethsemane and the indignities heaped upon Him at His trial.” The
Chiangs sometimes employed the U.S. Methodist Church to transmit
messages to the American people, as in 1938, when their Christmas
message predicted that “high moral standards” become
“accomplished fact” there would be “no more war.”
Before Pearl Harbor, in 1941, when China had already been at war
with Japan for years, the Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church in
Washington, D.C. hosted a rally for local Chinese to honor
China’s resistance to occupation and to bow before portraits of
Chiang. Madame sent her personal greetings, as did Methodist
bishops and Time magazine founder Henry Luce, a
long-time Chiang fan. After America had entered the war, Madame
visited the U.S. in 1943 to rapturous acclaim. While in
Washington, D.C. to meet with FDR, she worshipped at historic
Foundry Methodist Church with Vice President Henry
Wallace.
Foundry’s minister, who was also chaplain of the U.S. Senate,
referred to the Chiangs as “two great servants of God and
humanity,” whose “lives are as candles of the Lord,” whom we are
“proud to think of as fellow Methodists, inspiring examples of
the zeal and devotion to which our world-wide church is
summoned,” and “God-sent Christian leaders in the global struggle
to make men free.” Obviously no pacifist, the minister implored
for China: “Let us put weapons in her hand so she may hurl the
invader from her land and there build a city of God.”
The Chiangs sent greetings to the governing General Conference of
the U.S. Methodist Church in 1944, thanking America as a
“comrade-in-arms, able and willing to put the greatest potential
power existent in the world into battle for right dealings.” At
war’s end, the Chiangs donated their 100-acre estate outside
Chungking to the Methodist Church as a school and home for war
orphans. Of course, the property, with the rest of China, soon
fell to the communists. In 1948, Madame again was in Washington,
appealing for further U.S. aid, and she returned to Foundry
Church. The minister remained supportive, hailing her as “one of
the most distinguished Methodists in the world,” and saluting the
“patient sacrifices of her nation” in its “present struggle” with
the “same sinister system which threatens China and is reaching
out to control Asia in plotting the final overthrow of every
nation governed by the people, by the people and for the people.”
He urged confronting communism with “militant democracy purged of
its betrayals and denials and which actually practices the
sacredness of the individual.” A stained glass window at Foundry
Church commemorating FDR’s “Four Freedoms” purportedly includes a
likeness of Madame with her words urging a “better world.”
When Madame addressed a crowd of 17,000 at Madison Square Garden
in 1943, she afterwards met with Methodist bishops, one of whom
later called her the “foremost woman of China, perhaps of the
world,” likened her to Joan of Arc, declared she was “more than a
little wonderful,” and could not find words to describe her
“personality, dress, power, charm…” He finally rhapsodized that
he bowed to her “greatness that summons her people not to hate.”
Fourteen years later, when the same bishop visited her in Taiwan,
he still gushed: “Madame Chiang is the same captivating,
brilliant, beautiful personality.”
In 1945, even before Japan surrendered, a Methodist bishop and
former missionary to China urged President Truman to back the
Chiangs against the communists because, in part, Chiang “actively
seeks Divine Guidance for the affairs of State.” While
conservatives and old-style progressive churchmen sided with the
Chiangs, new-style leftist church officials romanticized
communist rule or at least urged an end to U.S. support for
Chiang. The Chiangs’ long exile on Taiwan after the 1949
communist victory did not discourage all of their U.S. church
friends. After Chiang’s death in 1975, Billy Graham fulsomely
eulogized him as a faithful Christian at a Washington, D.C.
National Cathedral memorial service.
Madame died at her New York home after many years of living in
the U.S. Her long-time Methodist pastor in Taiwan delivered a
eulogy at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City,
declaring: “We are all God’s creatures but [Madame] was God’s
masterpiece.” She outlived nearly all her U.S. church supporters
who had associated the Chiangs with Christianity and hope for
China. Probably few could have foreseen that Christianity
eventually would thrive in China despite the defeat of China’s
Methodist rulers by Maoists who persecuted the churches. Maybe
Madame survived long enough to appreciate the irony.
