Until recently there was a received, unkind wisdom about Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong May-ling, which went something like this. After seizing control of China in 1927 the two of them dissipated popular goodwill over the next 20 years: strangling dissent, filling their Nationalist party with fascist carpet-baggers, failing to attend to China’s most glaring socioeconomic problems. The Chiangs, this version of the story concludes, were 20th-century China’s also-rans: a gangster-warlord and his luxury-loving moll who lost it all to the Communists in 1949 through inhumanity, corruption and incompetence.
Hannah Pakula, however, in her fascinating but overlong biography, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), argues that — at the height of her influence during the 1940s — May-ling was one of the most powerful and brilliant women in the world. “The real brains and boss” in the Chiang partnership, she was a political celebrity who mesmerised the American public with her diamond-encrusted cheongsam dresses and charmed the US government out of billions of dollars of aid for China’s war effort.
The daughter of a self-made Methodist millionaire, May-ling was packed off to get an American education aged only 10. A decade later she graduated at the top of her class and returned to China to launch herself into the best career open in the 1920s to a pampered daughter of the Shanghai business aristocracy: hunting down a rich and powerful husband. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek — a successful career soldier who had just dragged China back together by purging the country’s left wing, and fighting or bribing separatist warlords into submission — was probably the best option around.
And for the stiff, socially inept Chiang, May-ling was a fine prize: beautiful, charming and invaluably Americanised — the ideal “mouth and ears” to win support in the West for his new Nationalist government.
May-ling’s talents as an international propagandist for her husband’s regime shone through the dark years of World War II. In 1942 she took herself off on a triumphant 10-month publicity tour of the US, preaching the gospel of eternal friendship between China and America, pleading eloquently for “the moral support” (and dollars) “of democratic people everywhere”. She brought a cheering Congress to the verge of tears; she drew tens of thousands to her public lectures; Time named her and Chiang “man and wife of the year”. At a rally held in her honour in the Hollywood Bowl, dozens of cinema legends — Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth and so on — provided a warm-up parade before Madame Chiang appeared on stage to lecture her 30 000-strong audience on China’s war effort.
Through Pakula’s account, Chiang — a monomaniac with a filthy temper, who maintained till the end of his life that women should not wear trousers — emerges in almost every way as less appealing: less glamorous, less savvy, less eloquent. After an attempt to teach her husband English ended with him greeting a British ambassador with “Kiss me, Lampson”, May-ling spoke for Chiang not only in America, but also at key negotiations with Western leaders. At the 1943 Cairo conference, May-ling — the only woman in a room of Allied strongmen that included Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — frequently interrupted the official interpreter to complain that the Generalissimo’s meaning had not been fully expressed: “If you will allow me,” she purred, “I shall put before you his real thoughts.”
There was plenty of steel to her, of course. In the middle of one of her Washington charm offensives, when Roosevelt asked her what she would do with troublesome striking labourers, “the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat”. There was also a good deal of humbug about her patriotic sermons around the US. While famine stalked wartime China, she was dazzling the Americans with her gold-trimmed dresses and jade earrings, dancing from one champagne reception to another, and spending half a million dollars on fur coats. She would, Pakula suggests, have dropped her humourless, puritanical husband (who refused to touch alcohol, coffee or even tea) like a hot potato had the right opportunity come along. On one visit to America, she allegedly propo-sitioned — in a highly businesslike manner — a potential presidential candidate: if he were elected, she told the lucky man’s representative, “he and I would rule the world”.
May-ling was never a woman short on a sense of self-worth. While Churchill was in Washington in 1943 she summoned him to an audience in New York. He explained that the pressures of work made a trip north impossible and persuaded Roosevelt to invite her for lunch at the White House. “The invitation was refused with some hauteur. Madame was of the opinion that I should make the pilgrimage.” When Churchill offered to meet her halfway, his suggestion was dismissed as “facetious”.
Pakula’s story of May-ling’s conquest of America is extraordinary, but elsewhere the book drags. For a biographer supposedly dedicated to giving May-ling top billing over her less photogenic husband (that “crabbed little bastard”, in the words of one of his American detractors), Pakula sidelines her prima donna with curious frequency. For chapters on end, we lose sight of May-ling amid floods of slow, male-dominated detail about revolutions and wars. Somewhere among it all is a glittering cameo of an ambitious, overindulged woman who — had she been born 50 years later — truly might have ruled the world. —