Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek, a Wu speaker born in Zhejiang in 1887, was one of a generation of Chinese students educated in Japan in the Qing Dynasty's last years. After graduating from the Tokyo Shinbu Gakko military school and returning to China, he served as a soldier and became involved with Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui revolutionary movement. After the revolution of 1912, he became a founding member of Sun's Nationalist Guomindang, moving to Guangdong. Put in charge of Whampoa Military Academy, he was (wrongly) nicknamed "the Red General."

After Sun's 1926 death Chiang assumed command of the National Revolutionary Army and led an alliance of Nationalists and Communists in the Northern Expedition. He took Nanjing and Shanghai, but fell out with the left and launched a bloody purge of communists in Shanghai. He continued northward and in 1928 took Beijing (which he renamed Beiping), becoming State Council Director and de facto head of state.

As Chinese leader Chiang had to fight three factions: the warlords, often still powerful at the local level; the Japanese, who seized Manchuria in 1931; and the Communists, who established a Jiangxi power base for several years before being driven out and taking the Long March west and north to Yan'an. In 1937 Japan invaded China proper, forcing a reluctant Chiang to accept an uneasy second alliance with the Communists. Nanjing was brutally overrun in 1938, and Chiang retreated upriver until a new Nationalist capital was established at Chongqing.

The war with Japan dragged on until Tokyo surrendered to the Allies in 1945. While the Nationalist regime had been bled white, suffering from corruption and inflation, the Communists had gradually strengthened their position, and fighting between the two started even before the surrender, leading to a long civil war. In 1949 the Communists finally took the whole Chinese mainland, and Chiang retreated again to Taiwan.

On this island, which had been Japanese territory just four years before, Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo achieved economic success, making their reduced nation into one of eastern Asia's "Four Tigers." But they maintained martial law, launching the White Terror against suspected leftists. Political liberalization would only happen in the late 1980s, well after Chiang's 1975 death.

For background reading, you can try Xavier Paules' The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949.