http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/2 ... 3&ex=1172034000
Her skill as a politician, alternately charming and vicious, made her a formidable presence. She made a play for Taiwan's leadership after Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, even though she was 90 and living in New York.
Although she suffered numerous ailments, including breast cancer, she outlived all her contemporary rivals. She was said to credit her religious faith — she told friends she rose at dawn for an hour of prayer each day — for her good health.
Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, who worked closely with her when he commanded American forces in China during the war, described Madame Chiang in his diary as a "clever, brainy woman."
"Direct, forceful, energetic," he wrote. "Loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. Can turn on charm at will and knows it."
Soong Mei-ling's rise to power began when she married Chiang in an opulent ceremony in Shanghai in 1927, bringing together China's star military man with one of the nation's most illustrious families.
Her eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling, directed the family's affairs and innumerable money-making ventures with the help of her husband, H. H. Kung, a scion of one of China's wealthiest banking families.
Madame Chiang's second sister, Soong Qing-ling, was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president after the last emperor was toppled in 1911. After Sun's death, Soong Qing-ling carried his banner over into the Communist camp, causing an irreparable rupture in the family.
When the vanquished Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Soong Qing-ling stayed behind. The Communist Party leadership called her the only true patriot in the Soong family, and appointed her honorary chairman of the People's Republic in 1980, a year before her death.
A Telling DittyToday, Chinese still remember the three sisters with a telling ditty: "One loved money, one loved power, one loved China," referring respectively to Ai-ling, Mei-ling and Qing-ling.
Madame Chiang's elder brother, T. V. Soong, often called Nationalist China's financial wizard, served at various times as finance minister, acting prime minister and foreign minister, where his primary role was raising money from America.
Although Madame Chiang developed a stellar image with the American public, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders became disillusioned with her and her husband's despotic and corrupt practices. Eleanor Roosevelt was shocked at her answer when asked at a dinner at the White House how the Chinese government would handle a strike by coal miners. Madame Chiang silently drew a sharp fingernail across her neck.
"She can talk beautifully about democracy," Mrs. Roosevelt said later. "But she does not know how to live democracy."「她可以把民主談得很漂亮，但是，她不知道如何生活在民主政治裡。」羅斯福女士事後說。
By the end of the war, the loyalty of Nationalist officials melted away as the government grew corrupt and fiscally traitorous, printing money so aggressively that the Chinese currency fell to an exchange rate of several million yuan to the dollar. Many Nationalist soldiers were reduced to begging for food because they went unpaid, yet American diplomats discovered that military supplies sent from the United States to China sometimes appeared on the black market soon after arrival.戰爭結束前夕，國民 政府的官員們對政府的忠誠已消失殆盡。政府愈來愈貪婪，甚至在財政上叛國，貪得無厭的印鈔票，使得中國對美金的匯率跌到只剩好幾百萬分之一。許多國民政府 的軍隊因沒有薪水而被迫乞討，但是，美國外交官員們發現，從美國送去中國的軍事補給，有時在一抵達中國就出現在黑市上。
During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland, although That hope eventually faded.
In New York, Madame Chiang lived in an apartment on Gracie Square in Manhattan. In March 1999, as she turned 101, hard of hearing but still quick-witted, she told visitors that she read the Bible and The New York Times every day.
The Soong family's saga, cutting across many strands of modern Chinese history, began when Madame Chiang's father, Charlie Soong, sailed to the United States at the age of 12. Coming from a family of traders in Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Mr. Soong was taken in by Methodists in North Carolina who converted him to Christianity in hopes of sending him back to spread the word of Jesus in China.
After returning to Shanghai in 1886, Mr. Soong, a genial wheeler-dealer, passed up missionary life to start a business printing Bibles, earning a fortune. He also printed political pamphlets secretly for Sun Yat-sen, then working to overthrow China's last emperor. On Jan. 1, 1912, Sun became China's first president.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/2 ... 3&ex=1172034000
Sun lasted in office only a few months before his coalition disintegrated, and after he fled to Japan, he hired Mr. Soong's second daughter, Soong Qing-ling, as a secretary. They soon married, despite the age difference: he was 50 and she was 21.
Educated in America
Mei-ling Soong was born in Shanghai on March 5, 1898, although some references give 1897 as the year because Chinese usually consider everyone to be one year old at birth. At the age of 10, she had followed her elder sisters to the Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Ga.
She entered Wellesley College near Boston in 1913; her brother, T. V., was enrolled at Harvard. She majored in English literature, and was remembered by her classmates as a chubby, vivacious and determined student. She graduated in 1917 and returned to Shanghai speaking English better than Chinese.
She was introduced to her future husband in 1922. By that time, she had matured into a slender beauty and taken to wearing full-length, body-hugging gowns.
Chiang Kai-shek, a severe-looking military aide to Sun who established a school for officers in southern China, may have been as attracted to the Soongs' financial and political connections as he was to their youngest daughter. His initial overtures to her were rebuffed, and after Sun's death in 1925, as Chiang took the title generalissimo and tried to succeed him as the leader of the Nationalist cause, he proposed to Sun's young widow, Soong Qing-ling. She said no.
Chiang allied himself with warlords in southern and central China and with the Soviet Union, where Stalin regarded the Nationalists as more progressive than the warlords who still controlled Beijing and northern China. Communist rebels, not yet led by Mao Zedong, felt they deserved Moscow's support. But Stalin insisted on supporting the Nationalists.
In 1927, Chiang shocked his Soviet backers by carrying out a massacre of leftists in Shanghai. Edgar Snow, the American journalist, estimated that Chiang's forces had executed more than 5,000 people.
The massacre caused a permanent rent in the Soong family. Soong Qing-ling, as Sun's widow, led a faction of Nationalists who voted to expel Chiang from all his posts. T. V. Soong resigned as finance minister, though he was later persuaded to resume his alliance with Chiang.
When Chiang renewed his interest in Soong Mei-ling in 1927, she told him that she would consent to marry only if he could win the approval of her mother, who had reservations about a man who was neither Christian nor single. Chiang had already fathered a son in a marriage that was arranged when he was only 14, and had adopted a second son and married a second wife, Chen Chieh-ru. Chiang promised to convert, and eventually sent Chen away to the United States, where she enrolled at Columbia University and earned a doctorate.
The Chiang-Soong wedding took place in Shanghai on Dec. 1, 1927. A small Christian ceremony was held at the Soong mansion on Seymour Road, followed by a political ceremony at the Majestic Hotel, beneath a portrait of Sun.
As a political partner to her husband, Madame Chiang developed what she called the New Life Movement, a series of principles for modernizing China through social discipline, courtesy and service. She engineered public hygiene campaigns and denounced traditional superstitions.
While many ordinary Chinese resisted it, the campaign was popular with foreigners, particularly with Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, who was born to missionaries in China. A longtime supporter of the Chiangs, Luce named the couple "Man and Woman of the Year" in 1938.
During the war with the Japanese, Madame Chiang pushed her husband to build up the Nationalist air force, and helped hire Claire Chennault, who commanded a mercenary force of pilots that came to be known as the Flying Tigers.
During World War II, the relationship between General Stilwell, Chiang and Madame Chiang proved contentious. The general accused Chiang of hoarding resources, deliberately avoiding battle with the Japanese to spare his men to fight the Communists.
