The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China Paperback – Illustrated, November 16, 2010

My wife, who is Asian, is reading this biographical history - she'svery impressed, to say the least!Bought it as a gift for her with the proviso that I get to read it after she's finished with it...only problem is that she likes it so much, she may never put it down!A terrific look at a country that is now verging on global dominance in so many ways - and how one woman with brains, toughness, and perseverence, not to mention a charm that could win over an entire American Congress, helped her country battle the Japanese just before and during WWII when their formidable and often brutal military was overrunning not only China, but all of South East Asia!And, of course, the transition - during which she played a major, and often tragic role - from a budding democracy to a Communist state. Had she succeeded, along with her husband, Chang Kai Shek,in keeping Mao and his cohorts out of the picture, we would be looking at an entirely different global partner, economically, militarily, and ideologically!What a woman to still accomplish what she did! - her speech to our Congress, imploring America to send aid and men to join the "Flying Tigers" - a group of volunteer fighter pilots that wreaked havoc onthe Japanese bombing squadrons who were so indiscriminate - as were their soldiers - in murdering innocents was a triumph of pure genius, laced with a charm made all the more warming by her beauty, grace, wit, and PERFECT ENGLISH! (SHE WAS EDUCATED AT AN ELITEPRIVATE COLLEGE, WELLESLEY, IN THE U.s., BEGINNING AT AGE 15!LIKE I SAID - WHAT A WOMAN! ALL POLITICIANS AND LEADERS OF TODAY'S WORLD COULD LEARN SO MUCH FROM HER LIFE; UNFORTUNATELY, THEY DON'TPUT TOO MUCH STOCK IN WORLD HISTORY!READ THIS BOOK! YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED...UNLESS YOU ARE A COMMUNIST!

Aside from being an interesting compendium of modern Chinese history, and a very well done job delineating the amazing life of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the meticulous design, many photos, and care with which this book was made elevates it to a work of art of which the author and her collaborators should be proud. Despite the many twists and turns necessary in attempting to chronicle modern Chinese history, the author does an excellent job in doing it in an interesting and logical fashion that makes the reading very enjoyable. I think the author found just the right mix of Chinese history to showcase and explain much of Madame's life, and certainly, this is a broad study that I found completely enthralling and enjoyable.This book opened my mind with many facts that I didn't know, and gave me the desire to learn more. It made me think very hard about the central character, and gave me the information about her in what I believe to be a completely unbiased manner. When I finished the book, I felt a real satisfaction, knowing that I had enriched my mind greatly while being entertained the whole time. I found myself wanting to learn more about some of the events that were described in the book, and in particular, about Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.Therefore, I feel the author hit a home run with this book, because it not only entertains and educates, it instills a desire to learn more.Bravo, to the author, Hannah Pakula, and thank you for such a beautiful book.Michael P. SakowskiBaltimore

Engrossing history of post-imperial China through revolution, the warlord era, the Second Sino-Japanese War and many phases of civil war, frames Hannah Pakula's biography of the complex character of Song Meiling 宋美龄, Madame Chiang Kai-shek - a remarkable individual from one of the most extraordinary and powerful families of the 20th century, the Song (aka Soong).Madame Chiang exercised more real hands-on power than any empress in Chinese history. She headed Chinese aviation and its air force; was a key player in a broad swathe of Chinese Government policy; founded orphanages and conducted many charitable works; often put herself in harm's way in war zones to rally public and military morale; was, over many years of the Second Sino-Japanese War, China's most effective and most prominent advocate for international assistance, addressing a joint sitting of US Congress on 18 February 1943 with an extraordinary speech appealing for greater emphasis on the war against Japan. Without her magnifying power, her husband Chiang Kai-shek almost certainly would have been just another also-ran classic Chinese warlord, no more significant than Wu Peifu or Zhang Zuolin. All this, and she lived to the age of 105, dying in her Manhattan apartment in 2003.This book will be of particular interest to many readers for its insights into Madame Chiang as a distorting factor in US-China relations, and on US public opinion about China. Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (Grove Great Lives) remains a definitive study of General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell and his contemporaries, but Pakula also competently covers the contributions of Stilwell, Chennault, Marshall, Roosevelt, Truman, MacArthur, Nixon, Kissinger and many other Americans who shaped US policy on China, and their interactions with and responses to Madame Chiang. Pakula gives insights into the role of W. H. Donald (1875-1946), the Australian journalist who became a close confidant and friend of the Chiangs and the Song family over a span of more than 40 years, and arguably the most influential Westerner in China over the first half of the 20th century.Pakula relates many anecdotes about Donald and the Chiangs and Songs, including some that don't appear in the 1948 biography Donald of China by Earl Albert Selle, an American journalist who knew him from his work on Shanghai newspapers during the 1930s. Selle's book was the only published biography on W. H. Donald until Craig Collie's The Reporter and the Warlords: An Australian at Large in China's Republican Revolution appeared in 2013. Donald went to Hong Kong in 1903, and reported the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 for several newspapers. He knew many prominent Chinese, from Sun Yat-sen to Madame Chiang's parents, and he had known Meiling since she was a child. Donald had a central role in releasing Chiang Kai-shek from kidnap, saving his life, during the "Xi'an Incident" of December 1936. A little-stated but obvious fact is that this incurred a lifetime debt of gratitude to Donald. Pakula relates the interaction between Donald and Madame Chiang during the Xi'an Incident, in which Meiling insisted herself on going to Xi'an to support her husband. She well understood the grave risk she took: handing Donald a revolver and making him promise to shoot her if "troops got out of control and seized me". Another anecdote in both Pakula's and Selle's books, showing the avuncular relationship Donald had with Madame Chiang, and her courage and determination, is about an incident during the Battle of Shanghai which opened the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Donald and Meiling (he typically called her M'issimo after her marriage to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) had a car crash en route to visit Chinese troops. Donald was thrown out and saw Meiling hurled over his head into a ditch where she was knocked unconscious. The worried Donald picked her up and carried her to a nearby farmhouse to wash her face, singing "Oh she flies through the air with the greatest of ease, this daring young girl who fights Japanese" to cheer her up. Meiling was weak, pale and in pain, but insisted on completing their schedule. Hours later she was diagnosed with a broken rib and advised to rest for a week. Pakula shows that Song Meiling had, in abundance, style, intelligence, charm, determination and courage - as well as ruthless capacity to manipulate and use people, and wilful blindness to corruption by her own family members who embezzled billions of dollars.Pakula movingly relates the generosity of the Chiangs - chiefly of Madame herself - to Donald when he was terminally ill in Hawaii in 1946, after release from three years in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines. Donald wanted to die in China. The Chiangs, and the US Navy, arranged an aircraft to bring him back to Shanghai. He spent his last days in the former Country Hospital there, being visited every day either by Madame Chiang when she was in town, or by a member of her staff. When Donald died on 8 November 1946, Meiling took great care over his funeral arrangements, having him buried in the Song family plot of the former International Cemetery (now maintained by the Shanghai authorities as an attractive park and heritage site, although no original pre-Communist era foreign graves have survived. It is presented and is best-known in China as the site of Song Qingling's grave).Assessments of Madame Chiang's place in history inevitably depend on point of view. The comparisons most frequently made with her in China are Empress Wu, the Dowager Empress Cixi, and Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing - all of whom exemplify the recurrent figure of the villainess in Chinese culture. In the west, particularly during the height of her power, she enjoyed uncritical press coverage and popularity thanks to assiduous propaganda and her own exceptional ability to communicate and persuade. It clearly emerges through Pakula's biography that she had a dark side largely hidden from westerners, but was more and better than China's classic villainesses, wholly neither heroine nor villainess: entirely extraordinary.Other than the villainess comparisons, Madame Chiang is often compared with her talented siblings, particularly her sisters Ailing (who married the financier and Confucius descendant H. H. Kung) and Qingling (who married the apotheosis of the Chinese revolution, Dr Sun Yat-sen). All of the siblings were well-educated in Shanghai and in the United States with the support of their remarkable father, Charlie Soong, a self-made businessman who rose from humble origins in Hainan through education in the US with Methodist missionaries. Pakula relates in her book many insights into these family connections, and relays the saying most commonly heard in China about the Song sisters: that one (Ailing, Madame Kung) loved money; one (Meiling, Madame Chiang) loved power; and one (Qingling, Madame Sun) loved her country （一個愛錢，一個愛權，一個愛國）. Pakula's book shows through many examples of Madame Chiang's patriotism, work ethic, courage, kindness and philanthropy - as well as her character flaws and idiosyncrasies - that it is an over-simplification to characterize her merely as a power junkie. The truth was closer to a western journalist's insight that Meiling combined Ailing's supreme practicality and Qingling's predominant idealism, a combination that made her the most impressive and influential of all three - for good and bad purposes.The dark side of Madame Chiang was revealed in what Pakula terms "mental gymnastics". Like her husband, "she may well have been able to keep the contents of her mind carefully compartmentalized," Pakula writes. Non-Chinese forever have been perplexed by Chinese contradictions, especially corruption and obsession with "face". Meiling must have known that members of her own family were extensively engaged in "squeeze". Pakula relates an occasion when the straight-talking W. H. Donald raised with Madame his concern about Ailing's corrupt dealings, and Meiling slapped him down, saying some topics were off limits. (Cumulative disgust with this and many other challenges to Donald's sense of what was right and best for China resulted in him resigning in 1940, and leaving China via Hong Kong to go sailing around the Pacific while writing his memoirs.) Surely Madame knew that Chiang Kai-shek's "opium suppression" campaign was the exact opposite: in fact, an opium monopoly set up in collusion with organized crime bosses like Big-Eared Du (Du Yuesheng 杜月笙 1888-1951) to help fund huge military costs which were financially crippling the Nationalist Chinese government. Pakula cites scholarly research showing that the Nationalist regime was dependent on its opium monopoly, skimming up to more than 400% taxes from traffic in the drug. She was undoubtedly aware also of her husband's strategic intention not to use war materiel obtained from the USA to fight the Japanese, but to hold back Chinese Nationalist military strength to fight the Communists while engaging the Allies to defeat Japan. Such "mental gymnastics" are recurrent and deep-seated among China's greatest figures throughout its history. They are easier to understand (not necessarily to excuse) if Chinese principles are understood: like Confucian principles of loyalty to family, and Chinese strategic thinking like the "win without fighting" principle of The Art of War - Sun Tzu's Classic in Plain English With Sun Pin's : The Art of Warfare.It is difficult to find comparisons with Madame Chiang anywhere in the world or in any era. She was in parts a warrior queen, coquette, fashionplate, politician and demagogue. She was in parts Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos and Maggie Thatcher. She came to power neither through royal succession nor election. Her power derived from her origin in a talented and wealthy family; her marital-political partnership with the stubborn, Confucian-minded warlord, Chiang Kai-shek; and her possession of the faculty of some highly intelligent, charismatic and motivated women - without, necessarily, having affairs - to use calculated flirtation to advance their ideas and influence in "a man's world". Pakula relates the episode of one alleged affair, with failed Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie during his visit to China in 1942. When Madame Chiang subsequently met President F. D. Roosevelt during the visit to the USA in 1943 in which she addressed Congress, Roosevelt was aware of the gossip and was determined himself not to be "vamped" by Meiling. He asked her, teasingly, what she really thought of Wendell Wilkie. She replied, "Well, Mr President, he is an adolescent, after all." Roosevelt asked what Meiling thought of him, if Wilkie was an adolescent. "Ah, Mr President - you are sophisticated." Song Meiling could turn on charm at will, and charmed women as easily as men. Pakula gives many examples, from Meiling's old school friend Emma Mills, to Eleanor Roosevelt.To a wide potential readership, 'The Last Empress : Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China' is an insightful - although sometimes culturally off-beam - early-to-mid 20th century story of China through the experiences of one of her most outstanding public personalities. Pakula, being no China expert, but as a trained historian and expert biographer, skilfully draws on China scholars like John King Fairbank and Jonathan Spence and many contemporary memoirs, diaries and other primary sources. Pakula has had published two other acclaimed biographies of "royal women" - of Queen Marie of Romania and of Princess Victoria (1840-1901) who became Empress of Germany. Her capacity to write this fine biography of Madame Chiang was not impeded by the fact that they both were graduates of Wellesley College, near Boston, and also both longtime New York residents, where Pakula had access to many archives and sources related to her subject.This is a large book, running to some 852 pages. Inevitably, there are mistakes - mostly inconsequential to the overall value of the work. An example of an inconsequential mistake - citing Laura Tyson Li, who got it wrong in her 2006 biography Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China's Eternal First Lady - is a misinterpretation of Wendell Wilkie's remark in a wire to Madame about "the gospel according to Hoyle". Pakula's linked note 238 repeats Li's howler that 'The Gospel According to Hoyle' referred to "a book of card tricks with Christian messages used by evangelists". Card players and users of English idioms who are familiar with the legacy of card game rules authority Edmond Hoyle 1672-1769, and the many editions still published of the card game rules "gospel" According to Hoyle, will not be misled about what Wilkie actually meant, and might have a laugh.The Kindle edition is generally well formatted and easy to navigate, except that the 77 illustrations are difficult to find (not indexed or listed in contents hyperlinks). Text is missing at the end of chapter 36, which in the Kindle edition ends mid-sentence, 'Writing in Fortune magazine, Janeway seems to have been blinded by Madame's charisma or', and chapter 52, which ends, 'It was never established whether these men operated on their own or under the aegis of Chiang, although Crozier said that "the Nationalist government is involved in the opium traffic in the 'Golden Triangle' where Burma, Laos, and Thailand overlap." This state-'

A well researched and written book. Soong Mei-ling's was a powerful woman, the one behind the throne, without her, Chiang Kia-shek might not have achieved as much as he did. On the other hand, the Soong family was a completely corrupted and self serving lot which the book hardly mentioned.

excellent book

Fascinating!