Long Overdue

China Quietly Rehabilitates Once Reviled Enemy by Benjamin Kang Lim

The issue of Taiwan and a campaign by its president, Chen Shui-bian, to assert sovereignty have prompted Beijing to turn to the Communists' late mortal enemy, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek...

For decades, the Chinese dismissed Chiang, who once ruled all of China, as a "bandit" after his Nationalist troops lost the civil war to Mao's Red Army and fled to Taiwan in 1949...

China has been quietly rehabilitating Chiang as part of a campaign to boost its claim of sovereignty over the self-governed island and stymie attempts by Taiwan's increasingly assertive leaders to push for formal nationhood.

While Chiang's political rehabilitation is far from complete, China now sees the leader who died in Taiwan in 1975 and always clung to the ideal of recovering the mainland as a secondary enemy, if not an ally.

"It's a classic example of 'drawing over one's secondary enemy to strike at one's primary enemy'," historian Bao Zunxin said of the Communists rewriting Chiang's legacy...

China's slow and unusual steps to revise their view of the once-hated generalissimo illustrate their deep distrust of Chen, and are all the more remarkable given the enmity between the Nationalists and Communists dating back to the 1920s.

Chiang campaigned twice to exterminate the Communists, most famously in the 1930s when he drove Mao's forces on a winding retreat that became known as the Long March.

In the years after the revolution, the rivalry between Chiang and Mao was so bitter that neither would recognize the other's government, each claiming to be the sole, legitimate representative of all China...

Mao, who died in 1976, once called his arch-rival "China's No. 1 war criminal." China's history textbooks described Chiang as the "common enemy of the people."

But the Communists now acknowledge Chiang's role as leader of the resistance against Japanese invaders from 1938 to 1945. Previously, most Chinese schoolchildren were told that ill-equipped Red Army guerrillas did all the fighting...

Chiang's China was mired in corruption as the gap between rich and poor widened. In Taiwan, he ruled with an iron fist, jailing critics.

Mao's China saw 30 million people starve to death in a man-made famine, a million intellectuals banished to toil in the countryside and millions more either purged or hounded to death during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution...

"In the past, even historical research on Chiang Kai-shek was banned. He was branded a traitor for refusing to fight the Japanese," said Bao, the historian.

This has been a longtime trend, but the fact that the Commies are finally recognizing his role against the Japanese is long overdue.