Chiang Ching-kuo
Chiang Ching-kuo was president of the Republic of China on Taiwan from 1978 to his death in 1988, Chiang Kai-shek's son and successor, the man who had run his father's secret police for twenty years and who, in the last eighteen months of his life, lifted the martial law that had been in force since 1949, allowed an opposition party, let Taiwanese visit the mainland, and said that his family would not succeed him, so that the island's democracy was made by the man best placed to prevent it. He was also the premier and president of the ten major construction projects of the 1970s. There was the north-south freeway, the railway electrification, the steel mill, the shipyard, the nuclear plant and the new port and airport, which took Taiwan from a light-industry exporter to the economy that made the world's computers. He was born in Zhejiang in 1910, was sent to Moscow at fifteen to Sun Yat-sen University, where he was Deng Xiaoping's classmate. He was kept in the Soviet Union as a hostage after his father's purge of 1927, working in a Urals machine factory and marrying a Belarusian, Faina, until Stalin sent him home in 1937 for the united front. In the civil war he ran the currency crackdown in Shanghai in 1948 that shot speculators and failed. On Taiwan he built the political warfare and security apparatus of the White Terror, in which a hundred and forty thousand people were imprisoned and some thousands shot. He was defence minister in the 1960s, premier from 1972, and president from May 1978, seven months before Carter recognised Peking and withdrew recognition from Taipei. He answered with the Kaohsiung crackdown of 1979 and then, as the island's middle class grew and Washington's Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, with the opening. The Democratic Progressive Party formed illegally in September 1986 and he let it stand; martial law ended on 15 July 1987; the mainland visits began in November. He was diabetic and in a wheelchair for the last years, and died in Taipei in January 1988 of a haemorrhage, with the Taiwanese-born Lee Teng-hui as his vice-president and heir.
- Lived: 1910 CE – 1988 CE
- Nationality: Taiwanese
- Roles: president, politician
