Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek led the Chinese Nationalists for half a century, lost the mainland to the Communists, and ruled Taiwan until his death. Born in Zhejiang in 1887 to a salt merchant's family, he trained at a military academy in Japan, joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement, and returned for the 1911 revolution. Sun sent him to Moscow in 1923 and made him head of the Whampoa Military Academy, which gave him a personal following in the officer corps and the base from which he took over the Kuomintang after Sun's death in 1925. He launched the Northern Expedition in 1926 and unified much of the country by 1928. In April 1927 he turned on his communist allies in Shanghai with the help of the Green Gang, killing thousands and beginning a civil war that ran, with interruptions, for twenty-two years. His Nanjing decade brought some modernisation and much corruption, and he pursued the Communists relentlessly, driving them onto the Long March in 1934. He was kidnapped by his own generals at Xi'an in 1936 and released only after agreeing to a united front against Japan. He led China through eight years of war from 1937, absorbing enormous casualties, losing the eastern cities and retreating to Chongqing. He also blew the Yellow River dykes in 1938 to delay the Japanese, drowning several hundred thousand of his own people. He lost the resumed civil war between 1946 and 1949, and withdrew to Taiwan with about two million followers and the treasury and museum collections. He ruled under martial law until 1975, executing and imprisoning opponents in the White Terror while presiding over land reform and rapid industrialisation.

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