Taiwan’s War of the Christians (Part I)
What happens when religion and political agenda have a baby
If this were a movie, the opening scene would be of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling sitting side by side in their private chapel at Sun Moon Lake, enjoying a sermon of Methodist teachings. This wholesome, idyllic scene could be further romanticized by title cards on the screen, explaining that Soong was Wellesley-educated with an ordained Methodist preacher for a father, and that her marriage to Chiang was built on the foundation that he convert to Christianity to win her hand.
The next sequence of scenes would show that while this power couple were surrounded by the world that they built, a White Terror raged elsewhere throughout the island of Taiwan — men and women who spoke out in dissension against Chiang’s military regime and martial law were imprisoned and often tortured to give up accomplices. The very thing the dissidents were protesting, the lack of rule of law, was what kept their lives in peril as many “disappeared” over a period of four decades. A prominent figure among political prisoners, as were many others, was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan.
Around 1880, an 18-year-old boy from Hainan was adopted by a relative and taken to Boston to live out the rest of his life. He soon ran away and eventually ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he converted to the Methodist strain of Christianity. Through luck or manipulation, several Methodist community leaders then banded together to ensure this new Christian of Chinese origin would become a missionary to China — the innovative concept of a Chinese missionary converting fellow Chinamen was utterly enticing and irresistible; heaven and hell would be moved to ensure a saved “middle kingdom” on earth.
Within a decade, the machinations of Methodist power brokers from the American south had come to fruition. However, personal ambition and desire was left out of the equation, so their model Chinese missionary left the mission field soon after he started and instead turned to entrepreneurial ventures to “save” his people. It was inevitable that he would give up his preaching career because it was becoming a conflict of interest with his budding business (and increasingly political) career. In the mid-1890s, while on his quest for liberation from the Qing dynasty, he met a remarkable man at a Methodist church service in Shanghai. This second man was a Chinese man who spent his formative years in Hawaii (where he learned English and a variety of subjects, chief among them, Christianity), a British Hong Kong-licensed medical doctor who gave up his profession to pursue a vocation in political philosophy, and most importantly, the rare Chinese person who was a baptized Christian. Indeed, this church service in 1894 was the fateful meeting of 33-year-old Charlie Soong and 28-year-old Sun Yat-sen.
It seemed a match made in heaven: not only were both men of an especially shared background — both were from southern China and therefore shared the same Chinese dialect, yet American-educated, and had abandoned their first careers in search of something greater — it was their faith and belief in Christianity that fueled their desire for a radical change to the political traditions of China. The Qing dynasty that ruled their home was in decline, after over two centuries in power. Soong and Sun were born right after the end of the Second Opium War, in which the Qing dynasty suffered humiliating defeat. While foreigners and foreign influence grew in China, Chinese culture became more insular, with violent clashes among ethnic groups in a string of rebellions du jour. By the time these two budding revolutionaries met, the Qing Restoration that was supposed to bring back the golden era last enjoyed in the mid-18th century was simply a doomed mandate to resist modernization. Independently from each other, Soong was already deep into financing the types of activities that Sun was organizing and running — one of the reasons their friendship grew quickly was because they recognized the power of combining forces among their various connections to organized crime syndicates into a giant network. However, when their first real joint venture to overthrow the Qing empire failed, Sun Yat-sen was forced to flee to Japan to start, what would turn out to be, a 16-year exile. It had not even been a year since the two men first met in a Shanghai Methodist church.
During Sun Yat-sen’s exile, neither men stayed idle (nor abandoned their friendship). While Sun went on a global tour raising funds for his revolutionary campaign, Charlie Soong was busy building his business empire and raising the next generation of power brokers. He sent his three daughters to the US to be educated at Wesleyan College, and all three would play pivotal roles in their own rights in the revolution:
- The eldest daughter, Ai-ling, would go on to become Sun Yat-sen’s English-language secretary. She only quit in 1914 when she married H.H. Kung, a Chinese banker who was educated at Oberlin and Harvard (which was a result of Kung having gone to a Christian mission school and been taught by missionary Luella Miner, an Oberlin graduate). An early supporter himself of Sun Yat-sen (like his father-in-law), Kung would also fund the revolution and eventually become a leader in Sun’s KuoMinTang (KMT, or translated as Nationalist Party).
- The middle daughter, Ching-ling, would pick up the baton left by her older sister and also become Sun Yat-sen’s secretary. By this time, the Soong family was also living in Japan because it was unsafe for them in Shanghai where everyone knew Soong was bankrolling the revolution. When he moved the family back to China in 1915, Soong did not know that his friend and daughter were in a secret romantic relationship. He only found out when Ching-ling expressed desire to move back to Japan to be with Sun. At the time, not only was Sun Yat-sen still married to his first Chinese wife, he was also living with his Chinese concubine who had been acting as his de facto wife in Japan. Previously, Sun had been a bigamist by marrying a Japanese wife (legally, in Japan) while also still married to his first wife, and had had another Japanese concubine. Charlie Soong had chosen to look the other way because their political and martial cause was too great to squabble over personal matters, but now that his daughter was mixed up in all this, Soong could no longer ignore the cognitive dissonance that Sun Yat-sen represented: a noble visionary, destined to rule a righteous China with good Christian values… while living an immoral life with multiple wives and concubines. Soong once wrote a letter to Sun, saying that theirs was “a Christian family and no daughter of ours will become anybody’s concubine, be he a king, an emperor or a president of the greatest on earth”. Soong even went so far as appealing to the Japanese government soon after Sun and Ching-ling’s “for show” non-legally binding wedding, claiming that Ching-ling was kidnapped and forced to marry. The friendship that had been like brotherhood between the two men never recovered from this rift. Not only did Soong never see his friend again, he also disowned his daughter — such was the price to pay for not living devout Christian morals.
- The youngest daughter, Mei-ling, was sent away to boarding school when she was nine years old, and she returned to China in 1917 a Wesleyan alumna and Wellesley College graduate. Ten months after her return, Charlie Soong passed away from kidney disease. Mei-ling, though not particularly religious, was devoted to her Pentecostal mother, and adored her oldest sister Ai-ling who had renewed faith after bouts of post-partum depression. As Mei-ling was catching up on her Chinese language education after a decade away studying only in English, Chiang Kai-shek was climbing the ranks of the KMT and growing close to Sun Yat-sen. Chiang’s ambitions were not unlike those of Charlie Soong and Sun Yat-sen, but he was very different from the Western, Christianity-educated revolutionaries. However, his star was undeniably on the rise, and Ai-ling (who by now had unofficially become her father’s political heir) wanted another powerful man in the family. Who better than Chiang as a husband for Baby Sister? This was a welcome invitation to Chiang, who was looking for a way to become recognized as Sun Yat-sen’s successor and was planning to become China’s future ruler. What better way than to become his brother-in-law and be bankrolled by the same family of financiers that had supported Sun from the very beginning? All he had to do was divorce his legal wife, get rid of his two concubines, and promise to convert to Christianity (which he later did, being baptized in the Methodist church of his in-laws).
By the start of World War II, both Charlie Soong and Sun Yat-sen had been long dead. Soong’s children had become a royal family of power brokers: bankers, politicians, generalissimos, and revolutionaries of a different breed — wives who started and normalized the convention of being public figures in their own right. Internationally, this played out as the Chiangs being featured on the cover of TIME magazine twice, and one of them with the headline “Man and Wife of the Year”.
During World War II, the Pacific Asian Theatre was the perfect storm of civil wars, revolutions, cold wars, and open conflicts all piled on top of each other. In the eyes of the Christian Western world, this brave “young” couple — he a dashing soldier and she a Wellesley girl in exotic Asian packaging — were the ideal representatives to forge a desirable landscape into permanent allies of the Anglo-American coalition. Who cares if they had to commit a few dirty tricks (such as exploiting Bolshevik Russians) as long as it brought good to the “right” people? That being, in particular, Protestants with strong missionary traditions and methods.
As for the mythology of the Chiangs’ marriage being based on a foundation of Christian principles? By all accounts, the Soong parents were devout Christians who made many major life decisions based on their faith, and the children went along out of respect. For their own lives, it seems only the eldest, Ai-ling — whose husband was also a devout Christian (and Oberlin College alumnus) — was the true believer of the bunch. The middle sister, Ching-ling, was reportedly never a true believer, and in fact, this was one of the reasons why she had such a strong bond with Sun Yat-sen. “So we will both go to hell”, was an inside joke they had shared. As for Mei-ling, the sister who is most famous in English-speaking Christian circles, she was probably the most undecided of the bunch. The two women she respected the most, her mother and oldest sister, had often tried to persuade her to develop a personal faith construct as the nucleus for living a life of purpose and vitality. It was Ai-ling who played matchmaker for the Chiangs, and acted as senior advisor to the generalissimo’s life’s work. Ai-ling’s husband, H.H. Kung, was later Chiang’s prime minister and finance minister for many years. Although Chiang Kai-shek is often criticized for being the Christian pretender of the lot, all to gain the legitimacy he so wanted for becoming the party leader, his journals tell a story of a contemplative man who integrated traditional, Confucian principles with Protestant Christian doctrine. Each person, in his or her own way, was looking for a way to emancipate old China and catapult Chinese culture with Christian values.
It’s never for one to say what’s truly in the heart of another man, but whatever was there, it was brought to Taiwan — with devastating consequences.
Part II can be found here.
Written by Emi Higashiyama, the preservationist behind @JapaneseColonial on Instagram. Sources for this essay came from the books on this list of recommendations.
