发新话题
打印【有6个人次参与评价】

纽约时报对宋美龄一生的回顾

纽约时报对宋美龄一生的回顾

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/2 ... G.html?pagewanted=1

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a Power in Husband’s China and Abroad, Dies at 105
By SETH FAISON
Published: October 24, 2003

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a pivotal figure in one of the 20th century's great epics — the struggle for control of post-imperial China waged between the Nationalists and the Communists during the Japanese invasion and the violent aftermath of World War II — died on Thursday in Manhattan, the Foreign Ministry of Taiwan reported yesterday. She was 105.

Madame Chiang, a dazzling and imperious politician, wielded immense influence in Nationalist China, but she and her husband were eventually forced by the Communist victory into exile in Taiwan, where she presided as the grande dame of Nationalist politics for many years. After Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, she retreated to New York City, where she spent the rest of her life.

But her old influence overseas was matched, and perhaps exceeded, by the relentless and sophisticated lobbying effort she and her husband set up in Washington, through which they distributed uncounted millions through law firms and public relations companies to promote Taiwan's cause and maintain recognition by the American government.

During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband blamed the United States for the Nationalists' loss of China, and continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland. Although that hope eventually faded, American support for Taiwan remained strong for years, delaying Washington's recognition of Beijing as the capital of China until 1979, three decades after the Communists seized power.

As a fluent English speaker, as a Christian, as a model of what many Americans hoped China to become, Madame Chiang struck a chord with American audiences as she traveled across the country, starting in the 1930's, raising money and lobbying for support of her husband's government. She seemed to many Americans to be the very symbol of the modern, educated, pro-American China they yearned to see emerge — even as many Chinese dismissed her as a corrupt, power-hungry symbol of the past they wanted to escape.

Ultimately, that difference in perspectives was perhaps one reason that she fled an increasingly democratic Taiwan, where many people reviled her and where she felt less at home as native Taiwanese eclipsed the exiled mainlanders.

Madame Chiang was the most famous member of one of modern China's most remarkable families, the Soongs, who dominated Chinese politics and finance in the first half of the 20th century. Yet in China it was her American background and style that distinguished Soong Mei-ling; that was her maiden name, sometimes spelled May-ling.

For many Americans, her finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.

She helped create American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist government's propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuverings of her husband, who was uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warlords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.

A devout Christian, Madame Chiang spoke fluent English tinted with the Southern accent she acquired as a schoolgirl in Georgia, and she presented a civilized and humane image of a courageous China battling Japanese invasion and Communist subversion. Yet historians have documented the murderous path that Chiang Kai-shek led in his efforts to win, then keep, and ultimately lose power. It also became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.

Madame Chiang had a notoriously tempestuous relationship with her husband, and then with his son by a previous marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo, who became Taiwan's leader after Chiang Kai-shek's death. She had no children.

Her skill as a politician, alternately charming and vicious, made her a formidable presence. She made a play for Taiwan's leadership after Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, even though she was 90 and living in New York.

Although she suffered numerous ailments, including breast cancer, she outlived all her contemporary rivals. She was said to credit her religious faith — she told friends she rose at dawn for an hour of prayer each day — for her good health.

Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, who worked closely with her when he commanded American forces in China during the war, described Madame Chiang in his diary as a "clever, brainy woman."

"Direct, forceful, energetic," he wrote. "Loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. Can turn on charm at will and knows it."

Soong Mei-ling's rise to power began when she married Chiang in an opulent ceremony in Shanghai in 1927, bringing together China's star military man with one of the nation's most illustrious families.

Her eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling, directed the family's affairs and innumerable money-making ventures with the help of her husband, H. H. Kung, a scion of one of China's wealthiest banking families.

Madame Chiang's second sister, Soong Qing-ling, was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president after the last emperor was toppled in 1911. After Sun's death, Soong Qing-ling carried his banner over into the Communist camp, causing an irreparable rupture in the family.

When the vanquished Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Soong Qing-ling stayed behind. The Communist Party leadership called her the only true patriot in the Soong family, and appointed her honorary chairman of the People's Republic in 1980, a year before her death.

A Telling Ditty

Today, Chinese still remember the three sisters with a telling ditty: "One loved money, one loved power, one loved China," referring respectively to Ai-ling, Mei-ling and Qing-ling.

Madame Chiang's elder brother, T. V. Soong, often called Nationalist China's financial wizard, served at various times as finance minister, acting prime minister and foreign minister, where his primary role was raising money from America.

Although Madame Chiang developed a stellar image with the American public, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders became disillusioned with her and her husband's despotic and corrupt practices. Eleanor Roosevelt was shocked at her answer when asked at a dinner at the White House how the Chinese government would handle a strike by coal miners. Madame Chiang silently drew a sharp fingernail across her neck.

"She can talk beautifully about democracy," Mrs. Roosevelt said later. "But she does not know how to live democracy."

By the end of the war, the loyalty of Nationalist officials melted away as the government grew corrupt and fiscally traitorous, printing money so aggressively that the Chinese currency fell to an exchange rate of several million yuan to the dollar. Many Nationalist soldiers were reduced to begging for food because they went unpaid, yet American diplomats discovered that military supplies sent from the United States to China sometimes appeared on the black market soon after arrival.

During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland, although That hope eventually faded.

In New York, Madame Chiang lived in an apartment on Gracie Square in Manhattan. In March 1999, as she turned 101, hard of hearing but still quick-witted, she told visitors that she read the Bible and The New York Times every day.

The Soong family's saga, cutting across many strands of modern Chinese history, began when Madame Chiang's father, Charlie Soong, sailed to the United States at the age of 12. Coming from a family of traders in Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Mr. Soong was taken in by Methodists in North Carolina who converted him to Christianity in hopes of sending him back to spread the word of Jesus in China.

After returning to Shanghai in 1886, Mr. Soong, a genial wheeler-dealer, passed up missionary life to start a business printing Bibles, earning a fortune. He also printed political pamphlets secretly for Sun Yat-sen, then working to overthrow China's last emperor. On Jan. 1, 1912, Sun became China's first president.

Sun lasted in office only a few months before his coalition disintegrated, and after he fled to Japan, he hired Mr. Soong's second daughter, Soong Qing-ling, as a secretary. They soon married, despite the age difference: he was 50 and she was 21.

Educated in America

Mei-ling Soong was born in Shanghai on March 5, 1898, although some references give 1897 as the year because Chinese usually consider everyone to be one year old at birth. At the age of 10, she had followed her elder sisters to the Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Ga.

She entered Wellesley College near Boston in 1913; her brother, T. V., was enrolled at Harvard. She majored in English literature, and was remembered by her classmates as a chubby, vivacious and determined student. She graduated in 1917 and returned to Shanghai speaking English better than Chinese.

She was introduced to her future husband in 1922. By that time, she had matured into a slender beauty and taken to wearing full-length, body-hugging gowns.

Chiang Kai-shek, a severe-looking military aide to Sun who established a school for officers in southern China, may have been as attracted to the Soongs' financial and political connections as he was to their youngest daughter. His initial overtures to her were rebuffed, and after Sun's death in 1925, as Chiang took the title generalissimo and tried to succeed him as the leader of the Nationalist cause, he proposed to Sun's young widow, Soong Qing-ling. She said no.

Chiang allied himself with warlords in southern and central China and with the Soviet Union, where Stalin regarded the Nationalists as more progressive than the warlords who still controlled Beijing and northern China. Communist rebels, not yet led by Mao Zedong, felt they deserved Moscow's support. But Stalin insisted on supporting the Nationalists.

In 1927, Chiang shocked his Soviet backers by carrying out a massacre of leftists in Shanghai. Edgar Snow, the American journalist, estimated that Chiang's forces had executed more than 5,000 people.

The massacre caused a permanent rent in the Soong family. Soong Qing-ling, as Sun's widow, led a faction of Nationalists who voted to expel Chiang from all his posts. T. V. Soong resigned as finance minister, though he was later persuaded to resume his alliance with Chiang.

When Chiang renewed his interest in Soong Mei-ling in 1927, she told him that she would consent to marry only if he could win the approval of her mother, who had reservations about a man who was neither Christian nor single. Chiang had already fathered a son in a marriage that was arranged when he was only 14, and had adopted a second son and married a second wife, Chen Chieh-ru. Chiang promised to convert, and eventually sent Chen away to the United States, where she enrolled at Columbia University and earned a doctorate.

The Chiang-Soong wedding took place in Shanghai on Dec. 1, 1927. A small Christian ceremony was held at the Soong mansion on Seymour Road, followed by a political ceremony at the Majestic Hotel, beneath a portrait of Sun.

As a political partner to her husband, Madame Chiang developed what she called the New Life Movement, a series of principles for modernizing China through social discipline, courtesy and service. She engineered public hygiene campaigns and denounced traditional superstitions.

While many ordinary Chinese resisted it, the campaign was popular with foreigners, particularly with Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, who was born to missionaries in China. A longtime supporter of the Chiangs, Luce named the couple "Man and Woman of the Year" in 1938.

During the war with the Japanese, Madame Chiang pushed her husband to build up the Nationalist air force, and helped hire Claire Chennault, who commanded a mercenary force of pilots that came to be known as the Flying Tigers.

During World War II, the relationship between General Stilwell, Chiang and Madame Chiang proved contentious. The general accused Chiang of hoarding resources, deliberately avoiding battle with the Japanese to spare his men to fight the Communists.

Madame Chiang was in the middle, sometimes interceding on General Stilwell's behalf when resisting him threatened American support. But she also plotted against the general, telling journalists that he was incompetent. She and her husband lobbied Washington to have him replaced, and he was, in 1944.

After Japan was defeated in 1945 and the civil war between Nationalists and Communists accelerated, the Communists swiftly expanded their control into the northeast.

The governing Nationalists received considerable American aid, but American officials in China warned of vast amounts of graft among Nationalists. More than $3 billion was appropriated to China during the war, and most of it was transmitted through T. V. Soong, who as China's foreign minister was based in Washington. It later became apparent that the Soong family suffered vicious infighting over the purloined funds.

Madame Chiang traveled to Washington again in November 1948 to plead for emergency aid for the war against the Communists. Yet Congress had recently assigned $1 billion more to China, and President Truman was impatient with the Chiangs and what had become an apparently hopeless effort to shore up the Nationalist government. Madame Chiang never returned to China.

"I can ask the American people for nothing more," she said. "It is either in your hearts to love us, or your hearts have been turned from us."

In her frustration, she publicly likened American politics to "clodhopping boorishness." Coming after years of generous American support, that irritated Truman.

"They're thieves, every damn one of them," Truman said later, referring to Nationalist leaders. "They stole $750 million out of the billions that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it's invested in real estate down in São Paolo and some right here in New York."


General Chiang resigned as president of Nationalist China in January 1949 and fled to Taiwan that May, taking with him a national art collection that was kept in crates in Taiwan for years as the Chiangs clung to the ever-diminishing hope that they would some day take it back to Beijing.

Over the years, Madame Chiang's health wavered, and in 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy, and later, a second one.

Her Final Years

Even after she moved to permanent residence in New York, she kept her finger on the pulse of Nationalist politics. She returned to Taiwan after her stepson died in January 1988. Even though she was nearly 90, she tried to rally her old allies. But Lee Teng-hui, chosen as vice president both because he was Taiwan-born and because he was considered a pushover by fellow Nationalists, proved more adept at politics than expected, and he gradually solidified his control.

Madame Chiang lived out her final years in New York, with a pack of black-suited bodyguards who cleared the lobby of her Gracie Square apartment building every time she entered or left. She returned to Congress for one last appearance in 1995.

Until this year, Madame Chiang maintained an annual tradition of receiving a few friends at her Manhattan apartment on her birthday. But this year, she came down with pneumonia, and was was unable to do that, the local Chinese press reported.

Her last public appearance was believed to be in January 2000, when she attended an exhibition of her watercolor paintings of traditional Chinese landscapes at the Queens headquarters of the World Journal, a prominent local Chinese newspaper. She was in a wheelchair, but was reported to be in good spirits, telling people there that she was very happy that day.

[ 本帖最后由 adamyu 于 2012-11-13 18:51 编辑 ].

TOP

一个爱钱, 一个爱权, 一个爱中国
精辟!.

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

回复 6楼伊万豆夫 的帖子

宋庆龄是最苦的一个, 早年不懂成了共产国际的间谍。她后悔留在了大陆。 和许多民主人士一样感觉到上当受骗。 文革中她想走,宋家准备好派人接了, 毛也批了, 周恩来不放她走。 最后死前在她不愿意的情况下, 被入党。 历史公平, 许多劣迹都会被揭露的。.

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

回复 8楼伊万豆夫 的帖子

唉,勿同阶层,想法大大勿同啊~.

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

提示: 该帖被自动屏蔽

TOP

我只想说宋庆龄好美,尤其是她的眼睛,清澈极了。.

TOP

确是老二最美.

TOP

回复 7楼rainbow123 的帖子

到底怎么回事啊?百度上都是周恩来如何保护宋庆龄如何修缮宋氏墓穴的。.

TOP

回复 16楼kecy 的帖子

可是周不让她离开大陆, 因为影响太大了, 据说人都到了香港。 期间我方还向宋家索取巨额保证金, 孔家答应付了。百度上有的。宋在晚年给中央毛写信, 是她的高贵人格在历史中留下一笔, 没有人敢销毁这些信。 她是个值得尊敬的人。

[ 本帖最后由 rainbow123 于 2012-11-26 19:38 编辑 ].

TOP

回复 17楼rainbow123 的帖子

1955年认为宋庆龄是“要代表资本家说话”的毛泽东,1959年反对宋出任国家副主席时即认定宋是“民主革命时期的同路人,在社会主义革命时期,她和我们就走不到一起了。从不赞成我们的方针路线到反对我们的方针路线。我们同她是不同阶级”。此时,他已容不得宋庆龄:“她不愿意看到今天的变化,可以到海峡对岸,可以去香港,去外国,我不挽留。”宋庆龄的答复是:“是否嫌我还在?我的一生还是要在这块土地上,走完最后几步。”“我不想作政治上的点缀。”这个回答明确坚定,毫不含糊,使下逐客令者无可奈何。宋庆龄推掉要她出面充当“点缀”的一些活动,却执意带病到八宝山参加陈毅元帅的追悼会。陈毅是中共高级领导人中敢于公开反对“文革”及其发动者的一位大勇者,宋庆龄说:“我深深地敬仰他,因为他是一个胆识过人,具有真诚性格的人。”周恩来在“文革”中遭受几人帮的残酷迫害,对宋庆龄等党外人士备加关照保护。周恩来逝世后,宋庆龄给予高度评价:“他将被历史学家公认为中国这个最重要的国度里最具伟大人格魅力的人。”
http://news.ifeng.com/history/zh ... 08/17452786_1.shtml.

TOP

发新话题