Chiang Kai-shek, also known as Chiang Chung-cheng and romanized via Mandarin as Chiang Chieh-shih and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese Nationalist politician, revolutionary and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China between 1928 and 1975, first in mainland China until 1949 and then in Taiwan until his death.
Chang Hsüeh-liang, also romanized as Zhang Xueliang, nicknamed the "Young Marshal" (少帥), known in his later life as Peter H. L. Chang, was the effective ruler of Northeast China and much of northern China after the assassination of his father, Zhang Zuolin, by the Japanese on 4 June 1928. He was an instigator of the 1936 Xi'an Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of China's ruling party, was arrested in order to force him to enter into a truce with the insurgent Communist Party of China and form a united front against Japan, which had occupied Manchuria. As a result, he spent over 50 years under house arrest, first in mainland China and then in Taiwan. He is regarded by the Communist Party of China as a patriotic hero for his role in the Xi'an Incident. He was also known for having an affair with Edda Mussolini.
The Chinese Civil War was a civil war in China fought between the Kuomintang (KMT)-led government of the Republic of China (ROC) and forces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lasting intermittently between 1927 and 1949. The war is generally divided into two phases with an interlude: from August 1927 to 1937, the KMT-CCP Alliance collapsed during the Northern Expedition, and the Nationalists controlled most of China. From 1937 to 1945, hostilities were put on hold, and the Second United Front fought the Japanese invasion of China with eventual help from the Allies of World War II. The civil war resumed with the Japanese defeat, and the CCP gained the upper hand in the final phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution.
Chiang Ching-kuo was a politician of the Republic of China after its retreat to Taiwan. The eldest and only biological son of former president Chiang Kai-shek, he held numerous posts in the government of the Republic of China. He served as Premier of the Republic of China between 1972 and 1978, and was the President of the Republic of China from 1978 until his death in 1988.
Zhu De was a Chinese general, military strategist, politician, revolutionary of the Chinese Communist Party. Born poor in 1886 in Sichuan, he was adopted by a wealthy uncle at age nine. His wealthy uncle provided him a superior early education that led to his admission into a military academy. After the academy, he joined a rebel army and soon became a warlord. It was after this period that he adopted communism. He ascended through the ranks of the Chinese Red Army as it closed in on securing the nation. By the time China was under Mao's control, Zhu was a high-ranking official within the Chinese Communist Party. He served as commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1955 he became one of the ten marshals of the People's Liberation Army, of which he is regarded as one of the principal founders. Zhu remained a prominent political figure until his death in 1976. As the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress from 1975 to 1976, Zhu was the head of state of the People's Republic of China.
The Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) was established in November 1931 by future Communist Party of China leader Mao Zedong, General Zhu De and others, and it lasted until 1937.
Fu Zuoyi was a Chinese military leader. He began his military career in the service of Yan Xishan, and he was widely praised for his defense of Suiyuan from the Japanese. During the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, Fu surrendered the large and strategic garrison around Beiping to Communist forces. He later served in the government of the People's Republic of China as Minister of the Hydraulic Ministry.
Edgar Parks Snow was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He was the first western journalist to give a full account of the history of the Chinese Communist Party following the Long March, and he was also the first western journalist to interview many of its leaders, including Mao Zedong. He is best known for his book, Red Star Over China (1937), an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.
Patrick Jay Hurley was an American politician and diplomat. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to 1933, but is best remembered for being Ambassador to China in 1945, during which he was instrumental in getting Joseph Stilwell recalled from China and replaced with the more diplomatic General Albert Coady Wedemeyer. A man of humble origins, Hurley's lack of what was considered to be a proper ambassadorial demeanor and mode of social interaction made professional diplomats scornful of him. He came to share pre-eminent army strategist Wedemeyer's view that the Communists could be defeated and America ought to commit to doing so even if it meant backing the Kuomintang Party and Chiang Kai-shek to the hilt. Frustrated, Hurley resigned as Ambassador to China in 1945, and publicised his concerns about high-ranking members of the State department, alleging they believed that the Chinese communists were not totalitarians and the United States priority was to avoid allying with a losing side in the civil war.
Agnes Smedley was an American journalist, writer, and activist who supported the Chinese Communist Revolution. Raised in a poverty-stricken miner's family in Missouri and Colorado, she dramatized the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929).
Zhang Zhizhong or Chang Chih-chung was a Chinese military commander and politician, general in the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China and later a pro-Communist politician in the People's Republic of China.
The Second United Front was the alliance between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to resist the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which suspended the Chinese Civil War from 1937 to 1941.
The Soong Sisters is a 1997 Hong Kong historical drama film based on the lives of the Soong sisters from 1911 to 1949. The three sisters married the most important historical figures – Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and K'ung Hsiang-hsi – in the founding of the Republic of China, making their family the focal point of every major decision made in modern Chinese history. Directed by Mabel Cheung, the film starred Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh and Vivian Wu as the sisters. The screenplay was written by Mabel Cheung's husband, Alex Law, whom she frequently collaborates with.
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 is a work of history written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published in 1971 by Macmillan Publishers. It won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book was republished in 2001 by Grove Press It was also published under the title Sand Against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 by Macmillan Publishers in 1970.
The Crippled Tree is a history and biography by Han Suyin. It covers the years 1885 to 1928, beginning with the life of her father, a Belgium-educated Chinese engineer of Hakka heritage, from a family of minor gentry in Sichuan. It describes how he met and married her mother, a Flemish Belgian, his return to China and her own birth and early life..
The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China is a 2009 biography of Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader and President of the Republic of China Chiang Kai-shek written by Hannah Pakula. The book was widely reviewed as extensively researched and strongly put forward the argument that Madame Chiang and her husband have not been given the credit they deserve in shaping the modern Chinese nation. It has been translated into Chinese in two editions, one in Taiwan and one in Beijing, both by the same translator.
China's Red Army Marches (1934) is a book of reportage by American radical journalist Agnes Smedley on the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi from 1928 to 1931, It describes a stage in the Chinese Communist Revolution after the break-up of the First United Front with the Chinese Nationalist Party and before the Long March of 1934-1935, a stage in which the party followed a radical land and class policy. The book deals with events up to 1931 and cannot anticipate the destruction of the Jiangxi Soviet and the subsequent Long March. It does have detailed accounts of the words and actions of Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong, whose name is transcribed as 'Mau Tse-tung'. It includes a full speech by Mao and some shorter remarks, perhaps the first time his words had appeared in English.
After World War II, Hu Zongnan battled the Communist Party of China and in the early stage of the struggle, was successful in the Battle of Yan'an capturing Yan'an, the capital of the communist base in Shaanxi.
Hu Lanqi, also spelled Hu Lanxi, was a Chinese writer and military leader. She joined the National Revolutionary Army in 1927 and the Chinese branch of the Communist Party of Germany in 1930. She was imprisoned by Nazi Germany in 1933 and wrote an influential memoir of her experience, for which she was invited by Maxim Gorky to meet him in Moscow. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, she organized a team of women soldiers to resist the Japanese invasion, and became the first woman to be awarded the rank of Major General by the Republic of China. She supported the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, but was persecuted in Mao Zedong's political campaigns following the Communist victory in China. She survived the Cultural Revolution to see her political rehabilitation, and published a detailed memoir of her life in the 1980s.
The retreat of the Government of the Republic of China to Taiwan, also known as the Kuomintang's retreat to Taiwan, or "The Great Retreat", refers to the exodus of the remnants of the internationally recognized Kuomintang-ruled government of the Republic of China (ROC) to the island of Taiwan (Formosa) in December 1949 toward the end of active battles in the Chinese Civil War. The Kuomintang, its officers, and approximately 2 million ROC troops took part in the retreat, in addition to many civilians and refugees, fleeing the advance of the Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army.
