At the end of December Xi Jinping’s People’s Liberation Army launched Justice Mission 2025, the latest and most comprehensive of eight large-scale military drills it has conducted around Taiwan since 2022. The drill mobilized large numbers of army troops, more than twenty navy and coast guard ships, Rocket Force missiles and artillery, and more than 130 military aircraft. Its goal appeared to be to warn Taiwan’s democratic government and people not to entertain any thoughts about independence. Earlier PRC military maneuvers around the island led Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, to caution that they “are not just exercises—they are dress rehearsals.”

When I first arrived in Taipei as a student in the 1960s, Taiwan was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and was under martial law. Chiang insisted that the Chinese mainland belonged to his Nationalist government, and he fully intended to “rescue his fellow countrymen” from Mao Zedong’s “Communist bandits.” Now Xi is aggressively insisting that Taiwan belongs to his People’s Republic of China and that if the Taiwanese people do not voluntarily submit, he reserves the right to use military force to compel “reunification.” As President Trump’s planned trip to Beijing in April approaches, a somber thought occurs: What if Trump were to agree that Taiwan is China’s business in return for a trade deal and Xi’s agreement to respect Trump’s pet interests, such as his “Donroe doctrine,” and to keep his distance from the Western Hemisphere?

Xi’s regime, like Mao’s before, may seem eternal. But it, too, shall pass. And if someday there is to be an alternative to the CCP’s crypto-Marxist-Leninist regime on the mainland, there are lessons to be gained from China’s failed Republican government during the 1930s and 1940s. Two excellent places to learn more about that interesting and not entirely unpromising period are Alexander Pantsov’s riveting biography of Chiang, Victorious in Defeat,and Xavier Paulès’s very informative The Republic of China. These studies are reminders that while Chiang had enormous flaws as a leader, something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his government were forced into exile on Taiwan by Japan’s invasion and Mao’s Communist revolution.

Near the Republic of China’s Presidential Office Building in Taipei stands the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Inside this enormous monument, capped with a traditional sloping blue tile roof, is a gigantic bronze statue of Chiang seated on a throne. His face is etched with a suggestion of a smile, and just above his head the characters 民主—democracy—are inscribed on the back wall.

Chiang led the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) from the mid-1920s as it struggled to govern China, which his mentor Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the KMT in 1894 and the Republic of China in 1912, once disparaged as a “dish of loose sand.” As civil war engulfed the country after World War II, inflation, corruption, military failure, political disorder, and economic collapse so crippled Chiang’s regime that in 1949 his Nationalist forces were defeated by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army and driven to Taiwan, where Chiang lived in exile until his death in 1975. Despite his vaunted pledge to someday “counterattack the mainland” and win a “final victory” over Mao, that much-heralded moment never came. It was an ignominious end for such an ambitious, proud leader.

On a recent visit to Taiwan, Chiang’s years leading China suddenly seemed relevant again. After all, it was under him that China had its last semblance of a government that aspired to be democratic. As I strolled around his memorial, I could not help but reflect on the time I’d spent studying in Taipei years before, when the cold war made it impossible for Americans to go to Beijing. Compared to the big-top revolution being ring-mastered by Mao just ninety miles across the strait, Taiwan felt like an irrelevant backwater. Mao had already launched his Anti-Rightist Campaign (in which more than half a million intellectuals were persecuted) and his Great Leap Forward (in which 30 to 40 million people starved to death); still to come was his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (in which millions more would be uprooted, persecuted, and even killed). Nonetheless the common perception then was that Chiang’s Nationalist regime had been corrupt, venal, and inept in governing the mainland, while Mao’s Communists, despite being dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, were viewed by many Chinese and foreigners as at least less crooked and more forward-looking.

By the early 1960s, the cachet of Chiang and China’s republican period seemed not only irrevocably tarnished but misbegotten. To say there was a triste air of defeat hanging over his exile would be an understatement. As a student in Taipei, I lived in a crowded dorm room at National Taiwan University with seven Chinese classmates. Because there were so few foreigners studying on the island at the time, I was invited on several occasions by the KMT’s youth arm—the China Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps—to visit Chiang. With invitation in hand, I’d bicycle down to his huge, gloomy Presidential Palace, built for Japanese governors during the colonial period, for my audience with the Generalissimo—“the Gi-Mo,” as he was known. These occasions were enacted with all the ritual formality due a president. Chiang had met Stalin, FDR, Churchill, and Nehru, and with his monk-like shaved head, clipped mustache, stylish uniforms, and elegant wife, he still had some residual presidential panache. But he also radiated the unmistakable air of a deposed potentate whom history was passing by. It did not help that he spoke only his native Ningbo dialect, which was largely unintelligible to me as a student of Mandarin.

Those of us who had been initiated into China studies at Harvard by the likes of John K. Fairbank and Benjamin Schwartz, whose views of the country had been forged during World War II, were inclined to view Chiang and his Nationalist Party as defeated has-beens. Moreover, since martial law was still in effect on Taiwan and Chiang was using autocratic tactics to subdue opposition voices, the island’s moniker, “Free China,” was less than convincing. Indeed, I was then so flushed with youthful idealism and opposed to Chiang’s heavy-handed rule that I wrote a letter to President Kennedy indignantly questioning how the US could continue giving military support to such an undemocratic regime.

Chiang was born in 1887 and grew up in Xikou, near Ningbo in China’s southern Zhejiang province. Pantsov tells us that Chiang loved Xikou so much that when he confronted trying times or on those not infrequent occasions when he impetuously quit official leadership positions, he would often return to Xikou to be with his mother and lick his wounds. “He not only loved his mother more than anyone else on earth,” writes Pantsov, “but considered her his closest friend.”

After receiving military training as a young man in both China and Japan, Chiang teamed up with Sun Yat-sen to promote republican government, build the Nationalist Party, and reunify China, which had fallen into disarray after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Less than a year after Sun died in 1925, Chiang assumed leadership of the Nationalist Party, which like the CCP was structured on a Leninist model with the aid of Soviet Comintern advisers. Although Chiang believed in republican governance, he also wanted to see China unified and strong, and that required a centralized, disciplined party structure.

In 1923 the Communists and Nationalists were pushed together into a “united front” by Stalin. However, Chiang quickly became so alarmed by the CCP’s continuing clandestine activities against him that in 1927 he launched a sudden attack, known as the White Terror, to destroy its underground organization in Shanghai. What was left of the Communist movement were rural remnants in the countryside where Mao and a few other true believers had been struggling to set up several “soviet zones.”

That same year Chiang married Soong Mei-ling, the sister of Sun Yat-sen’s wife, Soong Ching-ling, scions of the wealthy, cosmopolitan Shanghai banking family headed by their brother T.V. Soong. It was, Pantsov writes, “the biggest wedding Shanghai had ever witnessed.” Despite being something of a prima donna, Mei-ling was devoted to Chiang. “I lost my heart to him,” she fondly remembered. “This was my chance. Together with my husband I would work, not folding my arms, to make China stronger.” In his diary, Chiang elegiacally wrote, “When I saw my beloved wife slowly sailing into the hall like a cloud in the evening sky, I felt a surge of love such as I have never experienced before.” (It’s difficult to imagine Mao making such a heartfelt declaration about any of his quartet of wives.)

In the years that followed, Chiang only became more and more wary of the expanding Communist insurgency. “Chiang simply did not trust the Communists,” writes Pantsov, “and he could hardly be blamed for this.” “The villages through which they passed are drowning in blood,” Chiang warned in 1934. “They are destroying everyone, men and women, old people and children…. No one has done such things in the last two hundred years.” Three years later he again warned, “It is necessary to struggle resolutely and to the end against the inhumane theories of the Communist Party, the communists’ amoral way of life, and their anarchistic, anti-national isms.”

And by then Chiang’s campaigns “to eradicate the Communist bandits” were making real progress. With China largely unified and a vigorous program of national development underway, many felt that his Nanjing-based government was entering a “Golden Era.” But Japan’s full-scale invasion in 1937 soon dashed that dream. As the Nationalist government was forced to retreat to three consecutive capitals, Chiang was deeply mortified. To be bested by what he called “dwarfs”—a people he disdained as peripheral and inferior to the Chinese—was so embarrassing that the theme of avenging national humiliation repeatedly appears in his diaries.

After Pearl Harbor brought the US into World War II, Chiang, ever sensitive to condescension, felt no better about being bossed around by Americans. When FDR ordered him to hand over unrestricted command of his troops to the US general Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Chiang confided to his diary that “it not only was an insult to me personally, but also an act of aggression against my country.”

After Japan was finally defeated in 1945, Chiang’s forces were left to vie with Mao’s to reclaim the Chinese territory from which Japanese troops were withdrawing. But Washington was weary of war, and instead of joining his anti-Communist crusade, American leaders kept urging Chiang to collaborate with Mao, as if there were no irreconcilable differences between them. As early as 1944, in a meeting with W. Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to Moscow, Stalin blithely dismissed Maoists as “Margarine Communists” and chided Chiang for “committing an error in disputing over ideological questions rather than employing them against the Japanese.”

In Chiang’s view, such efforts to cooperate were “tantamount to drinking poison in the hopes of quenching one’s thirst.” With the civil war heating up, in 1945 President Truman dispatched General George Marshall to China and kept pushing Chiang to make some kind of peace with Mao. But Chiang had long since concluded that this was impossible. The Japanese, he claimed, were only “a disease of the skin,” while the Communists were “a disease of the heart.” He bitterly wrote in his diary of Marshall’s entreaties:

Marshall wholly fails to understand that they are absolutely insincere. The communist bandits are unrestrained, they howl like a pack of dogs….

Americans are easily deceived, it is not difficult to make fools of them. This is even true of such hardened warriors as Marshall.

Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, who had lived in the USSR for twelve years and married a Russian, gave his father advice about how to understand Stalin’s Comintern and its support for China’s Communist movement. The Americans “need to reexamine relations with Russia and the [Chinese] Communists. And do this promptly,” Chiang wrote to Marshall.

One should not engage in empty blathering with the Communists. Instead, gathering one’s strength, one must switch to active measures [so the] Communists and Russia can be defeated. Otherwise the United States will find it extremely difficult to maintain its preeminent authority in East Asia, which would undoubtedly lead to a Third World War.

Such a hard-line posture made Chiang seem rigid and extreme, especially to war-weary, well-meaning, if naive Americans who endlessly sought some sort of peaceful resolution to what was actually an irreconcilable conflict. So in retrospect it’s hard to fault Chiang’s more realistic assessment of Mao’s intentions. Even Pantsov ends up wondering if there was ever actually “a bloodless path from totalitarianism to democracy.”

Sitting in exile on Taiwan, Chiang was widely viewed as just one more failed autocrat. Many Americans had come to believe that he had not only “lost” China, but deserved to lose it. These views, Pantsov tells us, were largely formed by the reportage that came out of China during World War II and the Chinese Civil War, as foreign correspondents—many of whom were “inclined to the liberal or even leftist views that were widespread in America at that time”—became so disaffected by the corrupt and self-serving officials they encountered in the Nationalist regime that they turned against it. A similar sentiment also permeated US academic circles.

“The negative portrayal of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek became a conventional theme in Western historiography,” writes Pantsov. “In the early 1970s the well-known American scholar Lloyd Eastman [educated at Harvard by Fairbank] even branded Chiang a fascist.” Perhaps, but it may be more accurate to view him as a man of contradictions whose authoritarian impulses were sadly amplified by chaotic circumstances largely beyond his control.

Owen Lattimore, an American Sinophile who served as an adviser to Chiang in the 1940s, thought that he was “a great man.” However, he added, “he certainly was no saint, but neither was he a total villain.” He was “a man who was not only patriotic, but according to his own lights, revolutionary. He wanted to change Chinese society… half feudal and militaristic and half modern in his mentality.” Indeed, if there is a modern Asian leader worthy of having a tragedy written about his rise and fall by the likes of Sophocles or Shakespeare, it’s Chiang. For here was a man of lofty republican intentions, rigorous military training, and much ambition who was thwarted by a combination of fate and his own flaws.

So, asks Pantsov, “how should one draw up a balance sheet on Chiang?”

The answer can hardly be unidimensional. On the one hand, Chiang was a perfidious and cunning ruler who thirsted after unlimited power and was responsible for the deaths of more than 1.5 million innocent people. On the other hand, he was a great revolutionary, a fighter for the national liberation of his innocent people, a patriot, a leading political and military figure of the twentieth century, the architect of a new, republican China, a hero of the Second World War, and a faithful ally of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. He was simultaneously a Christian and a Confucian and dreamed of universal equality.

Yes, Chiang was a leader manqué, but he was certainly far less tyrannical and inhumane than his Marxist-Leninist counterparts. And yes, he had his weaknesses, but they were exacerbated by a geopolitical deck stacked heavily against him.

“The CCP, totally marginalized, was on the verge of being wiped out” by the mid-1930s, writes Paulès. “The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 rescued it.” Had Japan not invaded, it’s likely that Chiang would have defeated Mao and that China would have taken a quite different, non-Communist path. With the benefit of hindsight the republican period, once seen as having little relevance to present or future China, has been gaining a new luster. And for many scholars of my generation this revisionism is long overdue. As Paulès counsels, “It is no longer legitimate to read the whole period in the light of the CCP’s ultimate victory.” After Chiang’s death, the fact that his son Chiang Ching-kuo not only succeeded him but facilitated Taiwan’s transition from autocracy to democracy, while the mainland has become more authoritarian under Xi Jinping, has also helped burnish the Chiang legacy.

One reason for such reassessments is the diaries that Chiang religiously kept from 1917 to 1972, which have been available to scholars at Stanford’s Hoover Institution archive since 2005. More than any other source, they’ve helped to humanize Chiang by illuminating him as both a private person and a public leader. In them we meet an immensely proud man who took umbrage easily. But we also meet someone who was surprisingly self-reflective and cared deeply about China’s fate, his Confucian rectitude, and his devout Christian faith, acquired from his Methodist wife. Chiang emerges from his diaries not so much as one more “big leader” bullying his way to the top, but as a well-intentioned, fallible man struggling to lead a disunified country during an extremely challenging time. He was also a deeply emotional man who had difficulty controlling his feelings, especially when he felt insulted or humiliated. A characteristic entry as early as 1923 suggests how he was constantly wrestling with himself:

My parents wanted me to become a perfect person…. But even now I am a small child, in the grip of wicked passions…. Who apart from Sun Yat-sen treats me with sincerity?… Those whom I once trusted are no longer deserving of trust. In all things under Heaven one must rely only on oneself.

In search of equanimity, he prayed daily, read the Bible, meditated, did calisthenics, and even washed in cold water to maintain discipline.

Paulès and Pantsov not only present Chiang in a new light but remind us that as more and more Chinese go into voluntary exile to live in a more open society, China’s twentieth-century interregnum of republican experimentation may point the way to its rebirth someday as a more just, humane, and cosmopolitan country under a less autocratic form of governance. Should that happen, the trials Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek endured may provide useful lessons. For it was the last time China openly dreamed of a constitutional republic and actually wrestled with the contending forces of democracy and autocracy. That experiment is now being dismissed, even suppressed, by CCP rulers who view it not only as a failure but as an ineffective and inappropriate form of government for the Chinese people. However, these two books remind us that leaders come and go and that Xi is no more eternal than Chiang or Mao.

Paulès urges us to remember that the republican period had

a coherence, which emerges in the political field: it was a time when a Western-style parliamentary democracy was a possibility. In this sense the use of the term ‘republican’ to designate it…is fully justified.

Pantsov insists that Chiang never lost his fundamental urge toward republican democracy. Moreover, he writes, Chiang “drew lessons from the defeat on the mainland and laid the social, economic, and cultural-ethical foundations on Taiwan for its current democracy.”

While the republican experiment ultimately failed on the Chinese mainland during the twentieth century because of Communist and Japanese military challenges, it has gained a new life on Taiwan in the twenty-first century, even as that island democracy has come under increasingly grave threat. Whatever may happen during the months ahead, Taiwan has shown that the Chinese people and their political culture can, in fact, give rise not just to “wealth and power” but also to a more democratic and enlightened form of governance. In this sense, Pantsov’s title, Victorious in Defeat, not only harkens back to Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek’s republican period but may help prefigure what a very different China might look like someday, even though that future is presently difficult to imagine. But then, during the Mao era it was difficult to imagine Deng Xiaoping’s surprisingly hopeful era of “reform and opening” that followed Mao’s death in 1976.