Was Chiang a Fascist?

In response to:

China’s Leader Manqué from the March 26, 2026 issue

To the Editors:

Orville Schell’s whitewashing of Chiang Kai-shek, as though he was merely a well-meaning patriot whose character flaws “were sadly amplified by chaotic circumstances largely beyond his control” [“China’s Leader Manqué,” NYR, March 26], demands a response. Lloyd Eastman is by no means the only serious historian who has accused Chiang of fascism. If Chiang himself was careful about using such language, publications sponsored by the Kuomintang party in the 1930s openly adopted the term “fascism” (for example, Qiantu 前途 and Shehui xinwen 社會新聞). As for being “a faithful ally of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition”: this did not happen until well after the Nazi alliance with Japan. Before that, Chiang had been a great admirer and indeed benefited from cordial relations with the Nazi government. But the strongest indictment of Chiang is that, under his rule on both the Mainland and in Taiwan, there were never free and fair elections. His motto was “political tutelage” (xunzheng 訓政), a phrase self-servingly borrowed from Sun Yat-sen and based on the premise that China was not yet ready for democracy. Meaningful steps toward democratic reform were not taken until the 1990s. If Chiang was not a fascist, he was an unrepentant fascist-inspired dictator.

Paul R. Goldin
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

When I went from Harvard to Taipei as a young swain in the early 1960s to live under martial law imposed by Chiang Kai-shek, I, too, viewed him as an unreconstructed autocrat, if not an outright “fascist.” In my review, the point I wanted to make was not that he had no “fascistic” tendencies but that he was a conflicted leader, an avatar of republican democracy in principle who failed in practice largely because he was beset by a brutal Japanese occupation, a relentless Communist insurgency, and his yearning to see China unified and strong. And the glue for that strength was nationalism and Leninist-style party control, as it had been for his mentor Sun Yat-sen.

However, as I’ve read more on Chiang and the republican period, I’ve come to see that he was not completely bereft of a moral compass like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Instead, he was a deeply complicated and fraught, if autocratic, leader who also possessed many “unfascistic” tendencies, such as Confucianism, Christianity, cosmopolitanism, republicanism, and even democracy. In his diaries we see a man constantly wrestling with himself, struggles that for me make him more what we might call an “ambiguous fascist.”