Jay Taylor's revisionist work is based extensively on Chiang Kai-shek's diary. Its strength lies in its grappling with the complexity of a man who cried easily, yet who “ordered or permitted” mass killings in Taiwan in 1947, “actions that amounted to staggering moral blindness or turpitude” (p. 591). Surely, if Chiang had been forthright in his diary, we would know whether he ordered or permitted the Taiwan “carnage” (p. 371). But nothing on the killings in Chiang's diary says other than that he thought the episode originated in what was “likely a Communist plot” (p. 370).

When a public figure writes a diary knowing that it will almost certainly become public, he obviously has complete discretion over what he wishes to include and how he shapes his image and the realities with which he dealt. Revealingly, in his diary, Chiang did not comment on the 1947 Taiwan killings, on the anti-Communist purge of the late 1920s, on the assassinations of high-profile dissidents (in the 1930s, Yang Quan and Shi Liangcai, and in the 1940s, Li Gongpu and Wen Yiduo), and on the 1938 blasting open (without warning) of the Yellow River dikes, producing a flood that drowned 300,000 to 800,000 or more of his countrymen and left more than 2 million homeless. There is also the less ponderous but nevertheless troubling matter of the more than 100 redactions in the diary from 1918 to 1922, about which the author says an unidentified family member “stated categorically” that only personal material was excised (p. 31).

A key (and unanswerable) issue here is to what extent Chiang's diary shaped or shaded the interpretation of events, developments, and personalities in this book. The most important revisionist interpretation, in my opinion, is the role of Joseph Stalin in Chinese affairs. Taylor says flatly that the Soviets played the “essential role in Mao's remarkable triumph” (p. 415). Taylor argues that Stalin called the shots in the evacuation of the Jiangxi Soviet, sent huge sums of money to Mao in Yan'an, directed Mao's actions in the aftermath of World War II, and was the key figure pressuring Mao to enter the Korean War. With these arguments, we have to adjust the heretofore “standard” interpretation of the relationship between Mao and Moscow: that Mao came to power without substantial help or direction from the Soviet Union. But it is well known that Chiang consistently viewed the Soviet Union as the overweening bête noire; the People's Republic was simply “its satellite” (p. 490). The nagging question, then, is, if seen through the lenses of Chiang's diaries, is (or how much is) Stalin's role magnified here?

Despite acknowledging Chiang's many flaws, the author paints in stark shades of black and white, with Chiang in white (except for his treatment of the Taiwanese in the 1940s and 1950s) and his opponents in black. When Chiang might have been linked to nefarious acts (the assassinations of Yang Quan, Shi Liangcai, Li Gongpu, and Wen Yiduo; the attempted assassination of Wang Jingwei; and the wartime burning of Changsha, to name only a few), the conclusion is that Chiang “may” have been or “perhaps” was involved, but that he “probably” was not involved or that it was “unlikely” that he was involved. In his treatment of dissent, “Chiang was capable of ordering hundreds of assassinations and kidnappings … and perhaps he did. But the evidence is not clear” (p. 105).

The sting of Chiang's actions is often downplayed. Zhang Xueliang's half-century house imprisonment was a “boring (but not unpleasant) experience” (p. 141); can any such lengthy confining prison sentence in whatever abode ever really be “not unpleasant”? After blowing up the dikes of the Yellow River, Chiang showed no remorse: “He spent little time expressing sympathy for human suffering, but few leaders in the great war did” (p. 155; emphasis added). Prices at the end of 1941 were twenty times higher than before the war: “a high figure but low considering the … circumstances” (p. 184); most suffering consumers would probably not have “considered the circumstances.”

It is in the Chiang-Stilwell controversy that black and white appear most starkly. In Taylor's eyes (as in Chiang's diary), Joseph Stilwell had few redeeming qualities. For Stilwell, he says, “life was categorical, nuances nonexistent” (p. 192). Stilwell is depicted here as unqualified, vindictive, wrong-headed, and mean-spirited. Foreign service officers John Paton Davies and John Service, also critics of Chiang, had similar “black and white views of Chinese politics, … curiously devoid of perspective or nuance” (p. 220). Ironically, in his treatment of these relationships, the author's interpretation borders on being similarly “nuance-less.” In the end, though I would have wished for more nuanced analyses in places, Taylor has provided the first well-researched, serious biographical study of Chiang. Future studies must begin with this important book.