Chiang Kai-shek's Politics of Shame by Grace C. Huang examines Chiang Kai-shek's leadership as evidenced by a compilation of his writings and speeches filtered through his personal secretaries’ selection and rewording. Huang focuses on the idea of shame (chi) that seemed to permeate Chiang's body of works in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting it as a central focus of Chiang's political rhetoric that he used to rally people behind some of his most unpopular decisions in the Second Sino-Japanese War. This monograph contributes to a growing body of work seeking to complicate the traditional histories of Chiang Kai-shek's role in twentieth-century China that branded Chiang as an incompetent leader because of his loss of the mainland. Offering a counternarrative, Huang argues that Chiang “was able to use potent cultural tools to inspire his country, persuade posterity of the rightness of his actions, and ultimately shape China's modern national identity in ways that continue to have repercussions today” (p. 5).
Chiang Kai-shek's Politics of Shame is divided into two parts of four chapters and two chapters, respectively. Part one, “Agency” (chapters 1–4), examines Chiang Kai-shek's ability to create viable historical narratives based on shared cultural understandings to legitimate his policies to different audiences. Part two, “Structure” (chapters 5 and 6), discusses how political, social, and economic institutions constrained Chiang's agency.
Chapter 1 introduces Chiang's three secretaries and their varied contributions to creating Chiang's political persona and a collective story featuring shame as a source of strength. The next chapter provides insights into the 1928 Jinan Incident that challenged Chiang's leadership. When conflict broke out between the Japanese and Nationalist troops in Jinan, Shandong, and Japanese troops drove Chiang's army out of the city, Chiang resorted to the rhetoric of enduring humiliation to not engage in war, to reassure his supporters of victory in the future, and to cultivate political stratagems through his diary entries. Chapter 3 examines Chiang's similar response during the Mukden Incident in 1931. Huang demonstrates that although Chiang appeared to be “the inverse of an inspiration leader,” he nonetheless secured his status within the Nationalist Party and increased China's favorability in the eye of the international community (p. 78). The following chapter covers the New Life Movement in 1934, during which Chiang offered “a vision of a national identity” by highlighting the country's weakness to the citizenry and urging them to develop civic-mindedness and patriotism (p. 105).
Chapter 5 emphasizes how Chiang Kai-shek's humiliation narrative sets him apart from other Chinese leaders such as Yuan Shikai and Mao Zedong. The final chapter examines Chiang Kai-shek in relation with Mohandas K. Gandhi to illustrate how leaders resorted to certain political rhetoric to confront strong states and build up nationalism. In the volume's conclusion, Huang brings the narrative up to the present by discussing Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping and Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek.
As indicated by the title, the book focuses on the discussion of shame in Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. As a Confucian concept, shame resonates as a source of resilience, strength, and motivation among Chinese audience. Huang traces the “original shame” back to the story of Goujian, the king of Yue who endured humiliation in order to defeat Fuchai, the king of Wu in the fifth century BCE.Footnote 1 Chiang mobilized the Goujian story, which was part of the cultural repertoire in China at the turn of the twentieth century, to justify his policies toward Japan and to implement societal changes with the New Life Movement. Huang argues that under Chiang's leadership, China was able to buy some time and became stronger when it engaged in war with the Japanese Army in 1937.
Huang relies almost entirely on Chiang Kai-shek's shilüe gaoben, a draft biography of Chiang's responding to the events of the day, implementing his action in the speeches and telegrams, and reflecting later in the diary. Readers get a glimpse into the inner workings of the personal secretaries who supposedly followed the objective truth while at the same time tried to make Chiang look good to posterity. Although other scholars have made use of shilüe gaoben, Huang provides a much-needed contextualization of this source. Furthermore, addressing the suspicion of its authenticity, Huang convincingly discusses it within the tradition of Chinese history writing. By using the shilüe gaoben, Huang approaches Chiang's leadership from the perspective of Chinese culture—a “China-centered” approach championed by Paul Cohen.
Although Huang offers a nuanced account of Chiang's leadership, her take on Chiang's legacy being more influential in the People's Republic of China (PRC) than in the Republic of China (Taiwan) is up for debate. Huang maintains that Chiang's narrative of shame has shaped the PRC's national identity, leading to a hypersensitivity to any perceived humiliation and influencing the PRC's diplomacy with Japan, the United States, and Taiwan. Huang asserts that Chiang's “politics of shame,” which includes putting the blame on foreign powers for China's problems and offering state-led approaches to solving said problems, was mobilized by Jiang Zemin to rebuild China's collective identity after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and by Xi Jinping to implement his ultranationalist and moralistic agenda. I think it is difficult to prove that Jiang “adopted Chiang's strategy of magnifying perceived humiliations to promote patriotism” and that Xi “has taken a page from Chiang's use of cultural resources in his ample appeals to Confucian ideas and Chinese moral stories” (pp. 162, 165). Rather, it is more reasonable to argue that these leaders rely on a shared cultural repertoire, to which the Goujian story and other moral stories belong, to make similar political decisions.
