Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang)

Biography

Soong Mei-ling was born on March 5, 1898, in Shanghai, the youngest of three remarkable Soong sisters whose lives intersected with the fate of modern China. Educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she was American in speech, manner, and cultural reference in a way that no other figure in the Nationalist leadership could match. When she married Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, she became far more than a political wife — she became China's most effective voice to the English-speaking world. Madame Chiang's role in the Second Sino-Japanese War was without precedent in the history of wartime diplomacy. She served as Chiang's primary interpreter and foreign policy advisor, organized the Chinese Air Force, supervised relief organizations, and most importantly conducted a sophisticated and brilliantly effective campaign to win American public and political sympathy for China's cause. She understood American politics, American media, and American Christian opinion — the last because she herself was a devout Methodist — with an intimacy no Chinese official could match. Her 1943 tour of the United States was a diplomatic triumph of the first order. She addressed a joint session of Congress on February 18, 1943 — only the second woman ever to do so — and received a standing ovation that reduced hardened politicians to tears. Her speech combined appeals to Christian values, democratic solidarity, and Wilsonian internationalism with elegant English rhetoric and elegant personal presentation: small, beautiful, dressed in Chinese silk, she was a figure of extraordinary charismatic power. She toured American cities to packed arenas, met with Roosevelt repeatedly, and generated enormous public pressure for increased American aid to China. Madame Chiang outlived her husband, her China, and virtually everyone she had known. After the Communist victory in 1949, she retreated first to Taiwan and then to the United States. She lived in her family's estate in Lattingtown, New York, lobbying in the corridors of American power for decades, convinced the Nationalists would reclaim the mainland. She died on October 23, 2003, in New York City at the age of 105 — having outlived the century in which she made history.

Key Battles