The Nobody Who Would Rule China — Chiang Kai-shek Before Power

The Gambler Who Lost Everything, Became the Supreme Ruler — Chiang Kai-shek's Rise is an episode of Shenzhou Dadi (神州大地), our documentary series. Below is the full transcript of this short.

Before he had anything at all.

Shenzhou Dadi — a documentary on China's landmarks, culture, and people. Episode 28: The Gambler Who Lost Everything and Rose to Rule — The Rise of Chiang Kai-shek. Brought to you by SY Horizon, sylogs.com.

Last time, we left Beijing — where an old man had come to the end of his life. In March 1925, in a ward of Beijing's Xiehe Hospital, a man who had shouted "revolution" for thirty years finally closed his eyes. He left behind two wills. And the hand that wrote those few lines belonged to another man — Wang Jingwei. A question rises from that deathbed: why Wang? And how did the man who would one day rule China end up standing at his elbow? To answer that, we go back — to a soldier who, at the start of this story, had nothing at all.

Wang Jingwei, original name Wang Zhaoming, was a native of Panyu in Guangdong. He was Sun Yat-sen's most trusted pen in his later years, and the "number-one man of letters" of the Kuomintang. On his deathbed Sun dictated the will that distilled his lifelong "Three Principles of the People" — nationalism, democracy, livelihood — and Wang wrote it down. That document, later called the "Premier's Will," opens with lines that generations of Chinese would come to recite by heart.

"For forty years I have devoted myself to the cause of national revolution, its aim being the free and equal status of China. In these forty years, experience has taught me that to achieve this goal we must arouse the people and ally with those nations of the world that treat us as equals, and strive together."

To see why Wang held that pen — and later climbed to the pinnacle of power — you have to see where he came from. Born in 1883 in a declining scholar's family in Panyu, orphaned young, he rose only through hard study and public scholarships. He was no scholar waving a fan in the rear: as a young man he played for keeps. In 1910, aged twenty-seven, Wang buried explosives at Liulichang in Beijing, intent on assassinating the Qing regent Zaifeng. Caught and jailed, he wrote in his cell the poem that would soon spread across the land.

"A brave song in the city of Yan; calmly I become a prisoner of Chu. I draw the blade for one swift joy — and betray not my youthful head."