Chiang's Humanity Trumps Mao's Cruelty

China is the geopolitical hinge on which war or peace in East Asia rests. And no figure has been so central to China's destiny over the past century as Mao Zedong, who unified China out of the chaos of competing warlordoms in 1949 and made it a world power. The decades of unprecedented economic growth in China that are only now starting to fade would have been impossible without the political coherence Mao provided. But Mao may not last as China's most important 20th-century figure. That title may eventually pass on to the man Mao defeated in a civil war in the 1940s, and who generations of Western journalists and intellectuals have so often disparaged: Chiang Kai-shek.