IN IMPERIAL China, overthrown rulers were ill-treated in the official histories written by the dynasty that succeeded them. They were blamed for all the evils that justified the transfer of the mandate of heaven. Today, not all Chinese history is written by its latest winners, the Chinese Communist Party. But its victory certainly colours views of the Republican period that preceded the revolution.
One casualty of this has been the reputation of the Republic's leader, Chiang Kai-shek. During the second world war, he was a hero in the West, feted in Cairo in 1943 by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as the free world's great hope against Japan and the Communists in China. But, after the war, as the armies of his Kuomintang (KMT) government crumbled in the face of Mao Zedong's Communists, Chiang's standing likewise disintegrated.
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