蒋介石的耻辱政治。中国的领导力、遗产和国家认同

 东亚基金会的期刊

Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China 

By Grace C. Huang Harvard University Asia Center, 2021, 442 pages, $28.00 (Paperback)

耻

https://www.globalasia.org/v16no4/book/no-rehabilitation-but-real-insight_james-baron

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没有康复，但有真正的洞察力

作者：詹姆斯-巴伦

出版。2021年12月 (第16卷第4期)

蒋介石的耻辱政治。中国的领导力、遗产和国家认同 

作者：Grace C. Huang 哈佛大学亚洲中心，2021年，442页，28.00美元（平装）。

实现这一理想......自由民主的中国，必须归功于这个人的政治家精神、活力和个性，而不是任何其他单一因素，"

张汉民在1944年的蒋介石传记中写道。

这是一个了不起的声明。

蒋介石从来没有表现出对民主的倾向。

同样奇怪的是，有人声称他已经 "在政治上统一了 "中国。

在东部，汪精卫的日本傀儡政权名义上统治着中国的大片土地，一直到满洲国，也在日本的控制之下，而毛泽东的红军则占有大片领土。

事实上，蒋介石在他的传记中引用的 "理想 "要温和得多：

国民党政权 "成功 "促成了1943年的《中英放弃在华域外权利条约》。

然而，与蒋介石的大多数成就一样，这只是一个有限的胜利。

英国拒绝了中国代表团提出的 "一刀切 "的要求，保留了香港和以前租界的广泛特权，而大多数中国人（和世界）都对此视而不见。

把蒋介石描绘成 "亚洲的命运之人"，用张学良传记的副标题，是当时的产物--中国战争的结果并不明确，蒋介石被一些西方官员视为该国的唯一希望。这也是作者作为国民党外交官地位的产物。

没有任何关于蒋介石生活和领导能力的英文报道接近于这样的胡编乱造。

如果不考虑1981年以英文出版的古谷圭司为日本《产经新闻》撰写的大量专栏汇编，以及杰伊-泰勒的慷慨评价，这些传记--已经有很多了--都描绘了一幅普遍负面的画面。

这使得Grace C. Huang的重新评价成为一个异类。

从一开始，Huang就承认了这一点，他提供了Jonathan Spence的观点，

即一个 "不灵活 "的人，"对好政府的看法有限"，他愿意牺牲军队和平民的生命来追求权力。

与H.H. Chang的描述相反，大多数关于蒋介石的作品的标题，正如黄所指出的，加强了失败的说法。

对布莱恩-克罗泽来说，蒋介石是 "失去中国的人"；

乔纳森-芬比提到 "中国的总司令和他失去的国家"。在中文作品中，情况变得更糟。

文谢将蒋介石称为 "给国家带来灾难的人"。

 黄强调说，这种诋毁低估了蒋介石所面临的挑战。

在质疑通常分析领导力所采用的个人机构与政治结构的二分法时，Huang发现前一种方法忽视了这样一个事实：

"领导人运作的政治环境往往会影响他们取得成果的能力，而这并不反映他们的努力。"

黄认为，第二个陷阱是，传记作者 "倾向于忽视领导人的实际创造性努力"，将他们视为在他们努力塑造的制度和进程面前无能为力。

为了拒绝这种分叉，黄研究了蒋介石性格中的一个具体因素，她认为这撕毁了教科书中关于他失败的假设。

儒家的 "恥 "的概念--译为 "羞耻 "或 "屈辱"--以及更具体地说，一个叫勾踐的古代国王的磨难是她用来分析蒋介石的目标和他在实现这些目标方面的成功。

黄将蒋介石对这些概念的使用，以及他试图将个人和国家叙事建立在这些概念之上，与两个关键事件联系起来：

1928年5月的济南事变和三年后的穆克登事件。这两起日本侵略行为都遭到了国民党领导人的痛恨，而他的反应不足历来被描述为没有骨气。

然而，黄认为这种观点对蒋介石是一种伤害，他和勾踐一样，认为自己是在忍受这些屈辱，直到他建立了一个足以反击的国家。

黄认为，勾踐的 "十年增长人口，十年训练人口 "的方法是蒋介石的指导性口号。

通过他保持了几十年的日记中的一个章节标题，蒋介石几乎每天都会提到气。

报仇雪耻 "和恢复自己以前的地位的动机是蒋介石思想的关键，并告知他对他人的行为。"

在他作为与中国人民有关的上级的位置上，"Huang认为，"蒋介石经常试图羞辱他们，以改变他们不光彩的行为，同时又不越界羞辱他们。"

通过与蒋介石的前任袁世凯以及更令人惊讶的甘地（他的萨蒂格拉哈哲学与蒋介石对耻的使用有共同之处）的比较，

黄扩展了她对较弱国家的领导人如何利用这些工具来抵抗更强大的对手的研究。

问题是，甘地采取的具体行动为他的追随者提供了实际的例子--盐业大游行是最明显的--

而蒋介石的方法，正如黄氏所指出的，主要是正统的做法，显然是希望采取 "正确 "的行为最终会导致社会价值观的改变。

1930年代的 "新生活运动 "除了实现表面上的变化外，没有取得任何其他成果，这表明这是一种天真的妄想。

蒋介石喜欢就节俭和个人卫生等主题进行感性和冗长的说教，他还冲动地在该运动最初的96条指令中加入了诸如以下规则。

"在公共汽车上要坐正，不要坐歪"。

这些指令不仅无法执行，而且常常是荒谬的，人们假装遵守规则--例如在官员进城时清扫街道--是 "向内化蒋介石对中华民族的集体愿景迈出的一步"，这种说法是很无力的。

尽管黄尽了最大努力，但她还是无法颠覆这个共识。

从任何标准来看，蒋介石的领导都是失败的。

尽管如此，这仍然是一项引人入胜的研究，从蒋介石的气质叙述到目前中国官员对 "屈辱的世纪 "的热衷，都有令人信服的追溯。

虽然重振蒋介石声誉的尝试可能不会成功，但黄重新审视他的领导力和遗产的视角让我们更好地了解了他的特点。

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No Rehabilitation, But Real Insight

By James Baron

Published: December 2021 (Vol.16 No.4)

Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China By Grace C. Huang Harvard University Asia Center, 2021, 442 pages, $28.00 (Paperback)

344cff1771257d6de7fb0b1fff6130af_1640564247_5077.jpg“To the statesmanship, vigor, and personality of this one man more than any other single factor must be the credit for having realized this ideal … of a free and democratic China,” wrote H.H. Chang in a 1944 biography of Chiang Kai-shek.

 

This was a remarkable statement. Chiang had never shown an inclination to democracy. Equally strange was the claim that he had “politically united” China. In the east, Wang Jing-wei’s Japanese puppet regime nominally ruled over swathes of the country right up to Manchukuo, also under Japanese control, while Mao Zedong’s Red Army held huge portions of territory. In fact, the “ideal” that Chang cited in his biography was much more modest: the Nationalist regime’s “success” in brokering the Sino-British Treaty for the Relinquishment of Extra-Territorial Rights in China of 1943. Yet, as with most of Chiang’s achievements, this was a limited victory. The British rejected the “clean sweep,” demanded by the Chinese delegation, retaining Hong Kong and extensive privileges in former concessions, and most of China (and the world) was in any case oblivious.

 

The depiction of Chiang as “Asia’s Man of Destiny,” to use the sub-title of Chang’s biography, was a product of the time — the outcome of the wars in China was unclear, and Chiang was viewed by some Western officials as the country’s only hope. It was also a product of the author’s position as a Kuomintang diplomat.

 

No English-language account of Chiang’s life and leadership has approached such hagiography. Disregarding a huge compilation of Keiji Furuya’s serialized columns for the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun, published in English in 1981, and a generous assessment by Jay Taylor, the biographies — and there have been many — have painted a generally negative picture.

This makes Grace C. Huang’s reappraisal something of an outlier. From the outset, Huang acknowledges this, offering Jonathan Spence’s view of an “inflexible” man with a “limited view of good government,” who was willing to sacrifice the lives of troops and civilians to the pursuit of power. In contrast to H.H. Chang’s epithet, the titles of most works on Chiang, as Huang notes, reinforce claims of failure: For Brian Crozier, Chiang is the “The Man Who Lost China;” Jonathan Fenby refers to “China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost.” It gets worse in Chinese-language works: Wen Xie brands Chiang “The Man Who Brought Calamities on the Nation.”

 Such opprobrium, Huang stresses, understates the challenges that Chiang faced. Questioning the dichotomy of personal agency versus political structure through which leadership is typically analysed, Huang finds that the former approach ignores the fact that “the political context in which leaders operate can often influence their ability to achieve results in ways that do not reflect their efforts.” The second pitfall, Huang contends with a certain circularity, is that the biographer “tends to lose sight of the actual creative efforts of leaders,” casting them as impotent in the face of the institutions and processes they struggle to shape.

Rejecting this bifurcation, Huang examines a specific element of Chiang’s character that she believes tears up the textbook assumptions about his failures. The Confucian notion of chi — which translates as “shame” or “humiliation” — and, more specifically, the tribulations of an ancient king called Goujian are the concepts she uses to analyse Chiang’s goals and his success in achieving them.

 

Huang connects Chiang’s use of these ideas, and his attempt to base a personal and national narrative on them, to two pivotal events: the Jinan Incident of May 1928 and the Mukden Incident three years later. Both these acts of Japanese aggression were bitterly resented by the Nationalist leader, whose lack of response has traditionally been depicted as spineless.

Yet Huang believes that this view does a disservice to Chiang, who like Goujian, saw himself as enduring these humiliations until such time as he had built a nation that was strong enough to strike back. Goujian’s approach of “ten years to grow the population, and ten years to train the population,” Huang suggests, was Chiang’s guiding mantra.

 

Through a section heading in his diary that he kept up for decades, Chiang refers to chi on an almost daily basis. The motivation to “avenge humiliation” and regain one’s former status is key to Chiang’s thinking and informed his behavior toward others. “In his position as a superior in relation to the Chinese people,” Huang argues, “Chiang often tried to shame them to change their disgraceful behavior while not crossing the line into humiliating them.”

Through comparisons with Chiang’s predecessor Yuan Shikai and, more surprisingly, Gandhi — whose philosophy of satyagraha shares commonalities with Chiang’s use of chi — Huang extends her examination of how leaders of weaker states can wield such tools to resist their more powerful antagonists.

 

The problem is, while Gandhi took concrete actions that provided his followers with practical examples — the Salt March being the most obvious — Chiang’s approach, as Huang notes, was largely orthopractic, apparently with the hope that adopting the “correct” behavior would eventually lead to changes in social values.

That this was a naïve delusion is shown by the failure of the New Life Movement in the 1930s to achieve anything other than superficial change. Given to sententious and lengthy sermonizing on topics such as frugality and personal hygiene, Chiang also impulsively added to the original 96 directives of the movement such rules as: “Sit straight on the bus, not crooked.”

 

These edicts were not only unenforceable but also often ridiculous, and the argument that the pretence people made of following the rules — sweeping the streets when officials were in town, for example — was “a step toward internalizing Chiang’s collective vision for the Chinese nation” is a weak one. Despite her best efforts, Huang is unable to overturn the consensus: By any standards, Chiang’s leadership was a failure.

Nonetheless, this remains a fascinating study, with the through-line from Chiang’s chi narrative to the current penchant among Chinese officials for invoking the “Century of Humiliation” convincingly traced. While the attempt to resuscitate Chiang’s reputation might not work, the lens through which Huang re-examines his leadership and legacy gives us a better understanding of what made him tick.