"Chiang Kai-shek has long been viewed as a failure for having lost mainland China to Mao’s People’s Liberation Army in a stunningly short span of time. This richly detailed biography argues that Chiang’s neo-Confucian vision for a modern China may yet win. Chiang saw himself as central to China’s destiny, yet his years in exile were some of his happiest; as he once wrote, “Trouble is an excellent tonic.”
"While Mao was inflicting the Great Leap Forward on mainland China, Chiang was instituting a widely admired program of land reform on Taiwan, and today the raucously democratic island is often looked to in the People’s Republic as a model of prosperity. Drawing on a revelatory cache of newly available diaries and records, Taylor reveals the complexities of the soldier and statesman, showing him to be shockingly brutal at times, oddly passive at others, naïvely earnest, quick to tears, and always surrounded by intrigue."
