American historians tend to portray Chiang Kai-Shek (1887–1975) as an inept dictator who mismanaged China until Mao Zedong expelled him in 1945 and he finished his life ruling Taiwan under the protection of the U.S. military. But this...lucid biography by Taylor, a research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, describes an impressive figure who left China a greater legacy than he has been given credit for...Taylor does not conceal Chiang's brutality and diplomatic failures, but he is an admirer who makes a good case that Chiang governed an almost ungovernable country with reasonable skill and understood his enemies better than American advisers did.
   --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Jay Taylor's new biography, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, challenges the catechism on which generations of Americans have been weaned. Marshaling archival materials made newly available to researchers, including about four decades' worth of Chiang's daily diaries and documents from the Soviet era, it torpedoes many of that catechism's cherished tenets. This is an important, controversial book... Chiang emerges as a flesh-and-blood man rather than the buffoonish cardboard-cutout figure he has generally been portrayed as.
   --Laura Tyson Li, Washington Post Book World

This enthralling book by Jay Taylor of Harvard University shows that [the] conventional views of both Chiang and the Chinese civil war are caricatures. It is the first biography to make full use of the Chiang family archive. This includes Chiang's own diary, in which he wrote at least a page of classical Chinese daily from 1918 to 1972. The picture that emerges is of a far more subtle and prescient thinker than the man America's General Joseph Stilwell used to refer to as "peanut," and Britain's chief of staff, Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, dismissed in Cairo as "a cross between a pine marten and a ferret."
   --The Economist

Even in the rapidly widening field of modern Chinese history, it is unusual and gratifying to read a book that upsets not only the reader's previous views but even those of the author himself...Now a different Chiang stands before us. Drawing on new material, years of interviews with the dwindling number of those with first-hand memories of the Chiang family, and scrutiny of Chiang's voluminous diaries, Taylor reveals a much more interesting and despite his stiff exterior, frequently adaptable Chiang...The book is a huge advance on our knowledge of what happened in China from the early twentieth century to the present day, when an updated version of Chiang's Kuomintang is again in power in Taipei...There will be no oblivion [for Chiang]. Jay Taylor has seen to that...A substantial and comprehensive contribution to our knowledge of China.
   --Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review

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...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.
   --New Yorker

Master of his material, [Taylor] provides excellent in-depth accounts of episodes such as Chiang's kidnapping by Zhang Xueliang, the Manchurian exiled warlord, at Christmas 1936, the negotiations over the years between Nationalists and Communists and the old man's later years in Taiwan...This is the most thorough inquest on the Generalissimo so far.
   --Jonathan Fenby, Times Higher Education

Taylor shows in great detail that Chiang and his often-maligned troops fought more effectively against Japan's heavily armed and well trained war machine than is generally realized. He also depicts in a mostly positive light Chiang's performance during a quarter of a century in exile at the head of the Nationalist government on Taiwan, where he set the stage for the island's shift from dictatorship to democracy...Generalissimois well-written, and takes on an epic quality as Taylor guides us through many turning points in modern Chinese history. He draws on new materials, but his greatest strength is the fairness of his approach.
   --Dan Southerland, Christian Science Monitor

A new and apparently exhaustive biography...This could well be one of the more important non-fiction books of the year.
   --Tyler Cowen, marginalrevolution.com

The story of Chiang Kai-shek is so big, so interwoven with the story of modern China, and so complex, that it has defied a good biographical treatment. Now, Jay Taylor has provided us with a strong, vivid, and eminently readable biography of this major twentieth-century leader that captures his 'life and times' better than any previous work in English.
   --William C. Kirby

This splendid biography far surpasses previous scholarship on Chiang Kai-shek, providing new insights into the savage international and civil wars in China that raged for almost thirty years as well as Chiang's quarter century on Taiwan where he laid the predicate for democratic governance on the besieged island.
   --David Lampton, Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Following his masterful account The Generalissimo's Son, Taylor has fully tapped Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries and a comprehensive range of sources to provide the most authoritative assessment of this towering figure in the Chinese revolution and global politics of the 20th century.
   --Robert Sutter, Visiting Professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

Chiang Kai-shek rivaled Mao as a dominant figure in the history of modern China. Taylor has taken a fresh look at his long, eventful life based on new sources, and suggests a controversial but persuasive new reading of Chiang's motives and actions. This vividly realized account will be the authoritative work for a long time to come.
   --Andrew J. Nathan, author of China's Transition

Jay Taylor is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

Read More by Jay Taylor:

• The Generalissimo's Son: Chiang Ching-kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan