Chi-Shek In Hong Chong

establish a constitutional democracy was for China to have a strong leader to lead the way “only he could lead the Chinese people to overcome their challenge and move toward the ultimate goal of constitutional democracy” (Tanner 48) and in order to do so they would have to exercise a new style of leadership that “might be described as a benevolent Confucian autocracy” (Tanner 48). This style of government Chiang is exercising is not complying with the ideals of Americans. Chiang continues to go against the ideas of Americans, as “His penchant for authoritarianism and his confidence in a military solution to the Communist insurrection put in at odds with his American interlocutors” (Tanner 48). But in the end in order to reach to this goal,
However the role that he played among the citizens of Taiwan were completely different. Chiang came to the mainland of Taiwan as he was forced to retreat and exiled there, with the notion to once again go back to Mainland China one day to defeat the Communist and take over with his regime. But of course, we all know that will not happen as Chiang has passed away without ever traveling back to China even once. “Chinese living on the island of Taiwan may remember the civil war very differently –if they remember it at all” (Tanner 280) which is the reason why Taiwanese people have very different views of Chiang compared to Americans. In Taiwan “unlike the mainland, mass-market bookstores do not display piles of popular books on the battles that determined the fate of China” (Tanner 274) those who went through the events of the 1940s and listened in their history classes from the 1950s to the 1980s “shared a public memory that was created to explain the Nationalist defeat and to justify the decades-long charade in which the government on Taiwan maintained that its ultimate goal was to return to liberate the mainland from Communist oppression” (Tanner 274). The core of the public memory that remains is that “the myth of Chiang Kai-shek lost Manchuria because George Marshall and the Americans would not allow him to defeat the Communists” (Tanner 275) and the younger generation of Taiwanese who do not consider themselves Chinese, Chiang’s defeat in Manchuria have no place in their public memory that shape their identity as Taiwanese nor does it have any affect on them in the history of their island