Jewel of the Kingdom: General Chow Chih and Nationalist China

By Betty Wong

In 1890, the authors maternal great-grandfather Chow Chih was the firstborn son of a wealthy family in Canton, China, who could have pursued virtually any career. But China was swirling in revolutions and counterrevolutions as warlords and foreign interlopers fought for control after 2,000 years of imperial rule. Dr. Sun Yat-sen said China had become the poorest and weakest nation in the world. We occupy the lowest position in international affairs. Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat. Chow chose to fight for his country and graduated as an officer from the first class of the prestigious Whampoa Military Academy in 1924. His military prowess caught the eye of a powerful warlord in north China who tried to woo him to lead an army. Chow chose instead to join Sun Yat-sens new national army to fight the warlords and hopefully unify a splintered China. Chow served as a general for Sun Yat-sen and later became a four-star general for Chiang Kai-shek who described Chow as having brilliance in all things military and deserves respect as the supreme commander of the military world. Like Sun Yat-sen, Chow was described by his soldiers as being selfless. Despite his high rank, Chow was regularly called to the front lines of Chinas civil war and the second Sino-Japanese War.
As a voracious reader of Sun Tzus The Art of War, Chow was a military genius famed for leading one hundred battles during the Chinese Civil War and World War II. Would he be able to successfully maneuver in a post-Nationalist government world? As the Communists took over to rule China in 1949, the East Coast of China seemed in chaos with fellow Nationalists jumping onto steamships and trains to escape to Hong Kong and Taiwan. But Chow had fought hard and long to unify his beloved China and chose to stay behind. He hoped he would be able to read the new Communist regime that was bent on hard change to drive China into modern times. The chaos of the Communist takeover then turned to terror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466937451

Betty Wong

Betty Wong has been a journalist for more than 25 years at Reuters News and The Wall Street Journal. In her most recent role as global managing editor at Reuters, Betty oversaw editorial operations for 3,000 staff journalists working in 200 news bureaus around the world. Her bylines have ranged from covering white collar crime on Wall Street to stories on the stock market and brokerages to a new world record for the largest group performing the hokey pokey. Renowned US advice columnist Ann Landers called Betty decades ago on a story that appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Betty took the opportunity to ask Ann Landers for career advice and followed it, becoming a reporter first and then an editor. As Reuters global managing editor, Betty was reported to be the most senior Asian woman editor in the world. Betty lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her husband Terry and daughters Kristen and Amanda. She served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism and on the boards of the Overseas Press Club Foundation and Columbia University’s Knight-Bagehot Fellowship. Jewel of the Kingdom is Betty’s first book and a highly rewarding personal family project.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Epilogue

Afterword

For my mother Clara,

daughters Kristen and Amanda

and husband Terry, with love

The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the Jewel of the Kingdom.

—Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War

Prologue

The Jewel of the Kingdom

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

—Confucius

I was born in the generation that was tagged the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat) or ABCs (American-Born Chinese) as our parents and grandparents fled the Communist takeover of war-torn China for the United States. My parents settled first in Canada, where my older sister Carol and I were born in the early 1960s before Washington lifted the quotas on the number of Chinese immigrants allowed after the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act restricting immigration. We then joined my mother’s parents and siblings in Manhattan’s Chinatown for a few of my early school years.

My mother King-Ngan (Clara) Kong is the third eldest of seven children born to Tso-Hsu Chow and his wife, Lan Sau Kwan Chow. In Cantonese, I dutifully call my uncles by their titles in descending order by age: Big Uncle (David), Second Uncle (Ricky), Third Uncle (Tony) and Fourth Uncle (Joseph), while I called my mother’s older sister Big Auntie and my mother’s younger sister Cathy, Auntie. There are more than 20 first cousins in our generation, mostly males who carry on the family name assigned by immigration officers—Chow, Joe or Zhou.

As a child, I straddled Chinese and American life. At home my parents were strict, Chinese food was served for almost every meal and my siblings and I were hit on the hands with chopsticks if we dared to utter a word in English rather than Cantonese. At school, I did my best to blend in but nonetheless was regularly called Chink by non-Asians.

The only story I recall from my grandfather is how he fled China—by swimming to freedom at night in August 1951 from the Mainland to then British-controlled Hong Kong. Grandfather, or Gung Gung as I called him in Cantonese, said he encountered sharks along the way but he made a fist, thumped them on the head and they left him alone. I deeply regret not asking to hear more stories from my grandfather, who died on August 28, 1993, at the age of 79 after heart problems. However, I have since learned that he shared few personal stories about his past, even with his own children.

Grandfather was tall, slender and had an authoritative manner. What little I knew was his father Chow Chih (or Zhou Zhi in pinyin) had been a great general during wartime in China and Gung Gung had been one of three federal judges in Canton province (Guangdong). Like some other highly educated immigrants, grandfather fled to freedom in the United States but wasn’t fluent in English so he took on lesser jobs including working in a garment factory and as a Chinese schoolteacher.

Despite Chinese being my native language, I shed my past quickly as I became a teenager and my family moved in the mid-1970s from Chinatown to Whitestone, Queens, to a mostly white neighborhood. I convinced my mother to let me drop my weekly Chinese and piano lessons in Chinatown and my connections to my past slowly frayed.

I attended New York University and became a journalist, working first at The Wall Street Journal for five years and then at Reuters News for 21 years. During that time, I married my Bronx High School of Science sweetheart Terry Moy and we raised our now teenaged daughters Kristen and Amanda in Connecticut. As I climbed the corporate ladder at Reuters to my last role there from 2008 to 2011 as Global Managing Editor, I became the busy executive who could only attend family functions when I was not on the road.

A cousin said there were murmurings that I was the extended family’s biggest banana—yellow or Chinese on the outside, but white on the inside. Perhaps I had given up my heritage as I tried to succeed in the white male-dominated corporate world I entered in 1985. It is ironic that a long-time mentor and one of my former bosses is what we would call an egg. Former Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger is white on the outside, but yellow on the inside.

I am grateful because David and his Chinese wife Rachel translated a short Chinese biography on my great-grandfather that was my first source material for this book. It is a copy of a chapter within a book a relative gave to my mother, although unfortunately neither have the book and I was unable to learn the book title, publisher or year of publication.

The reconnection to my heritage was due to my brother Al Kong. He gently convinced me to make time in my busy work life in 2007 and early 2008 to more regularly visit our aging grandmother at her apartment in Chinatown.

Grandmother, or Paw Paw as we called her in Cantonese, was slight in stature and plump. She was talkative, loved kids and had a warm and frequent high-pitched laugh. Paw Paw’s hair was jet black but seemingly turned gray overnight after the Chinatown murder of her son Tony on November 15, 1980, at the age of 31. Lan Sau’s mind remained pretty sharp even at her advanced age. She died on April 15, 2008, just three days past her 93rd birthday after a fall in her apartment.

Family members gathered at Lan Sau’s apartment a week after her death to sort through her things. I secretly wanted only one thing as a memento and was quite surprised to get it with no argument from my many relatives.

Perhaps it helped that my mother said I would write a book one day on the family legacy.

This book.

The treasured item is an old black and white panoramic photograph about 8 inches tall x 40 inches long taken on January 5, 1959, in Taipei to celebrate the 48th year after the founding of the Republic of China. The photo hung framed on Tso-Hsu and Lan Sau’s kitchen wall above an old-fashioned telephone table and chair. Part of the glass covering the photo had broken and the small v-shaped exposed section of the photo is slightly yellow and faded.

It is a picture of Chiang Kai-shek surrounded by some 300 key Nationalist Party loyalists. The Generalissimo sits confidently in the front row center wearing a heavy overcoat and is the only person holding a hat in his lap. To the right is Chang Chi-yun who later founded the Chinese Culture University, a prestigious private university in Taiwan. The white-haired gentleman to Chiang Kai-shek’s left is Chen Cheng, the 2nd and 3rd term vice president of the Republic of China.

Tso-Hsu is one of the men in uniform posing for the photograph, looking a bit pained and withdrawn. By that time, Tso-Hsu’s father had been murdered and relatives remaining in Mainland China were suffering through Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

The re-matted and re-framed photograph now hangs in my living room in Connecticut where it has been a source of inspiration for me as a link to my past. It appears in the background of my author photo on the back cover.

While researching China’s history for this book, I relied mostly on books available at my local public libraries in Greenwich, Connecticut. A surprising aspect was the many published accounts with seeming romanticism of Chiang Kai-shek. There generally was a pro-Nationalist Party bias with more historical details cited on the Communists’ killings of Nationalists and Chinese civilians than the Nationalists’ similar campaigns in several history books. I also had to dig more for balance on the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese, although I was stunned when one 200-page Japan history book by an American author (not listed as source material for this book) did not have even one reference to the Rape of Nanking.

What I hope to have accomplished is a fair rendering of China in the era of my great grandfather Chih for context on what drove his efforts to help rescue and unite a downtrodden China.

My great grandfather came of age in a China splintered by warlords after the end of 2,000 years of imperial rule. With his schooling and family wealth, Chih could have pursued a number of careers but he put his country ahead of himself to join the military to fight and free China from oppressive foreign rule.

Like Chiang Kai-shek, Chih no doubt would have preferred to stay out of war against Japan and other countries and to allow more peaceful unification of China. However it was an era marked by foreign predators, war against the Japanese, civil war and warlords battling to preserve their power.

For the second Sino-Japanese war, the official Nationalist history counts 23 campaigns fought by its troops against Japan’s Imperial Army, involving 1,117 major battles and 38,931 lesser engagements. That does not include fighting between the Communists and the Japanese, according to Jonathan Fenby, author of Modern China—The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present. Most estimates of the dead Chinese