Madame Chiang Kai-Shek dies at 105

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, famous for using her beauty, charm and fluent English to lobby Washington to help China fight the Japanese and later the Chinese Communists, has died in New York at the age of 105, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said today.

Ministry spokesman Richard Shih said details about the cause of death were not immediately available.

Madame Chiang had been treated for cancer and other ailments. She lived in semi-seclusion after her husband's death in 1975, spending most of the time in her Manhattan flat or at her family's 36-acre estate in Lattingtown, an exclusive Long Island suburb 35 miles east of New York City.

Madame Chiang and Chiang Kai-shek were once one of the world’s most famous couples. They married in 1926, one year after Mr Chiang, also known as the Generalismo, took over China’s ruling Nationalist Party.

The Nationalists, or Kuomintang, overthrew China’s last dynasty, the Qing, but their pledges to bring democracy to China and modernise the economy were frustrated by Japan’s invasion during the Second World War and corruption within the government.

After the war, the Nationalists lost a bloody civil war to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan in 1949.

Although born in the East, Madame Chiang was thoroughly Western in thought and philosophy.

Brought up in a Methodist family, she studied in America between the ages of 10 and 19 and graduated with honours from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1917.

“The only thing Oriental about me is my face,” she once said.

Her supporters said she was a powerful force for international friendship, understanding and good.

But her detractors called her an arrogant dragonlady and propagandist for her husband’s corrupt and incompetent government.

She was born Soong Mei-ling in 1898, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. Her family’s background could stand as a brief history of modern China as seen through revolution, efforts to unify and modernise, and the split between the communist People’s Republic of China and the Nationalists’ Republic of China.

Her father, Charles Soong, was educated as a Christian missionary at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Soong worked closely with Dr Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Nationalist revolution that overthrew China’s last emperor in 1911.

Education was important to Soong, and Madame Chiang and her two sisters were among the first Chinese women educated in the West at a time when foreign education was considered important only for sons.

A scholar at heart, Madame Chiang once said her idea of happiness would be a life of uninterrupted reading, studying and writing.

Madame Chiang met her husband, a disciple of Sun Yat-sen, around 1920 and married him in 1927.

She later converted him to Methodism, but their marriage was often stormy, in part because of Chiang’s infidelities.

Madame Chiang’s sisters also married prominent Chinese figures and all three of her brothers held high posts in the Nationalist regime.

Ching-ling, the second of six Soong children, married Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China. She broke with the family’s Nationalist ideology and sided with the Communists after her husband’s death in 1925.

She eventually was appointed to a high-ranking position in the Communist government in Beijing, roughly equivalent to vice-president. Madame Sun died in 1981.

Madame Chiang was a working wife, taking on tasks ranging from interpreter and social worker to head of China’s air force during the Second World War, an ironic twist of fate since she suffered greatly from air sickness.