One of the most momentous stories of the last century is China’s rise from a self-satisfied, anti-modern, decaying society into a global power that promises to one day rival the United States. Chiang Kai-shek, an autocratic, larger-than-life figure, dominates this story. A modernist as well as a neo-Confucianist, Chiang was a man of war who led the most ancient and populous country in the world through a quarter century of bloody revolutions, civil conflict, and wars of resistance against Japanese aggression. In 1949, when he was defeated by Mao Zedong―his archrival for leadership of China―he fled to Taiwan, where he ruled for another twenty-five years. Playing a key role in the cold war with China, Chiang suppressed opposition with his “white terror,” controlled inflation and corruption, carried out land reform, and raised personal income, health, and educational levels on the island. Consciously or not, he set the stage for Taiwan’s evolution of a Chinese model of democratic modernization. Drawing heavily on Chinese sources including Chiang’s diaries, The Generalissimo provides the most lively, sweeping, and objective biography yet of a man whose length of uninterrupted, active engagement at the highest levels in the march of history is excelled by few, if any, in modern history. Jay Taylor shows a man who was exceedingly ruthless and temperamental but who was also courageous and conscientious in matters of state. Revealing fascinating aspects of Chiang’s life, Taylor provides penetrating insight into the dynamics of the past that lie behind the struggle for modernity of mainland China and its relationship with Taiwan. “Taylor succeeds in recovering a complicated man who was responsible for military and economic success as well as stunning failures… The Generalissimo is now the best English-language biography available. Taylor has considerable narrative skills, and is the first Western biographer to have drawn on Chiang Kai-shek’s handwritten diaries.” ― Jeremy Brown , Times Literary Supplement “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 “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 “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 “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 “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 centur