In a Few Strokes, Chiang Kai-shek Could Not Hide His Disgust for Chen Jiongming's Camp

By Clio Walker
Historical span: March 29 to April 26, 1920; the central story took place from April 11 to 16.

On March 29, 1920, Chiang Kai-shek recorded only one event in his diary: “Jinggong wired, urging me to go to Zhangzhou.”

“Jinggong” was Chen Jiongming. The verb “urging” makes this more than a casual invitation. Six days later another urgent telegram arrived. Chiang finally decided to leave, though he did not depart at once. The electronic transcription preserves an obvious textual problem on that date, rendering the month of departure as “August.” The entries that follow leave no comparable doubt about the itinerary. At noon on April 8 he boarded a ship, which sailed at two. On April 9 he read New Youth aboard. At six in the evening on April 10 he reached Xiamen and stayed at the Zhongying Hotel on Gulangyu. At seven-thirty the following evening, he arrived in Zhangzhou.

Thirteen days had passed between the first telegram and his entrance into the Yue Army headquarters.

That night he saw Commander-in-Chief Chen Jiongming and colleagues whom the transcription identifies by the familiar names Ruwei and Zhongzhi. At eleven he lodged at the residence of a man surnamed Xu. The diary makes the sequence plain: headquarters, meetings, lodging. It records no welcoming banquet and no long conversation. Nor does it say what authority Chen intended to give the man he had twice summoned.

Five nights began there.

More Than a Garrison

The Zhangzhou Chiang entered was the center of the Guangdong army that had moved into southern Fujian. After Chen Jiongming’s forces arrived in 1918, they expanded and trained there while extending their reach into local administration, education, and public works. Later accounts call this the army’s “Zhangzhou period” for more than the presence of troops. Barracks, schools, newspapers, roads, and local government all revolved around the military regime.

On April 10, the very day Chiang reached Xiamen, the American consulate there sent a dispatch entitled “Bolshevist Propaganda in the Amoy Consular District.” It described Zhangzhou as the seat of the military government of Chen Jiongming’s Southern forces. Government-school teachers, it reported, had spread radical doctrines, while pamphlets advocating anarchist communism had circulated at a large athletic meet. The consul collapsed anarchism, socialism, and Bolshevism into a single threatening category. His vocabulary was unreliable. His surprise is nevertheless revealing. Ordered by Washington to look for “Bolsheviks,” a foreign official found teachers, students, athletics, printed pamphlets, and political argument sharing a single public arena in Zhangzhou.

The dispatch does not show that Chiang attended the athletic meet, and it cannot fill the five days his diary leaves nearly blank. He read New Youth at sea on April 9. People in Zhangzhou were also using schools and print to debate a new social order. The two lines ran close together in time, but there is no evidence that they met. What can be said is more modest: Chiang was not summoned to a town made only of tents and commands. An army’s foothold was being tested as a form of political life.

For Chen Jiongming, Zhangzhou was a hard-won base. Displaced from Guangdong and caught between the Guangxi military faction and powers in Fujian, his army needed training, money, weapons, and a workable local order. Chen’s subsequent return to Guangdong and military success made the Zhangzhou years look like a successful preparation.

Chiang’s diary presents an entirely different picture. He did not praise the experiment and did not describe the military work. After the arrival entry of April 11, the transcription contains no readable daily entries for April 12 through 15. On the morning of April 16 he again saw “the commander.” That afternoon the direction of the story changed abruptly.

A Letter from Anhai

A letter arrived from Chiang’s elder brother. It said that the recent fighting at Anhai had ended in total loss. The diary supplied no casualty figure and no account of the engagement. Chiang merely wrote that he had endured a severe fright and could count it as one more experience.

The news from Anhai and his decision about Zhangzhou occupy the same diary entry, but the causal link is unclear. We cannot say that the loss at Anhai made him resign. Nor can we say that the letter’s arrival was merely incidental. Yet the letter brought news of failure on another front into the headquarters. Chiang then wrote the sharpest lines he left about the entire journey.

Since reaching Zhangzhou, he said, his nerves had developed feelings of disgust and remorse. Living there was like sitting on a cushion of needles. The sight of “this tedious lot” made him even less willing to remain. He therefore left without taking formal leave and declared the journey utterly pointless.

The words are powerful, but they belong to the diarist. They prove that Chiang felt disgust and regret, and that he viewed some of the people around him with contempt. They do not prove that everyone at headquarters was incompetent. Nor do they identify precisely whom he opposed or why. Chen’s two telegrams show that, before the summons, the two men still regarded cooperation as possible. Five days later Chiang would not even complete a formal farewell. The transcription does not preserve enough of what lay between.

That missing interval is precisely where a smooth dramatic account would be most tempting and most misleading. Perhaps Chiang resented the position offered to him. Perhaps he disliked his colleagues. Perhaps the loss at Anhai changed his assessment of the military situation. Perhaps several reactions converged. Every possibility is plausible; none has yet been proved.

At two-thirty in the afternoon on April 16, Chiang boarded a boat and left. That evening he reached a wharf whose name is no longer legible in the transcription and slept aboard. At noon on April 17 he returned to Xiamen and again lodged at the Zhongying Hotel on Gulangyu. His brother came to speak with him. Chiang wrote only that he was deeply unhappy. At noon on April 18 he reached Anhai.

He had not gone straight back to Shanghai. First he visited the place named in his brother’s alarming letter. The diary does not say what he inspected there or what remedy he attempted. Only on April 22 did he board the Suiyang at Xiamen, in company with Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai, and others. He reached Shanghai on April 25.

That return journey restores the five Zhangzhou days to the larger revolutionary network. Chen Jiongming held armed power in southern Fujian. Sun Yat-sen’s allies wanted the Yue Army to return to Guangdong. Zhu Zhixin and Liao Zhongkai carried messages and negotiated, while Chiang departed almost as quickly as he had come. Several months later the Yue Army finally mustered in Zhangzhou for its return to Guangdong. The later victory cannot be projected backward to make every participant agree in April.

Summoned, but Not Kept

Brief appointments and withdrawals recurred during this phase of Chiang’s career. He was willing to assume military responsibilities, yet he often left when authority, colleagues, or chains of command did not suit him. Later he could present these departures as proof of principle. At the time, they also meant something simpler: a revolutionary with military training and an appetite for effective power had not yet found a position in which he could remain.

The five nights in Zhangzhou compress that problem. The first telegram asked him to come; the second pressed him. He sailed south, reading a journal of new ideas along the way. Once inside the headquarters, he stayed five nights. What ended the appointment was not a surviving dismissal order but his own record of disgust, remorse, and a departure without leave.

The Zhangzhou seen by different observers barely resembles a single city. To the American consul, it was a disturbing center of radical propaganda. Chen’s associates made it a military and political base. Later narratives emphasized training, construction, and the victorious return to Guangdong. Chiang’s diary left only the discomfort of a cushion of needles. No witness owned the whole city.

On April 26, the day after returning to Shanghai, Chiang met Dai Jitao, Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai, and others to discuss going to Europe and raising money for the journey. Zhangzhou had not held him, and he was already looking for another way forward. That European plan would not unfold as imagined. Coming immediately after his unannounced departure, however, it makes the end of the five nights more than a retreat. It was another turn.

Two telegrams could bring a man into headquarters. They could not guarantee that he would find a place on a stage others had already built.

The next episode must return to an earlier defeat. In the winter of 1918, the retreat from Yongtai cost Chiang more than a town; in 1929 he still remembered that the campaign might have carried away an old diary notebook. Yet this series already told the principal Yongtai story in Episode 002. The next investigation will not publish the same events under a new title. It must first determine what unexamined echoes that defeat left in Chiang’s actions and self-explanations in 1919 and 1920.

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Sources and Editorial Boundaries

  1. Primary base text: the user-supplied electronic compilation/transcription Chiang Kai-shek Diaries 1917–1936, with the entries from March 28 through April 26, 1920 actually inspected. In the private R1 research database they correspond to lines 517–535 of the merged source text; the source document SHA-256 is `593632d5add8f884f8b12a8bdd3c83f653bfd92d7d3d34a9372d8c7a36d393f3`. This is not a manuscript facsimile. It contains missing characters, tildes, and probable transcription errors. The “August departure” on April 4 and the unreadable wharf names on April 16–17 have not been silently repaired. Only brief necessary quotations are used; neither the user document nor the private database is published.
  2. Independent source group one: Huang Tzu-chin, “The Revolutionary Experience of the Young Chiang Chung-cheng, 1906–1924,” Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica 65 (September 2009), pp. 1–50, especially printed p. 34 and its surrounding discussion. Huang dates the brief Zhangzhou appointment to April 11–15, 1920, and examines Chiang’s repeated resignations. This story follows the diary itinerary for the evening arrival on April 11 and afternoon departure on April 16. The archival items cited by Huang were not all independently inspected here, so the article does not count as a second witness to every detail in the diary. https://www.mh.sinica.edu.tw/MHDocument/PublicationDetail/PublicationDetail_27.pdf
  3. Independent source group two, outside Chiang’s political circle: American Consulate, Amoy, Bolshevist Propaganda in the Amoy Consular District, dispatch no. 306, April 10, 1920, in Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of China, 1910–1929, NARA Microfilm Publication M329, roll 71. The relevant passage and archival location were inspected through Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991); roll 71 was not examined directly. The dispatch supplies a contemporary outside view of the Zhangzhou military government, schools, and radical pamphlets at an athletic meet. Its conflation of anarchism, socialism, and Bolshevism is not adopted as an accurate classification. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/arif-dirlik-anarchism-in-the-chinese-revolution ; NARA series guide: https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/far-east.html
  4. Supplementary background: Chen Manling, Chen Jiongming and the Yue Army, 1917–1925, MA thesis, National Chengchi University, 1983. Only the institutional repository’s bibliographic record, abstract, and table of contents were inspected; this does not claim a reading of the full thesis. They establish that the “Zhangzhou period” has been studied in terms of army expansion, finance, social and political construction, education, and New Culture activity, not Chiang’s individual five-day experience. https://ah.lib.nccu.edu.tw/item?item_id=131301&locale=zh_TW . The official Sun Yat-sen chronology is used only for the August 1920 return-to-Guangdong aftermath and retains the viewpoint of a Guomindang compilation: https://sunology.yatsen.gov.tw/detail/1352dac1510e823e2005599fb15cf516/?seq=4
  5. Conflicts and unknowns: the old catalog provisionally placed Episode 004 in 1919; the actual diary anchor and Huang’s article point to April 1920. The public chronology is corrected without changing the permanent episode number. There are no readable daily entries for April 12–15, so no meeting, office, dialogue, or quarrel has been invented. The Anhai letter and departure appear on the same date but are not made into a proven single-cause explanation. Chiang’s insult toward his colleagues establishes his attitude, not their character.
  6. Space, rights, and adaptation: confirmed event locations are Zhangzhou, Xiamen and Gulangyu, Anhai, and Shanghai in 1920. Public map data uses only city or regional precision; the hotel, headquarters, and unreadable wharf are not forced into point locations. Gulangyu is now part of Siming District, Xiamen; Anhai uses a regional reference near modern Anhai Town, Jinjiang, not a memorial site as proof of the battle. The U.S. government dispatch is an official record; modern publications are only paraphrased for limited facts. This is an original, source-checked, AI-assisted bilingual narrative by Clio Walker, not a submission by Chiang or a continuous republication of his diary.