An original historical narrative by Clio Walker, prepared with AI assistance and checked against its sources.

November 28, 1918. "Forcing the collection of army funds troubles my conscience. But the officials are bad and the gentry crafty; without this we cannot hold out. And yet the ignorant common people suffer. In the morning I received and answered Brother Wu Liqing's letter, instructed the officers setting out to negotiate the raising of funds, and dispatched troops to Wulijie to watch the rich merchants, as a show of force to raise funds; for without this we cannot set out to attack." So Chiang Kai-shek wrote in his diary.

The magistrate did not come. Neither did the gentry.

On the morning of November 25, 1918, Chiang Kai-shek invited Magistrate Zhu of Yongchun and the local gentry to his detachment headquarters to discuss raising money. The only one who turned up was a section chief from the county office.

He began with kind words, and ended with threats.

Three days later, he sent troops to Wulijie.

I. The Far Horizon of the Flag-Sacrifice Oration

On October 20, the headquarters of the Second Detachment of the Guangdong Army Aiding Fujian was established, with Chiang as its commander.

The oration for the sacrifice to the flag reached very far: victory in battle, cities taken, China unified, all Asia pacified, majesty shaking the whole world.

A little over a month later, what stood in front of the troops was the pay that one county could not raise.

Arrows on a map do not deliver money.

This was not a difficulty peculiar to Yongchun. In February of that year, Xu Chongzhi and others had appealed to Sun Yat-sen for help. Sun's reply admitted that the money could not be raised for now and told them to find a way locally. The Constitutional Protection cause had a name; it did not have a treasury that paid salaries on time.

Telegrams demanding money went up the chain; the burden of raising it fell back on the localities underfoot.

On the evening of November 17, Chiang hosted a banquet for the gentry; on the evening of the 22nd, he met the local notables again. How the money was discussed, the record does not say. Over the next few days, what the diary preserves is persuasion, refusal, anger, and pressure.

II. The Magistrate's Source of Revenue

On November 24 he went to call on the magistrate and the elders and was turned away at the door. He concluded that the magistrate was avoiding him over pay and grain, and was beside himself with anger.

Later the magistrate did come, and the two quarreled again, this time over opium.

Chiang held that poppy planting should not be allowed, nor an opium tax collected. By his account, the magistrate said: banning it won't stop it, so better to let it go and add some income to the treasury for army pay.

Hearing this pained him. He wrote the man up as a string of misdeeds, even declaring that unless this Zhu was removed, the people's hearts could not be set at ease.

This was not only a moral dispute. The commander wanted money, yet would not let the magistrate use this source of revenue. The magistrate spoke of a reality that could not be banned away; the commander wanted him to submit to the higher cause. They argued about opium, but underneath was still the same question: with what was the locality to pay the money the army wanted?

The next morning, Chiang invited them again. Not one of them, magistrate or gentry, came.

That section chief received the whole treatment, from kind words to threats.

Those who refused had, for the moment at least, won. The commander had troops, and still the money did not arrive.

III. Wulijie

On November 26, Chiang arrived in the county town of Yongchun and learned that the fund-raising had got nowhere. At a meeting of gentry and merchants held in his absence, someone said things that made him feel insulted and provoked. What was said has not survived.

He wrote down his decision: deal with them by force.

By now his abuse was no longer confined to the magistrate and a few gentry; he disparaged the people of Fujian as a whole.

On the morning of November 28, he answered Wu Liqing's letter, instructed officers to go and negotiate the raising of funds, and sent troops to Wulijie to watch the rich merchants. He stated the purpose bluntly: a show of force to raise funds. Without it, the troops could not set out.

Wulijie lay west of the Yongchun county town, on the bank of the Tao River, a market hub for goods from Yongchun, Dehua, and Datian. What he had his sights on were the rich merchants here.

The word "raise" was still there. What was sent was soldiers.

How many households were watched, whether anyone was arrested, how much each paid: the record says nothing.

The army itself was swelling. Chen Jiongming's forces were absorbing outside troops in batches, keeping their old commanders and old subordinates in place. The more soldiers there were, the more mouths to feed; and as numbers grew, command and supply did not keep up.

When a title could not buy cooperation, he put armed force on the negotiating table.

That same day, when the magistrate sent someone to discuss the pay, Chiang "reasoned with him on grounds of feeling and principle." Kind words, threats, and a show of force did not follow one another and end; on a single day they took turns.

IV. The Same Page

That day's diary does not begin with a triumphant report on raising funds.

First comes the troubled conscience, then the claim that the officials are bad and the gentry crafty and nothing else will keep them going, then the admission that the common people will suffer. Only after that come the reply to the letter, the dispatch of officers, the dispatch of troops.

Self-reproach did not stop the orders.

In the afternoon he took a bath and looked at a photograph of Wei'er.

The man who had threatened the county was also a father thinking of his child. The two things sit on that same page, each in its place, and neither changes the other.

On November 29, part of the money was handed over.

The next day he recorded: what Magistrate Zhu delivered yesterday was only a third.

The total, how it was apportioned, from whom it was collected: none of this is written down. He also developed another suspicion: that the magistrate was using the army's demand for pay to squeeze the locality in turn, and lining his own pockets in the process.

The commander squeezed the magistrate; how the magistrate then squeezed the people was no longer under the commander's eye.

V. "What Crime Have the Common People Committed?"

On November 30, Chiang set out from the county town of Yongchun for Songkou in Yongtai.

At last the troops were moving. On the day of departure he wrote: "What crime have the common people committed?" And he said that his store of hidden merit had been entirely used up.

Hidden merit, yinzhi, belongs to the older moral world's fear of secret virtue and retribution. A few days earlier he had written the officials and gentry off as people who could only be dealt with by force. On this day he saw that the money he had squeezed out might have harmed people who never once appeared at the negotiating table.

But the money had been collected, and the troops had marched. There is no record that he returned the funds, investigated the skimming, or made any amends to those who paid.

He would not allow opium to be planted, nor would he admit that this money might go unraised. With these demands crowding together, what finally came down to earth was sending troops to make a show of force.

Nine days later, the troops entered the county town of Yongtai. The battalions fought over first honors and over the county magistracy; only when he announced that he would hold the post himself did they disperse. One battalion commander hid the county seal and would not hand it over; one commander went to seize the salt bureau.

A force that could set out only by squeezing money from the locality still could not, in a newly occupied county town, keep offices, revenue, and orders straight.

The problem of Yongchun marched off with the troops.

The money that was handed over went with the army. Whoever paid the price for it stayed behind in the town.

The third of the army pay that Yongchun delivered took to the road with the troops. Nearly two years later, this force fought its way back into Guangdong, and someone asked him to serve as commander-in-chief.

———

Notes on sources and writing (original draft: Notes on materials)

The diary base text and scope of reading. This story first obtained the complete original file in the user's Google Drive, "Chiang Kai-shek Diaries 1917–1936 (manuscript edition) [Stanford University collection].txt": 1,985,907 bytes, modified 2026-02-25T23:18:02.000Z, SHA-256 593632d5add8f884f8b12a8bdd3c83f653bfd92d7d3d34a9372d8c7a36d393f3. The relevant entries from October 19 to December 30, 1918, were actually read, with emphasis on November 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, and 30; entries from July–September 1920 were also read for preliminary research on the next installment. This is an electronic compilation and transcription; the file title does not prove that the manuscript images have been verified. Compared with rendered lines 390–419 of the user-uploaded "Chiang Kai-shek Diaries 1917–1936 copy.docx" and the private R1 entries for 1918-11-24 to 30, the key passages are identical; the TXT used for R1 has the same hash as the Drive file, so the three cannot count as three independent witnesses. Tildes, boxes, and other doubtful characters are not filled in. The epigraph briefly quotes only the November 28 entry, in an editorial English translation; the text later paraphrases that same entry and does not splice it into a long quotation. The private file is not published in full.

Independent participant material. Sun Yat-sen, "Telegram in Reply to Xu Chongzhi and Others, Asking Them to Raise Funds Locally," 1918-02-23, Collected Works of the Father of the Nation, vol. 5, p. 25, public transcription in the Sun Yat-sen academic database, citing the Party History Committee original 050/333; full text and edition notes: https://sunology.yatsen.gov.tw/detail/c2f15a321775080078a208ee4ef43980/ . It independently supports the long-standing shortage of pay and the problem of raising funds locally for the troops aiding Fujian; it does not prove that Sun directed Chiang's specific coercive actions in November. The original image was not seen. Used only for factual summary.

Independent source on local society. "Special Plan for the Protection of the Cultural Ecology of Taocheng and Wulijie Towns, Yongchun County," published 2016, plan period 2016–2030, part two, "Historical Development and Cultural Ecology": public text: https://www.mnwhstq.com/fgwj/201606/t20160603_17095.htm . Its passages on local history, trade, and transport were read; they support Wulijie's location and its function as a market hub. A modern conservation plan is not used to prove the circumstances of each merchant household in 1918, and the commercial prosperity of the War of Resistance period is not projected back onto 1918.

Independent research and source dependence. Chen Mo, "The Origins of the Split in the Guangdong Army around the Constitutional Protection Movement: Organizational Form and Internal Contradictions," Anhui History, 2026, no. 4, reprinted with the author's permission on 2026-09-18: public article: https://www.aisixiang.com/data/182908.html . Its passages on organization and expansion were read and are used for the limited background statement that units were absorbed whole and their existing lines of loyalty continued; Chiang's own statements quoted in the article are not counted as an independent witness, and there is no claim to have consulted each archival document it cites. Huang Tzu-chin, "The Revolutionary Apprenticeship of the Young Chiang Kai-shek (1906–1924)," Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 65 (2009), actually read at pages 32–34: paper: https://www.mh.sinica.edu.tw/MHDocument/PublicationDetail/PublicationDetail_27.pdf , used to recheck the background of his appointment, without adopting wholesale its explanations of the campaign that derive from Chiang's later reports.

Agreement, conflict, and unknowns. The shortage of pay and local fund-raising have a background in political documents outside the diary; Wulijie's commercial location is supported by local material. The magistrate's refusal to meet, the opium position, the gentry and merchant meeting, the dispatch of troops, the collection of money, and the guilt are mainly Chiang's contemporary self-account; no contemporary words of the magistrate, the merchants, or the people who paid independently confirm the whole sequence. The magistrate's full name is undetermined and is not supplied from an official of the same surname appearing in later local memory. "Skimming" is Chiang's accusation, not a verified case of corruption. The total sum, the apportionment of the levy, any detentions, and any remedies are all unknown. The original plan provisionally placed 006 in 1919, but the core diary entries actually used are from November 1918; the permanent number is unchanged, and the difference in year is kept on a separate research card.

Time, place, the next installment, and rights. Yongchun is today's Yongchun County, Quanzhou, Fujian, which became a county in 1913, having previously been a directly administered prefecture. The county-town area is located by combining the local plan, the county government's physical geography page: https://fjyc.gov.cn/zjyc/zrdl/ and the DILA historical place-name reference point: https://authority.dila.edu.tw/place/search.php?code=PL000000017946 ; the point does not represent the 1918 headquarters or county office. Only the arrival in town on November 26 and the departure on the 30th are linked to it; no coordinates are forced for where the entries of the 24th and 25th were written, the specific places watched in Wulijie, or the Songkou route. Preliminary research for the next installment also uses diary entries for August 7 and 31, 1920, and the entry for August 16, 1920, on the Guangdong Army's return to Guangdong in the Chronological Biography of the Father of the Nation: https://sunology.yatsen.gov.tw/detail/1352dac1510e823e2005599fb15cf516/ ; the latter is a later compiled chronology and is not used to prove that Chiang accompanied the army throughout. Modern texts are limited to factual summary; an original bilingual narrative with necessary short quotations does not constitute republication of the private diary or of modern papers in full. The order of actions comes from the record; paragraph transitions and the closing echo are editorial organization, with no invented dialogue, psychology, weather, or sensory scenes.