Clio Walker | This is an AI-assisted contemporary historical narrative checked against the Chiang Kai-shek Diaries and independent sources. It is neither Chiang’s original writing nor a submission by him. The diary base is a user-supplied electronic compilation and transcription, not a complete original manuscript.

On January 12, 1921, Chiang Kai-shek sent Sun Yat-sen a not very polite telegram. You have been in Guangdong for fifty days, it said, and I have not heard of a single mobilization order or any urgent push to advance; that is why I hesitate. If mobilization is ordered, I will not wait to be summoned. I will come on my own to serve at your side and help direct the army, without further delay.

Sun had asked him to come to Guangdong and help. Chiang set a condition: if mobilization is ordered, I will come on my own, without waiting to be called, and without further delay.

Without mobilization, what was the use of people coming and going?

That was his reasoning. The difficulties on the Guangzhou side cannot be seen in this telegram.

1. After Victory, Dividing Up the Posts

Two months earlier, the Guangdong Army had entered Guangzhou.

In early November 1920, the military government appointed Chen Jiongming governor of Guangdong and commander-in-chief of the Guangdong Army. Chen did not accept the whole package. With military matters unfinished, he was willing to keep running them; as for the governorship, he asked that another capable man be chosen, or that Tang Tingguang hold it concurrently.

In his telegram he said that he had come back to Guangdong for the self-government of the people of Guangdong, and that once the work was done he had meant to lay down his arms. This was a victor explaining himself, and cannot be taken as the whole of what he had in mind. But asking for someone else to be governor while he handled the military alone was a clear request.

Other posts were also being shuffled. Chen Jiongming proposed that Liao Zhongkai take charge of government affairs and Zou Lu of finance. Sun Yat-sen in the end reversed the order: Liao for finance, Zou for government affairs.

A recommendation, a revision, documents reissued: only bit by bit did the offices find people to take them over.

Appointment, acceptance, receiving the seal, taking up the duties: four steps, not one day. Squeeze them into a single date and the back-and-forth of the time disappears.

2. Two Kinds of Hurry

Sun Yat-sen was in Shanghai, longing to return south. For him, Guangdong was the base of the revolution, and the task did not stop at the provincial border.

Chen Jiongming wanted to settle the territory he had just recovered: the armies, the finances, the various local powers.

One wanted to use Guangdong for a larger cause; the other wanted first to get the Guangdong in front of him running. Their work could fit together, or it could collide over money and grain, troops, and what came first.

This was not yet the countdown to a break. In a letter to Chiang on October 29, Sun still made clear that he trusted Chen and hoped everyone would do their best to help him. What he wanted, Sun said, was cooperation among people who shared the same views, not the silent obedience of subjects to an autocrat.

The letter also criticized Chiang: too unbending, too contemptuous of worldly ways, hard to work with. It credited him with knowing military affairs, being honest and brave, then urged him to be more accommodating.

Being able to write a battle plan and being able to get a group of people willing to carry it out together are two different skills.

3. The Cost of Banning Gambling

On November 21, at home, Chiang received a telegram urging him to come to Shanghai; it said that if he did not come, Xu Chongzhi would not move either. He declined: family matters were unsettled, and going would do no good.

On November 25, Sun Yat-sen sailed south with Tang Shaoyi, Wu Tingfang, and others.

Around his departure he told reporters that he opposed Beijing's declaration that the country was already unified, would not recognize loans made without the South's consent, and demanded equal negotiations on the constitution and foreign affairs. He also said that Guangxi's forces were still there and had to be dealt with.

Yet in his remarks on the same journey, he named the banning of gambling as the first task of government, and spoke of officials taking an oath on assuming office, obeying the law, and refusing bribes, so that the people would see real benefits from the reforms.

From December the ban on gambling took effect. The American consular officials in Guangzhou reported that the government preferred to give up this income rather than immediately impose a new tax of the same size to make up for it. The report's estimate of the loss was large and not necessarily accurate, but it shows that banning gambling was not a slogan that cost nothing.

The same report mentioned cutting troop numbers, paying off arrears owed to demobilized soldiers, and putting the army's affairs in order. The observers approved, but that was what one foreigner saw at the time, not a consensus across the province.

Soldiers had to be paid, discharged men had to be settled with, the city had to be run. Fighting further afield meant more than moving a few arrows on a map. Fight first or reform first: both sides had immediate reasons. In the end, the disagreement always came down to which units would march when, who would be commander-in-chief, and where the money would come from.

4. To Shanghai, and Home Again

Chiang was probably not in Guangzhou at this time. On December 1 he was at home drafting a memorandum on how the military government should proceed; his diary that same day says his mother had a cough and family affairs were weighing on him. The full text of the memorandum is not available here and cannot be filled in.

At the end of the month, Dai Jitao came to Fenghua in person to persuade him. Chiang felt pressured and found it hard to accept. On December 27 the two set out together all the same. The next day they reached Shanghai, where at Zhang Jingjiang's house Chiang saw a letter from Liao Zhongkai, felt he had not been treated as a friend, and flew into a rage.

He decided not to go to Guangdong.

On the 29th, Zhang Jingjiang sent for him several times. He did not go, and took a boat home. On the 30th he reached home by way of Ningbo.

Whether Liao's letter was really as arrogant as he said cannot be judged from the recipient's word alone.

On the 31st he turned the blame on himself: arrogance, extravagance, and a hot temper were his old failings.

First he blamed the people urging him on, then himself; first he agreed to go, then turned back once he reached Shanghai.

5. Writing Letters, Rewriting Letters

With the new year, he took up his brush again. On January 4 he drafted a letter to Hu Hanmin, Liao Zhongkai, and others, which his diary calls a letter of repentance and apology. The next day he wrote to Dai Jitao, felt afterward that the letter was angry and forced, and went on revising it on the 6th.

The letters do not survive in full. What we can follow is only the order: drafting, revising, judging himself.

On January 11, Sun Yat-sen telegraphed again: the campaign to aid Guangxi was decided, come quickly.

The next day came the reply that opens this story.

Sun had announced a decision, but the troops would not necessarily finish mobilizing on the same day.

6. The Battle Plan That Was Held Up

On January 21, Chen Jiongming also telegraphed, asking him to serve as commander of the central army. Again he declined the post, promised to come within ten days to help in a personal capacity, and recommended someone else.

On January 28, in Shanghai, he received notice from the post office: the battle plan he had earlier mailed to Chen had been held up by the garrison commissioner.

Startled, he wrote it out again and kept working on it the next day.

The man who seemed to be at home just waiting for mobilization had in fact been sending military advice out all along. Whether it got through depended on checkpoints he did not control. How the person who held up the letter read that document, we cannot know.

7. A Long Talk

In February he finally went south. On the boat he said it again: he would take no post, only help Sun and Chen. He worried that his ability was not enough and that he would carry an empty title.

He reached Guangzhou on February 6 and saw Xu Chongzhi, Chen Jiongming, and Sun Yat-sen in turn. Early the next morning he studied maps, then spent the morning calling on people one by one, trying to understand everyone's views.

In the evening he talked with Chen Jiongming again about the post of commander-in-chief for the Guangxi campaign, and they talked for a long time.

His diary says that Chen agreed to set out and take up the task, and only then was he at ease. He immediately warned himself: do not be frivolous.

What one visit won was one man's willingness to take on one task. The disagreements remained.

How far apart were the two men's revolutions? At the time there was no later outcome to measure it by. What could be seen were declined appointments, revised lists, a gambling ban beginning to take effect, a reply telegram with conditions attached, and, at last, people sitting down to work out when to set out.

He had set his conditions. But even if a mobilization order came, what kind of army would he be commanding? Three months earlier, at the Wu temple in Xiangshui, he himself had written: "the army's organization is incomplete."

Sources and narrative boundaries

  1. Diary base: the user-supplied electronic compilation/OCR for 1917–1936, read through the connected Drive raw text and checked against the supplied DOCX and private R1 research records. Dates used: November 21 and 25, December 1, 25 and 27–31, 1920; January 4–6, 11–12, 21 and 28–29, February 4, 6 and 7, 1921. These versions are not three independent witnesses. Missing characters and editorial omissions are not repaired. No extended quotation or private source corpus is reproduced.

2. Sun’s letter to Chiang, October 29, 1920, Complete Works of Sun Yat-sen, vol. 5, p. 270, as explicitly identified by the database. The published transcription derives from Mao Sicheng’s 1937 compilation and begins with an omission; no manuscript facsimile was examined. The available letter was read and is selectively paraphrased.
https://sunology.culture.tw/detail/23e54c068e03258217c0ef628b03237e/?seq=2

3. Sun Yat-sen Chronology, entry on Chen’s appointment as Guangdong governor and army commander-in-chief, November 1, 1920, lower volume, p. 1104. The database’s chronological entry and the Chen telegram and secretariat order it quotes were read. Appointment, reply, and actual assumption of duties remain distinct. The cited archival originals were not inspected. The entry supports the proposals and adjustment of appointments described here.
https://sunology.culture.tw/detail/b2c0233a32b79cbc55808296d701a959/

4. Sun’s press interviews of November 23 and 25, 1920, Complete Works, vol. 2, pp. 533–534, as supplied in the database. The November 25 text is compiled from Shanghai’s Minguo ribao of November 26. Although the title identifies an interview with the North-China Daily News, its original English printing was not obtained. The separate November 23 interview is transmitted through a Shuntian shibao dispatch. Policy statements are not evidence of complete implementation. The editor’s arrival-date note differs from a U.S. consular report; this narrative does not specify Sun’s arrival day.
https://sunology.culture.tw/detail/81091270f952207b9b48dadfd5891e89/?seq=3

5. Foreign Relations of the United States: 1920, vol. I, documents 477, 478 and 480; 1921, vol. I, document 279, Price to the Minister, January 11, 1921, No. 209, 893.00/3736. The official English texts were read in full. Administrative judgments, revenue estimates, and political assessments retain their authors’ positions. These reports form one U.S. diplomatic source group, not a separate country or independent witness for each document.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1920v01/d477
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1920v01/d478
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1920v01/d480
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1921v01/d279

  1. This is original contemporary narration. The diary, writings generated by Sun and Chen, and American diplomatic reports have different originating authors. Sun and Chen’s material was obtained through later compilations and an official database, not original documents. Transmission of Sun’s letter intersects with Chiang-related chronological materials; distinct authorship is not a claim that every transmission chain is independent. No letter-opening scene, interior, weather, dialogue, or private thought has been invented. Chiang’s feelings and judgments about friends are attributed to him. Canton, Shanghai, and Fenghua provide regional locations; where a letter was written is not automatically where its subject occurred. The later armed rupture is not imported into this episode as the inevitable meaning of every negotiation in 1920.