Clio Walker | An original AI-assisted historical narrative checked against the Chiang Kai-shek Diaries and independent sources. This is not Chiang's own text or a submission by him. The diary sources are user-supplied electronic compilations and transcriptions, not a complete original manuscript.

December 31, 1920: "Arrogance, extravagance, and a hot temper are the great illness of my life. The four words calm, reverence, detachment, and single-mindedness must not be forgotten for a single day."

Noon, December 28, 1920, Shanghai, at the home of Zhang Jingjiang.

Chiang Kai-shek read a letter from Liao Zhongkai. In his diary he wrote: "Extremely arrogant; it seems he does not treat me as a friend. I am furious beyond words."

His traveling companion Dai Jitao was also more than he could bear: "Utterly high-handed, he will not even listen to reason. He is forcing me to go to Guangdong. His arrogance is extreme."

That same day he made up his mind: "So I will certainly not go to Guangdong, to settle this petty quarrel."

Three days later, on the last page of the same diary, what he wrote about was his own illness.

1. "If You Don't Go, Ruwei Won't Either"

That autumn, the Guangdong Army returned to Guangdong and drove out the Guangxi clique. Chiang had served as a staff officer at the front, and had declined posts again and again. On November 5 he reached Guangzhou and met Xu Chongzhi and Deng Keng; their complaints "poured out and could not be stopped." The next day he decided to go back to Shanghai.

On November 14 he was home in Fenghua, and seeing that Weiguo could already read, he was "very glad."

On the afternoon of the 21st, three telegrams arrived, from Sun Yat-sen, Zhang Jingjiang, and Dai Jitao, all urging him to come to Shanghai. One line in them carried real weight: if he did not go, Xu Chongzhi would not move either.

He refused. His reason: "caught in a dilemma, and with family matters unsettled, going would do no good."

On the 25th, Sun Yat-sen left Shanghai for Guangdong with Tang Shaoyi, Wu Tingfang, and others, to reestablish the military government.

2. No Peace at Home Either

Staying at home did not bring him peace.

On the morning of December 1 he was at home drafting a memorandum on how the military government should proceed, and then wrote: "Hearing my mother's coughing and scolding, I am overwhelmed with gloom. At home there is hardly a single happy day."

The next day, before setting out, he asked his elder brother over to look after the house, but his brother "deliberately made trouble." His mother refused to move. He wrote: "How deeply family can harm a person."

In Shanghai, his landlord Zhu Ziqian left him "deeply indignant." On the 11th he wrote: "I truly loathe Chinese society to the extreme. How can I ever escape it?" On the 16th he took a boat home again.

He could not go where he wanted, did not want to go where he should, and could not stay where he was.

3. Liao Zhongkai's Letter

On December 25, Dai Jitao came to Fenghua in person to talk about going to Guangdong. Chiang found his "coercive words and manner very hard to bear," yet two days later he set out with him all the same.

Then came the 28th and the letter at Zhang Jingjiang's house.

The letter itself has not survived. All we can read today is the recipient's anger. What Liao Zhongkai wrote, and why he wrote it that way, the diary cannot tell us.

On the 29th, Zhang Jingjiang sent people several times to find him. He "had broken with the ways of the world and was unwilling to go through the motions, so did not go to see him," and that night slept aboard the steamer Beijing, bound for Ningbo.

4. A Verdict on Himself

On the 31st he went back over the year's accounts.

He did not write about Liao's arrogance, nor about Dai's high-handedness. He wrote: "Lately my temperament has grown especially eccentric. I am arrogant and self-important and unbearably hot-tempered. My loathing for society has grown worse, and so has my loathing for my family. This is a bad sign."

He also wrote: "Arrogance, extravagance, and a hot temper are the great illness of my life."

Two months earlier, someone had already said something similar to him directly. On October 29, Sun Yat-sen wrote to him, first with praise: in courage and sincerity you are a match for Zhixin, and in knowledge of military affairs you surpass him. Then he went on: but you are unbending by nature and too contemptuous of common ways, and so you often clash with others and find it hard to get along. He hoped that, for the party's sake, Chiang would make himself set aside his own views and lower his demands.

Was the self-reproach in the diary prompted by this letter? There is no evidence to say so. But the failing Sun Yat-sen saw and the failing Chiang wrote down for himself were the same one.

5. Letter after Letter of Repentance

On January 4, 1921, he wrote to Zhang Jingjiang, and then drafted letters to Hu Hanmin and Liao Zhongkai. His diary calls them "letters of repentance and apology," and says that while writing them he was "calm and at peace, and my self-cultivation has made some progress."

The next day he wrote to Hu Hanmin and Dai Jitao, and again picked at his own faults: "There is still the flaw of temper and affectation." On the third day he was still revising the letter to Dai.

The letters written, his days did not grow calm. On the 7th: "No important letters have come from Shanghai; thinking of it, I am depressed." On the night of the 9th he tossed and turned, unable to sleep: "Looking back on my rashness and violence in the past, and the boundless uncertainty of what is to come, I have always been sewing wedding clothes for others." He even thought of becoming a monk, "but I dare not decide on entering the Buddhist order just now."

He wanted to leave and could not; he did not want to stay and could not let go.

6. The Telegram Arrives

On January 11, Sun Yat-sen's telegram arrived: "The campaign to aid Guangxi has been decided and the army will set out quickly. Please come and help. You promised me you would follow me to Guangdong to help. Do not delay any longer. Reply tomorrow."

That same day, the American vice consul in Guangzhou, Price, wrote a report to Washington. He spoke well of the new government: the ban on gambling, the reduction of troops, financial reform, the establishment of a Western-style municipal government, officials who were diligent and frugal. He also saw a crack: Sun Yat-sen and Chen Jiongming disagreed over sending troops to Guangxi.

The telegram urging Chiang to come south was asking precisely for the Guangxi campaign.

On the 12th, Chiang replied. He did not agree at once. Instead he said: you have been in Guangdong for fifty days without issuing a single mobilization order, and 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."

The letters of repentance were written; the conditions were set.

7. Calm, Reverence, Detachment, Single-Mindedness

The prescription he wrote for himself at the end of the year was four words: calm, reverence, detachment, single-mindedness.

January 1: "My practice of calm, reverence, detachment, and single-mindedness is not yet complete." January 2: "My practice of calm, reverence, detachment, and single-mindedness is not yet complete." January 4: "My practice of calm, reverence, detachment, and single-mindedness is not yet complete."

He wrote those four words in his diary again and again. But whether to go to Guangdong, and whether the next mobilization order would be issued, were still not things four words could decide.

Sources and narrative boundaries

  1. Main diary source: the user-provided Google Drive electronic compilation/OCR text for November–December 1920 and January 1–12, 1921, with surrounding entries, actually read and compared entry by entry with the user-provided Chiang Kai-shek Diaries 1917–1936 copy DOCX and private R1 transcription. The opening four-character expression comes from December 31, 1920; the rest is original paraphrase. The receipt of Sun's message on January 11 and Chiang's reply on January 12 follow the diary. The transmitted telegram's date notation is not used to invent its receipt date. Year-end miscellaneous notes and annual retrospect are not daily entries: plans recorded for the start of the year have not been moved into December, and damaged expenditure figures are not used. Missing text and omissions are not supplied.

2. Sun Yat-sen, October 29, 1920, letter to Chiang concerning confidence in Chen Jiongming's return to Guangdong, Collected Works, volume V, page 270 as identified by the database. The published transcription derives from Mao Sicheng's 1937 compilation. All visible text and the version note were read; the opening ellipsis belongs to the transmitted source. No original image was obtained. Sun's letter was independently authored, although its transmission overlaps Chiang-related documentary collections; these carriers are not counted as several independent witnesses.
https://sunology.yatsen.gov.tw/detail/23e54c068e03258217c0ef628b03237e/?seq=2

3. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1921, volume I, document 279: Ernest B. Price, January 11, 1921, No. 209, 893.00/3736. The complete officially published English text was read. This contemporary observation lies outside Chiang's political circle and helps establish Canton's administrative work and the Guangxi disagreement. It does not establish the wording of Chiang's letters to friends; Price's approval is not a final audit of administrative performance.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1921v01/d279

4. Attribution and limits: Liao's letter, Dai's visit, and family and commercial disputes retain the standpoint of what Chiang thought. The other parties' complete correspondence has not been obtained; their speech and intentions are not invented. Diary forms Jingjiang, Jitao, Zhantang, and Zhongkai are identified as Zhang Jingjiang, Dai Jitao, Hu Hanmin, and Liao Zhongkai. Beijing is a vessel's name and creates no event location in Beijing. Fenghua town, the home district, Ningbo, and Shanghai are not conflated; Dadong No. 16 is not assigned an unverified modern address. The Shanghai city reference is 31°14′ N, 121°29′ E, as published by the municipal education authority, not a coordinate for Zhang's residence or the lodging.
https://edu.sh.gov.cn/study_cn_about_shanghai/
The episode begins with correspondence conflicts in late 1920 and continues into January 1921, without redating the latter events to 1920.

  1. This is an original historical narrative. Private electronic sources are used for verification and are not published in full or exposed through a search interface. Sun's letter is summarized; FRUS is a U.S. government publication. No protected text is reproduced as a substitute for its source. The literary candidate title was adjusted to reflect remorse preceding the later telegram, avoiding an invented causal claim that its arrival immediately produced self-reproach.