Soviet Russia sees Wu Peifu, not Sun Yat-sen, as its best ally in China. Stalin favors Chiang Kai-shek, not Mao Zedong. Leon Trotsky warns and Stalin plans to “squeeze the lemon.” Even Chen Duxiu defers to the Comintern. Chiang Kaishek's tragedy is to live in the same era as Mao Zedong.

Mao Zedong once asked in his now famous essay “Why Is It that Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” Many people tried to figure that out.

No matter how fascinating and soul-stirring history is, as those who were involved in those momentous events gradually die off, it cannot help but become a row of old books, lined up on a shelf and gathering dust.

In the stillness of the library of the PLA National Defense University in western Beijing there is a 70-year-old book on a shelf in a corner. Age has turned the pages yellow and brittle like shriveled leaves in the fall. It is a first edition, published in Chongqing in October 1942, or the 31st year of the Republic of China. Turn to page 195, you will see a diary entry for December 12, 1936:

… It was 5:30 in the morning, and I was just putting on some clothes, after my morning exercises on the bed, when I heard a gunshot from the entrance of the compound. I immediately sent a guard to investigate. A second gunshot was fired before he could report back. I sent a second one out, and that was when more shots were fired and it felt like they were not going to stop any time soon….

It reads like the start of a blood and thunder thriller. You can imagine the writer's hand shaking as he logged the happenings of that momentous morning. The diary goes on:

… I made my way out and up a hill in the back, across a rainbow bridge. The gate on the east side was locked and there was no time to find the key, so I scaled the wall. The wall was only about three meters tall so it was not hard to surmount. But there was a ditch on the other side and I fell in the dark. I was in so much pain after I landed that I stayed there for about three minutes before I could walk again. I walked for a short while and arrived at a small temple. There were guards there. They helped me walk. There were no trails on the east side of the hill, but with the mutineers to the west, we had to keep on trekking east. It got steep near the top, and we made our way up on all fours….

For a three-meter-high wall to seem “not hard to surmount” the situation must have been desperate indeed. And the writer must have been in panic for his life to think nothing of leaping from the top of that wall into the unknown, a leap that landed him deep in a ditch.

Surprisingly, this man vaulting walls and scrambling over mountains was in his 50s.

He was none other than Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Military Committee of the Republic of China.

And the flight that he recorded, which took place on December 12, 1936, is remembered in history as the Xi'an Incident ¹ .

The following morning, the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) met in Bao'an to discuss their response to the mutiny within the Kuomintang (KMT) ranks. The majority opinion was to have Chiang tried and eliminated for good. That opinion was made clear in a telegram that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai dispatched at noon that day to Zhang Xueliang, the KMT general who had staged the mutiny. It was reiterated in a telegram sent on December 14 from generals of the Red Army to Zhang and Yang Hucheng, Zhang's co-conspirator, and again in a December 15 telegram from the Red Army generals to the KMT leadership.

Two days after the incident, the Soviet newspaper Pravda published an editorial that blamed the mutiny on the pro-Japan activists working to help Japan to bring down China and called Zhang a Japanese agent, acting in secret for his masters.

The Japanese government, on the other hand, believed Moscow had made a deal with Zhang, turning him into a Soviet pawn. It viewed Soviet Russia as the true mastermind behind the drama in Xi'an. An editorial in the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun stated that any settlement China's central government might reach with Zhang involving concessions to the Communists in fighting Japan would meet with the strongest opposition from Tokyo.

Meanwhile in Nanjing, He Yingqin, then minister of Political and Military Affairs of the KMT government moved troops into offensive positions while Soong Mei-ling, or Madam Chiang Kai-shek was engaged in diplomacy seeking to make a deal. With Dai Jitao pounding on the table, screaming and wailing, even Ju Zheng, normally most composed under pressure, lost his normal voice as he asked: “Even now we've not gone after the Zhang-Yang rebels. What useless objects we must be!”

If they had a role to play on China's political stage at this fateful moment, not a single one of them was useless.

History is created both through gentle, incremental accretion and big decisive changes. We can easily see the small, incremental changes by the hour and the day, but it is harder to feel the huge changes coming or which, indeed, have already taken place.

On December 12, 1936, when enough small changes had accumulated in Chinese politics, the sudden thrust of an invisible hand pushed all parties center-stage.

History was at a crossroads.

The Kuomintang or the Nationalist Party of China, the Communist Party of China, the USSR and the Comintern, and the Showa militarists of Japan were all exploring their real positions in this game, cautious but determined, resolved but wavering. They would make their stance plainly known to all, and then amend their position.

Chiang Kai-shek, bruised from his escape in Xi'an, had limped his way to the turning point now.

Just as events were taking huge turns, big changes were happening for Chiang too. It was a course that led him from leaping off a wall to lying in bed awaiting death, from point blank accusing Zhang Xueliang of taking orders from the Reds, to telling Zhou Enlai how much he missed his son, who had joined the Communist Party and until then been studying in the USSR.

Generalissimo Chiang was thrown into turmoil. The curtain of history was falling on him even before he was properly dressed. But he did get to write down what must have been his bitterest regret in his entire life on that small piece of paper:

This mutiny proved to be one of the biggest setbacks in the course of our national revolution: Eight years of fighting against the rebels, which could have ended in our complete victory in just two weeks (or one month at most), has now become a total waste, and all because of the mutiny.

He believed that the eight-year-long war with the Communists could have been won in just two more weeks, that the KMT, who had fought for 2,920 days, could have only 14 days more fighting ahead. Such a little way to go, yet, in the event, they lost by a huge margin.

So near and yet so far: The idea haunted Chiang until Tomb Sweeping Day on April 5, 1975.

At 11:50 that day, he died in his home in suburban Taipei.

The Communists survived every existential crisis he brought upon them, and he spent the rest of his life wondering how.

His life came to an end, and this 1942 edition of his diary had turned to ash. But the answer to his life-long puzzle remains in there. nAfDLPZJvqSNXoe1SK5ZhKU7LEQrrrBsLH9XM7K2CERMW8yce3zjgnJwKTavOEYC