Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石, 1887–1975), military leader of the Kuomintang and ruler of Nationalist China (1928–1949), then Taiwan until his death — the man who inherited Sun Yat-sen's revolution and betrayed its social content.
Record
- Rose through the Whampoa Academy; after Sun's death launched the April 12, 1927 Shanghai massacre — the purge of the CCP and left-KMT financed by Shanghai bankers and Green Gang gangsters, inaugurating two decades of White Terror.
- Nanjing decade: rule through landlord-comprador coalition; failure to resist Japanese aggression until forced ("internal pacification before external resistance" — prioritizing anti-communism over national defense).
- War with Japan (1937–45): massive casualties, corruption, famine (Henan 1942), and hoarding of US aid.
- Civil war defeat (1946–49): hyperinflation, conscription terror, and battlefield collapse drove the KMT to Taiwan; there he ran an authoritarian garrison state under US protection while maintaining the fiction of governing all China.
Infrared treatment
Chiang exemplifies the comprador betrayal of national revolution: a nationalist movement captured by finance and foreign patrons, which then had to be defeated by the people's forces to complete the nation's liberation. The parallel drawn is with every US-backed client regime since — and with the danger Infrared warns of inside MAGA: patriotism without social content becoming a shell for oligarchy (see Tridemism, Yen Chia-kan).