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When Chiang captured Wuhan, the Communists, backed by Madame Sun, took over, launching a reign of terror as small Red armies seized territory. The KMT congress was hijacked by its Communist minority, and Communists in Shanghai, led by a subtle young leader, Zhou Enlai, seized businesses: Chiang was losing control of China. The Songs urged action: recruiting his gangster-boss ally ‘Big-Eared’ Du, Chiang planned a counter-coup and compiled death lists: Mao and Zhou were on them.

Chiang’s son was still in Moscow, but Chiang said, ‘I can’t sacrifice national interests for my son.’ On 12 April 1927, he pounced: ‘Big-Eared’ Du and his gang members beheaded Communists in the streets of Shanghai. Ten thousand were killed. ‘Better to kill 1,000 innocent people,’ said Chiang, ‘than let a single Communist escape.’ Mao escaped and met up with a Communist army, later launching an uprising that was obliterated. Demoted for ‘military opportunism’, Mao fled to a Communist enclave in Jiangxi, but he learned the lesson of Chiang’s purge, telling Stalin’s envoy, ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’^* Taking command in Jiangxi, he spotted a skinny, neurotic graduate of the Whampoa Academy, the twenty-one-year-old Lin Biao, who later became the best Communist general and the chosen heir but who died trying to overthrow him. Mao felt the ferocity of the struggle when his wife was beheaded by the KMT, though he swiftly married a young comrade, with whom he had more children. While Zhou organized clandestine work in Shanghai, Mao held public executions of landlords at Party rallies, declaring, ‘Revolution’s not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor embroidery,’ but ‘an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’. Stalin noticed that Mao was ‘insubordinate but successful’ and started to back him.

Now Chiang courted Meiling Song, inviting her on a series of dates. He agreed to study Christianity and dismiss his concubines. In September 1927, they were engaged, marrying in December, the ‘biggest wedding Shanghai ever saw’, wrote Meiling, who tamed Chiang, emerging as his chief adviser, eschewing western clothes and always sporting a silk cheongsam, slit to the knee on both sides. It was never a passionate romance. ‘Here was my opportunity,’ she wrote. ‘With my husband, I would work ceaselessly to make China strong.’

Chiang set up his dictatorship at Nanjing styled as chairman of the State Council and generalissimo. He disdained Chinese people as ‘lazy, indifferent, corrupt, decadent’ and ‘walking corpses’, and he trusted no one, setting up rival secret-police organs whose operatives assassinated his rivals and tortured his enemies. When Chiang had a Communist comrade executed, Madame Sun screamed at him, ‘Butcher!’ Afterwards, he planned her assassination in a faked car crash, but cancelled it.^*

Yet in the north an aggressive empire was keen to expand. The Tiger of Mukden, Grand Marshal Zhang Zuolin, still ran Manchuria, with Japanese backing. On 25 December 1926, Hirohito became emperor at a time when his generals sought to guide the nation. The army’s Imperial Way faction saw the new reign as an unmissable opportunity to remove cautious liberal politicians and bring in a militaristic nationalist dictatorship under the emperor: a Chinese empire was Japan’s right as a great power.

Two men stood in their way: in Manchuria, Marshal Zhang; and in the rest of China, Chiang Kai-shek. Without any permission from Tokyo, Japanese generals solved the first problem. On 4 June 1928, they blew up the marshal’s train. Manchuria was inherited by the Tiger’s opium-addicted son, known as the Young Marshal, but his grip was much weakened. Next they needed to deal with Chiang, who had emerged as national leader at the same time as the man who would ultimately back him.

On 6 November 1928, Franklin Roosevelt pulled off an astonishing rebirth. The Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith, had proposed that FDR run for New York governor, presuming that a crippled man would never be able to challenge him at a national level. Though he was lifted out of cars and helped to rostrums, Roosevelt proved him wrong. ‘Well, here’s the helpless cripple my opponent is speaking about,’ he said on the pitch. ‘This is my sixteenth speech today.’

JAZZ: ROOSEVELT, JOSEPHINE BAKER, LUCKY LUCIANO AND THE ROARING TWENTIES

To everyone’s surprise, even his own, Roosevelt won the governorship, and Smith lost the presidency resoundingly to Herbert Hoover. A reporter asked Eleanor how she felt. ‘I’m not excited about my husband’s election. I don’t care. What difference can it make to me?’ Roosevelt promised ‘an era of good feeling’.