The soldier who unified China by force in the 1920s, turned on his Communist allies, and then fought Japan for eight years as the leader of the Allied power the West forgot.
The fork
April 1927. Halfway through the Northern Expedition, the Nationalist march from Canton to unite China, he turns on the Communists in Shanghai and has thousands killed. The civil war that will decide China's future starts here, ten years before the Japanese war.
What they wanted
A unified, modern, Nationalist China. He calls the Communists a disease and Japan an injury, and fights them in that order until his own generals kidnap him at Xi'an in 1936 and force a united front.
What it cost
The White Terror against the left; a regime riddled with corruption; the breaching of the Yellow River dykes in 1938, which drowned or starved hundreds of thousands of his own people to slow the Japanese; the famine in Henan in 1942–43. He loses the mainland in 1949.
The fight
The failed autocrat who lost China, or the leader who held it together against Japan at a cost nobody else paid? Jay Taylor argues for the second, against a generation of American contempt.