Former Chinese warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, who along with Chinese Communists kidnapped Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and changed the course of Chinese history, died in Hawaii on Oct. 15, Taiwan and Chinese news agencies reported. He was 100.
Chang, who spent decades under house arrest in Taiwan, died days after he was admitted to a hospital in Honolulu for pneumonia, Taiwan's Central News Agency said.
On Dec. 12, 1936, he kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in the central city of Xian and forced him into an alliance with the Communists against the invading Japanese.
That decision helped reestablish Mao Zedong's hard-pressed Red Army, whose numbers had dwindled to a few thousand in fighting with the Nationalists and was on the verge of being wiped out.
After Mao established the People's Republic in 1949, Beijing regarded Chang as a national hero and repeatedly invited him to return to the mainland for a visit.
On word of his death, President Jiang Zemin described Chang as a "great patriot" and said that the Chinese people would always cherish his memory, China's official Xinhua news agency said.
"His death marks the end of a generation," Chang's biographer, Kuo Kwan-ying, said.
In a rare interview for a British-produced television documentary in the early 1990s, Chang said he had no regrets. He said that he had kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek to save China from the Japanese invaders.
Chang said that he and Chiang Kai-shek held conflicting views: The generalissimo considered the Communists the chief enemy, while he considered the Japanese the main foe.
Chiang Kai-shek eventually agreed to an alliance with the Communists and was released unharmed.
Chang, who was called "the Young Marshal," escorted him back to the southern city of Nanking (modern-day Nanjing), then China's capital, only to be arrested.
"I wanted to be held wholly responsible for the things that I did . . . and that is why I went to Nanjing after the Xian incident. In Nanjing, they could have put me to death or shot me by firing squad," Chang told his British interviewer.
More than a decade later, as Chiang's forces folded at the climax of the civil war, Nationalist agents assassinated Gen. Yang Hu-cheng -- who had kidnapped the generalissimo along with Chang -- and Yang's family before fleeing China.
In 1939, Chang was taken to Taiwan, where he spent three decades under house arrest before the island embraced democratic reforms in the late 1980s.
In 1991, he was allowed to leave Taiwan for the first time to visit his children in the United States. He resettled in Hawaii in 1994.
Chang was born June 3, 1901, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, the son of Manchurian military strongman Chang Tso-lin.
The Japanese later killed Chang Tso-lin by bombing his train after he refused to collaborate with them.
When Chang was 27, he inherited control of Manchuria and parts of northern China along with a 200,000-strong army, winning the nickname "Young Marshal."
Chang's wife died in Hawaii last year.
He is survived by a son, a daughter and two grandchildren.
