This admirable book explains how China's Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek earned the epithet “incompetent and corrupt” during the late days of its existence in mainland China. Parks Coble has soundly substantiated some of the rumors that gave rise to that thumbnail explanation of why Chiang's regime was swept away by Chinese Communist forces in 1949.
In his acknowledgments, Coble evocatively describes a decades-long journey to understand the collapse of China's Guomindang-led government. His trek originated in discussion of the Nationalist failure in graduate seminars led by the late Lloyd Eastman, pathbreaking researcher on Republican China. In those days, intriguing snippets and speculation stood in for archival documentation. Coble now applies his expertise and narrative flair to an eye-opening examination of source materials to which scholars have at last gained access during the past twenty years, particularly the papers of T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek,...
