Located on the south side of Taipei's central government office, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is not actually a mausoleum for Chiang Kai-shek's burial, but a memorial similar to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
On April 5, 1975, Chiang Kai-shek, then president of the Republic of China, died, and the executive president Chiang Ching-kuo presided over an executive council that decided to build the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall here to commemorate it.
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is the most characteristic building preserved in Taiwan, and the design is heavily influenced by the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou, a square pavilion-like building built on a large three-story platform, covered with blue glazed tile octagonal spires inside and out, symbolizing the symbol color of the Kuomintang.
Chiang Kai-shek was an enemy of the Communists all his life, but he was repeatedly defeated in battles, playing a good card in his hand, and finally fled to Taiwan in 1949.
At the end of 1949, in the final stage of the Liberation War, Chiang Kai-shek went to Chongqing and Chengdu to convene military conferences to organize resistance, and at the dangerous moment when the defeat had been determined and Sichuan soldiers Liu Wenhui and Deng Xihou conspired with Lu Han, chairman of the Yunnan provincial government, to detain Chiang, Chiang hastily left Chengdu by plane on December 10 and flew to Taiwan, and since then he has never set foot on mainland soil.
After Chiang retreated to Taiwan, he faced the collapse of the party-state, first of all, the complete collapse of finance and finance, and the legal tender and gold vouchers were like waste paper. Secondly, the army suffered heavy losses, and a large number of generals and soldiers were killed, surrendered and captured, and the army was completely collapsed. The Kuomintang factional rivalry was scattered, acting president Li Zongren fled from Nanjing and never returned, and many people left the party and joined the Communist Party. Taiwan's internal situation is turbulent, and the Communist Party has penetrated deep into the Taiwan people to continuously launch mass protests and riots, inspiring a strong sense of local consciousness among Taiwanese people and hoping to get rid of the powerful rule of the Kuomintang. With the complete loss of the mainland area, the military risk of the PLA launching a sea-crossing operation to attack Taiwan has increased significantly, and whether Taiwan can hold it is also a worry.
Chiang Kai-shek urgently prioritized the withdrawal of the most trusted troops to Taiwan, while strengthening the defense of the main islands off the coast, and began to reorganize the army, build bunker fortifications, and replenish weapons and ammunition in an attempt to put on a final resistance. In March 1950, the PLA crossed the Leizhou Strait to launch a sea-crossing operation, and in May the Nationalist Army lost the entire territory of Hainan Island, and the PLA took advantage of the situation to start planning a war against Taiwan.
After the mainland's military threat was lifted, Chiang Kai-shek immediately launched a plan for the transformation of the Kuomintang, set up a 16-member "Central Reform Committee" headed by himself to replace the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee as the temporary core leading organ of the party, and through the promulgation of the "Measures for the Elimination of Original Party Members," all those who defected to the enemy, became corrupt and degenerate, wavered in their beliefs, and abandoned their duties were expelled from the party and re-registered as party members. In 1952, the Seventh National Congress of the Kuomintang elected a new Central Executive Committee, and Chiang announced the completion of the transformation of the party and the dissolution of the "Central Reform Commission".
In order to resolve Taiwan's internal social antagonisms and conflicts and ensure economic development, in 1953 Chiang Kai-shek and Chief Executive Chen Cheng began to promote the land reform measure of "land for the tiller" to solve the problems of unfair land distribution and peasant poverty. It was stipulated that the landlord could keep the three paddy fields or the six dry fields, and the rest would be leased by the government to tenant farmers by means of expropriation compensation, and the landlords could invest the compensation funds provided by the government in industry and commerce, thus giving rise to a number of influential enterprises.
After the situation stabilized, Chiang Kai-shek used the anti-riot martial law regulations to concentrate all the power of the party, government, and army into his own hands. The First Constituent National Convention held in Nanjing in 1946 adopted the Constitution of the Republic of China, and with the full-scale outbreak of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party Civil War, the situation was reversed, and in July 1948, the National Assembly urgently passed the "Provisional Provisions for the Period of Mobilization and Counter-insurgency" proposed by Zhang Qun and 71 other members, granting the president the authority to impose emergency sanctions to facilitate the government's war.
In 1954, after the National Convention moved to Taiwan, it reconvened and extended the expired Provisional Regulations without setting an expiration date. In 1960, the National Assembly further amended the Provisional Regulations to freeze the constitutional restriction that a president could serve no more than two consecutive terms, paving the way for Chiang's third election as president and making him president for life. After that, he continued to revise the "Provisional Regulations" to authorize the president to set up organs for mobilizing and fighting chaos, adjusting the organization of the central government, formulating and promulgating methods to add by-elections to the Central People's Congress, etc., so that Chiang Kai-shek had absolute power over the party and the state.
In 1967, Taiwan launched the "Chinese Cultural Revival Movement" to establish itself as the inheritor and defender of Chinese culture with the concepts of loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, love, faith, and righteousness. It has published a large number of ancient Chinese classics, implemented the "Instructions for National Life", and formulated 99 specific rules including clothing, food, housing, transportation, entertainment, etc., as a code of conduct that citizens must abide by, etc.
Under the governance of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo's father and son, Taiwan achieved economic take-off in the seventies, entered the ranks of the "Four Asian Tigers", and became a force to be reckoned with in the global economy. But the admission of the People's Republic of China as its legitimate representative in 1971 through UN Resolution 2758 and Nixon's subsequent visit to Chinese mainland in 1972 plunged Chiang Kai-shek into the darkest moments of his life.
The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek's government by the US government is directly related to the changes in the international strategic environment, after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union formed two camps of confrontation, and in the Korean War, the Soviet Union resisted the United States and aided Korea, and the United States naturally supported the Taiwan government against the mainland. After the armed conflict between China and the Soviet Union on Zhenbao Island, China and the United States joined forces to resist the global expansion of the Soviet Union, and the relationship between the United States and Taiwan was relegated to a secondary position.
On the other hand, Chiang Kai-shek's personal dictatorship in Taiwan was not in line with the political philosophy of the Americans, and if it had not coincided with the unexpected outbreak of the Korean War, the US government would have basically abandoned Taiwan. After entering the seventies, China and the United States eased relations and jointly resisted the Soviet Union, but Chiang Kai-shek still refused to accept the proposal of constitutional reform, and naturally went further and further away from the United States.
Chiang was a stubborn nationalist, perhaps a dictator who could no longer listen to different opinions, refused to face reality in his relations with the mainland, stubbornly insisted on counterattacking the mainland, did not accept "two Chinas" or "one China, one Taiwan," and announced his withdrawal from the United Nations in advance before the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 2758, thus losing its legitimate seat in all international organizations.
After Chiang Kai-shek's death, Chiang Ching-kuo continued to adhere to political conservatism after taking over power from his father. In 1971, the severance of diplomatic relations between the Taiwan National Government and the United States caused shocks in the intellectual circles, and non-party organizations began to privately issue administrative magazines criticizing the government; Chiang Ching-kuo's high-pressure policy led to the Formosa Incident, the Jiangnan case plunged society back into turmoil, and Chiang Ching-kuo finally had to open the party ban, the ban on newspapers, and the people went to the mainland to visit relatives, paving the way for Lee Teng-hui's announcement of the lifting of martial law and the restoration of the Constitution.
Since Sun Yat-sen founded the Kuomintang in 1924 "with Russia as a teacher", after experiencing the loss of mainland power in Taiwan, Zhongxing in Taiwan, it lost again to the DPP in the subsequent constitutional election stage. Judging from the prospects for the future, this century-old party has faltered and is extremely unoptimistic, the factions within the party are intertwined, and the leadership or ideology is outdated or hindered by entangled interests, and cannot be recognized by the younger generation.
Now that Taipei's "Chiang Kai-shek Square" has been renamed "Freedom Square", the history of the Kuomintang is a mirror, and only by keeping pace with the times and following the trend of the times can it not be eliminated by society.
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