Since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in defeat at the end of 1949, he learned the lessons of his failure to rule the mainland for more than 20 years, and began to stabilize Taiwan's economy, reorganize the army, and realize the streamlining and reform of the Kuomintang when he first arrived in Taiwan. After some efforts, the Kuomintang at that time swept away the factions in the party in the past, and almost all the power was in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, laying a good foundation for his smooth succession to his son Chiang Ching-kuo.
After the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo faced great difficulties if he wanted to pass the throne to his son. On October 15, 1984, the gunshots from San Francisco shocked the whole of Taiwan, and Liu Yiliang, a Chinese-American writer with a complicated background, was assassinated by Taiwanese gangsters in his home in San Francisco, and what cost him his life was his own "Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo", the publication of which caused the Taiwan authorities to send underworld killers to the United States to kill Liu Yiliang, and at the same time, because of this assassination case, it completely disrupted Chiang Ching-kuo's succession plan and buried the rule of the Chiang family dynasty in Taiwan.
The Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo
What exactly did this "Jiangnan assassination case" that ended the Chiang family regime arise, and what impact did it have on Taiwan's future? Today, the History Inquiry Institute will take you to understand the Twilight Years of the Chiang Family Dynasty in Taiwan, which shocked the Jiangnan assassination case at home and abroad.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > assassinate Gangnam, the building will fall</h1>
Liu Yiliang's pen name is "Jiangnan", but he is not a full-time writer, before writing and publishing the book, he was a correspondent for Taiwan Daily in the United States, lived in the United States for a long time, and later became an American citizen. Liu Yiliang, born in 1932 in Jingjiang County, Jiangsu Province, had a rough early life, his parents died early, and soon after finishing junior high school in his hometown, Liu Yiliang followed the Kuomintang to Taiwan, which was 1949, the most important year in Chinese history, the year of the founding of New China, Chinese people have since stood up.
Liu Yiliang's pen name "Jiangnan",
Chiang Kai-shek, who had lost power, also decided to move to Taiwan. Since the restoration of Taiwan in 1945, during the three-year Liberation War, more than 2 million people have migrated to Taiwan, a great migration that affected the fate of millions of people, some people have left their homeland and never returned to their hometowns in this life, and some people have taken advantage of the situation to rise up in Taiwan. Liu Yiliang is the lucky one among millions of people.
At that time, Liu Yiliang, who went to Taiwan, was only 17 years old, and under the tide of the times, he boarded the ship of history as a soldier of the Nationalist Army, although Liu Yiliang was young, he had read books and liked to study, analyzing things and the beginning of the Road, on the steamship to Taiwan, he talked with an officer very happily, and Liu Yiliang also transformed from a big head soldier into a captain officer.
In the era of war and chaos, having a smart mind is more important than anything else. After arriving in Taiwan, Liu Yiliang entered the "Ministry of National Defense" political cadre training school presided over by Chiang Ching-kuo for training by virtue of his ability to do things with a clean foundation and serious work. This school was used by Chiang Kai-shek in order to let Chiang Ching-kuo succeed his son Chiang Ching-kuo. Although Chiang Kai-shek had always been a dictatorship before, it was not Chiang Kai-shek's word in the Kuomintang during the mainland period.
Chiang Kai-shek, Song Meiling, Chiang Ching-kuo
Let's say that the Song family and the Kong family, on which Chiang Kai-shek relied, had some problems with Chiang Ching-kuo. In April 1975, when Chiang Kai-shek was dying, he specially summoned his wife Soong Mei-ling and son Chiang Ching-kuo and asked them to assure him that they would get along well and be united and harmonious. During his lifetime, Chiang Kai-shek had been racking his brains to improve the relationship between Soong Mei-ling and Chiang Ching-kuo, but it had been ineffective, but after his death, chiang ching-kuo's "mother-son" relationship with Soong Ching-ling had eased.
The reason for this is also because Chiang Kai-shek's seat will eventually fall on Chiang Ching-kuo's head; after Chiang Kai-shek's death, Chiang Ching-kuo smoothly took over Taiwan's administrative affairs, and Soong Mei-ling flew to the United States to spend his old age in peace, and the natural contradiction between the two did not see each other decreased.
Chiang Kai-shek died
After retiring to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek began to focus on cultivating Chiang Ching-kuo, making him the political and military leader of the Kuomintang successively; just as Chiang Kai-shek relied on the Whampoa Military Academy to accumulate important political capital during his ascension to power, Chiang Ching-kuo's political capital in Taiwan was also accumulated in the process of reorganizing the Kuomintang's army and party after 1950.
Liu Yiliang did not pursue a career after training at the Political Cadre Training School, because he refused to be sent to the army as an instructor, so he was expelled from the school. He then studied in the English Department of Taipei Normal University, and after graduation, he entered the press as a reporter for Taiwan Daily, and his experience of learning English also laid the foundation for him to be sent to the United States as a journalist.
In 1967, Liu Yiliang was stationed in the United States as a reporter for the Taiwan Daily and became a citizen of the United States, during which time he used Jiangnan as a pen name to publish a large number of articles exposing the shady scene of the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek's father and son in Taiwan, and wrote the "Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo", which earned him a lot of money and reputation but also made him lose his life.
The biographies of political figures like Chiang Ching-kuo are generally written by himself or his subordinate imperial literati, and Liu Yiliang's biography of Chiang Ching-kuo written as a journalist is guaranteed? It should all be the story of the street stall literature, right?
In fact, in the 1980s, these articles exposing the shady rules of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo's father and son in Taiwan were written by many people and were widely circulated in the overseas Chinese world, but Liu Yiliang's "Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo" was different from those stall literatures, in which he wrote a large number of unknown Taiwanese political secrets, and most of the content was not a wild history of catching wind and catching shadows and hearsay, but a first-hand information. Otherwise he wouldn't have been killed by a book.
Why did Liu Yiliang have access to the contents of the factional struggle within the Chiang family and within the Kuomintang? In fact, in addition to Liu Yiliang's identity as a reporter for Taiwan Daily, he also has multiple identities. First of all, after training at the political cadre school, he did not break away from Taiwanese politics, but instead went underground and became a spy.
Liu Yiliang joined the military command, and later the military command was renamed the Intelligence Bureau, Liu Yiliang was a paid intelligence officer working for the Taiwan Intelligence Bureau all the way down, and the reason why he was sent to the United States was also because the Taiwan Intelligence Bureau asked him to go to the United States as a journalist to collect U.S.-related intelligence.
But I don't know whether Liu Yiliang's intelligence work in the United States is not very smooth or too smooth, he was also favored by the US intelligence agencies, Liu Yiliang became an informant of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, so liu Yiliang became a double-sided spy, he wandered between the Taiwan Intelligence Bureau and the US FBI, Liu Yiliang, who lives in the United States, gradually did not pay attention to the Taiwan authorities, he began to publish articles as a writer Jiangnan to win fame and fortune, and his life was not happy.
Liu Yiliang was once a student of his own political work school, and he was also a disciple of Chiang Ching-kuo and a secret agent of the Kuomintang, so he had a unique channel of understanding the unknown internal affairs of the Chiang family and the Kuomintang, and now this "own person" has exposed the old bottom of the Chiang family, which makes the Kuomintang authorities very angry. Kuomintang intelligence officers contacted Liu Yiliang before the publication of the book "Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo" and gave him a sum of money to delete the unfavorable remarks in the book, and Liu Yiliang accepted the money and agreed.
However, the contents of the "Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo" published after deletion and revision are still not conducive to maintaining Chiang Ching-kuo's image. What the Kuomintang authorities could not bear even more was that Liu Yiliang was addicted to writing books, and the "Biography of Wu Guozhen" he was writing, which exposed the Kuomintang dictatorship and also involved the scandals of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling and other high-level Kuomintang officials.
The Biography of Wu Guozhen
Wu Guozhen was a political figure of the Republic of China; when the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, Wu Guozhen was a well-known "pro-American faction." Chiang Kai-shek was still in a precarious state when he first arrived in Taiwan; in order to consolidate political power, he had to ask for assistance from the United States, and the conditions given by the Americans were that aid was acceptable, but it had to be wu Guozhen, the leader of the "pro-American faction" within the Kuomintang, as the chairman of Taiwan Province.
Wu Guozhen, who had no dealing with the Father and Son of the Chiang Family, also saw the ups and downs in Taiwan's political arena. At that time, Chiang Kai-shek put Chiang Ching-kuo in charge of the intelligence and secret service system, and Wu Guozhen also saw that Chiang Kai-shek intended to let Chiang Ching-kuo succeed him. In the early 1950s, Taiwan was in the midst of a severe white terror, with "bandit spies" caught every day, and people were imprisoned and assassinated every day.
In 1952, when Wu Guozhen went downstairs after eating in the hotel, he found that his driver's face was miserable, and the screws on the front wheel and spindle connection of the front wheel and spindle he was riding were suspected of being loose, and if he drove, there was a danger of overturning. This made Wu Realize that if he continued like this, his life would be in danger, so he resigned as chairman of Taiwan Province in April 1953 and went to the United States on the pretext of seeing a doctor and never returned. In February 1954, Wu Guozhen criticized Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship in an interview with the American media, saying that he was not allowed to leave the United States by Chiang's father and son.
Wu Guozhen
In 1978, Chiang Ching-kuo took up the post of "president" of the Republic of China and became the leader of the Kuomintang. By 1984, Chiang Ching-kuo had already considered the issue of succession, and the most promising person to take over Chiang Ching-kuo's position was his son Jiang Xiaowu, but would Liu Yiliang's writing of such a book exposing the chiang family's inner story affect the Chiang family's rule in Taiwan?
Jiang Xiaowu was of course very nervous, so he wanted to imitate his grandfather Chiang Kai-shek and use assassination to get rid of Liu Yiliang. Born in Chongqing in 1945, Jiang Xiaowu was liked by Chiang Kai-shek since he was a child, so he naturally became the third generation of successors that the Chiang family focused on cultivating.
Jiang Xiaowu
In the 1980s, in order to train Jiang Xiaowu, Chiang Ching-kuo deliberately let him meddle in the Intelligence Agents and Party affairs of the Kuomintang. Under the instructions of Jiang Xiaowu, Taiwan's intelligence bureau decided to impose "family law" sanctions on Liu Yiliang, and Wang Xiling, director of Taiwan's intelligence bureau, sent the Taiwan gangster Bamboo Gang to complete the task of assassinating Liu Yiliang, so Chen Qili, the leader of the Bamboo Gang, personally came to the United States on horseback, and on the morning of October 15, 1984, Chen Qili and others shot liu Yiliang three times at his residence in San Francisco, but the gang was not a professional agent after all, and the assassination of Jiangnan was soon discovered by the INVESTIGATION agency of the US government.
Because Liu Yiliang was an informant of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, in order to find out the murderer, the US intelligence department was very active, and soon found out that the murderer was Chen Qili, Wu Dun, and Dong Guisen of the Taiwan Bamboo Gang. The United States Government immediately exerted pressure on the Taiwan authorities to thoroughly investigate the matter. The Taiwan gangsters also knew that they were doing black work for the Kuomintang authorities, and their attitude toward the Kuomintang authorities was to use them when they thought of them and throw them away when they ran out, so in order to prevent the Kuomintang from crossing the river and demolishing the bridge, Chen Qili specially prepared an audio tape of how the director of taiwan's intelligence bureau explained how he killed Liu Yiliang and the details recorded in the form of self-description. The tape was left in the United States.
In the middle is Chen Qili
The case of Liu Yiliang's assassination caused an uproar in Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo was forced by strong public opinion pressure to order the police to carry out a very vigorous anti-gang crime operation, Chen Qili, Wu Dun, and others who fled back to Taiwan were quickly arrested, and Dong Guisen fled to Brazil a year later and was arrested and extradited to the United States by the Brazilian police. The United States requested the extradition of Chen Qili and Wu Dun, but the Taiwan authorities refused. The U.S. government was furious that dared to send people to carry out assassinations in the United States against a U.S. intelligence department informant with U.S. nationality and refused to extradite the murderer afterwards.
The United States revealed an audio tape confirming the involvement of Kuomintang intelligence personnel in the case, completely convicting the Kuomintang authorities of the crime. On January 10, 1985, Chiang Ching-kuo ordered the arrest of Intelligence Bureau Chief Wang Xiling and others, demanding a thorough investigation of the case. The tape prepared by Chen Qili was also made public, declaring that Jiang Xiaowu was the culprit in the murder of Jiangnan.
Although Chiang Ching-kuo then ordered the abolition of the intelligence department and the trial of the people involved in the case, it was still impossible to block the mouths of the People of Taiwan, and everyone knew that the mastermind behind the assassination of Jiangnan was Jiang Xiaowu. At the same time, this case has also made the precarious Taiwan-US relationship worse.
Wang Xiling
Forced by internal and external pressure, Chiang Ching-kuo had no choice but to publicly announce that the descendants of the Chiang family would no longer be involved in politics, and Jiang Xiaowu was also "exiled" to Singapore as "deputy representative of Taiwan's commercial delegation to Singapore," completely ruining his political career. The Chiang dynasty has finally come to the end of history since Chiang Ching-kuo.
Chiang Ching-kuo stated that the descendants of the Chiang family would not succeed him, declaring that Taiwan had entered the "post-Chiang family era," and Liu Yiliang, who caused many disputes and affected the history of later generations, was discovered after his death that he was originally a three-sided spy, and Liu Yiliang was also collecting intelligence for the intelligence departments of Taiwan, the mainland, and the United States, and before that, all three parties were in the dark.
Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, and before his death personally ordered the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, the opening up of the party ban, and the ban on newspapers; although Chiang Ching-kuo conformed to the development of the times and gradually began democratic reforms in his later years, the people of Taiwan still did not intend to spare the Kuomintang, which had ruled Taiwan for many years.
And if the Jiangnan case had not occurred, would Chiang Ching-kuo have been able to smoothly pass the throne of power to his son? Looking back at history, we can find that the reason why Chiang Ching-kuo finally lifted martial law was only forced by the situation, and he did not have the idea of letting his son succeed him, but the changes in the objective environment led to the inability to take over anymore. The assassination of Jiangnan in 1984 can be said to be the last straw that crushed the crumbling Chiang family dynasty. No matter how turbulent the political situation is, the beautiful island of Taiwan will eventually return to the embrace of the motherland.
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