Soong Ching-ling was a Chinese political figure. As the second wife of Sun Yat-sen, one of the leaders of the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China, she was often referred to as Madame Sun Yat-sen. She was a member of the Soong family and, together with her siblings, played a prominent role in China's politics prior to 1949.
Background
Song was born into a rich Christian family in Shanghai. The Songs were an exception in late Qing China Americanized, entrepreneurial, Christian, and puritanical. Her father, Charles Jones Song, educated in the United States, was a Methodist minister and a printer. His commercial press printed both bibles and revolutionary pamphlets, and financed Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement. Song Qingling's political life underwent three stages as Sun’s follower in the republican revolution as a Communist supporter and a critic of Jiang Jieshi’s government and as a figurehead under Cornmunism.
Education
His second daughter, Chlng-ling, received her early education at the McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai and was then sent to Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia, a school her elder sister Ai-ling had attended. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1913 and then left for China. En route she stopped in Tokyo where she met Sun Yat-sen, about 25 years her senior and already married.
Career
In 1913, Song Qingling joined her family who had fled to Japan after Yuan Shikai took power, and there she met Dr. Sun. In 1914, she took over from Ailing as Sun's English secretary and despite family opposition, she eloped and married him in 1915. Her bravery won her great fame in warlord Chen Jiongming's 1922 mutiny against Sun who was then president extraordinaire in Guangzhou (Canton). Sun intended to unify the nation while Chen favored a loose federation of warlords but intended to enlarge his base in Guangdong. During the skirmish, Song pleaded with Sun to escape first. After an arduous journey, she managed to escape, disguised as a countrywoman. The ordeal convinced Sun that the Guomindang (GMD) should turn to the Soviets instead of the warlords for support. Duly impressed by Soviet renunciation of all Tsarist gains from China through unequal treaties, she participated in negotiations with Soviet advisers Adolf Joffe and Michael Borodin in 1923. The GMD was reorganized and an alliance forged with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Song was identified, together with the couple Liao Zhongkai and He Xiangning, as members of the GMD Left. In 1924, she accompanied Sun to Peiping to negotiate national unification with the warlords.
It was after Dr. Sun's death in 1925 that her political stamina began to shine. She returned to Shanghai, establishing ties with the CCP elements and the student movement after the May 30th incident of 1925. It was rare for a Chinese widow to be involved in politics. Enraged at the assassination of Liao Zhongkai in 1925 and the Party purges, she showered attacks on the GMD Right. However, for her status as Sun's widow and for some semblance of unity within the GMD, she was elected in 1926 a member of the Second Central Executive Committee. (She was reelected in every subsequent congress until 1945.) Her sympathy for the Communists rendered her a one-person opposition party. She supported the Northern Expedition which started in mid-1926, and directed the Red Cross to care for wounded soldiers. With He Xiangning, she led the women's movement in 1925-1927, upholding women's rights and self-determination in marriage, but the efforts backfired when women activists were executed by village elders with the acquiescence of the GMD Right.
She helped form the Left-Wing Wuhan government with GMD leftists, Borodin and Song Ziwen who soon defected to Jiang at Kong Xiangsi s persuasion. When Wang Jingwei, alarmed by Stalin's instruction to the CCP to “lead the National Revolution to the goal of Communism,” considered expelling Communists from the GMD, Song recommended prudence, maintaining that Wuhan needed Soviet support to fend off Jiang. In 1927, Wang defected to the Nanjing government. Purges of Communists and execution of feminists, unionists, and student activists followed, and Song went on exile in protest.
The political differences produced a family feud. Qingling alone openly objected to the marriage of Meiling to Jiang, which the Kongs favored. In Europe, she attended tiie International Antiimperialist Convention in Brussels and formed the Third Force as an alternative to the GMD and CCP with Deng Yanda, a rebel general against Jiang. Back in 1929 to attend the burial of Sun in Nanjing, Song announced her wdissociation from participation in the work of the GMD, on account of the counterrevolutionary policy of the Central Executive Committee, and ushered attacks on Jiang5s White Terror and his sanctimonious resistance against Japan. Jiang's execution of Deng in 1931 led her to form the China League for Civil Rights with Cai Yuanbei in 1932, remonstrating against executions and torture of political prisoners. In 1936, she protested against the imprisonment of seven members of her National Salvation Association which called for ending the civil war and stronger resistance against Japan.
When Shanghai fell in 1937, she moved to Hong Kong and organized the China Defense League to channel medical aid to both government and Communist areas. Amid the amicable climate of the second GMD-CCP cooperation after the Xi'n Incident of 1936, the league included high officials like Song Ziwen. She obtained aid from the China Aid Council in the United States for both the league and the industrial cooperative movement initiated by her sisters to set up factories in rural areas. To boost morale and to forge solidarity, she reconciled with her sisters. They persisted in welfare and relief work. In 1945, Qingling established the China Welfare Fund in Shanghai, with a coordinating committee in New York, the China Welfare Appeal. When Japan occupied Hong Kong in 1941, she fled for the wartime capital Chongqing. As a gesture of unity, she accepted official appointments in 1945, member of the GMD Central Executive Committee, in 1946, member of the Standing Committee and GMD delegate to the National Assembly; in 1947, adviser to the government. Nevertheless, she kept her own agenda she criticized Jiang, complaining about undemocratic conditions to U.S. vice-president Henry Wallace in 1944; proposed a coalition government with the CCP in 1946; and in 1948 formed a GMD revolutionary committee with dissident elements. She remained in Shanghai when the city fell to the Communists.
Soong was held in great esteem by the victorious Communists, who reckoned her as a link between their movement and Sun's earlier movement. After the formal establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, she became one of six vice chairmen of the Central People's Government, and one of several vice-chairmen of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. In April 1951, it was announced that she had been awarded the Stalin Peace Prize for 1950.
In 1950, Soong became chairman of the Chinese People's Relief Administration, which combined several organizations dealing with welfare and relief issues. Her China Welfare Fund was reorganized as the China Welfare Institute and began publishing the magazine China Reconstructs, now published as China Today. In 1953, a collection of her writings, Struggle for New China, was published.
In 1953 Soong served on the committees preparing for elections to the new National People's Congress and the drafting of the 1954 constitution. Soong was elected a Shanghai deputy to the first NPC, which adopted the constitution at its first meeting in September 1954. She was elected one of 14 vice-chairmen of the NPC's standing committee, chaired by Liu Shaoqi. In December of the same year, she was elected a vice-chairman of the CPPCC, which became a consultative body, and replaced Liu Shaoqi as chairman of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. During this period, Soong traveled abroad several times, visiting Austria, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Her trips included a January 1953 visit to the Soviet Union, where she was received by Stalin shortly before his death. She visited Moscow again in 1957 with Mao Zedong's delegation to the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
In April 1959, Soong again served as a Shanghai deputy at the Second National People's Congress. At this Congress, Mao Zedong and Zhu De stepped down as President and Vice-President of the People's Republic of China. Liu Shaoqi was elected State Chairman (President), and Soong Ching-ling and Dong Biwu, a senior Communist Party 'elder', were elected Vice President of China. Soong resigned at this time from her positions as vice-chairwoman of the CPPCC National Committee and the NPC Standing Committee. She was re-elected to the post of Vice-chairperson of the PRC at the Third National People's Congress in 1965, and appeared frequently in the early 1960s on ceremonial occasions, often greeting important visitors from abroad.
Soong's public appearances were limited after the Cultural Revolution, and she was in generally poor health, but articles by her, primarily on children's welfare issues, continued to appear in the press. Her last public appearance was on 8 May 1981, when she appeared in a wheelchair at the Great Hall of the People to accept an honorary LL.D. degree from University of Victoria. A few days later she began running a high fever and was unable to rise again. On 16 May 1981, less than two weeks before her death, she was admitted to the Communist Party and named Honorary Chairwoman of the People's Republic of China. She is the only person to ever hold this title. According to one of Soong's biographers, she had wanted to join the Communist Party as early as 1957. However, when she asked Liu for permission to join the party, the request was turned down because "it was thought better for the revolution that she not join formally, but that she would thenceforth be informed, and her opinion sought, concerning all important inner-Party events matters, not only those involving the government."
Politics
In the beginning she was in Kuomintang Party, then in 1981 she was accepted to the Communist Party of China.
Personality
Throughout her career Sung Ch'ing-ling was a prodigious writer,especially from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. But most of her pieces were brief and polemical, and she never authored any major work. A selection of her articles and public speeches from 1927 to 1952 was published in English in 1953 under the title The Struggle for New China. The pre-1949 materials are particularly useful, in part because they are difficult to obtain elsewhere. The post-1949 selections, which constitute half the volume, are generally prosaic, except for a very long account of an inspection trip she made to Manchuria in 1951.
Connections
Soong married Sun Yat-sen, leader of China's 1911 revolution and founder of the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party), on 25 October 1915, even though her parents greatly opposed the match. (Dr. Sun was 26 years her senior.) After Sun's death in 1925, she was elected to the KMT Central Executive Committee. However, she left China for Moscow after the expulsion of the Communists from the KMT in 1927, accusing the KMT of betraying her husband's legacy. Her younger sister, May-ling, married Chiang Kai-shek shortly afterward, making Chiang Soong's brother-in-law.