Chiang Ching-kuo
6th and 7th President of Republic of China · China · On the map · Politicians · Lived 1910 to 1988 · aged 77
The son sent to study in Stalin's Soviet Union who came home to run his father's secret police, then spent his final decade dismantling the authoritarian state he'd helped enforce for three decades.
Chiang Ching-kuo is read about 2,825 times a day, in 48 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 12 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
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Photos 11
Family picture of Chiang Ching-kuo in the arms of his grandmother Wang Caiyu (middle), mother Mao Fumei (left) and father Chiang Kai-Shek (right), taken in 1910
Chiang Ching-kuo in 1920s
Chiang Ching-kuo with his father Chiang Kai-shek (1940s)
Chiang Ching-kuo in 1948
Chiang Ching-kuo (left) with father Chiang Kai-shek in 1948.
General Chiang Ching-kuo with U.S. President John F. Kennedy at the White House, 11 September 1963
Defense Minister Chiang Ching-kuo at the Pentagon with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 23 September 1965Awards
About this person
Born in Fenghua in 1910, Chiang Ching-kuo was shipped to the USSR as a teenager in 1925 when the Nationalists and Communists were still allies. When his father Chiang Kai-shek broke violently with the Communists, Stalin exiled him to a steel factory in the Ural Mountains, where he married Faina Vakhreva and learned fluent Russian. Stalin sent the couple back to China in 1937 as war with Japan loomed, and Ching-kuo earned his father's trust through wartime administration. He tackled corruption in Shanghai after the Japanese surrender, then followed the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan in 1949. There he commanded the secret police until 1965, wielding arbitrary arrest and torture as instruments of the White Terror, before climbing through Defense Minister, Vice-Premier, and Premier. He took the KMT chairmanship in 1975 after his father died and won the presidency in 1978. In his last years he courted Taiwanese voters over mainlanders, opened the media, allowed political dissent, elevated Benshengren including successor Lee Teng-hui, and ended martial law in 1987 - a year before his death.
