Chiang Ching-kuo

Chiang Ching-kuo (/ˈtʃæŋtʃɪŋˈkwoʊ/, 27 April 1910 – 13 January 1988) was a Chinese statesman and diplomat who served as the president of the Republic of China from 1978 to 1988. A member of the Kuomintang (KMT), he was the party's chairman from 1975 until his death. His presidency was defined by the end of martial law in Taiwan.

Born in Fenghua, Chiang was the eldest and only biological son of President Chiang Kai-shek. He was sent as a teenager to study in the Soviet Union during the First United Front in 1925, when his father's Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party were in alliance. Before his education in the USSR, he attended school in Shanghai and Beijing, where he became interested in socialism and communism. He attended university in the USSR and spoke Russian fluently, but when the Chinese Nationalists violently broke with the Communists, Joseph Stalin sent him to work in a steel factory in the Ural Mountains. There, Chiang met and married Faina Vakhreva. With war between China and Japan imminent in 1937, Stalin sent the couple to China. During the war, Ching-kuo's father gradually came to trust him, and gave him more and more responsibilities, including administration.

After the Japanese surrender, Ching-kuo was tasked with and effectively reduced corruption in Shanghai. The victory of the Communists in 1949 drove the Chiang family and their Kuomintang government to retreat to Taiwan. Ching-kuo was first given control of the secret police, a position he retained until 1965 and in which he used arbitrary arrests and torture to ensure tight control as part of the White Terror. He then became Minister of Defense (1965–1969), Vice-Premier (1969–1972) and Premier (1972–1978). After his father's death in 1975, he took leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT) as chairman, and was elected president in 1978 and again in 1984.

Under his tenure as president, the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, while remaining authoritarian, became more open and tolerant of political dissent. Chiang courted Taiwanese voters, and reduced the preference for those who came from the mainland after World War II. Toward the end of his life, Chiang decided to relax government controls on the media and speech, and allowed Han Chinese born in Taiwan into positions of power, including his eventual successor Lee Teng-hui. Chiang was credited for his Soviet-inspired city planning policies, economic development with Ten Major Construction Projects in Taiwan, efforts to clamp down on corruption, as well as the democratic transition of Taiwan and gradually shifting away from the authoritarian dictatorial rule of his own father Chiang Kai-shek.