During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband blamed the United States for the Nationalists' loss of China, and continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland. Although that hope eventually faded, American support for Taiwan remained strong for years, delaying Washington's recognition of Beijing as the capital of China until 1979, three decades after the Communists seized power.
As a fluent English speaker, as a Christian, as a model of what many Americans hoped China to become, Madame Chiang struck a chord with American audiences as she traveled across the country, starting in the 1930's, raising money and lobbying for support of her husband's government. She seemed to many Americans to be the very symbol of the modern, educated, pro-American China they yearned to see emerge -- even as many Chinese dismissed her as a corrupt, power-hungry symbol of the past they wanted to escape.
Ultimately, that difference in perspectives was perhaps one reason that she fled an increasingly democratic Taiwan, where many people reviled her and where she felt less at home as native Taiwanese eclipsed the exiled mainlanders.
Madame Chiang was the most famous member of one of modern China's most remarkable families, the Soongs, who dominated Chinese politics and finance in the first half of the 20th century. Yet in China it was her American background and style that distinguished Soong Mei-ling; that was her maiden name, sometimes spelled May-ling.
For many Americans, her finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.
She helped create American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist government's propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuverings of her husband, who was uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warlords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.
A devout Christian, Madame Chiang spoke fluent English tinted with the Southern accent she acquired as a schoolgirl in Georgia, and she presented a civilized and humane image of a courageous China battling Japanese invasion and Communist subversion. Yet historians have documented the murderous path that Chiang Kai-shek led in his efforts to win, then keep, and ultimately lose power. It also became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.
Madame Chiang had a notoriously tempestuous relationship with her husband, and then with his son by a previous marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo, who became Taiwan's leader after Chiang Kai-shek's death. She had no children.
Her skill as a politician, alternately charming and vicious, made her a formidable presence. She made a play for Taiwan's leadership after Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, even though she was 90 and living in New York.
Although she suffered numerous ailments, including breast cancer, she outlived all her contemporary rivals. She was said to credit her religious faith -- she told friends she rose at dawn for an hour of prayer each day -- for her good health.
Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, who worked closely with her when he commanded American forces in China during the war, described Madame Chiang in his diary as a ''clever, brainy woman.''
''Direct, forceful, energetic,'' he wrote. ''Loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. Can turn on charm at will and knows it.''
Soong Mei-ling's rise to power began when she married Chiang in an opulent ceremony in Shanghai in 1927, bringing together China's star military man with one of the nation's most illustrious families.
Her eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling, directed the family's affairs and innumerable money-making ventures with the help of her husband, H. H. Kung, a scion of one of China's wealthiest banking families.
Madame Chiang's second sister, Soong Qing-ling, was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president after the last emperor was toppled in 1911. After Sun's death, Soong Qing-ling carried his banner over into the Communist camp, causing an irreparable rupture in the family.
When the vanquished Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Soong Qing-ling stayed behind. The Communist Party leadership called her the only true patriot in the Soong family, and appointed her honorary chairman of the People's Republic in 1980, a year before her death.
A Telling Ditty
Today, Chinese still remember the three sisters with a telling ditty: ''One loved money, one loved power, one loved China,'' referring respectively to Ai-ling, Mei-ling and Qing-ling.
Madame Chiang's elder brother, T. V. Soong, often called Nationalist China's financial wizard, served at various times as finance minister, acting prime minister and foreign minister, where his primary role was raising money from America.
Although Madame Chiang developed a stellar image with the American public, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders became disillusioned with her and her husband's despotic and corrupt practices. Eleanor Roosevelt was shocked at her answer when asked at a dinner at the White House how the Chinese government would handle a strike by coal miners. Madame Chiang silently drew a sharp fingernail across her neck.
''She can talk beautifully about democracy,'' Mrs. Roosevelt said later. ''But she does not know how to live democracy.''
By the end of the war, the loyalty of Nationalist officials melted away as the government grew corrupt and fiscally traitorous, printing money so aggressively that the Chinese currency fell to an exchange rate of several million yuan to the dollar. Many Nationalist soldiers were reduced to begging for food because they went unpaid, yet American diplomats discovered that military supplies sent from the United States to China sometimes appeared on the black market soon after arrival.
During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland, although That hope eventually faded.
In New York, Madame Chiang lived in an apartment on Gracie Square in Manhattan. In March 1999, as she turned 101, hard of hearing but still quick-witted, she told visitors that she read the Bible and The New York Times every day.
The Soong family's saga, cutting across many strands of modern Chinese history, began when Madame Chiang's father, Charlie Soong, sailed to the United States at the age of 12. Coming from a family of traders in Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Mr. Soong was taken in by Methodists in North Carolina who converted him to Christianity in hopes of sending him back to spread the word of Jesus in China.
After returning to Shanghai in 1886, Mr. Soong, a genial wheeler-dealer, passed up missionary life to start a business printing Bibles, earning a fortune. He also printed political pamphlets secretly for Sun Yat-sen, then working to overthrow China's last emperor. On Jan. 1, 1912, Sun became China's first president.
Sun lasted in office only a few months before his coalition disintegrated, and after he fled to Japan, he hired Mr. Soong's second daughter, Soong Qing-ling, as a secretary. They soon married, despite the age difference: he was 50 and she was 21.
Educated in America
Mei-ling Soong was born in Shanghai on March 5, 1898, although some references give 1897 as the year because Chinese usually consider everyone to be one year old at birth. At the age of 10, she had followed her elder sisters to the Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Ga.
She entered Wellesley College near Boston in 1913; her brother, T. V., was enrolled at Harvard. She majored in English literature, and was remembered by her classmates as a chubby, vivacious and determined student. She graduated in 1917 and returned to Shanghai speaking English better than Chinese.
She was introduced to her future husband in 1922. By that time, she had matured into a slender beauty and taken to wearing full-length, body-hugging gowns.
Chiang Kai-shek, a severe-looking military aide to Sun who established a school for officers in southern China, may have been as attracted to the Soongs' financial and political connections as he was to their youngest daughter. His initial overtures to her were rebuffed, and after Sun's death in 1925, as Chiang took the title generalissimo and tried to succeed him as the leader of the Nationalist cause, he proposed to Sun's young widow, Soong Qing-ling. She said no.
Chiang allied himself with warlords in southern and central China and with the Soviet Union, where Stalin regarded the Nationalists as more progressive than the warlords who still controlled Beijing and northern China. Communist rebels, not yet led by Mao Zedong, felt they deserved Moscow's support. But Stalin insisted on supporting the Nationalists.
In 1927, Chiang shocked his Soviet backers by carrying out a massacre of leftists in Shanghai. Edgar Snow, the American journalist, estimated that Chiang's forces had executed more than 5,000 people.
The massacre caused a permanent rent in the Soong family. Soong Qing-ling, as Sun's widow, led a faction of Nationalists who voted to expel Chiang from all his posts. T. V. Soong resigned as finance minister, though he was later persuaded to resume his alliance with Chiang.
When Chiang renewed his interest in Soong Mei-ling in 1927, she told him that she would consent to marry only if he could win the approval of her mother, who had reservations about a man who was neither Christian nor single. Chiang had already fathered a son in a marriage that was arranged when he was only 14, and had adopted a second son and married a second wife, Chen Chieh-ru. Chiang promised to convert, and eventually sent Chen away to the United States, where she enrolled at Columbia University and earned a doctorate.
The Chiang-Soong wedding took place in Shanghai on Dec. 1, 1927. A small Christian ceremony was held at the Soong mansion on Seymour Road, followed by a political ceremony at the Majestic Hotel, beneath a portrait of Sun.
As a political partner to her husband, Madame Chiang developed what she called the New Life Movement, a series of principles for modernizing China through social discipline, courtesy and service. She engineered public hygiene campaigns and denounced traditional superstitions.
While many ordinary Chinese resisted it, the campaign was popular with foreigners, particularly with Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, who was born to missionaries in China. A longtime supporter of the Chiangs, Luce named the couple ''Man and Woman of the Year'' in 1938.
During the war with the Japanese, Madame Chiang pushed her husband to build up the Nationalist air force, and helped hire Claire Chennault, who commanded a mercenary force of pilots that came to be known as the Flying Tigers.
During World War II, the relationship between General Stilwell, Chiang and Madame Chiang proved contentious. The general accused Chiang of hoarding resources, deliberately avoiding battle with the Japanese to spare his men to fight the Communists.
Madame Chiang was in the middle, sometimes interceding on General Stilwell's behalf when resisting him threatened American support. But she also plotted against the general, telling journalists that he was incompetent. She and her husband lobbied Washington to have him replaced, and he was, in 1944.
After Japan was defeated in 1945 and the civil war between Nationalists and Communists accelerated, the Communists swiftly expanded their control into the northeast.
The governing Nationalists received considerable American aid, but American officials in China warned of vast amounts of graft among Nationalists. More than $3 billion was appropriated to China during the war, and most of it was transmitted through T. V. Soong, who as China's foreign minister was based in Washington. It later became apparent that the Soong family suffered vicious infighting over the purloined funds.
Madame Chiang traveled to Washington again in November 1948 to plead for emergency aid for the war against the Communists. Yet Congress had recently assigned $1 billion more to China, and President Truman was impatient with the Chiangs and what had become an apparently hopeless effort to shore up the Nationalist government. Madame Chiang never returned to China.
''I can ask the American people for nothing more,'' she said. ''It is either in your hearts to love us, or your hearts have been turned from us.''
In her frustration, she publicly likened American politics to ''clodhopping boorishness.'' Coming after years of generous American support, that irritated Truman.
''They're thieves, every damn one of them,'' Truman said later, referring to Nationalist leaders. ''They stole $750 million out of the billions that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it's invested in real estate down in São Paolo and some right here in New York.''
General Chiang resigned as president of Nationalist China in January 1949 and fled to Taiwan that May, taking with him a national art collection that was kept in crates in Taiwan for years as the Chiangs clung to the ever-diminishing hope that they would some day take it back to Beijing.
Over the years, Madame Chiang's health wavered, and in 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy, and later, a second one.
Her Final Years
Even after she moved to permanent residence in New York, she kept her finger on the pulse of Nationalist politics. She returned to Taiwan after her stepson died in January 1988. Even though she was nearly 90, she tried to rally her old allies. But Lee Teng-hui, chosen as vice president both because he was Taiwan-born and because he was considered a pushover by fellow Nationalists, proved more adept at politics than expected, and he gradually solidified his control.
Madame Chiang lived out her final years in New York, with a pack of black-suited bodyguards who cleared the lobby of her Gracie Square apartment building every time she entered or left. She returned to Congress for one last appearance in 1995.
Until this year, Madame Chiang maintained an annual tradition of receiving a few friends at her Manhattan apartment on her birthday. But this year, she came down with pneumonia, and was was unable to do that, the local Chinese press reported.
Her last public appearance was believed to be in January 2000, when she attended an exhibition of her watercolor paintings of traditional Chinese landscapes at the Queens headquarters of the World Journal, a prominent local Chinese newspaper. She was in a wheelchair, but was reported to be in good spirits, telling people there that she was very happy that day.
