Creating a Public Face for Posterity: The Making of Chiang Kai-shek’s Shilüe Manuscripts

Abstract

In the midst of war, secretaries began selecting and organizing excerpts from Chiang Kai-shek’s diary, telegrams, written reports, and speeches to form the shilüe gaoben , which might be roughly translated as “draft” or “working manuscripts.” Yet because of the Guomindang’s later exodus to Taiwan, these manuscripts remained incomplete and in different stages of draft form. As such, they open an intriguing window into the process of establishing a Chinese leader’s political legitimacy in the eyes of posterity. In comparing the shilüe to its nearest equivalent, the dynastic Standard Histories, this article finds that its content reflected the change from the relationship between emperor and subject to that between national leader and citizen. In addition, by clarifying the methodology informing the shilüe as a political/historical document, this article finds that the secretaries’ varying goals for, and abilities to put together, the shilüe influenced how posterity would view Chiang’s legacy.