Mass Murder

Chiang may not have been a personally cruel man. But he let. others do his dirty work for him and thus avoided direct responsibility, and he seldom condemned those who performed murder in his name. At the very dawn of his reign, gangsters slaughtered the Shanghai workers and Chiang made the gang leader one of the pillars of his regime. In fact, Kuomintang papers called this gangster 'the well-known philanthropist' Towards the end of his reign, when his soldiers massacred the Formosans, Chiang castigated the murdered islanders, but not his murdering troops. Yet when Tai Li, the head of his secret service, whose men performed their duties with hatchet, poison and pistol, died in an airplane accident, the Generalisimo is said to have wept.