While the West obsesses about whether or not China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, is going to invade Taiwan, the Taiwanese seemingly have other concerns. Today the hot issue is statues. To be precise, statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the post-war founder-dictator of independent modern Taiwan.

In an inventory taken in 2000 it was estimated that there were over 43,000 statues of Chiang in Taiwan. A removal process, albeit limited in scale, was begun shortly after. Some 150 statues were removed and taken to the sculpture garden that surrounds the mausoleums of Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo – a place often referred to as the ‘Garden of the Generalissimos’. So why then is the newly elected Taiwanese Democratic Progressive party president, Lai Ching-te, planning to remove 760 more Chiang statues?

To explain why the statue issue is such a hot topic with not insignificant relevance to Taiwan’s current and future relationship with China, we need to delve back a little in history to the Chinese civil war that brought Mao Tse-Tung to power. By 1947 the parts of China controlled by Chiang were falling into chaos. While a Japanese military arsenal had fallen into the hands of Mao’s communist forces after the Pacific war, Chiang was relatively starved of equipment by a US state department which tended to believe the Zhou Enlai propaganda that Mao was more of a rebel against the corrupt government of the Chiang’sKuomintang (Nationalists) than a hard-line communist.

The resulting collapse of morale within the Kuomintang forces combined with Mao’s seizure of the countryside destroyed the economies of China’s cities where Chiang was strongest. Food shortages and the printing of money to finance military expenditure brought hyperinflation and civil unrest. In Shanghai between 1946 and 1947 there were 4,200 labour strikes. Panic spread as Mao’s armies advanced.

As defeated loomed, Chiang developed a Plan B,........

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