Name: Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek (1971) | 60 Minutes Archive
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T02:44:49.000Z
Duration: 18 min 32 s
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Molly Safer, who was the first American television newsman to report from Communist China, has just returned from the China of Chiang Kai Shek.

For two decades since his defeat on the mainland, it was the policy of the United States to practice and propagate the idea that Chang's island of Taiwan was the one and only China.

There was a mad Hatter's kind of logic about it all, supporting Chang's pronouncements that his forces of so called Free China would invade the mainland at the same time carefully ensuring that he would not, while at the same time containing Communist China with a nuclear threat and at the same time not recognizing its existence.

And so for generations now, our China policy has been anchored to our commitment to to Chang.

For years in the United States, a barrage of propaganda portrayed Chang and his regime both before and after his defeat on the mainland as the democratic leader of Free China, denying that the struggle in China between Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Zedong was a naked struggle for power between two ruthless men, both bent on imposing their own personal dictatorship over millions of Chinese people.

So on Taiwan, the myth of a republican China was perpetuated and Chang and Madame Chang were pictured as the aging Kennedys of a Camelot that never was.

Little has disturbed the calm of their Taiwan exile over the past 20 years.

American assurances of protecting and nurturing the so called Republic of China guaranteed at least the Generalissimo's position as the leader of a mini China.

US Policy of not recognizing the mainland reinforced Chang's dream of a return.

But last week reality intruded in the bizarre form of a ping pong competition.

He is fit and in full control, according to his advisors.

As we walked in his garden, there was nothing to indicate otherwise.

And after a decade of almost gullist inaccessibility, the Generalissimo submitted to a television interview.

Chang refused to give a spontaneous interview.

He would only agree to give his views if questions were submitted in advance, no follow up questions permitted.

His policy, he says, has not changed in 40 years and he proudly states it will never change.

President, with regard to the ping pong visits to Communist China by the United States, do you regard this change in policy between the United States and Communist China as a direct threat to the Republic of China?

The Chinese Communist invitation and the visit of the American table tennis team to the Chinese mainland are merely new approaches to the international united front intrigues of the Pepin regime.

Such Chinese communist tactics of external infiltration and subversion have borne their first fruit.

If all of us are aware of this, I think there should be no substantial change in the relationships between the United States and the Chinese Communists.

The cheating of BEI Ping will fail as the deceit is recognized.

The fundamental foreign policy of the Republic of China is based on belief that in statecraft the nation should rely not on others but itself.

No change in external elements or factors will affect the position of the Republic of China or alter its fundamental national policy.

Neither the Chinese version of communism on the mainland nor the Chinese version of Western democracy here in Taiwan has very much changed the nature of the Chinese people.

Both are alien ideas adopted out of necessity by the people of the Middle Kingdom.

And when you look at both Chinas, you get the feeling that the similarities between the two are much stronger than the differences that keep them apart.

What has been called the cultural unity of the Chinese people dominates life both in Peking and Taiwan and among Chinese people on the other side of the earth.

The same rich street life, the same gregarious nature, the same pride and arrogance, the same respect for the fundamental importance of education, the same sense of being Chinese and the same understanding that Americans and other foreigners, no matter how inscrutable and alien they may be, must be dealt with.

Chang and his army and his Kuomintang party found the mainland ungovernable.

But Taiwan, under the umbrella of American security, was a tight little island, rich with the heritage of China's great past, but

relatively free of the dissensions that have torn it apart through the centuries.

The old relationship between man and soil.

It is the old cycle of China, man and earth.

And for him, it is not all that different.

120 miles away, nature has created its own bondage on the Chinese people.

And neither Chang's nor Mao's version of liberty has even challenged it.

But both Chinas have learned to feed themselves that alone.

Taiwan is not so ideologically regimented as the mainland.

But you wonder just how deeply embedded communism is over there.

In its long history, China has gone through periodic convulsions of self assertion.

And the result, in both Chinas and in Chinese communities overseas, has been a way of life, a philosophy, a culture, even a diet that is unique.

Taipei is not drenched in the thought of President Chiang, but

to a foreigner's eye, the red banners that hang in every street, that front every shop, give it the look of Peking.

They are slogans too, all with a strong moral tone.

Slogans and homilies in the streets of China predate both Mao and Chiang.

The 22 years of exile have been fruitful ones for the people of Chang.

There is no question that the 14 million people of Taiwan, to put it in its simplest terms, are better off than the 700 million on the mainland.

Simple arithmetic has a lot to do with it, and

so has the energy and inventiveness of the people themselves.

China on Taiwan has leaped into the 20th century its own natural vigor urged on by the two biggest industrial giants at either end of the globe, Japan and the United States.

For reasons of profit and geopolitics, firms like Toyota and Philips, Ford and Sony, Mitsubishi and IBM have poured billions into industrializing Taiwan to the point that the tiny island's gross national product almost equals that of the communist mainland and its exports are even greater.

Japanese and American business supports Taiwan for more than ideological reasons.

The Tatung Company of Taipei makes and assembles computer components.

Their main customer is the International Business Machine Company.

The girls on the assembly line in Taipei, all high school graduates, earn $50 a month, a very good salary in Taiwan.

So long as outside production costs are high and Taiwanese production costs are low, Chiang's China will continue to prosper.

But with China's great grab of the 20th century, they've carried with them the deeply rooted culture of the 10th.

In the mornings in Taipei, just as in Shanghai and Nanking, the men rise early and gather in public places for the ancient art of shadow boxing.

It is part exercise, part dance, as spiritual as it is physical, totally at odds with the sweaty Anglo Saxon version of keeping in shape, but

In Taiwan, they claim to be the repository of China's cultural tradition that the Communists have rejected the richness of the past.

Some validity to it, perhaps, during the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

But even then, when I was in Mao's China, I found that centuries of tradition could not be erased by any Marxist Maoist doctrine, not in a country where individual old age is revered as scholarly wisdom, which perhaps explains why both Chairman Mao and Generalissimo Chang have both held power for so long.

Of all the virtues, the Chinese place most value on education.

In Taiwan, history classes stressed the great cultural superiority of China in the 11th century, while most of Europe fumbled through the darkness of the Middle Ages.

On the mainland, I watched a similar class discuss the same subject, the Song Dynasty.

But the stress was on the talent of the great proletarian masses whose artistry flowered.

The teachers proclaimed despite the despotism of the landlords in Taiwan they gloss over the history of the past 25 years.

Even so there is great pride in the modern achievements of the Chinese people no matter where they were made Mixed with a certain bitterness when they are made on the mainland.

Of course there is a common pride you see in Chinese.

The pride of the culture of their forbearers.

It's not a pride of just being a Chinese.

Whether he's educated or under educated, he's very.

The pride is only of our culture and civilization.

James Wei runs the government's information office for Taiwan.

He escaped the mainland along with Chang and his army 22 years ago.

He now helps to sell Taiwan's image of abroad.

Don't you tell me that Mao Zedong is respected by.

By the other world, by the other countries?

No, he's despised upon but since he claimed to have this nuclear weapon and 700 million.

Actually he has 700 million enemies, you see and then you see boost him up like a big fellow.

The more he claimed of the civil the population on the mainland the more he has the enemy to us we deeply confident of that.