There was a time in the history of modern China when one of Mao Zedong's favorite proverbs, "women hold up half the sky," could have been amended to the singular: "A woman holds up half the sky." That woman, Soong May-ling, was the wife of Mao's bitter rival and better known by her married name, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. To virtually everyone in her orbit, she was simply "Madame."
In 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek's influence as the leader of China's Nationalist government was at its peak, Life magazine called Madame the "most powerful woman in the world." Liberty magazine described her as "the real brains and boss of the Chinese government." Clare Boothe Luce compared her, without a hint of hyperbole, to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale. Ernest Hemingway, who had lunch with Madame in 1941 in the wartime capital Chongqing, called her the "empress" of China. That's the appellation that Hannah Pakula has appropriated for the title of her entertaining, though overlong, biography, "The Last Empress."
Soong May-ling was born in Shanghai in 1898, the youngest of what came to be known as the "fabled" Soong sisters. The girls were educated in the U.S.—Madame majored in English at Wellesley—and all married well. Ai-ling became the wife of financier H.H. Kung; Ching-ling's husband was Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China; and May-ling in 1927 wed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the man who would soon unify a fractious China but ended up losing the country to the Communists and decamping to Taiwan in 1949. The usual rap on the sisters is that Ai-ling loved money, Ching-ling loved China and May-ling loved power.
