A specter is haunting East Asia — at least according to Sydney’s Morning Herald. The ghost is none other than the Generalissimo of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek. His great-grandson’s election as Taipei’s mayor, seen as a springboard to the presidency, appears to have stirred up long-forgotten echoes of the elder Chiang’s vision of a China reunified not by Beijing’s Communists, but by the Free Chinese on Taiwan.

The election of Chiang Wan-an, the Herald writes, is putting a spotlight back on the elder Chiang. A former president of the Republic of China, Chiang “fled to Taiwan after being defeated by Mao Zedong in a brutal two-decade civil war,” the Herald relates, and moved Free China’s capital to Taipei. The election as mayor of the younger Mr. Chiang, as protests spread across the mainland, is a moment to weigh the Generalissimo’s legacy.

During World War II Chiang Kai-shek was one of the “Big Four” — with Churchill, FDR, and Stalin — fighting the Axis. Yet Chiang faced two enemies. One was the invading Empire of Japan. The other was Mao’s Communists at home. Victory over Japan in 1945 was followed, in 1949, by the defeat, by Mao’s People’s Liberation Army, of Chiang’s army, causing shock in the Free World and precipitating the question “Who Lost China?”

Retreating to Taiwan, Chiang preserved Sun Yat-sen’s vision for a democratic Republic of China without ever conceding the mainland to the scourge of Communism. Chiang even weighed invading the mainland in the early 1960s, when China was enfeebled by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” conflict raged in Vietnam, and the Communists looked poised to build a nuclear weapon. A lack of American support foiled Chiang’s plan.

Until Chiang’s death in 1975, he held to the dream of a China reunified and free, even as his Nationalists kept a lid on dissent in Taiwan. In his will he called Taiwan a “citadel of freedom,” urging it not to abandon “the sacred task of exterminating Communism and recovering the mainland” and to maintain Sun Yat-sen’s democratic principles, which called for gradual transition to full democracy. By then, though, many saw Chiang as a relic. 

Upon the Generalissimo’s death, the New York Times dismissed his hopes for the restoration of China’s free republic on the mainland as “a monumental delusion.” He “was a visionary, but his vision came out of the past,” the Times condescended, insisting that a young generation “is not so fervently moved by the dream of reconquering the mainland.” The Times sneered at the “lingering zeal of an American missionary generation.”

Chiang’s passing, in the Times’ view, was a victory for “mutual accommodation among ideological opponents” — in short, the appeasement of Communist China. That mentality was in vogue at the time, as Free China was first expelled from the UN and its founding seat on the Security Council, and then humiliated as America withdrew from its defense pact and even its diplomatic recognition of the island, on the verge of transition to democracy.

At the time the Wall Street Journal saw America’s “sell-out” of Free China as “another in a series of signals that the U.S. has become an unreliable ally” against “Communist nations.” Looking back, it’s plain that “normalizing” relations with Beijing’s tyrants was a strategic blunder, as was the drive to admit Red China to the World Trade Organization in 2001. In the cold light of history, were they in our best interest?

Whatever one might say about Chiang Kai-shek — for he was not without profound faults — cozying up to Beijing is not an error he would have made or condoned. It would be a mistake to make too much of his great-grandson’s election in Taipei but also to make too little of it. It’s a moment to think of possibilities. For if Chiang’s ghost troubles the Far East today, it could be because he left behind at his death a great deal of unfinished business.