(March 17, 1985)
THE SOONG DYNASTY By Sterling Seagrave. Illustrated. 532 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $22.50.
No mater whether you love them or hate them, Charlie Soong's six children make good copy. There were three sons and three daughters, and between them they carved out a permanent niche in the steamy politics of the Chinese republic in the years from its founding in 1911 to its fall in 1949. The three sons were educated at universities in the United States, two at Harvard and one at Vanderbilt, and became vastly wealthy. The eldest, T. V. (Tse-ven) Soong (by common practice all three were referred to by the initials of their Chinese given names) became a major figure in Nationalist Chinese, Kuomintang Party politics, serving at intervals as Finance Minister, Foreign Minister and governor of the Central Bank of China; his younger brothers, T. L. (Tse-liang) and T. A. (Tse- an), were powerful as bankers, industrialists and company directors.
Charlie Soong's three daughters, all also American-educated, had even more dramatic fates through their marriages - the eldest, Ai-ling, started out as Sun Yat-sen's secretary and went on to marry H. H. Kung, a wealthy industrialist, Oberlin College and Yale University graduate, and lineal descendant of Confucius; the middle daughter, Ching- ling, married Sun Yat-sen, and after his death in 1925 became an influential exponent of the liberal-radical cause, and eventually a vice chairman of the People's Republic of China; the youngest daughter, May-ling, married Chiang Kai-shek.....(continue)
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