China Background - T.V. Soong to the rescue & Whampoa Military Academy
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Topic: Cold Front Passing Hokkai
               1923 - Chiang Kai-shek, badgered KMT leader Sun Yat-sen into sending him to Moscow to learn about security and discipline from the Soviets. Chiang stayed three months at a time when Lenin was dying. Trotsky, in a battle with Stalin for power, found time for long conversations with Chiang who returned to China convinced that the Communists were the number one enemy of the KMT and the right wing Green Gang in the fight to rule China. Chiang nominally answered to Sun Yat-sen, but his real loyalties were to Green Gang kingpins Pock-marked Huang, Big-eared Tu, and Curio Chang.
                With the help of Russian military advisors, the KMT set up  the Whampoa Military Academy on an island in the Pearl River 10 miles south of Canton, where a real army could be trained and equipped  with Soviet weapons. Chiang Kai-shek prevailed on Sun Yat-sen to become military commandant of Whampoa in spite of strenuous objections from the Russians and the Chinese Communist members of the KMT. Of three thousand qualified applicants to the first class, only five hundred could be admitted, all highly literate, and most members of the Shanghai Green Gang. Classes began on May 5, 1924. Chiang, following the principles of Sun Tzu's Art of War was allowing the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Communists to build a modern army for him.
                In October, 1923, the 1915 Harvard graduate, T.V. Soong, after quickly establishing a reputation as a financial genius by straightening out the books and financial operations of a Shanghai industrial complex of coal mines, iron mines, and steel mills, was called to Canton by Sun Yat-sen at the suggestion of Ching-ling, to solve KMT financial worries. T.V. used a Russian loan of $10 million to set up the Central Bank of China with himself as manager and quickly built the bank's reputation for reliability to the point where money printed by the bank was accepted all over China.