Chiang Ching-kuo

Chiang Ching-kuo (, 27 April 1910 – 13 January 1988) was a politician and diplomat who served as the president of the Republic of China from 1978 until his death in 1988. A member of the Kuomintang (KMT), he was the party's chairman from 1975 to 1988. His presidency was defined by the end of martial law in Taiwan. Born in Fenghua, Chiang was the eldest and only biological son of President Chiang Kai-shek.

He was sent as a teenager to study in the Soviet Union during the First United Front in 1925, when his father's Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party were in alliance. Before his education in the USSR, he attended school in Shanghai and Beijing, where he became interested in socialism and communism. He attended university in the USSR and spoke Russian fluently, but when the Chinese Nationalists violently broke with the Communists, Joseph Stalin sent him to work in a steel factory in the Ural Mountains.

There, Chiang met and married Faina Vakhreva. With war between China and Japan imminent in 1937, Stalin sent the couple to China. During the war, Ching-kuo's father gradually came to trust him, and gave him more and more responsibilities, including administration. After the Japanese surrender, Ching-kuo was tasked with and effectively reduced corruption in Shanghai. The victory of the Communists in 1949 drove the Chiang family and their Kuomintang government to retreat to Taiwan.