ABSTRACT
Soong Ching-ling was a prominent figure in the 'Left Kuomintang' in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek smashed the Kuomintang-Communist alliance and set up his own regime at Nanking. The Kuomintang-Communist rift had been thinly papered over by a new 'united front' in common pursuit of the war against the Japanese. Under Mao Tse-tung there could not be more than one father of the country. The Communists had their own anniversary to mark the victory of their revolution on October 1. Sun Yat-sen portrait never hung among the great ones up on the wall at Tiananmen. Soong Ching-ling died in Peking on May 29, 1981, age ninety. While she lay on her deathbed, she was made a member of the Communist Party and was named Honorary President of the People's Republic. The Communist leadership seized upon the occasion of the death of Sun Yat-sen's widow to make a major propaganda pitch at Sun Yat-sen's political heirs on the island of Taiwan.
