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The Characteristics and Biographical Value in Secrets in Chiang Kai-shek’s Diaries

Abstract: Bian Kesheng’s An Exploration into Chiang Kai-shek’s Diaries is a mixture of excerpts from the diary. Bian quotes various materials and comments on the boundaries between fiction and imagination, attempting to demonstrate and reveal the anecdotes in Chiang’s diaries. Bian’s text is characterized as putting top priority on the diary, supplementing the diary with historical materials, so as to restore a more historically accurate Chiang Kai-shek as a political and historical figure. Bian’s text provides valuable materials from Chiang’s diary for it has not been published in China’s mainland and, hence, is an important supplement to the materials and ideas in the life writing of Chiang.


Key words: Chiang Kai-shek, Diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, biographical value, intertextuality, verisimilitude


Wang Hongyue Zhejiang Normal University and Researcher at the Research Center of Jiangnan Culture, Zhejiang Province. His six monographs include The Shadow of the Avant-garde (2011) and The Paradox in Aesthetics (2005). He is the editor of The Reader of Appreciation of Ugliness (2011).