Soong Mayling and Wartime China, 1937-1945

Soong Mayling and Wartime China, 1937-1945: Deploying Words as Weapons focuses on the First Lady of China’s timely and critical contributions in the areas of war, women’s work, and diplomacy during China’s War of Resistance as inflected through gender. This book explores Soong Mayling through her own words by examining her speeches, essays, letters, telegrams, and news reports during the war period. How did Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s gender identity shape her interactions with other Chinese women, the male military and political leadership in the Republic of China, and the broader global public? How did Confucianism’s cardinal virtues and Chinese Christianity converge in Soong Mayling’s work and worldview? What were her main contributions as Secretary-General of the Chinese Air Force? Drawing on Chinese archival materials such as Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries and other records around the world, Esther Hu provides a historically informed perspective of the First Lady’s legacy within the context of World War II history, international cultural and military affairs, and transnational geopolitics.

Esther T. Hu is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, Senior Fellow at the International History Institute , and Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She has published many essays, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries and is the English translator of Soong Mayling's Chinese-language pictorial biography, A Legacy of Grace and Resilience: Soong Mayling and her Era (2023; 2nd Ed. 2024). She is the author of Soong Mayling and Wartime China, 1937-1945: Deploying Words as Weapons (2025).