Soong family

Soong family, influential Chinese family that was heavily involved in the political fortunes of China during the 20th century. Among its best-known members were Charlie, the founder of the family, and his children T.V. Soong, financier and politician; Soong Mei-ling, who became Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi); and Song Qingling (Soong Ch’ing-ling), who married Sun Yat-sen.

Charlie Soong (1863–1918), also called Charles Jones Soong, was born Han Jiaozhun and was reared until he was nine in Wenchang, a port on the eastern coast of the island of Hainan, China. After a three-year apprenticeship in the East Indies (Indonesia), he spent eight years in the United States, where he was educated and trained by the Methodists for missionary work among the Chinese. In 1886 he returned to China. He married in 1887; the following year he joined a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. He nevertheless continued his missionary work until 1892. About this time he became a publisher—a career he had started with the printing of inexpensive, vernacular Chinese Bibles—and, with the aid of Julian Carr, a wealthy American patron, soon became a wealthy, influential industrialist involved in a number of businesses. In 1894 Soong met Sun Yat-sen, who helped to transform him into a revolutionary. In 1906 he was officially appointed treasurer of the Revolutionary Alliance and was responsible for financing the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) revolution.

Soong had all of his children educated in the United States. After her return to China, his eldest child, Ai-ling (1890–1973), acted as a secretary to Sun until her marriage to banker and businessman H.H. K’ung (Kong Xiangxi) in 1914. Qingling, Soong’s second child, replaced Ai-ling as secretary and in 1914 married Sun Yat-sen, who was 26 years her senior. Both H.H. K’ung and Charlie Soong’s third child, T.V. Soong, were financially significant forces in the advancement of Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist cause in China and the United States. After Sun’s death in 1925, the Nationalist Party split into factions. The group led by Sun’s widow, Qingling, was eventually overshadowed by the faction led by Chiang Kai-shek, who in 1927 married Soong Mei-ling, Charlie Soong’s fourth child. (The two youngest of Soong’s children, T.L. and T.A., became bankers.) T.V. Soong became an influential member of Chiang’s Nationalist government and, with his sister Mei-ling, was extremely important in Chinese foreign relations. Qingling remained opposed to Chiang’s government; when the communists established the People’s Republic in 1949, they granted Qingling high, though largely symbolic, status. Thereafter, the power of the Soong family began to dissipate.