Chiang sought to institute a modest program of reforms, including financial and educational reforms, infrastructure improvements and a revival of Confucianism, supported by the “New Life Movement” campaign. The bulk of his government’s energies and resources, however, were focused on threats to its own stability from within and outside of China. The Communists were operating their own opposition government from rural strongholds, while war with Japan–which seized Manchuria in 1931–seemed imminent. Chiang initially focused on the communist threat rather than confront Japan directly, a choice that angered many of his supporters. In the Sian (Xian) Incident of December 1936, one of his generals seized Chiang and held him captive for two weeks until he agreed to ally with Mao Zedong’s Communist forces against Japan.
Japan invaded China the following year, sparking the Sino-Japanese War. China fought Japan on its own for more than four years, until the Allies (with the exception of the Soviet Union) declared war on Japan in 1941. For its efforts, China earned inclusion among the Big Four powers, and Chiang’s international reputation skyrocketed. In 1943, his Western-educated wife, Soong Mei-ling, became the first Chinese and only the second woman to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, when she asked for increased U.S. aid for China in the Sino-Japanese War. At the same time, however, Chiang’s government was losing a good deal of support within the country itself, thanks to his relative passivity toward Japan and increasingly conservative policies that favored landowners and mercantile interests and alienated peasants (who made up nearly 90 percent of the Chinese population).