Chiang Fang-liang

Chiang Fang-liang (1944)

Faina Chiang , Chinese: Chiang Fang-liang ( 蔣方良 , Jiǎng Fāngliáng , originally Faina Ipatjewna Wachrewa / Russian Фаина Ипатьевна Вахрева ; * May 15, 1916 with Orscha ; † December 15, 2004 ) was the wife of President and First Ching-kuo Chiang Lady of Taiwan from 1978 to 1988.

Faina Chiang was born in Belarus and grew up in Yekaterinburg . Her parents died young and she was raised by her older sister Anna. At the age of 16 she was a member of the Komsomol and worked at the Uralmash engineering factory . There she met Chiang Ching-kuo, who was not allowed to return to China due to the break of the Kuomintang with the communists, and the two married on March 15, 1935. Their first son, Hsiao-wen , was born in December 1935. The two had two other sons, Hsiao-wu and Hsiao-yung, and a daughter, Hsiao-chang .

In December 1936, Stalin finally allowed Chiang to return to China. Faina followed him, lived with Mao Fumei , the mother of Chiang Ching-kuo, and learned to speak the Wu dialect of Ningbo . She later fled to Taiwan with her family during the Chinese Civil War.

After Chiang Ching-kuo became President of the Republic of China in 1978, Chiang Fang-liang rarely performed her traditional duties as first lady. She remained in the background throughout her husband's political career, as it was not politically wise to underline the presence of a Russian woman in the government in the midst of the severely anti-communist atmosphere. She never returned to Russia and only made three trips abroad in her life to visit her children and their families. In 1992 she received a visit from a Belarusian delegation including the mayor of Minsk; that was the only time that she had contact with someone from her home country after emigrating.

After Chiang Chin-kuo's death, she lived in a suburb of Taipei with some officials from China and supported by the presidential office, and was occasionally visited by prominent politicians who paid their respects to her. She has been portrayed in the Taiwanese media as a virtuous woman who endured her loneliness with dignity without complaint.

Chiang Fang-liang died of heart and lung failure at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital at the age of 88. Her funeral was held on December 27, 2004, in the presence of President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu and many senior Kuomintang leaders such as Wang Jin-pyng and Ma Ying-jeou . She was cremated; her ashes were buried in her husband's makeshift mausoleum in Touliao in Daxi in the city (then county) of Taoyuan . It is planned to transfer both of them to the Wuchih Military Cemetery in Xizhi near Taipei at a later date .