This essay by Kō Bun’yū dismantles the postwar myth that Chiang Kai-shek advocated “repaying resentment with virtue.”
By contrasting Confucius with Lao-Zhuang philosophy, it exposes a fundamental misunderstanding deeply rooted in Japan’s postwar discourse.

2016-10-12
What follows is a continuation of a paper by 黄文雄, published in the March issue of the special Seiron 26, written with genuine intellect unlike the ignorance of the world. These are many historical facts that most Japanese people did not know at all, and of course many historical facts that people around the world did not know at all.
A sorrowful misunderstanding concerning “repaying resentment with virtue.”
Among Japan’s postwar conservative circles, there are many who firmly believe that Chairman 蒋介石 made the statement “repay resentment with virtue.”
I too, in Taiwan, was told this so often from my elementary, junior high, and high school days that my ears grew numb from hearing it.
The source of the story is unclear, but to state the conclusion plainly, it is a fabricated tale, a fraud created as propaganda by the Kuomintang government.
There are plenty of “hearsay accounts,” but there were no radio interception records from the Chongqing government of the China Expeditionary Army, nor any written records up through the period immediately before and after the end of the war, and above all, domestic and international circumstances left no room for such matters.
The Communist Red Army, which the Kuomintang forces had driven into a corner, eventually swelled to one million men. At the end of the war, Wang Jingwei of the Nanjing government had already died, and the remaining anti-Chiang factions were dealt with through “traitor” trials, but the real problem was that arch-enemies such as Yan Xishan and Li Zongren had survived.
After losing the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, and the rest fled to the United States.
His trusted aide Chen Cheng landed in Taiwan first and refused to allow the steadily retreating non-Chiang Kuomintang forces to land, instead driving them into the sea.
Allowing allied forces of different lineages to land would have left future troubles, so it was more convenient to erase them as seaweed drifting away.
Until President Truman declared the defense of Taiwan by the Seventh Fleet, Chiang and his son were thinking that “if Taiwan is no good, then America,” and they hardly had the leisure to speak of something as mythical as “repaying resentment with virtue.”
Chiang advocated moral education based on the “Four Cardinal Virtues and Eight Virtues” and protected Confucian thought, but “repaying resentment with virtue” is not the claim of 孔子.
Rather, it is the opposite.
When someone asked Confucius, “How about repaying resentment with virtue?” the Master replied, “With what, then, would you repay virtue? Repay resentment with uprightness, and repay virtue with virtue” (Analects).
“Repaying resentment with virtue” belongs to Lao-Zhuang thought, and Confucius clearly answered that if one repays resentment with virtue, then with what should one repay virtue? It is better to repay resentment appropriately (with resentment), and to repay the virtue one has received with virtue.
In other words, it is a calculation of gain and loss: “one only loses by following the Lao-Zhuang idea of ‘repaying resentment with virtue.’” Confucius is closer to the Islamic idea of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” while Lao-Zhuang thought is closer to Christ’s teaching of “if struck on the right cheek, offer the left as well.”
This manuscript continues.