TAIPEI, Oct 15: Former Chinese warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, who kidnapped Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and changed the course of Chinese history, died in Hawaii on Monday, Taiwan’s Central News Agency said. He was 100.

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian cabled his condolences to Chang’s family, the presidential office said in a statement.

Chang, who spent decades under house arrest, died days after he was admitted to a hospital in Honolulu for pneumonia, the state-funded news agency said.

Chang changed Chinese history by kidnapping Generalissimo Chiang in the central city of Xian in December 1936 to force him into an alliance with the Communists against the invading Japanese.

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported Chang’s death and said he “has been remembered as a great patriot in contemporary China”.

Chiang Kai-shek’s abduction gave a new lease on life to Mao Zedong’s ragtag Red Army, whose numbers had dwindled to a few thousand and was on the verge of being wiped out by the Nationalists.

Beijing regards Chang as a national hero and had repeatedly invited him to return for a visit. “His death marks the end of a generation,” Chang’s biographer Kuo Kwan-ying said in an interview.

Generalissimo Chiang died in Taiwan in 1975 and Mao, revered as Communist China’s “Great Helmsman”, in Beijing the following year. The sole surviving prominent figure from that generation is Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who is 104 and has spent her later years in New York.

At the age of 27 Chang Hsueh-liang inherited control of Manchuria and parts of northern China along with his father’s 200,000-strong army, earning him the nickname “Young Marshal”. The Japanese had assassinated his father, Manchurian military strongman Chang Tso-lin, by bombing his train because he had refused to collaborate with them.

After his kidnap Generalissimo Chiang eventually agreed to an alliance and was released unharmed. Chang escorted Chiang back to the southern Chinese city of Nanjing, then China’s capital, but the Young Marshal was placed under house arrest.

He was taken to Taiwan in the late 1940s shortly before the Communists won the Chinese civil war and drove the Nationalists from the mainland.—Reuters