Dai was born Dai Liangbi in Guanghan, Sichuan to a family of potters. He went to Japan in 1905 to study in a normal school and entered Nihon University's law program in 1907. He graduated and returned to China in 1909.
Writings
Dai started to write for the Shanghaiese China Foreign Daily and Tianduo Newspaper at 19. At this time, his sobriquet for himself was Dai Tianchou, or Heaven-Revenge Dai, to signify his dissatisfaction for the Qing Empire. The Qing officials threatened him with imprisonment for his writings, so in 1911 he fled to Japan, and then to Penang, where he joined Tongmenghui and wrote for its Guanghua Newspaper. Later that year, he returned to Shanghai after the Wuchang Uprising and founded the Democracy Newspaper.
Political career
Dai's fluency in Japanese, unusual for a Chinese young man, attracted the attention of Sun Yat-sen. He became Sun's translator and then his confidential secretary. After the Kuomintang failed to overthrow Yuan Shikai, he went to Tokyo to join the Chinese Revolutionary Party in 1914. He attended the first national congress of the Chinese Kuomintang in 1924, where he was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee, then later a member of the Standing Committee, and the Minister of Propaganda. Soon after Sun's death in 1925, he published a controversial book that reinterpreted Sun's legacy. He claimed Sun derived his ideology chiefly from Confucianism instead of Western philosophies and that Sun was a traditionalist. This was praised by the KMT's right-wing but condemned by leftists and communists. After the right's triumph, Dai's interpretation became the dominant one within the KMT. In 1926, he served as principal of the Sun Yat-sen University, and the chief of politics at Whampoa Academy, with Zhou Enlai as his deputy. From 1928 until 1948, he served as head of the Examination Yuan. From October 1928 to June 1948, his official positions consisted of:
After Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Dai changed his name to Chuanxian, Continuing-Virtue. He jumped into a river and was rescued by a fisherman. After this suicide experience, he converted to Buddhism and was accused by many of being superstitious. His works about Buddhism are published in The Collection of Mr. Dai Jitao's Discussions on Buddhism. He was widely known to be the birth father ofChiang Wei-kuo, the adoptive second son of Chiang Kai-shek. According to popular speculation, Dai believed knowledge of his extramarital affairs would destroy his marriage and his career, so he entrusted Wei-kuo to Chiang Kai-shek, after the Japanese Yamada Juntaro brought the infant to Shanghai. Yao Yecheng, Chiang's wife at the time, raised Wei-kuo as her own. The boy called Dai his "Dear Uncle". Dai had also fathered a son, Anguo, whom Dai later sent to Germany, to be educated at the Technical University of Berlin. Anguo and Chiang Wei-kuo were half brothers. In 1949, with the Kuomintang losing the Chinese Civil War to the Communist Party of China, Dai committed suicide by swallowing over 70 sleeping pills in Guangzhou.
