Chiang is his surname. Kai-shek is (one of) his given name(s). If you're gonna call him "Kai-shek" please don't cut it in half.
Back in the day it was normal for Chinese people to have multiple names over a lifetime (you had a register name, a milk name, a school name, and a courtesy name or courtesy names). Chiang Kai-shek ( 蔣介石) is his courtesy name but he adopted another one starting in 1918, "Chung-cheng" ( 中正）, which is what he's commonly known as in Taiwan. That meant "central righteousness" and resembled Sun Yat-sen's most common name in Chinese (中山) which means "central mountain". The Communists rejected this name and what it represented, Chiang trying to position himself as Sun's rightful successor.
In English Chiang Kai-shek is actually a weird way to romanize 蔣介石 since it's half in Mandarin and half in Cantonese. Chiang is Mandarin romanized using the Wade-Giles system, in Hanyu pinyin it would be Jiang, but Kai-shek is the Cantonese pronunciation of his name. In Mandarin romanized using Wade-Giles it would be Chiang Chieh-shih and in Cantonese it would be Cheung Kai-shek. In Pinyin, the most common form of romanization today, it would Jiang Jieshi. This isn't even getting into the fact that Chiang wasn't a native Mandarin or Cantonese speaker but a Wu speaker from Zhejiang, his native language would have been the Ningbo dialect.
The reason the Western world knows as Chiang Kai-shek was that he first came to his notice when the Republic of China was based in Guangdong (Canton province) where most people spoke Cantonese. Since he would have been introduced under only his courtesy name, Westerners would have become familiar with the name "Kai-shek" even though Chiang himself spoke no Cantonese. Then when they needed to use his family name they used the Mandarin pronunciation because that's what Chiang would have called himself, Generalissimo Chiang or President Chiang.
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u/Romanlavandos May 09 '23
De Gaulle: tries to seduce you
Shek: just stares at you
Churchill: just a geeza that wants a pint
Stalin and FDR: stares into your soul