Ah Chris, pinyin has its political side (note that some in Taiwan want to use it and Singapore's adoption of it and simplified characters was significant), but no I don't think the aim was to eradicate mention of Jiang Jieshi (note that Chiang Kai-shek isn't even a mandarin rendering, just as Peking isn't a Wade-Giles romanization -- Pei-ching).

Pinyin was a nationalistic effort (and was preceded by Guoyu Romanyu which indicated tones with different spellings, rather than the pinyin approach which employs macrons) and represented an effort to utilize some of the international phonetic alphabet.

One of my favorite books on the Chinese language is Richard Newman's About Chinese.

As it happens, esperanto, the internationlal language (apologies to those partial to love and song...), is alive, has adherents (some of whom pursue the language in summer programs in New England), and a history. In the optimistic 1920s there were many (well, some) in Japan, Korea, and China who saw it as a way to escape imperialism and nationalism.

http://www.esperanto.net/

A 2003 Newsweek article on Esperanto: http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/08/6401.shtml (reprinted by IndyMedia)