Wang Ching-wei

The Chinese revolutionary leader Wang Ching-wei (1883-1944) was an early follower of Sun Yat-sen and served as president and prime minister of the Nationalist government. During World War II he headed the Japanese puppet regime at Nanking.

Born at Canton in a minor gentry family, Wang Ching-wei was a brilliant student in traditional Chinese subjects. A good poet, an excellent calligrapher, and a master of Chinese prose, he later became a powerful orator. In 1903 he passed the first civil service examination and won a government scholarship to Japan. He earned a degree at Tokyo Law College and was a founding member of a revolutionary association, the T'ung Meng Hui. A major propagandist for the revolution, he became a national figure through an abortive attempt to assassinate the prince regent in 1910, which left him in jail until after the 1911 Revolution. He played a major role in negotiations between the revolutionaries and Yüan Shih-k'ai over the new government organization in 1912.

Wang married Ch'en Pi-chün in 1912 and left for France to further his education. He returned in 1917 and again became an active supporter of Sun Yat-sen. After Sun's death in 1925, Wang was made head of the Kuomintang party (KMT) and of its revolutionary government. He was forced to flee the revolutionary territory by Chiang Kai-shek's military coup in 1926, returning early in 1927. As head of the Nationalists' Wuhan government, Wang continued to support the Communist alliance for several months after Chiang's Shanghai coup in April but broke with the Communists himself in July. Forced out of his leadership position in the KMT, Wang became the chief opponent of Chiang in the party. He supported attempts to overthrow Chiang from 1929 to 1932.

As a result of the Manchurian incident in late 1931, Wang and Chiang formed a coalition to support a policy of minimal resistance to Japanese encroachment until the Chinese government could be strengthened. Wang was prime minister until the end of 1935, when he was forced to retire for medical reasons after being shot by an assassin.

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chiang's control of the party increased, and, although Wang held high position in the government, he was powerless. Hoping to ease the suffering of the helpless Chinese people in the war, avoid a Communist victory, and weaken Chiang's power, Wang urged a peace settlement with Japan. In December 1938 he fled China and ultimately accepted Japanese assurances of autonomy as head of a new regime in occupied China. In effect, he became a puppet of the Japanese until his death, resulting from an attempt to remove the bullet left from the 1935 attack.

Further Reading

Some of Wang's writings have been translated into English. The Poems of Wang Ching-wei (trans. 1938) has an introduction to his life and work by T. Sturge Moore. Wang's China's Problems and Their Solution (trans. 1934) contains a biographical sketch of him by T'ang Leang-li. There is no standard biography of Wang. The best study of him in English is T'ang Leang-li, Wang Ching-wei: A Political Biography (1931), which was intended to support his career. The biography by Don Bates, Wang Ching Wei, Puppet or Patriot (1941), also presents him in a favorable light. For general background see O. M. Green, The Story of China's Revolution (1945); Ch'ien Tuan-sheng, The Government and Politics of China (1950); and Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 1840-1928 (trans. 1956). □

Wang Ching-wei (1883–1944),Canton-born politician who, from November 1940, led a Nanking-based puppet government of Japanese-occupied central China.

Wang was an early political opponent of Chiang Kai-shek before forming a coalition with him in 1931. The Japanese, believing him a useful go-between with Chiang to end the China incident, persuaded him to defect in December 1938. Wang's original intention was to form an independent government in the unoccupied provinces of South China which would gradually take control of the ones occupied by the Japanese, but his position quickly deteriorated into almost pure collaboration. He went first to French Indo-China and then Shanghai and, after protracted negotiations with the increasingly obdurate Japanese, in March 1940 became president of the Reformed government, sponsored by the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Army and a carbon copy of the one he had left in Chungking. Eventually, in November 1940, he signed a treaty with Japan, which formalized his regime. But his government, dominated by its Japanese advisers, had no real power, while the treaty merely confirmed Japan's violations of China's sovereignty.

As the war progressed, Wang was pressed to declare war on the Allies. He eventually did so on 9 January 1943 and that June he was allowed to assume the administration of the International Settlement in Shanghai, perhaps the most significant move towards autonomy that the Wang regime achieved. In October the 1940 treaty was replaced with a ‘Pact of Alliance’, but though Wang's government now began to have an aura of independence, and its 900,000-strong army took over the role of rural pacification from Japanese garrisons, he could do nothing to lessen the Japanese grip on China. In November 1943 he attended the Greater East Asia conference in Tokyo (see Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere), but by then his health was failing. In March 1944 Ch'en Kung-po became acting president of the Reformed government when Wang was flown to Japan for treatment; but that November he died from complications caused by an assassin's bullet which had wounded him nine years previously. See also China, 3(b).

Bibliography

Bunker, G. , The Peace Conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China War, 1937–1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

Wang Ching-wei , 1883–1944, Chinese revolutionary and political leader. A supporter of Sun Yat-sen , Wang was sentenced (1910) to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate the regent of China. Freed in 1912, he studied in France until 1917, when he became personal assistant to Sun. Upon Sun's death (1925) Wang became chairman of the national government, though he remained in conflict with Chiang Kai-shek , who led the military and the right-wing of the Kuomintang . In uneasy truce, he served as premier (1932–35) and deputy leader of the Kuomintang (1938). Wang broke with Chiang in 1938, advocating peace with Japan and continued struggle against the Communists. From 1940 to his death he was premier of the Japanese puppet government at Nanjing.

Bibliography: See study by G. E. Bunker (1972).