Wang Jingwei

Chinese politician

• Born: May 4, 1883
• Birthplace: Canton, China
• Died: November 10, 1944
• Place of death: Nagoya, Japan

Wang, an early disciple of Sun Yat-sen and a founding member of the Tongmenghui, was contender for leadership of the Kuomintang after Sun’s death in 1925. He was initially identified with the left wing of the party, then became an anticommunist and favored appeasement of Japan as leader of the government between 1932 and 1936; in 1937, he defected to form a puppet government in Japanese-occupied China in 1940.

Early Life

The Wang family came from Shaoxing in Zhejiang Province. Wang Jingwei (wahng jihng-way) was born in Canton (Guangzhou), the tenth and last child and fourth son of Wang Shu and his second wife. His birth name was Wang Zhaoming. The elder Wang, then sixty years old, was a government legal secretary and, because of his large family, was compelled to work until failing eyesight necessitated his retirement at age seventy. Although the family was not well-off, Wang had a happy childhood until he was twelve, when his mother died, followed by the death of his father the next year and of several siblings in the following years. Supported by his eldest brother, he continued his schooling and worked part-time as a tutor from age seventeen, to contribute to the family’s income. His early education was typical for the time; it emphasized training in the classics, history, philosophy, and literature. He was later noted for his persuasive writing style and fine calligraphy. He also wrote poetry and published a volume of his poems.

In 1902, he placed third in the first level, or county, examination. Later that year he came in first in the provincial exam held at Canton, a great achievement considering his youth and the stiff competition. Despite this early scholarly success, Wang decided not to proceed to compete in the metropolitan exam but, influenced by new Western ideas, to pursue a modern education in Japan, for which he won a government scholarship in 1904. He quickly learned Japanese and attended Tokyo Law College, where he obtained a degree in 1906. While in Japan he became attracted to anarchism, but, more important, he met Sun Yat-sen and other Chinese revolutionaries, joined Sun’s Tongmenghui (United League) when it was formed in 1905, and contributed eloquent pro-republican articles to its publication, the Min Bao, waging pen battles with exiled supporters of a constitutional monarchy in Japan. His notoriety led his eldest brother to expel him from the family, lest its members in China should be blamed for his activities. When the Qing government successfully persuaded Japanese authorities to expel Sun from Japan in 1907, Wang accompanied him on a recruiting and fund-raising trip to Southeast Asia. During this trip, he met Chen Bizhun, the daughter of a wealthy overseas Chinese family in Malaya and an enthusiastic follower of Sun. He married her in 1912. She continued to be active in Kuomintang politics throughout her life. Against the advice of Sun and his other colleagues, Wang returned to China, was involved in a bungled attempt to assassinate the prince regent in 1910, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he was released in 1911 at the outbreak of the revolution. He and his wife lived in France from 1912 to 1917, during which time he wrote Chinese poetry but did not learn much French.

Life’s Work

Wang returned to China in 1917, again became active in Sun’s movement, and served in various high positions in Sun’s government in Canton. Although he had initially advised Sun against entering into an alliance with the Communists, once Sun embarked on it, Wang, like other members of the Kuomintang, acquiesced in the decision. At the first Kuomintang Congress held in Canton in 1924, Wang was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee and was appointed as the party’s minister of propaganda and to other key posts. He was among Sun’s entourage when the latter made his final trip to Beijing in 1924. Sun’s aim was to negotiate with the warlords who ruled north China with the goal of establishing a unified government, but he fell terminally ill with cancer and died in 1925. Wang was the author of Sun’s last will and testament.

After Sun’s death, Wang became the leader of the left wing of the Kuomintang, which favored continuation of the alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party that Sun had forged in 1922, and contended for leadership of the party with right-wing leader Hu Hanmin and centrist Chiang Kai-shek. Neither Wang nor Hu held military power, while Chiang, who was junior to both in the Kuomintang, became its rising star as commandant of the party’s military academy and commander in chief of the new party army that he had been appointed by Sun to organize. In 1926, Chiang led the Kuomintang army in the successful Northern Expedition to unify China; Wang headed the Kuomintang civilian government, which had moved to Wuhan along the lower Yangtze River Valley at the beginning of 1927. In the spring of 1927, when Chiang and his right-wing allies, who had established themselves in Nanjing, purged the Communists from lands that they controlled, Wang and his left-wing supporters in Wuhan refused to do so, and continued their cooperation with the Chinese Communists and Soviet advisers headed by Mikhail Borodin. They waited until July, 1927, when evidence proved beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union intended to use the Kuomintang to propel the Chinese Communist Party to power. The Wang-led Wuhan government dissolved itself after it, too, expelled the Soviet advisers and purged the Chinese Communists. From then until his death, Wang would be a staunch anticommunist; he regarded Communism and the Soviet Union as China’s greatest threat. He left China in disgrace late in 1927 for France but soon returned to head a group called the Reorganizationists, and joined in various movements against the central government in Nanjing headed by Chiang between 1928 and 1931, all of which, however, failed.

Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 forced the factions of the Kuomintang to mend their differences and resulted in Wang’s heading the civilian government as president of the executive yuan (premier) and foreign minister between 1932 and 1935, while Chiang led and modernized those units of the military under the central government’s control and organized campaigns against the Communist insurgents. The cooperation between Chiang and Wang was an uneasy one. While Chiang and his allies controlled the major portions of the military and the party machinery, Wang, who had only a small corps of personal supporters, was clearly relegated to a junior position. Wang and Chiang were, however, agreed that weak and disunified China was in no condition to resist Japan and that, while they implemented programs to modernize China, they must negotiate with the Japanese and make concessions if necessary. Both men, but especially Wang, became targets of hostile public opinion, expressed in the press and in student demonstrations, for their nonresistance and concessions to Japanese aggression. In November, 1935, Wang was wounded in an attempted assassination by an army officer bitter about Wang’s appeasement of Japan. He left for convalescence in Europe in early 1936, returned to China a year later, and found Chiang riding a crest of popularity as national leader in an incipient united front against Japan. When the Japanese invasion of north China in July, 1937, resulted in all-out war, Chiang came to symbolize resistance and gained even greater power as commander in chief and as party leader in 1938; Wang was named deputy party leader, again superseded by Chiang, whom Wang regarded as a junior in party seniority.

Dissatisfied with his subordination to Chiang and pessimistic over the sufferings in a war against Japan that he saw as hopeless for China, Wang secretly left Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, in December, 1938. He surfaced in Hanoi in French Indochina and began actively to campaign for peace with Japan. He offered to lead that movement and placed himself and his supporters as alternatives to the Chinese government in Chongqing led by Chiang. While he was in Hanoi, there was an attempt to assassinate him, probably instigated by some members of the Chongqing government. Although he escaped unscathed, this event marked a point of no return for Wang’s “peace movement.” After two visits to Tokyo, Wang signed a secret treaty with Japan that permitted him to set up and head a “reform government” in Nanjing in March, 1940. Aside from several longtime associates, no one of note deserted the Chongqing government to join Wang’s puppet regime. Anti-Chiang politicians and dissident warlords alike denounced Wang for treason. He had clearly miscalculated disastrously; Chiang’s prestige had soared as leader in a war of national salvation, and, among nationalistic Chinese, anti-Chiang did not mean pro-Japan. The Wang regime aped the legitimate Chinese government in its party structure and government organization, professed allegiance to Sun’s ideology, and even used the same national flag, to which it added a yellow tab that read “peace, anti-Communism and reconstruction.”

Japan had hoped that its installation of the Wang regime would bring about the collapse of the government at Chongqing and continued Chinese resistance. When these things did not happen, Japanese support for Wang waned. Thus it did not formally recognize his Nanjing regime until November, 1940, and conceded to it only nominal control of Japanese-occupied areas in central and south China, while earlier established puppet regimes in inner Mongolia and north China continued to exist separately. For its part, the Wang regime recognized Manchukuo, the first Japanese-created puppet state in China. It received diplomatic recognition from only the Axis powers and their client states.

The two most powerful offices in Nanjing throughout the life of the Wang regime were Japan’s Supreme Military and Economic Advisory Commissions, which supervised important activities in areas nominally under Chinese control. Several trips by Wang to Japan netted a treaty in 1943 in which Japan relinquished its extraterritorial rights in China and recognized the Wang regime as an ally in Japan’s scheme of Greater East Asia. These were empty gestures, because Japanese troops remained in occupation of conquered China, where Japan continued to enjoy enormous economic and political privileges. Strains over the Pacific War led Japan to permit a greater role for Wang’s puppet troops in the China theater after 1943, even as the same strains resulted in greater material demands on Chinese in occupied areas.

The turning tide of war enveloped the Wang regime in pessimism, evidenced by Wang’s frequent raging temper outbursts and heavy drinking and a live-for-today attitude among his associates. Failing health and persistent trouble from the assassin’s bullet wound led Wang to enter the Nagoya University Hospital in Japan in March, 1944. Even though he was given the best medical treatment available, Japanese authorities guarded his sickbed and prevented him from speaking to journalists. He died on November 10, 1944, from pneumonia. His body was flown back to Nanjing, and he was given a huge public funeral and buried near to Sun’s mausoleum outside Nanjing. His demoralized regime ended with Japan’s defeat and the end of World War II. After the war, Wang’s tomb was destroyed by order of the Nationalist government. His associates and widow (who had been active politically and held high positions under the puppet regime) were tried by the Nationalist government for treason. Some were executed on conviction, and Wang’s widow was sentenced to life imprisonment, which she served out under the Communist government.

Significance

Wang was a key figure in modern Chinese history. His eloquent writings in favor of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and in support of Sun’s ideology contributed to the cause of revolution, as did his willingness to sacrifice himself in the failed attempt to assassinate the prince regent. He was widely admired for his good looks, his elegant bearing, his charismatic speaking style, and his persuasive writing. The darker side of his personality includes his vaulting ambition, which drove him to sacrifice principle for personal political gain, and his mercurial temperament. His quest to be successor of Sun led him to oppose Hu Hanmin, another leading disciple of Sun, and to espouse the alliance with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party.

After the exposing of Joseph Stalin’s goal in China and the discrediting of the left wing Kuomintang that he led, Wang joined in a series of makeshift alliances with warlords that waged civil wars against the new national government in Nanjing led by Chiang. Even after his rapprochement with Chiang and installation as head of the civilian government in Nanjing after 1932, he continued to chafe under Chiang’s greater overall authority. He frequently used histrionics and real or pretended illnesses to threaten resignation and to gain political leverage. Popular opinion turned increasingly against him for his policy of nonresistance against Japanese aggression and for China’s territorial losses to Japan under his stewardship; after he turned quisling and organized a puppet regime in Japanese-occupied China in 1940, he became execrated as a traitor. Even those sympathetic to him condemned his collaboration with Japan as a hopeless and pointless endeavor. A revolutionary who had devoted much of his life in the cause of Chinese nationalism, he had disastrously misjudged its character when he deserted to the Japanese camp. In his last testament, he claimed that he acted to save the Chinese from the horrors of a prolonged war he saw as doomed and from the dangers of communism that he saw as worse for China than Japanese imperialism.

Bibliography

Barrett, David P., and Larry N. Shyu, eds. Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: The Limits of Accommodation. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Collection of essays about China’s collaboration with Japan that includes two essays about Wang: “Wang Jingwei and the Policy Origins of the Peace Movement, 1932-1937,” and “The Wang Jingwei Regime, 1940-1945: Continuities and Disjunctures Within Nationalist China.”

Boyle, John Hunter. China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972. An analysis of why Wang and others collaborated with Japanese conquerors.

Bunker, Gerald E. The Peace Conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China War, 1937-1941. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. A sympathetic account of Wang’s motives for collaborating with Japan. Examines the frustrations and achievements of his regime.

Fung, Edmund S. K. In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929-1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Examines the growing movement toward democracy and civil opposition to the one-party rule of the Kuomintang from 1929 through 1949, including information about Wang.

Shirley, James R. Political Conflict in the Kuomintang: The Career of Wang Ching-wei to 1932. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1965. Deals with Wang’s rise and early career. Good explanation of the Kuomintang.

T’ang, Leang-li. Wang Ching-wei: A Political Biography. Peiping: China United Press, 1931. A laudatory account written by a Wang supporter, this book goes fairly in depth in biographical information.

Wang, Chao-ming. China’s Problems and Their Solution. Shanghai: China United Press, 1934. Wang wrote this book while he headed China’s government to justify his policy. The listing of his name here is a variant spelling.