Wang Jingwei

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is 汪 (Wang)

Wang Jingwei
* Courtesy name: Jixin (季新)
* Alternate name: Zhaoming (兆銘).

Wang Jingwei (Traditional Chinese: 汪精衛; Simplified Chinese: 汪精卫; Hanyu Pinyin: Wāng Jīngwèi; Wade-Giles: Wang Ching-wei) (May 4, 1883 – November 10, 1944), was a Chinese politician. He was a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang and is most noted for disagreements with Chiang Kai-shek and forming a Japanese supported collaborationist government in Nanjing. He has often been labelled as a "Traitor to the Han Chinese".

1 Rise to prominence
2 Rivalry with Chiang Kai-shek
3 Japanese collaboration
4 Further reading
5 See also
6 External link

[edit] Rise to prominence

Born in Panyu, Guangdong, Wang went to Japan as an international student sponsored by the Qing Empire government in 1903 and joined the Tongmeng Hui in 1905. He was jailed for plotting an assassination of the regent, the 2nd Prince Chun, and remained in jail from 1910 until the Wuchang Uprising the next year.

Wang Jingwei, the "Chinese Quisling", pursued a complex and often inconsistent pattern of political life, ranging from far left to far right, interspersed with periods of exile. He was one of the more important members of the early Kuomintang, and was an assistant to Sun Yat-sen and presided over his will.

In the early 1920s Wang held several posts in Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Government in Guangzhou, but following Sun's death in 1925 he faced a powerful challenge for leadership of the KMT.

[edit] Rivalry with Chiang Kai-shek

During the Northern Expedition, Wang was the leading figure in the left-leaning faction of the KMT that called for continued cooperation with the Communist Party of China and the Comintern and for a halt in the Northern Expedition. Wang's faction, which had set up a new KMT capital at Wuhan in early 1927, was opposed by Chiang Kai-shek, who was in the midst of a bloody purge of Communists in Shanghai and was calling for a push north. The separation between these two sides was known as the Ninghan Separation (Traditional Chinese: 寧漢分裂; Simplified Chinese: 宁汉分裂; pinyin: Nínghàn Fenlìe). Wang's faction was weak militarily however, and was ousted by a local warlord the same year. Lacking the military or financial resources to resist the increasingly powerful Chiang, his faction had to rejoin Chiang Kai-shek at Nanjing in September 1927.

In 1930, Wang tried another abortive coup against Chiang, this time with the aid of Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan in the Central Plains War. During these incidents, he traveled to Germany, and maintained some contact with Adolf Hitler. After this failure, Wang reconciled with Chiang's Nanjing government in the early 1930s and held prominent posts for most of the decade, and accompanied the government on its retreat to Chongqing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). During this time, he organized some right-wing groups under European fascist lines inside the KMT. Wang was originally part of the pro-war group, but after Chinese defeats in the Battle of Shanghai (1932) and the Defense of the Great Wall, Wang became known for his pessimistic view on China's chance in a war against Japan. He often voiced defeatist opinions in KMT staff meetings, much to the chagrin of his associates. Wang believed that China needed to negotiate with Japan peacefully in order to survive political influences from Europe and oppression from the Chinese Communists.

[edit] Japanese collaboration

Wang received members of the National Socialist Party while he was head of state.

In late 1938, Wang left Chongqing and eventually ended up in Shanghai, to negotiate with the Japanese occupation. On March 30, 1940, however, he became the head of state of the Wang Jingwei Government based in Nanjing, serving as the President of the Executive Yuan and Chairman of the National Government (行政院長兼國民政府主席), and also maintaining his contacts with German and Italian fascists. Wang lived in Japan during the wartime, along with official Japanese advisers, until he died of pneumonia four years later in Nagoya.

Wang was buried in Nanjing near the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, in an elaborately constructed tomb. A few years later, with Japan defeated, the Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek moved its capital back to Nanjing, and destroyed Wang's tomb. (His body in the coffin was removed from the tomb, brought to the countryside and burned.) Today the site is commemorated with a small pavilion.

For his role in the Pacific War, Wang has been considered a traitor by most post-World-War-II Chinese historians. However, some took a different view and regard his collaboration with the Japanese as a good faith attempt to salvage China from foreign imperialism. Such reasoning was rejected by the Kuomintang government, as his senior followers were all executed or imprisoned as traitors after the war.

[edit] Further reading

David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds.; Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: The Limits of Accommodation Stanford University Press 2001
James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine, eds. China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945 M. E. Sharpe, 1992
Ch'i Hsi-sheng, Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937–1945 University of Michigan Press, 1982