Hey guys,

Besides the Wikipedia entry, I'm having a hard time finding a comprehensive summary on Wang Jingwei, who betrayed Chiang Kaishek's government in Chongqing and went over to the Japanese. He held the title of President of a Japanese-controlled puppet government from 1941 until the end of WW2. He died on foreign lands in Nagoya, Japan. Can anyone help me with some details on him, why he butted heads with Chiang, and anything else interesting? Thanks!

Wang Jingwei was, with Hu Hanmin, one of the two most important assistants to Sun Yat-sen before Chiang Kai-shek's rise to prominence. When the KMT came under Chiang's dominance, Wang and Hu were increasingly side-lined. They also were ideological rivals - Hu led the right-wing faction of the KMT, which was very anti-Communist, while Wang led the left-wing which advocated cooperating with the Communist Party. After the Northern Expedition, Wang Jingwei set up a left-leaning KMT government in Wuhan that lost out to Chiang Kai-shek's rival anti-Communist regime in Shanghai. He was a grudging member of the Nanjing KMT government (under Chiang), and then defected to the Japanese after the KMT retreat to Chongqing. The Japanese installed him as head of a government based in Nanjing and ruling over the the Japanese-occupied areas in China.

Wang Jingwei has been very simplistically condemned as a selfish traitor by both the KMT and the Communists. I believe that he wanted to end the war by giving the Japanese an alternative government with which to rule China, since Chiang refused to surrender. If he did anything wrong, it was misreading the Japanese and thinking that peace could be achieved.

Some books that you can read:
Odani Akira, "Wang Ching-wei and the fall of the Chinese Republic, 1905-1935" (1979)

Gerald E. Bunker, "The peace conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China war, 1937-1941" (1972)

Hwang Dongyoun, "Wang Jingwei, the Nanjing government and the problem of collaboration" (1999)

David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu (eds.), "Chinese collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: the limits of accomodation" (2001)

This is from J.A.G.Robert's 'A Concise History of China' (Harvard, 1999), p.241;

'In December 1937 Japan offered Jiang Jieshi peace terms, but he refused them because they required recognition of Manzhouguo, ....... As Japan could not force Jiang to surrender, the alternative solution was to establish puppet regimes in the parts of China now under Japanese control. In December 1938, Wang Jingwei, leader of the left wing of the Guomindang, defected from the Nationalist side and offered himself as leader of a collaborationist regime with its capital at Nanjing. This regime was to last throughout the war, although Wang himself died in 1944. It claimed to be an independent government, exercising authority over much of central and south-east China. It maintained diplomatic relations with Japan and Germany and had its own armed forces and the trappings of a government, though its dependence on Japan was never in doubt'

Can anyone tell me any more about Wang? What was his title? his puppet regime's name? motivations? etc.
Also other than Manzhouguo/Manchukuo and Wang's regime, what were the other states established by the Japanese as puppets?

Caocao74, there was already a thread on this earlier. I'ver merged the two, and others' comments would be very welcome.

There are not a whole lot of information on Wang Jinwei, but so far this is what I have compiled thus far for my website: http://www.ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=66.

This book seems to offer some good information on Chinese collaboration with the Japanese (duh, it says so in the book title), I might pick it up one day to learn a bit more.

As for other puppet governments -- I think something was set up in Korea? What about Thailand, where the Japanese strong-armed the king of Siam to allow Thailand to become a corridor for Japanese troops to walk straight into Malaya and Burma.

I know he was left-leaning and probably didn't like Chiang Kai-shek to the end, but didn't he realize the Japanese were on a genocidal rampage in China? Wang probably loved China and the Chinese, but his act would forever put him in the dark pages of history.

Anyway, if he was in power instead of Chiang, would the republic have taken a different course in its early history?

Was he really a closet communist like they say?

I am not sure if you are thinking of the right person...

Wang Jingwei formed a collaboration government with the Japanese.

He obviously knew. He became the head of the Reformed Government of the Republic of China based in Nanjing in 1940. (Puppet government for Japan like Manchukuo.)

Only a few years before, there were corpses lying all over Nanjing.

So he formed a governemnt with the Japanese despite what is happening all over China, and especially what happened in Nanjing.

So, why would he be loving China and the Chinese as you stated below?:


And why would NOT his act put him in the dark ages of history?


Yes, it would!

Reformed Government of the Republic of China headed by Wang Jingwei would be fighting the Communists too. But this time, with the alliance of the Imperial Japanese Army. China under Wang Jingwei would be in the Japanese sphere of influence if not Japanese empire.

You are getting the wrong sense of Wang Jingwei.

Most Chinese nationalists would rather demonise Wang Jingwei as an evil gutless traitor than try and examine his motivations, which must have been rather complex. This was a man who had once risked his life to assassinate a Manchu official as a revolutionary, became one of Sun Yat-sen's most trusted and loyal followers, and for quite some time sided with the Communists against Chiang. He was already safe in Chongqing after the great withdrawal, yet he decided to go east again and defect to the Japanese, knowing that he would be cursed as a turncoat by his countrymen. What was really going on in his mind?

I have merged this thread with an earlier one on Wang Jingwei. I would recommend discussing him with much greater nuance and objectivity than nationalists tend to do. I hardly think that the 'right sense' of Wang Jingwei is simply to condemn him as a selfish, power-hungry man with no love for his country and people. There is much more to it than that.

Wang Jingwei had a more closer relationship with Sun Yat-sen than Chiang had with Sun. In fact, I think Sun perceived Wang as a better successor to his mantle than Chiang.

Wow so much info, I'll have to read all this in my spare time.

Honestly, I believe Wang probably had more democratic tendencies than Chiang Kai-shek. If all the conditions were right, Wang might have led China and the KMT to semblances of democracy.

But, Wang epitomizes the Chinese character I seem to know too much about. He was distressed by all the bloodshed and confrontations. He thought he can put an end to all that by caving in to the Japanese. In some ways, he was just like Puyi.

And, he probably knew his political career was done with Chiang in power. Who knows? He might have been put under house arrest like so many other KMT figures were when they fled with Chiang to Taiwan.

The past is the past. Wang should be seen not only as the infamous traitor but also one of the leading revolutionaries who helped found modern China. I am sure he would be proud of the path China is taking today.

Wang Jingwei is the ugliest of the Four Pretty Boys of early 20th century China...

Just a naive man.

How is Wang Jingwei in the end?

Commited suicide?

Who were the other 3?

Really?
I wasn't sure...Perhaps anyone could help?

He died of illness in Japan before the war ended.

Wangjingwei's corpse was digged out by Chiang Kai Shek , then the soldiers whipped the body, smashed it into pieces and burned to ashes. （挫骨扬灰）

Now...that's pity....

What's the public opinion about him?

I think one was Zhou Enlai, don't know about other 2.

The four pretty boys of ROC（民国四美男）
version I:
1. Wangjingwei
2. ZhouEnlai
3. MeiLanFang 梅兰芳
4. ZhangXueliang 张学良

Version II
3. Miaohansan


WangjingWei



ZhouEnlai

not too long ago, Phoenix TV showed a program regarding Wang Jingwei s regime and the key figures of it..

can't remember the details .. but here is:

1. Wang was rather young when he died.. the illness he had was supposed to be cured through surgery but had complications and died shortly after.. many suspect sabotage

2. Wang s wife Chen Bijun was apparently the prime mover for Wang s defection as she was even more power hungry than Wang and resented Chiang climbing over her husband

3. 2 other key figures: Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai. Chen was a faithful follower of Wang who actually did not approved of Wang s dealings with the Japanese yet he followed him into the puppet regime. As for Zhou , it seemed he was power hungry and money hungry (having siphoned large amt of $$$ when he was in charge of the treasury) and also a 2 headed snake ... he collaborated with Chiang again after realising the Japanese were near the end of the road ..

I thought I knew Wang Jingwei enough, especially after I read the book by the son of Tao Xisheng. After briefly scanning John Boyle's "China & Japan At War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration", have to acknowledge that a real third party did have more neutral view. As said by Boyle, Wang and Chiang shared the same views from 1932 to 1936. Alternatively, Li Ao blasted Chiang by presuming Wang's innocence as a rubberstamp for the appeasement treaties, written or oral, with Japan around 1935. Boyle proved that Wang Jingwei was convinced that Chiang was correct in dealing with Japan. Secondly, Boyle proved that the motivation for Wang Jingwei to talk with Japanese was Wang Jingwei's anatagonism against the Chinese communists. In deed, looking back, we could find out that Wang Jingwei's cronies, Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai, were diehard anti-communists even though they had been either communists or leftists in 1920s. Boyle reminded us what Wang Jingwei feared the most out of the Sino-Japanese War. Wang Jingwei was correct in his judgment. Chiang, having played a trick in 1940 by spreading a rumor that Chongqing would merge with Nanking, got the first loan from America. What Chiang did not know but Wang Jingwei knew better was that Russians as well as Anglo-Americans wanted Japan and China at war, no matter what their motives were.

In the absence of scholarly studies of urban secret societies, those works that have addressed the issue directly, such as the books by Sterling Seagrave and Pan Ling on the Shanghai Green Gang, have been of distinctly popular kind. Both of these works provide extremely vivid and entertaining accounts of the activities of the Green Gang and its leader, notably Du Yuesheng, in Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s, but neither is ( nor claims to be ) a work of historical scholarship. Seagrave's account, in particular, with its conspiratorial view of Chinese history in the 1920s and 1930s and of Jiang Jieshi's rise to power ( which, he argues, was due to the machinations of Du Yuesheng ), sacrifices historical fact for sensationalist effect. Pan Ling's work, by contrast, is more solidly anchored in the secondary Chinese literature, especially the biographies of Du Yuesheng by Zhang Jungu and Xu Zhucheng, and it presents a much more balanced account of Du Yuesheng's career than that provided by Seagrave. Her approach, nevertheless, remains closer to that of a novelist than of a historian, and her work has many of the characteristics of the traditional Chinese genre of Yanyi, that is, a fictionalized reconstruction of historical events.

source: The Shanghai Green Gang" By Brian G Martin University of California Press 1996

There are a few threads devoted to Wang Jingwei on his latter accomplishment or lack of it. However, how did he lost out to Jiang Jieshi? What role did Du Yuesheng played in this power struggle?

hihi interesting thread

at the moment I am researching the Sino-Japanese War and to break out of the 'trap' of seeing the conflict in the binaries of Chiang Kai-shek/Kuomindang vs Mao Zedong/the Communists, i am interested in investigating either of these two interesting dudes - Wang Jingwei and Zhang Xueliang

i'm particularly interested in seeking out the records of the war crimes trials held after the end of the War where Chinese collaborators were incriminated. Wang Jingwei died in Japan before the war ended so he got off, but his wife Chen Bijun was tried and I believe that she made some remarks in defence of Wang Jingwei's decision to collaborate with the Japanese. Does anybody know where these records can be found?

The biggest contribution Wang Jingwei regime achieved would be to have the puppet troops excluded from appropriation by Japanese for military campaigns. No mainland puppet troops ever went overseas to join the Japanese wars against the Allied powers. The puppets had also protected underground agents of the National Government from the Japanese. One more notable thing is the order to prohibit opium trade and trafficking by the Japanese. Lastly, the puppet forces, after Japanese surrender in Aug 1945, had fended off communist attacks for 3-4 months across the northern China, which was quite an achievement.

I heard Wang Jingwei can write very good poems, including some patriotic poems. Anyone has links to his poems?

Just add one more contribution the puppets had for China. They stabilized the puppet currency by stopping Japanese from printing un-numbered Japanese military bills. The exchange rate was one puppet yuan = 2 Nationalist yuan.

Before the Nanking puppet government, Japanese, together with Zhangjiakou's puppet Mongolian Bank, Peking's Hebei Province puppet government and Shanghai's Huaxing Commercial Bank, printed currency that totalled no less than 0.666 billion equivalent Chinese currency; Japanese military currency, with no numbering, in 1940 alone, totalled 1 billion printed amount; and total Japanese military currency was equivalent to 3.5 billion equivalent Chinese "legalized currency" by 1940.

He died in a Japanese hospital where he was taken for treatment, possibly as a late complication of an assassination attempt against him in 1935. He was definitely a complex character. In his early life he was far left, and before the KMT-CCP split Mao Zedong worked closely with him. Later on he was involved in some warlord alliances which were directed at overthrowing Chiang Kai-Shek. Of course his eventual collaborator role is most well-known. He seems to have felt that a long drawn out war between Japan and China would benefit mostly the Soviet Union and the CCP and history seems to bear this out.

I recommend the following reading which I have used in this post:

http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eeasc/resources/w...me_6a_sloga.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Jingwei

Chang, Jung & Halliday, John (2005) Mao: The Unknown Story Knopf, New York

I'd also recommend checking out this site:

http://www.republicanchina.org

I take back my statement on the currency stabilization. It failed after Japan reversed its policy of imposing Japanese Yen onto occupied territories and sucking back Yen for maintaining exchange rate in Japan. So, by the end of Japan's surrender, the inflation in occupied territories was at least 500-1000 times that in free China. That's probably why the Nationalist government adopted the predatory conversion rate of one CNC=200 puppet upon Japanese surrender, disregarding the fact that wartime inflation was limited to cities only. - Th epuppets, though, claimed that they had done their best to compete for resources and materials with Japanese; otherwise, the people in occupied territories would be dying away, which was partially true.