Wang Jingwei

Wang Jingwei (汪精卫, born Wang Zhaoming, 1883–1944) was a Chinese revolutionary, writer and politician. He rose from the anti-Qing revolutionary movement to the top of the Kuomintang. He was a close associate of Sun Yat-sen and a leading figure in the party's left wing during the 1920s. In 1910 he became famous for a failed attempt to assassinate a Qing prince regent. He later served as head of the Nationalist government in Guangzhou and as premier of the Executive Yuan in Nanjing. For years he was the main rival of Chiang Kai-shek for control of the party and the state.

After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War he became an advocate of negotiating peace with Japan. In December 1938 he left the wartime capital at Chongqing, and in March 1940 he established a "Reorganized National Government" in Nanjing under Japanese military occupation. The regime was never recognized by the Allies, and it depended on Japan for its security and survival. Wang died in Japan in November 1944, less than a year before Japan's surrender. In China he is generally regarded as the archetypal hanjian (traitor), and his name became a byword for collaboration. Scholars have nonetheless examined his motives, the structure of his regime and the wider phenomenon of wartime collaboration in China.

This article traces his life in chronological order: his upbringing and study in Japan, his revolutionary activity and imprisonment, and his role in Guangzhou, Wuhan and Nanjing in the 1920s and 1930s. It then covers his break with Chongqing, the founding and character of the Nanjing regime, his death and the destruction of his tomb, and the later historiographical debate about collaboration.

Family background and early education

Wang Zhaoming, later known by the pen name Wang Jingwei, was born on 4 May 1883. He was born in the Sanshui county office, in Guangzhou prefecture, where his father was serving as a secretary. His family was not Cantonese in origin. Its ancestral seat was Shanyin, now part of Shaoxing in Zhejiang, where the graves of his forebears were. The family's move south followed a clan relative, a senior kinsman who had served as an aide (muyou) to several viceroys of Guangdong and Guangxi. His father registered the household at Panyu and settled in Guangzhou. That is why Wang is often described as a native of Panyu even though he was born in Sanshui.

His father had a modest career as a private secretary, working in county administrations such as Sanshui, Qujiang and Yingde on a low salary while trying to keep up the appearance of an official family. The household was frugal. His father taught him to read, and by the age of eight or nine he could read books for himself. In later years he read Wang Yangming's Instructions for Practical Living to his father and copied out poems by Tao Yuanming and Lu You. This classical training in philosophy and verse is the base of the poetic style that marked his later writing.

His parents died within about a year of each other. His mother died when he was thirteen and his father the following year. He then lived with his half-brother Wang Zhaoyong, who supported him. Wang Zhaoyong was a scholar who served in the secretarial staff of the Guangdong–Guangxi viceroy. The brothers' relationship later became awkward because of Wang Jingwei's revolutionary activity. The viceroy Cen Chunxuan regarded revolutionaries as enemies, and the elder brother's position grew embarrassing as the younger brother's reputation rose. According to a popular account, the pen name "Jingwei" was partly chosen to shield the family. The name comes from the mythical bird that tries to fill the sea with pebbles.

Examinations and the road to Japan

Wang took the imperial examinations in the early 1900s. He sat the Panyu county examination together with an elder brother, and placed first in the Guangzhou prefectural examination. Sources disagree on the exact year and on how the rankings were adjusted at the county stage. He was later admitted as a licentiate (xiucai), the entry-level degree, at the circuit examination presided over by the education commissioner Zhu Zumou, whom he treated afterwards as his teacher. The Guangdong naval commander Li Zhun hired him as a private tutor, which gave him an income to support the household. Wang's literary talent and the degree opened the way to a conventional official career. That path was closing, however: the Qing court was introducing its late "New Policies" reforms, and the imperial examination system was abolished in 1905.

Part of the reform program was to send students to Japan at government expense. In 1904 the court instructed Cen Chunxuan to hold a competitive selection for state-funded students in Japan. Wang was keen to apply. He recruited a group of Guangzhou licentiates who later became prominent in the Nationalist movement, including Zhu Zhixin and Hu Hanmin, and all of them were accepted. In September 1904 they left for Japan as government-funded students in the accelerated course of Hosei University in Tokyo. The course was a short program for Chinese students that trained them in modern law and administration with the help of interpreters. The syllabus covered legal theory, civil, commercial, constitutional, administrative, criminal and international law, as well as economics and public finance. Alongside his studies Wang translated Japanese legal reference works for about 60 yen a month.

The Tokyo environment

The Chinese student community in Tokyo, which numbered several thousand by 1905–06, was one of the main recruiting grounds for the late Qing revolutionary movement. It also hosted the constitutional monarchists around Liang Qichao. Wang later credited his legal studies with changing his political views. He said that constitutional law taught him the ideas of the nation and of popular sovereignty, and that these joined his inherited nationalism to point him toward revolution. A scholar-official's son who had trained for the examinations, he thus entered the political circles of the Qing reform era through a state scholarship, and used that education against the dynasty that had paid for it.

Tongmenghui and revolutionary journalism

In July 1905, shortly after arriving in Tokyo, Wang met Sun Yat-sen for the first time. The meeting was with Hu Hanmin, Zhu Zhixin and other Guangdong students. When the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) was founded in the Japanese capital that summer, Wang, aged 22, was a founding member who helped draft its charter. He was elected head of the party council and chief writer of the party organ Min Bao. Min Bao first appeared in Tokyo on 26 November 1905. It was a monthly, and Hu Hanmin, Wang, Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai and Zhang Binglin were among its contributors. The pen name "Jingwei" came into use in this period. It began as a pen name for the newspaper and was adopted in 1905.

The polemic with the constitutional monarchists

Wang's reputation as a writer rests on the exchange between Min Bao and Liang Qichao's Xinmin Congbao (New Citizen Journal), published in Yokohama. Liang argued for constitutional monarchy under the Qing, and the exchange was one of the largest ideological debates in late imperial China. On 18 April 1906 the third issue of Min Bao carried an extra setting out the points of disagreement between the two papers. One account says more than twenty other overseas publications joined in, and the debate texts ran to at least a million words. Wang was among the leading revolutionary contributors, with Hu Hanmin, Zhu Zhixin and Song Jiaoren. Sun, Wang, Hu and Song wrote articles on the Three Principles in Min Bao, giving them definition as an ideology and supporting the struggle against reformist opponents such as Liang. The Three Principles of the People were nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood.

Several themes ran through the debate. Liang claimed that anti-Manchu revolution would invite partition by foreign powers and social disorder. He advocated "enlightened despotism" as a stage before constitutional rule, and he opposed the Tongmenghui land programme. The revolutionaries answered that the Qing court could not carry out real reform and that a republic was the necessary form of government. Wang's own treatment of race and nation was more complicated than the anti-Manchu rhetoric of the journal. One study finds he stood out among the revolutionaries for clearly formulating the idea that the new Chinese nation should be composed of different nationalities, including the Manchus. The same study argues that although Sun influenced his thinking in these years, Wang developed his own ideas beyond Sun's framework. The Japanese authorities later suppressed Min Bao. By the end of 1908, after six failed revolutionary attempts, the Tokyo paper had been shut down.

Southeast Asia: propaganda and fundraising

From 1907 Wang worked among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, whose merchants were the main source of money for the Tongmenghui's uprisings in southern China. The press war that had begun in Tokyo continued there. In Singapore, where the Tongmenghui branch dated from 1906, local revolutionaries led by the merchants Tan Chor Nam and Teo Eng Hock founded the Chong Shing Yit Pao on 20 August 1907 to counter the reformist Union Times. The two papers fought a "battle of the pen" from 1907 to 1910, the longest clash between revolutionaries and reformists in British Malaya. Wang was one of the revolutionary writers sent to support this campaign.

In Malaya, Wang's travels included Penang. A reading room founded there in 1908 served in practice as a centre for revolutionary organisation and fundraising, and its constitution was reportedly drafted with Wang's help during a stay of several days at the request of local revolutionaries. Hu Hanmin, Huang Xing and Wang also conceived a plan in Penang for a publication to be called Kwang Hwa Pao. The plan was dropped when financial backing wavered after the collapse of tin prices. Overseas Chinese donations paid for the Tongmenghui's border and Guangdong-Guangxi risings of 1907–1908, but none of these succeeded. The failures, and the fracturing of the party's leadership that followed, shaped Wang's next move. He supported Sun and began to plan the assassination of Qing officials to boost the party's morale. The 1910 plot in Beijing is covered in the next section.

The 1910 assassination attempt and imprisonment

By 1910 the Tongmenghui's uprisings in southern China had repeatedly failed. Wang Jingwei argued that a single act of violence in the capital could revive revolutionary morale. He plotted against the life of the Prince Regent Zai Feng in 1910 to stimulate revolutionary fervor. Wang had been influenced by anarchist ideas while studying in Japan, and the plan reflected the assassination tradition of the early revolutionary movement. Wang went to Beijing with a small cell that included Sun Yat-sen's associate Huang Fusheng and Chen Bijun's circle. He arrived under the cover of opening a photography studio, but his real objective was to kill Zaifeng, the father and regent of Emperor Puyi. The plan was to bury a bomb beneath a bridge that Zaifeng crossed daily on his way to the palace and to detonate it by wire. Chen Bijun, his betrothed, held an informal wedding with him days before the failed plot.

The plot unraveled before the bomb could be used. Wang and his accomplices were spotted while burying the bomb, though they escaped. Not long after, while he was planning a second attempt, he was arrested at his photography studio. The arrest took place on 16 April 1910. Chen Bijun had left for Hong Kong by then, and she kept working for his release from outside. Other members of the cell later took part in the Yellow Flower Mound Uprising in Guangzhou on 27 April 1911. Chen, Fang Junying, Zeng Xing, Li Zhongshi and Yu Peilun all took part, buying and transporting guns and dynamite in Japan, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Wang followed that event only through news from prison wards, and he responded to it in verse.

Trial and sentence

The Qing authorities tried Wang openly. He spoke at length about revolutionary principles and called on everyone to rise up and overthrow the Qing. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some accounts describe this as a death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The leniency drew on his youth, his eloquence, and the influence of figures close to Yuan Shikai. Yuan's eldest son, Yuan Keding, is said to have played a significant role in the commutation and release, and a friendship between the two men followed. The prison poems he wrote in custody, which expressed his readiness to die for the cause, circulated widely among revolutionaries. Together with his courtroom defiance, they turned a failed plot into the basis of a heroic reputation.

Release and the peace talks

The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 changed his position. The National Assembly pressed the court to pardon political prisoners. On 6 November Zaifeng ordered Wang's immediate release and directed that he be returned to his native Guangdong. He did not go. Rather than going south to join his fellow revolutionaries, he remained in Beijing and soon linked up with Yang Du, a trusted member of Yuan Shikai's political entourage. Wang appears to have followed a strategy of using Yuan to bring down the Qing. Yuan Keding, as his father's representative, then discussed terms with him. Yuan's conditions included his own election as provisional president and the unification of north and south. On 26 December Yuan Shikai ordered Wang to go to Shanghai to mediate the north-south peace negotiations. The talks produced the abdication of the Qing in February 1912 and Yuan's accession to the presidency, as described in the article on the Xinhai Revolution. In the same weeks, Sun Yat-sen sent Cai Yuanpei and Wang Jingwei to persuade Yuan to move to Nanjing.

The episode gave Wang a reputation that few party colleagues of his generation could match. He was known as the revolutionary who had risked death in the capital and survived, and this reputation helped his later rise inside the Kuomintang. His role in the 1911–1912 settlement, however, also tied him to Yuan's circle at a time when many of his comrades distrusted Yuan.

Republican-era politics and years abroad (1912–1924)

Marriage and years in France

After the Xinhai Revolution and the abdication of the Qing, Wang stepped back from office. He and Chen Bijun were officially wedded in April 1912 in Shanghai. Chen came from a wealthy overseas Chinese family in Penang. Wang's own writings suggest the two regarded themselves as committed to each other from 1910, when he faced execution. After the wedding she went to study in France. The couple lived in France from 1912 to 1917. Wang wrote Chinese poetry there but did not learn much French. Wang is also associated with the early Chinese work-study movement in France. Some accounts say he initiated it in 1912. He moved in the same expatriate circle of Kuomintang veterans in Paris, which also included figures such as the activist Zheng Yuxiu. Chen's own movements were less settled. She left school and returned to China in 1913, then went back to France after the campaign against Yuan Shikai failed.

Distance from Sun during the Yuan Shikai years

After Yuan Shikai suppressed the 1913 "Second Revolution", Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan. In 1914 he founded the Chinese Revolutionary Party, which required members to pledge personal loyalty to him. Several of his old comrades refused to join, among them Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming. Wang objected to Sun's demand that members treat him as supreme commander, and did not join. Wang's break with Sun's organization was therefore one of procedure and not of aims. He stayed in Europe through the monarchist episode of 1915–1916 and the death of Yuan in 1916.

Return to Sun and the Constitutional Protection Movement

After Yuan's death the Chinese Revolutionary Party stopped all activity. Wang returned to China in 1917 to support Sun's Constitutional Protection Movement. That movement set up a rival southern government in Guangzhou against the northern warlord regime in Beijing. Wang worked with Hu Hanmin, Liao Zhongkai and Zhu Zhixin to build military forces in the south. In 1919 Sun reorganized the Chinese Revolutionary Party as the Zhongguo Guomindang. Wang held various senior posts in Sun's Guangzhou administrations through the early 1920s. He became one of the small group of civilian lieutenants, with Hu and Liao, around whom later succession disputes formed.

The alliance with the Soviet Union and the Communists

Sun's military position remained weak, so he turned to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. The Comintern agent Maring (Sneevliet) met him in Guilin in December 1921. Maring favored "internal cooperation", in which CCP members would join the Kuomintang as individuals. The arrangement is known as the First United Front, and it involved the Chinese Communist Party. Soviet advisers helped build a party organization on Leninist lines and a new military academy at Whampoa. Wang initially advised Sun against allying with the Communists. Once Sun committed to the alliance, Wang acquiesced, as other Kuomintang members did.

The 1924 First National Congress

The reorganized Kuomintang held its First National Congress on 30 January 1924. The Congress adopted a manifesto that restated the Three Principles of the People in anti-imperialist terms. Delegates included members of the CCP. At the Congress Wang was elected to the Central Executive Committee and appointed the party's minister of propaganda, among other key posts. The propaganda post made him the main public voice of the reorganized party. Wang had made his name as a writer and orator, and this work drew on that reputation. In late 1924 he was in Sun's entourage on the final trip to Beijing. Sun fell fatally ill there. That journey led directly to the testament and succession crisis of 1925.

Sun Yat-sen's death and the Guangzhou government (1925–1926)

The testament and the succession

Sun Yat-sen travelled north to Beijing at the end of 1924 for talks on national reunification. His health collapsed after he arrived on 31 December, and he underwent surgery in January 1925. On 11 March he signed the Premier's Testament and the Valedictory to the Soviet Union, both drafted by Wang Jingwei, and wrote a private will to his family himself. Sun died at 9:30 am on 12 March 1925. The testament became a quasi-liturgical text of the Kuomintang, read at the start of party and government meetings. Authorship of it gave Wang a claim to be Sun's political heir.

After Sun's death, Wang was one of three leaders positioned to succeed him. The other two were Hu Hanmin and Liao Zhongkai, and the three were the most powerful figures on the party's Executive Committee. Wang was the party's best-known orator and its link with the Soviet Union. Hu represented the party's right, and Liao represented the left, finance and the labour movement. Wang had no army of his own. His position rested on the party apparatus, on the Soviet adviser Mikhail Borodin, and on the military men who accepted party leadership, chiefly Chiang Kai-shek, commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy.

Chairman of the Nationalist Government

In mid-June 1925 the party's Central Political Council agreed to reorganize the southern regime. The Nationalist Government was formally inaugurated in Guangzhou on 1 July 1925, replacing Sun's personal "Generalissimo's headquarters". Wang was elected its chairman. He also chaired the Military Council, created on 3 July, which in theory gave him authority over the units being merged into the National Revolutionary Army. In practice, command lay with the commanders in the field: Chiang at Whampoa and the First Army, Xu Chongzhi in the Guangdong army, and the Yunnan and Guangxi generals in the provinces. Guangzhou's government meanwhile depended on the Hong Kong–Guangzhou strike and boycott against British trade, on Soviet money and arms, and on cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party under the arrangement of the First United Front.

The Liao Zhongkai assassination

On 20 August 1925 Liao Zhongkai was shot dead by five gunmen as he stepped out of his car in front of a Kuomintang Executive Committee meeting. Liao had been the main financial administrator of the southern government and a leading defender of the Soviet alliance. Investigation pointed to a circle of right-wing party figures, including Hu Hanmin's cousin Hu Yisheng, who fled. Suspicion fell on Hu Hanmin, who was arrested. Hu himself denied involvement, and the degree of his responsibility has remained disputed. A three-man emergency committee of Wang, Xu Chongzhi and Chiang was given extraordinary police and military powers. Borodin accused Hu of being the mastermind and forced him to step down. Hu was sent to Moscow on a nominal mission, and Xu Chongzhi was also pushed out of Guangzhou on suspicion of involvement. Right-wing opponents of the alliance with the Soviet Union met separately in Beijing's Western Hills in November 1925 (the Xishan Conference) and announced a break with the communists. With Hu removed, Wang and the rising Chiang were left as the main rivals for control of the Kuomintang. Chiang gained more than Wang from the purge, since he took over the forces that Xu had commanded and became the leading military figure in Guangdong.

The Zhongshan warship incident

The Kuomintang's Second National Congress in January 1926 confirmed the left-wing line, and Wang remained at the head of the government. Tension between Wang and Chiang grew over the planned Northern Expedition and over the growing communist presence in the army's political departments. On 18 March 1926 the gunboat Zhongshan was ordered to move unexpectedly between Guangzhou and Whampoa. On 20 March Chiang declared martial law and arrested the vessel's communist commander, Li Zhilong. He also detained communist political officers and surrounded Soviet advisers' residences and the strike committee's pickets. Chiang alleged a plot to kidnap him, and the question of who gave the order has never been settled. Some accounts hold that Wang was behind it, while others say Chiang invented or exaggerated the affair as a pretext. Chiang soon released most of those detained and restored relations with the Soviet advisers, but the shift in power was permanent. Chiang ousted Wang Jingwei after the incident in spring 1926. Wang's chairmanship of the Military Affairs Commission ended on 16 April 1926, and its powers passed to Chiang. In May the party adopted measures limiting communist activity within the Kuomintang. Wang, by then in ill health and politically isolated, left Guangzhou for Europe. Chiang took command of the Northern Expedition, which began in July 1926. Wang returned to China in April 1927 (see the following section).

Wuhan government and the split with the communists (1927–1931)

Return and the Wuhan government

Wang Jingwei had left China for Europe after the Zhongshan warship incident of 1926. He returned in April 1927 and issued a joint declaration with Chen Duxiu reaffirming KMT–CCP cooperation. He then led the left-wing Wuhan government in opposition to Chiang's government in Nanjing. The Wuhan government had its origins in the decision to move the seat of the Kuomintang government from Guangzhou to Wuhan during the Northern Expedition. KMT leader Wang Jingwei and his left-wing allies, together with the Chinese Communists and the Soviet agent Borodin, made this move. The government's own military base was weak. It depended on commanders such as Tang Shengzhi, who held no firm ideological commitment to the left.

The split between Wuhan and Nanjing came within days of Wang's declaration. On 1 March the leftist-dominated Nationalist government had reorganized the Military Commission and placed Chiang under its jurisdiction, while secretly plotting to arrest him. Chiang discovered the plot, which most likely strengthened his determination to purge the CCP from the KMT. The Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927 followed. Chiang then established a rival nationalist government in Nanjing on 18 April 1927. The Wuhan government under Wang initially opposed the purge.

The break with the communists

Wuhan's alliance with the communists deteriorated over the following three months. Peasant and labour mobilization in Hunan and Hubei alarmed the officers on whom the government depended. The Comintern issued a series of orders known as the "May Instructions" on 1 June, which Wang thought would destroy the KMT. On 15 July, Wang held a KMT meeting at which he made the content of the instructions public and condemned the CCP's decisions. He maintained that non-violent methods should be used to remove the communists from Wuhan. The KMT calls this the Wuhan–Communist split, and the CCP calls it the July 15 counter-revolutionary coup. It effectively ended the First United Front. In practice, troops occupying territories formerly controlled by Wang carried out massacres of suspected Communists. The sources describe killings in the area around Changsha in particular. The break did not save the Wuhan government. A Communist uprising that began on 1 August spurred reconciliation between the rival KMT factions, and Wang and the other KMT leftists abandoned Wuhan for Nanjing in September. Both Wang and Chiang were then forced to resign as the New Guangxi clique took control of the reunified government. The First United Front and the Chinese Communist Party's subsequent turn to armed insurrection and rural base-building are covered in other articles.

The Guangzhou Uprising and the fall from power

Wang then tried to rebuild a base in Guangdong, working with the general Zhang Fakui, whose Fourth Army had been associated with the Wuhan government. Zhang was working with Wang at the time, and his main task was to eliminate the CCP's influence in the Guangzhou area. The CCP launched the Guangzhou Uprising on 11 December 1927, and it lasted until 13 December. The rebels proclaimed a soviet government, but Zhang Fakui quickly recalled his troops and attacked the Communists. Casualties on both sides were heavy. The affair ruined Wang's position. Because the uprising had taken place under his government in Guangdong, his rivals held him responsible. His regime was completely disgraced and he sailed for France.

The Reorganizationist faction and the anti-Chiang coalitions

Wang's followers in China kept working on his behalf during his absence. Among them were Chen Gongbo, who founded the journal Geming Pinglun (Revolutionary Critique), which criticized Chiang Kai-shek's Nanjing Government, and Gu Mengyu. They formed the "Reorganizationist" faction (改組派), named for its call to restore the Kuomintang's 1924 reorganized form and its alliance policy. The faction acted as a vehicle for Wang's claim to be Sun Yat-sen's legitimate heir against the Nanjing leadership.

Wang's opposition to Chiang became more active after 1929, when the Nanjing government's military settlement with the regional commanders broke down. In late 1929 he joined a series of revolts against Chiang, but was defeated in the Central Plains War. The Central Plains War was the largest conflict of the Warlord Era. By 1930 the main anti-Chiang forces were those of Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang. Wang's group and the Western Hills faction supplied the political legitimacy for a rival government. Yan contacted Wang's group and the Western Hills faction and asked for an enlarged meeting in Beiping. The first session was held there on 7 August, and it criticized Chiang for running a dictatorship and prepared to organize a new national government. Wang was to serve as prime minister under Yan, who would be president. The coalition collapsed when Zhang Xueliang, the Manchurian commander, entered the war on Chiang's side in September 1930. Wang's attempts to aid Yan's government ended with Chiang's victory in the Central Plains War. Wang then retreated to the south, and he fled to British Hong Kong.

The Guangzhou government of 1931

A fresh opening came in 1931 from a dispute between Chiang and Hu Hanmin over the drafting of a provisional constitution. On 27 May 1931 the Guangdong and Guangxi leaders Chen Jitang and Li Zongren, together with KMT factions including Wang's Reorganizationists, Sun Fo's group and the Western Hills group, set up an Extraordinary Session of the Kuomintang Central Executive and Supervisory Committees in Canton. The anti-Chiang Canton National Government that followed was established on 28 May 1931. The government was headed by Tang Shaoyi, Wang, Sun Fo and Zou Lu among others. It controlled little beyond Guangdong and Guangxi. It was dissolved on 5 January 1932. The rival governments were reconciled after Japan's seizure of Manchuria in September 1931, and Wang's partnership with Chiang over the next several years is covered in the following section.

Premier under Chiang and the policy of appeasement (1931–1937)

Reconciliation with Chiang

Japan's seizure of Manchuria after the Mukden Incident of September 1931 pushed the rival factions of the Kuomintang to settle their quarrels. Chiang Kai-shek resigned at the end of 1931. The short-lived government of Sun Fo, in office for most of January 1932, found itself paralyzed by the absence of the party's "Big Three": Hu Hanmin, Chiang and Wang Jingwei. High-level negotiations brought Chiang and Wang back into politics, with Wang becoming premier. Wang took office as president of the Executive Yuan on 28 January 1932 under President Lin Sen. He also served as foreign minister, while Chiang led and modernized the units of the military under central control and ran the campaigns against the Communists. The arrangement is often called the Chiang–Wang partnership, and the cooperation between the two was an uneasy one. Wang left office for several months between August 1932 and March 1933. He became foreign minister in August 1933.

Policy toward Japan

Wang took office on the same day that Japanese naval forces began fighting in Shanghai. The Nineteenth Route Army's resistance there ended in a ceasefire agreement on 5 May 1932, which kept Chinese troops out of the Shanghai area. Appeals to the League of Nations produced no practical help. In 1933 Japanese forces took Rehe and advanced on the Great Wall passes. The Tanggu Truce was signed on 31 May 1933 and created a demilitarized zone south of the Great Wall. The truce is treated in more detail in its own article. Wang defended it publicly as a local compromise that did not put China's territorial sovereignty in jeopardy. Because it tacitly acknowledged the de facto autonomy of Manchukuo, the speech caused an uproar.

Wang and Chiang both argued that China lacked the military and industrial strength to fight Japan, and that the Communist insurgency had to be dealt with first. Local agreements and diplomacy were meant to buy time for building up the army. Wang, as the civilian face of this policy, drew most of the public anger. Both men, but especially Wang, became targets of hostile public opinion in the press and in student demonstrations, over their nonresistance and concessions to Japanese aggression. The nationalist anger was strongest among students and in the cities. Further local arrangements in North China in 1935 deepened it.

The shooting of November 1935

On 1 November 1935, the Fourth Central Committee of the Kuomintang opened its Sixth Plenary Session in Nanjing. After the delegates posed for a group photograph, a man posing as a journalist fired at Wang, who was hit by three bullets. The assassin, Sun Fengming, was shot by guards and died in hospital the next day. He was identified as a veteran of the Nineteenth Route Army, which had fought at Shanghai in 1932. Chen Bijun, in distress, accused Chiang of plotting the attack. The accusation was never substantiated. One bullet is generally reported to have stayed in Wang's body, and it caused him health problems for the rest of his life.

Wang's incapacitation shifted power to Chiang. Wang resigned on 1 December. At the party plenum of 6 December, Chiang was formally elected chairman of the Executive Yuan. Wang kept the chairmanship of the Central Political Committee, with Chiang as acting deputy chairman.

Europe and the Xi'an Incident

Wang left China on 19 February 1936 and spent the rest of the year in Europe seeking medical care. In Germany he reportedly met Hitler and discussed the possibility of China joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. In December 1936 Chiang was detained at Xi'an by Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, who wanted an end to the civil war and a united front against Japan (see Xi'an Incident). Some accounts say that He Yingqin, who favored a military solution, contacted Wang and asked him to come back to take charge of the Kuomintang. The episode also brought Wang's name into discussions, in Moscow among others, about who might succeed Chiang. Wang did not reach China until 14 January 1937, after the crisis was already over.

On his return he found Chiang at a peak of popularity as national leader, with a united front against Japan taking shape. Wang held party posts but not the premiership. He chaired the Central Political Committee from December 1935 to November 1937, and he chaired the party's National Defense Committee from March to August 1937. The Second Sino-Japanese War began in July 1937, and his role in the war years is covered in the following sections.

From Chongqing to Hanoi: the road to collaboration (1937–1939)

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From Chongqing to Hanoi: the road to collaboration (1937–1939)

After the second-sino-japanese-war began in July 1937, Wang Jingwei remained the second-ranking figure in the kuomintang behind chiang-kai-shek. At the party's extraordinary congress in Wuhan in spring 1938 he was made deputy leader of the party, and he kept that rank when the government moved west to chongqing. Wang came to believe that a policy of resistance to the end would destroy China, and he sought to advance the mediation efforts of German ambassador Oskar Trautmann in the winter of 1937. Around him formed a loose "peace party". It centred on the so-called "low-key club" that met at the residence of Zhou Fohai. Wang did not attend its gatherings but shared its pessimism. Its other prominent members included Chen Gongbo, the diplomat Gao Zongwu and the professor Tao Xisheng. Gao was sent to hong-kong at the behest of Zhou Fohai and the club to make contact with Japanese officials sympathetic to peace. Zhou kept Chiang informed of these efforts. The channel was therefore not at first a secret break with the Generalissimo.

The Trautmann mediation and Japan's hardening line

Japan asked germany to mediate in October 1937, and Trautmann handed the first set of Japanese terms to the Chinese government on 5 November 1937. As the fall of nanjing approached, Chiang decided on 2 December to accept the terms as a basis for negotiation. By then Japan had begun to press greater demands after its military victories, which made the original terms obsolete. After the capture of Nanjing, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced on 16 January 1938 that Japan would no longer deal with the Nationalist government. The mediation collapsed. After the fall of Guangzhou and wuhan in October 1938, a second Konoe statement proposed "building a new order in East Asia". Japan now sought a new Chinese interlocutor. In early November 1938, Wang's circle sent Mei Siping and Gao Zongwu to negotiate with Japanese representatives in shanghai, and the two sides signed an agreement on 20 November 1938.

Flight to Hanoi

Wang said later that a meeting on 9 December convinced him Chiang could not adopt Konoe's proposals. After obtaining assurances of support from the Yunnan warlord Long Yun, he left Chongqing secretly with his family and supporters on 18 December 1938. They flew to Kunming and then to Hanoi in French Indochina (vietnam). On 22 December, Konoe declared a "New China Policy" based on three principles: good neighbourliness and amity, joint defence against communism, and economic cooperation. Wang took this as an opening. On 29 December he sent his "Yan telegram" from Hanoi, which explained his reasons for considering the Japanese armistice proposal. Chiang at first claimed that Wang had gone to Hanoi for medical treatment and sent envoys to persuade him to return. The Kuomintang then expelled Wang. The warlords on whom he had counted failed to respond. Konoe resigned within days of the telegram, and the new Japanese cabinet showed little interest in the understanding Wang had reached with Konoe's government.

Assassination attempt and move to Shanghai

On the night of 20 March 1939, gunmen stormed into the Wang residence in Hanoi and killed Zeng Zhongming, a close confidant and secretary. Wang had just switched rooms with Zeng, so the assassins sent by an intelligence agency killed Zeng instead. Wang's circle attributed the attack to Chongqing. Two days later, Tokyo's Five Ministers Conference decided to send Kagesa Sadaaki and Inukai Takeru to Hanoi. Wang had been considering a stay in France, but the attack left him convinced that he was safe only under Japanese protection. Japanese escorts took him to Shanghai. He also visited Japan in mid-1939 and negotiated with Prime Minister Hiranuma Kiichirō.

The Plum Agency and the exposure of the terms

The Plum Agency (Ume Kikan) was founded in Shanghai on 22 August 1939 under Kagesa's leadership. It managed relations with Wang's group, and it often argued with the Japanese cabinet on behalf of the collaborators to secure better terms. Meanwhile Wang secretly convened a "6th National Congress" of the Kuomintang in Shanghai in August, which created a rival party under his leadership. Talks with Kagesa's side ran through the autumn. They were conducted for Wang's side by Zhou Fohai, Mei Siping, Gao Zongwu and Tao Xisheng, and the terms were set by Japanese army and government bodies. Tao Xisheng described the talks as "drinking poisoned wine." The Japanese demands proved harsh, with economic and military dominance across China. The agreement documents concluded on 30 December incorporated almost all of Japan's requests. Gao and Tao had declined to attend the signing, and in early January 1940 they left Shanghai and reappeared on the Nationalist side. In Hong Kong they announced how crushing Japan's demands were and urged Wang to end the negotiations. The revelations were a major propaganda victory for Chiang and reinforced the perception that Wang's government was a Japanese puppet. The founding of the Reorganized National Government in March 1940 is covered in the next section.

The Nanjing government (1940–1944)

Founding and claim to legitimacy

On 30 March 1940, Wang attended a "capital returning ceremony" in Nanjing and established a government styled the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China. The regime presented itself as the legitimate continuation of the Kuomintang state, not as a new polity. Wang visited Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum on Purple Mountain on 19 March. He adopted the Nationalist flag to discredit the Chongqing government and to present himself as Sun's rightful successor. Japan proposed adding a triangular yellow pennant bearing the slogan "Heping, fangong, jianguo" (peace, anti-communism, national construction). Wang refused the compromise because it risked undermining his government. The slogan nonetheless became the regime's motto. The regime kept the five-yuan structure, Sun's Three Principles of the People and the Kuomintang's party organization. It issued a ten-point platform for "peaceful nation building", and the Kuomintang was the only legal party.

The formal arrangement was a legal fiction. At first Wang served only as acting chairman, because Lin Sen, who was still in Chongqing, was nominally chairman of the National Government. On 28 November 1940 the Central Political Committee revised the organic law and elected Wang chairman. He also served as president of the Executive Yuan.

Merger of the earlier collaborationist regimes

Japan had already sponsored two local regimes: the Provisional Government in Beijing, set up in December 1937, and the Reformed Government in Nanjing under Liang Hongzhi, established on 28 March 1938. Both were merged into Wang's government on 30 March 1940. The merger was less complete than the name suggests. The Beijing regime continued in North China as a semi-autonomous North China Political Council, and Mengjiang in Inner Mongolia and Manchukuo stayed outside Nanjing's authority. Actual control was limited to the cities, railway lines and some of the countryside in occupied central and southern China. Guerrilla forces, the Communists and Chongqing's agents contested the rest. Japan's Supreme Military and Economic Advisory Commissions were the most powerful bodies in Nanjing and supervised important activities in areas nominally under Chinese control.

The 1940 Basic Relations Treaty

Japan delayed formal recognition while contacts with Chongqing were still possible. The treaty negotiations were conducted with Abe Nobuyuki, Japan's special envoy. On 30 November 1940 Wang and Abe signed the Sino-Japanese treaty in Nanjing. A Japan–Manchukuo–China joint declaration was signed the same day. In the joint declaration Nanjing accepted Manchukuo. The treaty combined statements of mutual respect for sovereignty with provisions for anti-communist cooperation. It allowed Japanese troops to stay in designated areas, and it gave Japan privileged access to economic resources, especially in North China and Inner Mongolia. Germany, Italy and other Axis-aligned states recognized the regime in July 1941. Neither Chongqing nor the Allied powers did.

Entry into the Pacific War and the 1943 concessions

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nanjing declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom in January 1943. In the same month Japan agreed to return its own concessions and to give up extraterritorial rights, and in 1943 Tokyo and Nanjing also concluded an alliance treaty. The timing followed the Allied move to end extraterritoriality in China. The United States and Britain signed treaties with Chongqing to that effect on 11 January 1943, so Japan used the gesture to compete over the claim to restore Chinese sovereignty. The handovers of the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession took place in mid-1943. The Wang government ran a press campaign, also sponsored by Japan, that highlighted Italy as the last European colonizer still holding concessions in China. One assessment holds that Japan gave up extraterritorial rights and recognized the regime as an ally, but these gestures were empty, since Japanese troops stayed and Japan kept large economic and political privileges.

The Greater East Asia Conference

The Greater East Asia Conference was held in Tokyo on 5–6 November 1943, hosted by Japan for leaders from the territories of its Co-Prosperity Sphere. Wang arrived on 1 November, accompanied by Zhou Fohai, Chu Minyi and others. He sat alongside Tōjō Hideki, Zhang Jinghui of Manchukuo, Ba Maw of Burma, José P. Laurel of the Philippines, Wan Waithayakon of Thailand and Subhas Chandra Bose. Historians generally treat the meeting as mainly propaganda. It aimed to strengthen the delegates' commitment to Japan's war effort and improve Japan's image, but the delegates were neither independent nor treated as equals. Wang's presence placed Nanjing in Japan's pan-Asian wartime framework. It did not change Nanjing's dependence on Japanese military and economic power.

Governance, economy and wartime conditions

Administrative organization

The Reorganized National Government copied the formal structure of the Kuomintang state: five yuan (Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Examination and Control) under a National Government chairman. When it was inaugurated on 30 March 1940, Wang Jingwei served as acting chairman, because Lin Sen, still in Chongqing, was nominally chairman of the National Government. The fiction was dropped in November 1940, when the organic law was revised and Wang was elected chairman. Real policy-making sat with the Central Political Committee. It was defined as the highest guiding body for national politics and, unlike its Kuomintang predecessor, was not an internal party organ. Zhou Fohai was its secretary-general. The regime's ruling party was a Kuomintang reconstituted in 1939 and presented as the true heir of Sun Yat-sen's movement.

Posts were spread among Wang's Guangdong-born "reorganizationist" followers and men from the earlier Japanese-sponsored regimes. Chen Gongbo was president of the Legislative Yuan from 1940 to 1944 and also mayor of Shanghai. Zhou Fohai was finance minister throughout the regime's existence and became vice premier in December 1940, succeeding Chu Minyi. Liang Hongzhi, who had headed the Reformed Government, held senior office in Nanjing and succeeded Chen as Legislative Yuan president in 1944. Factionalism was intense. One account describes a plan approved by Zhou in 1939 to place ten of his sworn brothers in vice-ministerial posts across ten ministries. North China was run separately through a political council under Wang Kemin, so Nanjing's authority there was largely nominal. Even so, the regime nominally ruled more than one hundred million people in the richest area of central China, in the historian David Gordon's assessment.

Armed forces

Wang initially planned to raise a force of twelve divisions under his personal command. In practice the "Nanjing army" was assembled from former warlord units, defectors from Nationalist formations and the garrison and security forces of the earlier Beijing and Nanjing regimes. After the regime was founded in 1940, the collaborationist forces rose to about 145,000 men, mostly drawn from local forces in eastern, central and southern China. Estimates for all pro-Japanese Chinese forces combined run from 300,000 to 683,000 troops. Japan valued them mainly as a source of manpower, since after 1942 and the outbreak of the Pacific War it needed local soldiers to maintain public security in occupied areas. Their equipment, supplies and operational direction depended on the Japanese army, whose advisers were attached to the units. The troops were widely seen as unreliable and as a source of exactions on the population. Large-scale defections to Chongqing or to communist-led forces occurred in the last years of the war.

Economic policy

The regime's main financial instrument was the Central Reserve Bank, based in Nanjing and Shanghai, which operated between January 1941 and August 1945. Its notes were meant to displace the Nationalist government's fabi in the occupied lower Yangzi region and to give Nanjing an independent monetary base. Some contemporaries and later accounts say the new notes stabilized prices in the early years. As the war turned against Japan, however, note issue expanded to cover government and military spending, and the denominations grew until a 10,000-yuan note was in circulation. Hoarding and rapid inflation followed in 1943–1945, along with food shortages in Shanghai and Nanjing. Rice and other grain were requisitioned and rationed through state control bodies, and buying was often below market prices. Japanese military and semi-official companies controlled much of the industrial base, as well as transport and raw materials. After the 1943 alliance arrangements, part of this property was nominally returned to Chinese management. Scholars disagree about how much room Nanjing had. Joshua H. Howard argues that the regime created an autonomous domain in the socio-economic sphere free from Japanese supervision, and tried to promote production.

Rural pacification and the intelligence war

Security policy was built around the "Clean Countryside" (qingxiang) campaigns in the lower Yangzi region, launched in 1941 against communist-led New Fourth Army bases and other guerrillas. A Rural Pacification Committee was founded in May 1941 and became almost a parallel administration, with intelligence chief Li Shiqun as its main powerbroker. The campaigns combined military sweeps and blockades with household registration, local militias and "political work" teams.

Shanghai was the centre of a covert war. The regime's secret police worked from a headquarters at 76 Jessfield Road, run by Ding Mocun as director and Li Shiqun as deputy. Both had come from the Nationalist and communist intelligence worlds and were recruited by Zhou Fohai in early 1939 to provide security for Wang's group. The agency carried out kidnappings, assassinations and arrests against Chongqing's agents and the communist underground, which struck back in turn. Li became police minister in December 1940 and died on 9 September 1943, at a time when relations between his faction and the Japanese had deteriorated. Some Nanjing leaders, Zhou Fohai among them, opened secret contacts with Chongqing as Japan's position weakened.

Culture, education and legitimacy

The regime claimed legitimacy through Sun Yat-sen's doctrine, the Kuomintang flag and its motto "Peace, Anti-Communism, National Construction." A "New National Movement" in 1941 promoted moral and civic renewal. Schools kept the Republican curriculum but added Japanese-language instruction, anti-communist content and pan-Asian themes. Radio, newspapers, film and youth organizations were used for propaganda. Cultural work also reached into the countryside: historians of the Rural Pacification programme describe efforts at "civic training," youth affairs, propaganda and party affairs to win over rural communities. Chongqing, by contrast, held the international recognition of the Allies and the claim to wartime resistance. Nanjing's attempts to present itself as the authentic Nationalist government therefore ran against the facts of Japanese occupation. Scholars still debate how far these policies reflect a genuine programme of national revival and how far they were instruments of the occupation.

Death, burial and aftermath

Final illness and death

Wang's health declined steadily through 1943 and 1944. The bullet from the November 1935 shooting had never been removed, and it caused persistent trouble. Failing health and persistent trouble from the assassin's bullet wound led Wang to enter the Nagoya University Hospital in Japan in March 1944. He was admitted under the code name "plum". Japanese authorities guarded his sickbed and kept him from speaking to journalists. He died on the afternoon of 10 November 1944 at Nagoya Imperial University Hospital. Accounts of the immediate cause differ. One memorial source gives multiple myeloma, while others give pneumonia. The death was announced in China on 12 November, after commemorations for Sun Yat-sen's birthday had concluded.

Burial and succession

Wang's body was returned to Nanjing, and his widow Chen Bijun oversaw the repatriation. Jeremy Taylor's study of the rites notes that the regime chose a more ambiguous "laying to rest" over a formal state funeral. It also notes that the regime built no statues of Wang and named no institutions or streets after him, so that the Wang personality cult was distinguished by its ephemerality, with the tomb the only exception. The tomb was built on Plum Blossom Hill (Meihuashan), close to the mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen. The planned elaborate monument was not finished before the war ended.

The succession was settled quickly. On 12 November the Nanjing Central Political Committee named Chen Gongbo president of the Executive Yuan, acting chairman of the National Government and chairman of the military committee. He took office on 20 November. Chen led a regime that had little room left to act. Japan's military position was collapsing, and the regime ended with Japan's surrender in August 1945.

Destruction of the tomb

The Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek treated the site as a symbol to be removed. Reports say that on Chiang's order, He Yingqin and others planned the demolition, and the tomb was blown up on 21 January 1946. The destruction removed from the Nanjing landscape a monument that had stood next to the founding father's own mausoleum.

Trials of the leadership

Prosecutions rested on the Nationalist government's "Regulations on Punishing Han Traitors" of 6 December 1945. Anyone found guilty of one of twelve listed crimes of conspiring with the enemy was to be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. The regulations were applied to anyone who had collaborated with the Japanese, not only ethnic Chinese. They gave the legal basis for treating the people involved as hanjian. Many leading defendants were tried at the Jiangsu High Court in Suzhou, where the main proceedings took place in the spring and summer of 1946.

• Chen Gongbo was extradited from Japan in October 1945 and tried in April 1946. He argued that he had refused to cooperate with the Japanese in several significant matters and had acted out of loyalty to Wang. The court sentenced him to death on 12 April, and the sentence was carried out on 3 June 1946.
• Chen Bijun, arrested in late August 1945, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on 23 April 1946. She did not appeal.
• Chu Minyi, the regime's long-serving foreign minister, was executed at Suzhou on 23 August 1946.
• Hu Yukun, a senior army officer, was shot at Nanjing on 24 May 1946.
• Zhou Fohai was tried at Suzhou with the others. His death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1948.

Outcomes varied. Some defendants received commutations on appeal, as Cai Pei did when his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in November 1947. Lower-ranking officials, police and military personnel were tried in provincial courts. The defendants commonly argued that they had stayed behind to protect occupied populations. Press commentary at the time compared the trials unfavourably with the faster purges in France.

Collaborators under the two governments

The chinese-civil-war interrupted the process. In spring 1949, before the Communist armies crossed the Yangtze, the National Government released imprisoned collaborators serving less than life terms and moved those serving life sentences to the Ward Road Jail in Shanghai. The prisoners who remained therefore passed into the custody of the People's Republic. Chen Bijun was among them and died in prison in 1959. Others held in Shanghai, such as the former Wang-regime figure Zhou Xuechang, stayed imprisoned after 1949 and died there of illness in 1952. In both states the official judgement on Wang and his regime stayed hostile, and the trials fixed his name as the archetype of the collaborator in postwar Chinese memory.

Historiography, memory and debate

The hanjian verdict

In both the Republic of China on Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, Wang Jingwei is classed as a hanjian, a "traitor to the Han Chinese", and his government is routinely called the "Wang puppet regime" (Wang wei). The two ruling parties had different reasons for keeping the verdict. For the Kuomintang, it removed the "peace party" from the story of the war of resistance and defended Chiang Kai-shek's claim to be the only legitimate heir of Sun Yat-sen. For the Chinese Communist Party, Wang stood for the capitulationist and anti-communist wing of the Nationalist camp, which served as a foil for its own account of leading national resistance. Mainland historians such as Cai Dejin and Huang Meizhen published detailed work on the Wang group, but inside this frame. Postwar trials of leading collaborators, including war-crimes and treason cases, gave the label a legal basis as well as a moral one.

Revisionist and comparative scholarship

Western-language studies from the early 1970s, notably John Hunter Boyle's China and Japan at War and Gerald Bunker's The Peace Conspiracy, were the first to treat Wang's turn to Japan as a political choice that could be explained. They traced it to his long-standing doubts about whether China could win, his dislike of Chiang's dominance, and his fear that prolonged war would benefit the Communists. Later authors have stressed other motives. Zhou Fohai's diary has been read as showing a different version of nationalism. It combined relief from wartime suffering, anti-communism, and a version of Sun Yat-sen's pan-Asian ideas that treated Japan as a necessary partner. The 2004 essay by Jian-Yue Chen describes a "revisionist school" that credits Wang with limiting Japanese military rule, while an opposing view sees the regime as wholly dependent on Japanese arms and money.

Questions about the regime's autonomy rest on case studies. Lin May-li's archival work argues that the Nanjing government bargained over sovereignty and the treatment of occupied populations. Timothy Brook's Collaboration places such regimes within the strategies of local elites and Japanese agents. The volume edited by David Barrett and Larry Shyu, Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945, includes essays on the origins of the peace movement and on continuities and breaks in the Wang regime. More recent work uses other approaches. Jeremy Taylor's Iconographies of Occupation studies the regime's visual culture and the personality cult around Wang. Zhiyi Yang's Poetry, History, Memory reads Wang's classical verse as a self-portrait and sets it against the "punitive" verdict of later historians. Li Zhiyu's Jingxian: Wang Jingwei de zhengzhi shengya (Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 2014) is a Chinese-language biography. Relatives and descendants of Wang and his associates have also taken part in this debate, running a website and contributing to publications.

Sources and their limits

Zhou Fohai's diary is the most-used source on the inner life of the regime. After 1945 it was confiscated by the Nationalist intelligence service. A portion covering the years up to 1940 leaked and was published in Hong Kong in 1955. A Shanghai "internal publication" followed in 1984, and in 1986 Cai Dejin edited a two-volume edition covering 1937–1945 without 1939. A fuller edition appeared in Beijing in 2003, and a prison diary for 1947 was issued in 1991. Because Zhou kept the diary while he was in office and was later tried, and because publication was selective, historians treat it as an interested record rather than a neutral one.

The documents handed over by Gao Zongwu and Tao Xisheng are a different kind of source. They defected from Wang's group, and in January 1940 the Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao printed the draft terms of the Japanese–Wang agreement. Their account served an immediate political purpose, which was to discredit the planned government. Japanese military and diplomatic archives, together with memoirs by officers and officials involved in the "Plum" and "Ume" operations, give the occupier's side, but they too were written with later justification in mind. Wang's own papers have been deposited at the Hoover Institution, and scholars expect new research from them.

Literature, film and comparison

Fiction has mostly set the regime's Shanghai as a world of spies, informers and moral compromise. Eileen Chang's story "Lust, Caution" (adapted for film by Ang Lee in 2007) is set among the regime's secret police. Chinese television spy dramas, among them The Disguiser (2015), cast Nationalist agents against Wang's government. Wang's early career as an assassin-poet and prisoner has also been dramatized, with the later turn presented as a sharp contrast.

Comparisons are made with Vichy France, Norway under Quisling, and the Japanese-sponsored governments in the Philippines and Burma. Studies of Vichy since Robert Paxton's work have shifted attention from betrayal by a few individuals to the question of what a regime claiming continuity with the old state could do under occupation. That shift has been cited by historians who want to move Wang studies beyond the label.

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