Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing

On 30 March 1940 a ceremony billed as the “return of the government to the capital” (還都, huandu) took place in Nanjing, the former capital of the Republic of China, which Japanese troops had captured in December 1937 and where they had massacred tens of thousands of people. Wang Jingwei, until recently second only to Chiang Kai-shek in the Kuomintang and in the state, announced that the National Government of the Republic of China was returning from Chongqing on the Yangtze and assuming authority over the whole of China. The new government took over the name, offices, anthem and flag of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, as well as its ideology, the Three Principles of the People of Sun Yat-sen. In reality it was a collaborationist government, created with Japan’s consent and under its supervision, which ruled only those fragments of China that the Japanese army occupied.

Historians usually call it the Wang Jingwei government or, following the official usage of the time, the Reorganised National Government. In China, both on Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, it is spoken of as the “puppet” or “bogus” government (偽政府), and Wang himself is regarded as the very symbol of treason.

The man who wanted peace

Wang Jingwei was one of the best-known Chinese politicians. As a young revolutionary in 1910 he had tried to blow up the regent of the Qing dynasty, and in 1925 he had written down the political testament of the dying Sun Yat-sen. For years he vied with Chiang Kai-shek for the leadership of the Kuomintang; in 1932–1935 he was prime minister, and it was his name that stood behind compromises with Japan such as the Tanggu Truce. In November 1935 he was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by a man who called him a traitor. In 1938, at an extraordinary Kuomintang congress in Wuhan, he became deputy leader of the party, with Chiang elected as its leader.

From the outset of the war with Japan Wang doubted whether China could win it. He believed that the country was too weak economically and militarily, that the tactics of scorched earth and protracted war would ruin China more than Japan, and that there was no point in counting on help from the great powers. In the autumn of 1938, after Wuhan and Guangzhou (Canton) had fallen and Changsha had burned in a fire started by the Chinese authorities themselves, he was already saying openly that peace must be sought.

Since the beginning of 1938 Japan had been looking for someone in China to replace Chiang. On 16 January 1938 Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe declared that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang Kai-shek’s government. In the occupied territories the army had already created local collaborationist governments: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China in Beijing (December 1937) under Wang Kemin and the Reformed Government in Nanjing (March 1938) under Liang Hongzhi. Their men, however, were little known, and their authority did not extend beyond the reach of the Japanese garrisons. In Inner Mongolia there was also Prince De Wang’s Mengjiang. Wang Jingwei, a politician of national renown with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree, was something altogether different for Tokyo.

Flight from Chongqing

The go-betweens were younger diplomats and politicians from Wang’s circle, above all Gao Zongwu and Mei Siping, as well as Zhou Fohai. On the Japanese side the talks were conducted by General Staff officers, Colonel Sadaaki Kagesa and Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Imai. On 20 November 1938 in Shanghai, in a house known as the Chongguangtang, the two sides drew up an agreement: China would recognise Manchukuo and join a common struggle against communism; Japan would gain the right to station troops in Inner Mongolia and economic privileges in the north, and in return would withdraw its other troops from China within two years of the restoration of peace and would consider giving up extraterritoriality and its concessions. The plan was that Wang would leave Chongqing, Konoe would announce Japan’s terms, and Wang would publicly endorse them and, with the help of generals hostile to Chiang, build a new government in the south-western provinces not occupied by the Japanese.

On 18 December 1938 Wang, with his wife Chen Bijun and several associates, flew from Chongqing to Kunming, and the next day, in an aircraft provided by the governor of Yunnan, Long Yun, to Hanoi in French Indochina. At that point the plan began to unravel. Neither Long Yun nor the commanders in Sichuan and Guangdong followed Wang. On 22 December Konoe delivered his promised statement on the three principles of policy towards China – good-neighbourly friendship, common defence against communism and economic cooperation – but under pressure from the army he left out the most important promise: the withdrawal of troops. Wang nevertheless kept his side of the bargain. On 29 December he sent the Kuomintang leadership a telegram, published in the Hong Kong press and known, from the character denoting that date, as the “Yan telegram” (豔電), in which he called for peace talks on the basis of Konoe’s statement. On 1 January 1939 the Kuomintang expelled him from the party for life and stripped him of all his posts. On 4 January the Konoe government fell.

Wang was stranded in Hanoi without an army and without territory. Chiang Kai-shek sent him a passport and money for a journey to Europe, while at the same time ordering his intelligence service to prepare an assassination. On the night of 20–21 March 1939 agents of Dai Li’s secret police broke into Wang’s house in Hanoi and shot dead his secretary and friend Zeng Zhongming. The attempt decided the further course of events. Wang concluded that there was no going back, and the Japanese realised that without their protection he would be killed. At the end of April, with Kagesa’s help, he left Hanoi, and at the beginning of May he reached Shanghai by ship. The idea of a government in the free provinces had collapsed. A new government could now be formed only in the territories occupied by Japan.

Negotiations in Tokyo and Shanghai

At the end of May 1939 Wang flew to Japan. He talked with Prime Minister Kiichirō Hiranuma, with the War Minister Seishirō Itagaki and with the former prime minister Konoe. He obtained consent to set up a central government that would absorb the governments in Beijing and Nanjing. A dispute broke out over the flag: Wang wanted to keep the flag of the Republic of China, the same one that Chongqing used, and Itagaki objected. It ended in a compromise: a yellow pennant bearing the slogan “Peace, anti-communism, national construction” (和平反共建國) was attached to the Blue Sky, White Sun flag so that Japanese soldiers could tell allies from enemies.

A special office of the Japanese army now operated in Shanghai, known as the Plum Agency (梅機関) and headed by Kagesa. With its help Wang convened, on 28 August 1939, a “Sixth National Congress of the Kuomintang”, which proclaimed itself the party’s legitimate leadership and elected him chairman of the executive committee. In September the division of posts in the future government was settled with Wang Kemin and Liang Hongzhi. At the same time an apparatus of terror was set up in Shanghai: a secret police at No. 76 Jessfield Road, run by Ding Mocun and Li Shiqun, which in the following years kidnapped, tortured and killed Chongqing agents, communists and inconvenient journalists.

The hardest talks were those over the treaty. From November 1939 Japanese envoys put forward terms far harsher than Konoe’s promises. Northern China and Mengjiang were to remain “special zones” with Japanese troops and advisers, the lower Yangtze an area of close economic cooperation, and the islands off the southern coast bases for the Japanese navy. Wang came close to breaking off. In an article entitled “To Japan”, published in the autumn in the Tokyo monthly Chūōkōron, he warned that the Chinese understood Japan’s “New Order in East Asia” as another name for the destruction of China. In the end, on 30 December 1939, he accepted a secret document called the “Outline for the Adjustment of New Japanese–Chinese Relations”.

The negotiations were taking place at a time when the war in China had flared up again. In November 1939 the Japanese took Nanning in Guangxi to cut Chongqing off from supplies from Indochina, and from December the Chinese armies conducted a winter offensive along almost the entire front, the largest since the war began. They recaptured no important city, but they showed that China had no intention whatever of capitulating. All the more did Tokyo need a Chinese government that would declare the war unnecessary.

Then came a blow. Gao Zongwu and Tao Xisheng, two men from Wang’s innermost circle, fled to Hong Kong and handed copies of the documents to Chongqing. On 22 January 1940 the Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao and other newspapers published their contents. For Chiang Kai-shek’s propaganda it was a gift: the secret agreement confirmed that Wang had agreed to China’s subordination to Japan. Even so, on 23–26 January in Qingdao, Wang, Wang Kemin and Liang Hongzhi agreed to merge their administrations. It was then that Chen Gongbo, Wang’s old associate from the Kuomintang left, who had hesitated until then, went over to his camp. In Tokyo the point of it all was questioned even in parliament: on 2 February the Diet member Takao Saitō, in a celebrated speech in the budget debate, asked whether the planned government would have any real power at all.

Return to the capital

On 20 March 1940 a Central Political Council met in Nanjing, attended by Wang’s men, representatives of both existing collaborationist governments and a few “independent” politicians. It approved the constitution of the new government, modelled exactly on that of the Republic of China before 1937, with five branches of government, the so-called Yuan. On 29 March the Beijing and Nanjing governments formally dissolved themselves. The former was transformed into the North China Political Council, which under Wang Kemin retained wide autonomy and in practice answered more to the Japanese army in the north than to Nanjing.

On 30 March the “return to the capital” ceremony took place. Wang announced a ten-point programme of “peaceful national construction” and called on Chongqing to end the war. He did not, however, take the title of chairman of the government. Formally the chairman remained Lin Sen, the aged President of the Republic of China, who was in Chongqing and would hear nothing of the whole affair; Wang became his “acting” chairman and at the same time president of the Executive Yuan, that is, prime minister. This was meant to show that the new government was not a rival to Chongqing but its “true” continuation, which Chiang could still join. Chen Gongbo became head of the Legislative Yuan, Zhou Fohai took the finance ministry and Liang Hongzhi the Control Yuan.

Chongqing’s response was immediate. Chiang Kai-shek’s government denounced the new government as a puppet and issued arrest warrants for 77 of its members. Lin Sen made a speech promising to fight on to victory. The United States, through Secretary of State Cordell Hull, declared that it continued to recognise the government in Chongqing as the sole government of China, and Britain took a similar position.

A puppet without recognition

Most significant of all, however, was what Japan did not do. The government of Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai welcomed the new government with a friendly statement and sent the former prime minister, General Nobuyuki Abe, to Nanjing as special ambassador, but it did not formally recognise it. Tokyo still hoped to make peace with Chiang Kai-shek himself. Since the turn of 1939 and 1940 Japanese intelligence officers had been holding secret talks in Hong Kong with men who presented themselves as Chongqing’s emissaries (the so-called Operation Kiri). For Japan the Wang government was above all a means of pressure: it was to show Chiang that if he did not accept the terms, Japan would find itself another partner.

Wang’s authority was very limited from the start. Nominally it covered the whole of China except Manchukuo, which he recognised. In fact he governed in Nanjing, Shanghai and parts of the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, and even there only in the towns and along the railways, since the countryside largely belonged to communist guerrillas and to units loyal to Chongqing. The north was under the Japanese army in Beijing, and Mengjiang was independent of him. Japanese advisers were attached to every office, and the command of the Japanese China Expeditionary Army, based in that same Nanjing, could overrule any decision. The government’s army, known as the Peace and National Reconstruction Army, numbered in 1940, according to Chinese estimates, several tens of thousands of poorly armed men and served mainly to guard areas behind the Japanese lines.

Wang justified his decision by arguing that someone had to protect the population of the occupied territories from direct rule by the Japanese military, and that peace with Japan on acceptable terms was China’s only salvation from destruction or communism. Many historians accept that he partly believed this sincerely. The government he created, however, had no means whatever of achieving these aims. It could not end the war, because Japan would not withdraw its troops and Chongqing would not negotiate. Nor could it truly protect the population, because it had no authority over the Japanese army, and its own police and secret services committed violence and plunder. In the eyes of most Chinese it was simply a tool of the occupier.

Place in the war

Japan recognised the Wang government only after eight months, when the talks with Chongqing had failed. On 30 November 1940 Wang and Abe signed in Nanjing a Japanese–Chinese Basic Treaty and, together with a representative of Manchukuo, a joint declaration of the three states. The treaty, whose secret annexes gave Japan the right to keep troops in the north and in Inner Mongolia, was compared to the Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Wang then formally assumed the title of chairman of the government. On 1 July 1941 the Nanjing government was recognised by Germany, Italy and other states linked to the Anti-Comintern Pact, and Chiang Kai-shek responded by breaking off relations with Berlin and Rome.

After the outbreak of the Pacific War Wang tied himself to Japan even more closely. On 9 January 1943 his government declared war on the United States and Britain, and in return obtained from Japan the concessions in Chinese cities and the abolition of Japanese extraterritoriality. In November 1943 Wang took part in the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo. In the lower Yangtze his government conducted brutal “rural pacification” campaigns against the communist guerrillas and the peasants who supported them. Wang died on 10 November 1944 in a hospital in Nagoya. His successor Chen Gongbo dissolved the government on 16 August 1945, the day after Japan’s surrender. In the post-war trials Chen Gongbo, Liang Hongzhi and other leaders of the government were sentenced to death and executed, while Zhou Fohai and Chen Bijun died in prison.

Wang Jingwei’s government was the last and largest of Japan’s attempts to end the war in China by political means. Japan, which had occupied the eastern part of the country militarily but could neither force Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate nor convince the Chinese that its “New Order in East Asia” meant anything other than subjugation, created a government that had neither power nor the acceptance of its own people. Instead of shortening the war, it saddled Japan with yet another commitment and deprived it of the chance of peace with Chongqing, since Chiang could not negotiate with a country that had recognised his rival. The war in China, ever more hopeless, drove Tokyo to seek raw materials in the south, in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, which in December 1941 led to war with the United States and Britain. Wang’s name, like that of Vidkun Quisling in Europe, became a byword for traitor in China, and historians still argue over how much of his decision was conviction, ambition and rivalry with Chiang Kai-shek.