Background
Wang Jingwei was born in 1883 to a poor scholarly family in Guangdong province.
Wang Jingwei was born in 1883 to a poor scholarly family in Guangdong province.
Wang received classical education and passed the provincial examination with distinction before pursuing studies in Japan on a government scholarship in 1904.
While in Japan, he came in contact with the emerging anti-Manchu movement among overseas Chinese students, and joined the Tongmenghui (Chinese United League), the revolutionary organization founded by Sun Yat-sen, in 1905. He subsequently rose to fame as a principal participant in the polemic between Tongmenghui's organ, Minbao, and the constitutionalist publications guided by Liang Qichao. In 1910 Wang led a mission to assassinate the Manchu regent prince in Beijing. The mission failed and he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Qing government.
Released shortly after the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, Wang, by then a national hero, was nominated by the Tongmenghui as its new leader, but he declined. Instead he worked for a compromise between the revolutionaries and the leader of the Qing military, Yuan Shikai. When a settlement was reached and Yuan became the first president of the new republic, Wang temporarily retired from politics and devoted his attention to cultural and educational affairs. He made two trips to Europe with his former comrade and new bride, Chen Bijun. In 1917 Wang returned to the entourage of Sun Yat-sen, who was organizing his own government in Guangzhou to challenge the warlord regime in Beijing. For the next seven years Wang served as Sun's secretary, publicist, and emissary in negotiations with various political forces in China. A gifted writer and orator, Wang quickly gained trust from Sun as well as respect from his colleagues. When Sun reorganized his Guomindang (GMD) in 1924 with Comintern support and assistance, Wang became a member of its Central Executive Committee.
Sun's death in 1925 made Wang a leading contender for the succession to GMD leadership. He was elected head of the Party and the government in July, and as such he continued Sun's policy of allying with the Soviet Union and cooperating with the Chinese Communists. The succession struggle, however, was far from over. In March 1926 Wang was ousted by Jiang Jieshi in a coup that known as the Zhongshan Gunboat Incident. He left Guangzhou for France in April. In early 1927, the GMD, halfway in its northern expedition against the warlords, was paralyzed by a bitter rift within itself and with its Communist allies. Wang was welcomed back by his supporters to head the leftist Wuhan regime, which was in rivalry with Jiang Jieshi and the Party’s right-wing in Nanjing. Although the two camps were reunified later that year, after both had purged the Communists from their ranks, Wang again lost to Jiang in the ensuing contest for GMD leadership.
From 1928 to 1931 while spending most of his time on another overseas exile,Wang led an intraparty opposition to Jiang’s conservative Party and government leadership. He became known as the leader of the MLeft GMD,W which vowed to revive the Party's radical line of the 1924-1927 period. With the assistance of his personal following, known as the “Reorganize- tionists,M as well as several anti-Jiang militarists, Wang directed a series of political and military offensives aimed at toppling Jiang’s new government in Nanjing. All of these offensives, most notably the Beiping (Beijing) regime of 1930 and the Guangzhou regime of 1931, ended in failure. In early 1932, as the Japanese invasion in Manchuria alarmed the warring GMD factions, Wang decided to cooperate with Jiang and joined the Nanjing government.
During the first half of the 1930s, Wang served as China's premier (head of the Administrative Yuan) and shouldered the main responsibility of dealing with the Japanese threat. Buying time for domestic pacification and reconstruction, he insisted on a conciliatory stance toward Japan, which seriously tarnished his reputation as a nationalist and national leader. Meanwhile, Wang's share of power in Nanjing diminished as Jiang continued to expand his control over the Party and the government. In late 1935 Wang was wounded in an assassination attempt and forced to resign. He took another trip to France and did not return until early 1937.
Shortly after Wang’s return the Sino-Japanese War began. In the early stage of the war, Wang was second-in-command in the GMD and its war-time government, a position reaffirmed by his election as the Party's deputy leader (with Jiang as leader) and head of the People’s Political Council in 1938. Wang, however, was disappointed by his continued loss of power to Jiang, and extremely pessimistic about the possible outcome of the war. Soon he was involved in a secret effort to seek peace with Japan. In late 1938 Wang left China’s wartime capital,Chongqing,and announced his Mpeace initiativeM in Hanoi. Failing to persuade his colleagues in Chongqing to join him, he moved to Shanghai and negotiated a separate peace settle-ment with Japan. In March 1940, with Japanese help, Wang established a new “national government” in the Japanese-occupied Nanjing. For the next four years his regime tried, with little success, to restore Chinese rule and WANG MING reduce Japanese control in the occupied territories. The regime was constantly weakened by Japanese pressure and internal strife. Wang died of illness in Japan in 1944, months before the end of the war. By then he had been regarded by most Chinese as a traitor and a Japanese puppet.
Wang was married to Chen Bijun and had six children with her, five of whom survived into adulthood. Of those who survived into adulthood, Wang's eldest son, Wenjin, was born in France in 1913. Wang's eldest daughter, Wenxing, was born in France in 1915, after 1948 was a teacher in Hong Kong, retired to the US in 1984 and died in 2015. Wang's second daughter, Wang Wenbin, was born in 1920. Wang's third daughter, Wenxun, was born in Guangzhou in 1922, and died in 2002 in Hong Kong. Wang's second son, Wenti, was born in 1928, and was sentenced in 1946 to imprisonment for being a hanjian.