Contextualizing the Wang Jingwei Regime

Some of the existing scholarship on Wang Jingwei’s wartime government that was touched upon in the introduction is useful for considering the very nature of the RNG at various points in this regime’s short life. Rather than revisiting the internal intrigues of this regime or assess its political economy—topics that have been thoroughly addressed before1—this chapter demonstrates how individuals and institutions within the RNG sought to define and justify their administration in the context of occupation. How sections of the RNG presented their regime in the broader sweep of the modern Chinese Republic, and what they hoped China might become, are also considered. The broader picture that results will allow us to contextualize, in later chapters, the eclectic iconographies that developed in Wang Jingwei’s China. Indeed, without a sense of what the RNG was, we cannot properly appreciate the messages that various arms of this administration (and its non-state allies) sought to visualize.