A Humanist in Wartime France: Wang Jingwei during the First World War

Abstract

August 1912, Wang Zhaoming 汪兆銘 (1883–1944; better known as Wang Jingwei) left China for France. A leader of the nationalist movement, he had been imprisoned by the Manchu Regime for a failed attempt on the Prince Regent’s life. Now that the Republic had been founded, he chose to reject all offers of government positions. Instead, he decided to continue his study in France, under the tutelage of his anarchist friends. This erstwhile assassin would emerge from WWI France as a humanist opposed to all forms of violence. Employing rarely studied archival materials, this paper analyzes his poems during those Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre. It argues that, far from being idyllic pastorals as many biographers assume, they show a man torn by conflicting ideologies, agonizing over unfulfilled commitments, and tormented by his inner demons. Through these poems, he also creates an identity that is a traditional scholar-bureaucrat, an anarchist philosophe, a modern knowledge professional, and a statesman all in one – an identity that was unique in China’s transition into a modern polity. Wang’s later protean ideological allegiances, including his infamous collaboration with Japan under the banner of Pan-Asianism during WWII, arguably illustrated his intellectual hybridity. This paper will in particular examine a poem that ostensibly “translated” Jean-Pierre de Florian’s fable “La Brebis et le Chien” into a pentasyllabic ballad, elaborating on pacifism and the strength of the weak. It was both a personal response to the wartime upheaval and a harbinger of his future fate.