Chen Gongbo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chen.
Chen Gongbo (traditional Chinese: 陳公博; simplified Chinese: 陈公博; pinyin: Chén Gōngbó; Wade-Giles: Ch'en Kung-po, 1892-1946) Chinese politician, was the Head of the Legislative Yuan of the Wang Jingwei's puppet state, the Nanjing Nationalist Government.
Born in Nanhai, Guangdong, China in 1892. Chen Gongbo, had been a founder of the Chinese Communist Party and members of its First Congress, but left it the next year. He then lived in the United States for several years in the 1920s, returning to China in 1925. Chen joined the Kuomintang (KMT) being named head of the Department of Peasants. As a member of the KMT leftist clique together with Wang Jingwei in 1927, he was named Minister of Enterprises of the National Government in 1932. He was also a director of the KMT's Sichuan branch.
As the Second Sino-Japanese War went badly in 1938, he and Wang started to cooperate with the Japanese invaders. When the Nanjing Nationalist Government was established Chen became the speaker of the Legislative Yuan and mayor of Shanghai. When Wang was abroad in Japan, he acted as the president of Wang's government and became president of the Executive Yuan.
At the end of World War II, he fled to Japan and after World War II, immediately following Japan’s formal surrender on September 9, 1945, China’s representative He Yingqin asked Japan’s representative, Okamura Yasuji, to extradite Chen Gongbo to China for trial. Chen Gongbo was escorted back to China on October 3. At his trial, he defended himself vigorously. As President, he had refused to cooperate with the Japanese in several significant matters and had acted only because of his loyalty to his friend, Wang Jingwei. As he was sentenced to death as a traitor, he took his fate calmly saying that "Soon, I will be reunited with Wang Jingwei in the next world". Chen was executed by a firing squad at Suzhou, Jiangsu in 1946.
