Biography in English

Wang Ch'ung-hui 王寵惠 T. Liang-ch'ou 亮疇 Wang Ch'ung-hui (1881-15 March 1958), foreign minister in the provisional republican government in 1912. He subsequently held various ministerial posts and served briefly as acting premier at Peking in 1922. He later was president of the Judicial Yuan (1928-30; 1948-57), foreign minister (1937-40), and secretary general of the Supreme National Defense Council (1942-46). Wang also served as deputy judge (1923-24) and as judge (193136) on the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague.

Although his native place was Tungkuan, Kwangtung, Wang Ch'ung-hui was born in Hong Kong, where his father was a Protestant minister. When Wang was a boy, Sun Yat-sen and Ch'en Shao-pai (qq.v.) often came to the Wang home to discuss Christian theology and anti-Manchu revolutionary ideas. Wang received a bilingual education at Hong Kong, where he attended St. Paul's College and Queens College and studied classical Chinese with a tutor. In 1895 he went to Tientsin and enrolled at Peiyang University, newly founded by Sheng Hsuan-huai (q.v.). He was graduated cum laude from its law school in 1900. Because of the Boxer Uprising in north China, Wang Ch'ung-hui went to Shanghai in 1900 to teach at Nanyang College. The following year, he went to Japan to become an editor of the anti-Manchu Kuo-min-pao. He remained in Tokyo until late 1902, when he went to the United States for advanced education in law. He enrolled at the University of California but soon transferred to Yale University, where he received an LL.M. degree in 1903 and a D.C.L. degree in 1905. It was while Wang was at Yale that Sun Yat-sen went to the United States, and the two men met in New York to discuss politics. Wang drafted Sun's first public statement on the aims of the Chinese revolution, "The True Solution of the Chinese Question." During this period, Wang also served as an editor of the Journal of the American Bar Association. In 1905 Wang went to Europe for advanced study in jurisprudence and international law in England and Germany. He translated the German Civil Code of 1900 into English, and his translation, published in 1907, became the standard English version. In 1907 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, London. Soon afterwards, he was appointed an aide to Lu Cheng-hsiang (q.v.) at the Second Hague Conference. When the conference ended, he returned to London. In 1908 he wrote Sun Yat-sen in Singapore to ask for financial aid, and Sun sent him money, to the dismay of his T'ung-meng-hui colleagues, who were strapped for funds and who did not understand why any available money should not be used for specifically revolutionary purposes. Sun justified his action by saying that Wang was an eminent scholar whose services might later be important to the revolutionary cause.

Wang Ch'ung-hui returned to China in the autumn of 1911. When the revolution began, he became an adviser to Ch'en Ch'i-mei (q.v.), the revolutionary military governor of Shanghai. As a delegate from Kwangtung, Wang participated in the convention at Nanking which elected Sun Yat-sen provisional president of the Chinese republic. He and T'ang Erh-ho (q.v.) then were dispatched to Shanghai to inform Sun officially of his election. Wang was designated minister of foreign affairs in the provisional government. After Yuan Shih-k'ai succeeded Sun as president, Wang became minister of justice in the cabinet of T'ang Shao-yi (q.v.) at Peking. T'ang resigned in June 1912 and Wang followed suit in July. He then went to Shanghai and became chief editor of the Chunghua Book Company and vice chancellor of Futan University.

Although Wang did not take part in Kuomintang activities during the so-called second revolution of 1913, he later joined the anti- Yuan Shih-k'ai movement, becoming deputy commissioner of foreign affairs in the military council established at Chaoch'ing, Kwangtung, on 8 May 1916 (for details, see Liang Ch'ich'ao; Ts'ai O). With Yuan's death and the dissolution of the council, Wang went to Peking to be chairman of the Law Codification Commission, with Lo Wen-kan (q.v.) as vice chairman. In 1920 he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court. As China's leading jurist, he was one of ten men designated in 1921 to participate in the work of revising the League of Nations Covenant. On his way to that meeting, he made a public statement at Vancouver, British Columbia, in April 1921 to the effect that China had three important enemies: Article 21 of the League Covenant, the Anglo- Japanese alliance, and the Lansing-Ishü agreement of 1917. Wang was one of China's delegates to the Washington Conference convened that autumn, in the course of which the Anglo-Japanese alliance was dissolved and the Lansing-Ishü agreement was rescinded. In the meantime, in December 1921, Wang Ch'ung-hui had been appointed minister of justice in the cabinet headed by Liang Shih-i (q.v.). In January 1922, because of opposition from Wu P'ei-fu (q.v.), Liang was forced to resign in favor of W. W. Yen (Yen Hui-ch'ing, q.v.), who became acting premier. A struggle began between Wu P'ei-fu and Chang Tso-lin (q.v.) for control of the premiership, with Wu backing W. W. Yen and Chang supporting Liang Shih-i. In February, as the struggle continued, Wang Ch'ung-hui was named deputy judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. The struggle between the two warlords resulted in the first Chihli-Fengtien war in April, the defeat of Chang Tso-lin in May, and the return of Li Yuan-hung to the presidency at Peking. On 1 1 June Li designated W. W. Yen premier. Wang Ch'ung-hui became minister of justice in Yen's cabinet, and he became acting premier when Yen requested a leave of absence at the end of July. On 20 September, Wang was named officiating premier. He formed a cabinet, known as the "cabinet of able men" (hao-jen nei-ko), in which Lo Wen-kan was minister of finance, V. K. Wellington Koo (Ku Wei-chün, q.v.) was minister of foreign affairs, and Hsu Ch'ien (q.v.) was minister of justice. Before long, however, Wang's cabinet was caught in another power struggle. This time the chief antagonists were Wu P'ei-fu and Ts'ao K'un (q.v.). In November, the speaker of the National Assembly, Wu Ching-lien, and the deputy speaker, Chang Po-lieh, charged that Lo Wen-kan had accepted a bribe in connection with the adjustment of an Austrian loan contract. After Lo was arrested on these trumped-up charges, Wang Ch'ung-hui and his entire cabinet resigned on 21 November. It was with some relief that Wang left China in 1923 to assume his post on the World Court. On the recommendation of Lu Cheng-hsiang, he also represented China at the League General Assembly meeting in September 1923. Wang served on the World Court until 1925 and then became a member of the League Committee for the Progressive Codification of International Law.

Upon his return to Peking in 1925, Wang Ch'ung-hui became a delegate to the Special Customs Conference, chairman of the commission for investigation of extraterritoriality, and director general of the Law Revision Office. In January 1926 he was elected to the Central Supervisory Committee of the Kuomintang at that party's Second National Congress. In May, he was named minister of education in W. W. Yen's cabinet, but the cabinet was dissolved at its first meeting in June. Because of his continued association with the Peking government, Wang was removed from the Kuomintang Central Supervisory Committee in March 1927. Two months later, he left Peking and joined Chiang Kai-shek's regime at Nanking as minister of justice. He retained that post until mid- 192 8. When the Judicial Yuan was established on 16 November 1928, Wang became its president. He was reelected to the Kuomintang Central Supervisory Committee in 1929, and he was appointed chairman of the commission for rehabilitation of domestic and foreign loans in November of that year.

Wang Ch'ung-hui served as president of the Judicial Yuan and as a member of the State Council from 1928 to 1931. He worked to rid China of extraterritoriality and to inaugurate a system of political tutelage which, according to Kuomintang doctrine, would lead to constitutionalism in China. Wang played an important part in formulating the principles underlying both the civil and the criminal codes. He had participated in the drafting of the provisional constitution of 1912; he had helped Sun Yatsen evolve the concept of a five-yuan government; and he now guided the drawing up of the provisional constitution of 1931. In 1930 Wang had been elected judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice. His domestic commitments had caused him to defer acceptance of the post, but he went to The Hague in April 1931 after an opposition movement had begun in protest against Chiang Kai-shek's arrest of Hu Han-min (q.v.). He completed his term on the World Court in 1936 and then returned to China, where he reportedly served as a moderating influence at Nanking during the Sian Incident of December 1936 [see Chiang Kai-shek; Chang Hsueh-liang). In March 1937 he became minister of foreign affairs. On 21 August 1937 he and the Soviet ambassador, Bogomoloff, signed a Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact which granted aid to China from the Soviet Union at a time when such support from other countries was difficult to obtain. He held the foreign ministership until April 1941 , when he was succeeded by Quo Tai-chi (Kuo T'ai-ch'i, q.v.) . In 1 942 he became secretary general of the Supreme National Defense Council, in which capacity he accompanied Chiang Kai-shek to India in 1942 and to the Cairo Conference in 1943. Beginning in 1943 he also served on the People's Political Council.

Wang Ch'ung-hui was a member of the Chinese delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco in 1945. Upon his return to China, he served as director of the Far Eastern Branch Committee of the Commission for the Investigation of Pacific War Crimes. He also supervised the preparation of an authorized English translation of Chiang Kai-shek's Chungkuo chih ming-yiln. The translation was published in the United States in 1947 as China's Destiny. During this period, Wang also helped to frame the constitution that was promulgated on 1 January 1947. He then served on the State Council, and in June 1948 he again became president of the Judicial Yuan. Also in 1948 he received membership in the Academia Sinica. When the Chinese Communists won control of the mainland in 1949, he moved with the National Government to Taiwan.

At Taipei, Wang Ch'ung-hui was a member of the Kuomintang Central Reform Committee and of its successor, the Central Advisory Committee. Despite chronic illness, he also continued to serve as president of the Judicial Yuan until his death on 15 March 1958. Wang was survived by his wife, nee Chu, and by a son, Ta-hung.

Biography in Chinese

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