Wang Ching-ch'un (30 June 1882-16 June 1956), known as C. C. Wang, had a long and distinguished career in railroad administration in China during the period before 1928. From 1931 until 1949 he served abroad as director of the Chinese Government Purchasing Commission in England. Born into a Christian family in Luanhsien, Chihli (Hopei), Wang Ching-ch'un received his early education at a school operated by the local Methodist mission, where his father, Wang Zy-yan, served as a pastor. When the Boxer Uprising engulfed the Luanhsien district in 1900, Wang took refuge in Peking. Because he was proficient in English, he found employment there as an interpreter at the American legation. In 1904 he made his first trip to the United States, serving as a representative of north China merchants at the International Exposition held at St. Louis. K. P. Ch'en (Ch'en Kuang-fu, q.v.), was also in St. Louis at that time attached to the Hupeh provincial delegation to the exposition. After Wang completed his mission, he remained in the United States, with financial aid from the Chinese government, for further education.

After studying science at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1905-6, Wang went on to Yale. He was graduated with honors in civil engineering in 1908. Wang then moved to the University of Illinois, where he gained an M.A. in 1909 and a Ph.D. in economics and railway administration in 1911. His thesis, which dealt with "Legislative Regulation of Railway Finance in England," was later published in the series entitled Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences. While a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Wang won recognition from the prominent Chinese diplomat Wu T'ing-fang (q.v.), who awarded him a special scholarship. Wang was also active in Chinese student affairs in the United States, serving as president of the Chinese Students Alliance in 1907-8 and as editor of the Chinese Students' 1 Monthly in 1908-9. During his last two years at Illinois, he was a fellow in railway administration and lecturer on commerce and Oriental history. Wang Ching-ch'un's sojourn in the United States from 1904 to 1911 coincided with the formative years of the republican revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen. After returning to China by way of Europe, Wang was appointed by Sun Yat-sen to work as a foreign affairs secretary in the newly inaugurated provisional republican government at Nanking. When Sun Yat-sen relinquished the provisional presidency, Wang resigned. In 1912 he began his career as a professional railway administrator when he was named vice director of the Peking-Mukden railroad. In 1913 he was transferred to the post of vice director of the Peking-Hankow line. It was mainly through Wang's recommendation that the ministry of railways at Peking in 1912 created a special commission, with Wang as acting chairman, to work on the problem of unification of accounts and statistics for China's rail system. The commission invited H. C. Adams, professor of economics at the University of Michigan, to come to China as its principal Western adviser. The group's investigations quickly confirmed the existence of serious administrative and fiscal confusion, due principally to the fact that, prior to the First World War, China's railroads had been built with foreign loans that represented diverse national interests, operating procedures, and languages. After more than seventy meetings, the commission formulated nine sets of accounting and statistical regulations to govern capital investment, operating receipts and expenditures, annual budgets, statistics on rolling stock, and other basic matters. The commission also prescribed standard procedure and format for annual reports on railway operations; these came into effect in 1915. With these new regulations, it became possible for the ministry of communications at Peking to exercise effective administrative control over China's rail system and to simplify and streamline operations. As a result of his service as acting chairman of the special unification commission, Wang was assigned in 1914 to direct the department of railway finance and accounts of the ministry of communications. Two years later he became controller general of the ministry. From 1917 to 1919 he served as managing director of the Peking-Mukden and Peking-Hankow railroad lines. His professional competence and personal integrity soon won him the confidence of Chinese colleagues and subordinates and also the respect of foreign staff and associates. Despite political and military strife in China, China's national railway service began to attain a measure of professionalism and administrative integrity; and Wang's public spirit did much to raise morale in that service.

Wang Ching-ch'un was assigned as technical expert attached to the Chinese delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference when it was envisaged that railroad questions in Shantung province would be on the agenda. Also in 1919, because of the chaotic situation that prevailed in Siberia after the Bolshevik revolution, an Inter-Allied Technical Board was established to manage the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria. Wang was named to represent China on that board. In November 1920, after the return of the Chinese Eastern Railway to China under a special agreement, the Chinese government at Peking named Wang deputy director general of that line. After a year (1921) as chief of the railway department of the ministry of communcations, he was promoted in 1922 to director general and chairman of the board of the Chinese Eastern Railway. He held that important post until 1924, when he became special adviser to the ministry of communications. In 1927 Wang held his final governmental position in China; chief of the postal department and director general of postal services. During the 1920's Wang also represented the Chinese government at several conferences, notably the International Telegraph Conference (Paris, 1925) and the International Radio Conference (Washington, 1927). He also was active in educational and social work; he served as chairman of the board of directors of the Peking YMCA and chairman of the board of the Huiwen School in his native Luanhsien district of Hopei.

After leaving the field of railway administration, Wang went to the United States in 1928 and spent three years there as director of the Chinese Educational Mission, supervising Chinese students studying abroad. Previously, he had been associated with the work of a special committee created in 1926 to advise the Sino- British Boxer Indemnity Commission headed by Lord Willingdon. Other Chinese members of the advisory committee were V. K. Ting (Ting Wen-chiang) and Hu Shih (qq.v.). After studying the problem of British Boxer indemnity funds returned to China, the commission recommended that the bulk of these funds should be used to develop and rehabilitate China's railroads and to develop other productive enterprises, while the interest should be spent on educational and cultural undertakings. After extended deliberations, a board of trustees of the Sino-British Boxer Indemnity Fund was created in 1931.

Under the board's auspices, the Chinese Government Purchasing Commission was established in England, with Wang Ching-ch'un as managing director. Wang's principal mission after 1931 was the procurement of essential railway and other materials on behalf of the ministry of communications and the National Resources Commission. Wang and his tiny staff in London handled the purchase of materials (paid for by the British share of the Boxer indemnity) for construction of the Canton-Hankow and Nanking-Kiangsi rail lines; overhaul of the Tientsin-Pukow, Kiaochow- Tsinan, and Shanghai-Hangchow-Ningpo lines; and materials for the river ferry across the Yangtze at Nanking. These transactions involved the outlay of an estimated £7 million. In addition, his office handled transactions totaling over £5 million for the National Resources Commission, including steamships and telecommunications equipment for the ministry of communications. Wang's tasks were greatly complicated by the outbreak of full-scale war between China and Japan in 1937 and ofgeneral war in Europe beginning in 1939.

After 18 years as head of the Chinese Government Purchasing Commission in London, Wang closed his office in 1949 when the Chinese Communists established the People's Republic of China. He then moved to the United States, where he settled in Claremont, California. During retirement, Wang was given a sinecure position by the Chinese National Government as special adviser on railways attached to the Chinese Embassy at Washington. In California, he_was active in Methodist activities, and he became an honorary consultant on Asian studies to the Claremont Graduate School.

Wang's primary activity during his later years, however, was the preparation of a new Chinese dictionary with romanized transcriptions of Chinese ideographs suitable for use in telegraphic communication. Because Chinese is not an alphabetical language, the so-called telegraph code system normally used in China for wireless communications identified individual Chinese ideographs by numerical compounds which were then transmitted in Morse, with coding and decoding required at each end of the process. International conventions, however, prevented acceptance of messages written in numerals for cable transmission as open messages. Wang had been concerned with this problem for many years, and as early as 1928 he had supervised preparation of a phonetic Chinese telegraphic dictionary. While in England during the Second World War, he had continued to work on an improved method for indexing Chinese ideographs. In 1940-41 he had published articles on that topic in the Chinese Social and Political Science Review and the Tung-fang tsa-chih [eastern miscellany]. In 1944 he had published in Chinese a detailed description of his so-called Sinhanzyx method of indexing characters and romanization. The system Wang developed in the United States to facilitate telegraphic transmission of Chinese messages in plain-language communications was called the Gueeyin system. Wang described it in a preliminary publication, "The Gueeyin System of Indexing," issued by the College Press of Claremont, California, in 1955. The system of indexing represented, in its author's view, an improved version of the radical system. Instead of grouping Chinese ideographs under 214 basic elements known as radicals, Wang's system presented a new method of indexing based on amalgamation of radicals, cross-entry of characters, location of characters through two radicals, and other special techniques. Long afflicted with chronic asthma, Wang Ching-ch'un died at the Pomona Valley Community Hospital in California on 16 June 1956, only two weeks short of his seventy-fourth birthday. The local Claremont Courier, in its obituary notice, paid tribute to Wang as a representative of the best type of government official of pre- Communist China. "He combined the cultural background of old China with technological training in the Western world." Perhaps more notable to Chinese residents of the United States was the modest size of Wang's estate, which was taken as conclusive evidence of personal integrity.

Wang was survived by his wife, Meng Wenjung, whom he had married in September 1903, and by two sons, Howard Wang of Toronto and David Wang of Pasadena, and two daughters, Mrs. Frances Chin of Berea, Kentucky, and Mrs. Lois Guo of Philadelphia.