Wu Kuo-chen (21 October 1903-), known as K. C. Wu, government official who served as mayor of Hankow (1932-38), mayor of Chungking (1939^4-1), political vice minister of foreign affairs (1943-45), mayor of Shanghai (1946-48), and governor ofTaiwan (1950-52) . He resigned in 1953 and went to the United States, charging that Taiwan was becoming a police state. Chienshin, Hupeh, was the birthplace of K. C. Wu. His father, Wu Ching-ming, was director of military training in the ministry of war at Peking, and the young Wu grew up in the capital. From 1913 to 1917 he studied at the Nankai Middle School in Tientsin, where he was a classmate of Chou En-lai (q.v.). In 1917 he enrolled at Tsinghua University, from which he was graduated in 1921. Wu then went to the United States for graduate work. In 1923 he received an M.A. from Grinnell College in Iowa, after having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Wu left Grinnell for Princeton, where in due course he was elected Nova Caesaria scholar, fellow in politics, and Elizabeth Proctor fellow. He received his Ph.D. in 1926, and his dissertation, Ancient Chinese Political Theories, later was published by the Commercial Press at Shanghai.

K. C. Wu returned to China in 1926 to teach at the National Political Science Institute in Peking. In 1927 he joined the National Government at Nanking as a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs. He was sent to Shanghai as a secretary and chief of protocol in the office of the commissioner of foreign affairs for Kiangsu province. In 1928 he was made a deputy section chief and a member of the treaty revision commission in the foreign ministry at Nanking. Later that year, as a result of proposals he had made for reforms in the Hupeh tax structure, he became director of the Hupeh wine and tobacco tax bureau. In 1929 he was appointed counselor, director of the land administration bureau, and director of finance in the Hankow special municipal government. He held those posts until 1931, when he served for ten months as Hupeh commissioner of finance and then became secretary to Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking. In 1932 K. C. Wu returned to Hupeh as mayor of Hankow. Depressed economic conditions in Hupeh, Communist activities, and the problems presented by foreign political and commercial interests made the Hankow mayor's task an unusually complicated and difficult one. Wu succeeded in gradually reducing opium traffic, and he played a major role in saving Hankow when it was threatened by floods in 1936. After the Sino-Japanese war began, Wu remained at Hankow until the Wuhan cities fell to the Japanese in October 1938. He then proceeded to Chungking, the wartime capital of the National Government. After serving briefly as chief of the second section of the Supreme National Defense Council, K. C. Wu was made mayor of Chungking in 1939. Wartime Chungking, its population swollen by hundreds of thousands of refugees from other parts of China, presented even greater administrative problems than Wu had encountered at Hankow. His efforts with respect to civil defense were largely responsible for Chungking's survival under sustained Japanese bombing raids. However, when nearly 1,000 people died in an air raid shelter panic in June 1941, Wu was removed from office. In 1943 K. C. Wu was appointed political vice minister of foreign affairs, serving under T. V. Soong (q.v.). At the Cairo Conference in 1943, Wu acted as official interpreter for Chiang Kai-shek. Because T. V. Soong spent much of his time in Washington, Wu was acting foreign minister for much of the remaining war period. At war's end, in August 1945, he was appointed Kuomintang minister of propaganda. The Nationalist return to areas which had been under Japanese occupation presented many difficulties. In May 1946 K. C. Wu was appointed mayor of China's largest and most turbulent city, Shanghai. Politicians and businessmen thronged back into the city from west China, UNRRA and military supplies poured into the port, and masses of hungry refugees converged on the city. Shanghai was beset by carpet-bagging, graft, sky-rocketing inflation, blackmarketing in rice and other foodstuffs, and the anger of restless workers and students. His fight to maintain order in the face of these chaotic conditions won Wu recognition as "the La Guardia of China." In the spring of 1949, as the Chinese Communist forces approached Shanghai, K. C. Wu withdrew to Taiwan. That December, he was made governor of Taiwan, minister without portfolio in the Executive Yuan, and a standing committee member of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee. As governor of Taiwan, Wu faced such problems as Taiwanese resentment caused by the earlier administration of Ch'en Yi (q.v.), the many difficulties caused by the influx of some two million Nationalist refugees, and the saddling of the island's population with the support of the National Government. He helped stabilize the island's financial position by selling 20,000 Japanese houses at 70 percent of their assessed value and by sacking surplus officials; he strove to lessen antipathy to the Nationalists by securing passage of a law guaranteeing free elections for municipal and district officials; and he continued the implementation of the land reform program initiated in August 1949 by his predecessor, Ch'en Ch'eng (q.v.). Elections held in the eastern coastal region of Taiwan in May 1950 gave the native Taiwanese a large measure of representation.

K. C. Wu was allowed to proceed with his liberalizing programs while the Nationalists were in extremis and without foreign military aid. The situation changed, however, after the Korean conflict began in 1950. The increased importance of Taiwan in American military planning in the Far East, the moving of the United States 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, and the new American program of large-scale military and economic assistance to the Nationalists markedly improved the National Government's hopes and prospects. Despite Wu's efforts, the freedom of elections in Taiwan diminished. Wu was given new titles—commander of the Taiwan peace preservation headquarters, director of the anti-Communist protection and mobilization committee, chairman of the Taiwan production board—but his authority dwindled. In particular, there was increasing interference by the Nationalist secret police, controlled by Chiang Ching-kuo (q.v.), in the maintenance of public order and the processes of justice and education. In the early spring of 1953 Wu submitted his resignation. Chiang Kai-shek refused to accept it, granting Wu a month's "sick leave." Wu and his wife were refused passports even though he had received several invitations to speak in the United States. After much difficulty, Wu was permitted to resign in April. Passports were issued to himself and his wife, but his son Hsiu-huang was not allowed to leave Taiwan. Wu and his wife arrived in the United States in May 1953 for the nominal purpose of obtaining treatment for his asthma. On 14 March 1954 he held a press conference in Evanston, Illinois, at which he announced that he had broken with the National Government. He charged that the National Government was endangering support from foreign countries for the effort to recover the mainland because of the undemocratic practices of its personalized one-party rule, because of damage to troop morale by the political department of the ministry of national defense and because of the activities of the secret police. The National Government responded by stripping Wu of his posts and party membership and by demanding that he return to Taiwan to face charges. Wu announced that he would return if a United States court, after consideration of the evidence, were to agree to extradition. The National Government chose not to accept the challenge. Wu then charged that his son was being detained in Taiwan, reiterating his request for a passport. The National Government acceded to his request in principle but stipulated that Wu would have to submit evidence that he would be employed and able to support his son in the United States for the next two years. Wu satisfied this requirement with a three-year contract of employment as Far Eastern consultant to the Chicago Tribune. And on 24 June 1954 his article "Your Money Has Built a Police State in Formosa" appeared in Look. In mid-July, his son left Taipei by plane for the United States.

K. C. Wu and his wife, the former Edith Cho-ch'ün Huang, lived in Evanston until 1967. They then moved to Savannah, Georgia, where Wu joined the faculty of Armstrong College. The Wu's, who married in 1930, had two sons, Hsiu-kuang and Hsiu-huang, and two daughters, Hsiu-jung and Hsin-hui.

In addition to his doctoral dissertation, Wu wrote a political novel, The Lane of Eternal Stability, which was published in the United States in 1962.