The Provisional and Reformed Governments
The Japanese have determined, assisted and promoted establishment of a number of friendly Chinese governments. Huapeikuo, a North China separatist state, went the way of the Francophile Rhineland Republic; it never got off the drafting board. The East Hopei Autonomous Anti-Communist Government of Mr. Yin Ju-kêng provided, within the North China demilitarized zone, a vast gateway for smuggling; when the National Government withdrew its forces from North China, the Japanese sought more pretentious aids to conquest. The Provisional Government was the first of these, following an Inner Mongol federation (Mêng-liu Lien-ho Tzŭ-chih Chêng-fu), affiliated with Manchoukuo; it was soon rivaled by the Reformed Government; and in March 1940, both were incorporated into the Reorganized National Government of Mr. Wang Ch'ing-wei. Other governments, sponsored by various quarreling departments of the Japanese military, or organized by Chinese confidence men, have appeared transiently and then disappeared.
Three points concerning Japanophile governments contribute to assessment of their chances; their origin and structure; their ideological (narrowly, propagandist) position; and their personnel. These points illustrate a significantly ambivalent trend: the Japanese have found their degree of freedom of action less than they had expected in Chinese politics, and to that extent have been defeated; they have also yielded to the demands of the situation, and have won, in part, in that their chances of success appreciate with realism.
The Provisional Government of the Republic of China (Chung-hua Min-kuo Lin-shih Chêng-fu) was formed at Peking on December 14, 1937, and ended by merger into the Wang Ch'ing-wei government on March 30, 1940, perpetuating a high degree of separatism under the subgovernmental style, North China Political Council. Like its predecessors and successors, it was created by a self-proclaimed committee organized with the consent and knowledge of the Japanese military, if not by the Japanese directly. The members of the Provisional Government were old, weak men, mostly adherents of the Anfu clique which had been Japanophile during and after the War of 1914-18. A few were even brought forth from more archaic strata, lonely adherents to the abandoned monarchy. The youngest were in their fifties and the leading officers were extreme conservatives—men of some intelligence and reputation, but obsolete.
The structure of the Lin-shih Government was interesting in that it formed a republic of three committees, as follows:[6]
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT (Committee)
Structurally important features are: the absence of any method of election, direct or indirect, or of any ultimate source of "sovereign" personnel—the government having borne itself out of chaos, constitutionally a remarkable feat; the elimination of even nominal party control of government, or cameral legislation, or constituent assembly, these being hated vestiges of the Chinese and Western, but not Japanese, notion that popular sovereignty is to receive genuflections if not credence; and, most startlingly, the absence of a head! There was no President, Protector, Chief of State, Leader, or Dictator; the highest officer was the Shanghai banker, Mr. Wang K'ê-min, Chairman of the Executive Division (literally, yüan, but not in the Nationalist sense). The scope, succession and competence of this Provisional Government were as much in doubt as its origin.