陳公博

My knowing of Chen Gongbo (陳公博) largely comes from a novel on Wang Jingwei (汪精衛) and Wang's wife (陳璧君). Chen was the right-hand man of Wang. Yes, that's around the time of the movie "Lust-Caution".

Chen's story that attracts me was plain simple. When Wang died at the convenient time before the - by then foreseeable and unavoidable - collapse of Japanese army, Wang's wife urged Chen to take charge of the (pseudo) Chinese government at Nanjing. Chen knew all too well that that would cost his life, but he accepted without a second word - Wang was his mentor; the show must go on until the music ended (be it a horrible tragedy).

That is, of course, in a novel. The annoying bit is, when I first read the story, I was told that it was genuine history. (It is always difficult to change once you form an opinion.)

We Chinese used to be proud of our 3000 years of written history. Nonetheless we have lost that era: there has been no objective account during that time and it is impossible to have one in the future. People with first-hand experience have vanished and important documents destroyed. It is a people who were drunk and drugged - for a century ! - and, when they woke up, there was no recollection of what had happened.

(They have some fragmented memory - some real, some hallucinations from their drugged mind. Stories are written as novel but treated as history. My god !)

Alas, maybe you are right. If there were a good account of what had happened, I may not wish to dine with Chen at all. The dark side is, in that case, I have no one in the history of my home country - no political character at least - whom I would like to dine with.