Wang Jinping or Wang Chin-ping (Chinese: 王津平; pinyin: Wáng Jīnpíng; 1946 – 7 September 2019) was a scholar and president of the "China Union for Unification". He was a noted activist of the Tangwai movement in touch with many writers of the Taiwan Nativist Literature movement since the mid1970s. He was also, together with Liang Jingfeng and a few others on the Tamkang campus in Tamsui, a key mover of a new political direction in native folk music.[1]

A tutor and then a young activist teacher in Tamkang

Wang Jinping was first a tutor and then a full-time teacher at the Dept. of English of Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences, now Tamkang University, in Tamsui in the 1970s.

In 1974, when Wang was a tutor at Tamkang, he met Malieyafusi Monaneng (b. 1956), a member of one of Taiwan's aboriginal tribes whose Chinese name is Mo Na-neng (莫那能).[2] This heralded Wang Jinping's and Liang Jingfeng's as well as Lee Yuan-chen's and Lee Shuang-tze's interested in aboriginal culture, especially aboriginal folk songs.

Together with two other members of the Faculty of Literature, Lee Yuan-chen (Li Yuanzhen 李元貞 - the founder of Women Awakening), Liang Jingfeng, and the noted composer, poet, painter and folksinger Lee Shuang-tze (李雙澤), Wang Jinping belonged to the group on the Tamkang campus in Tamsui that was called the "gang of four" radical pro-democracy activists. Thus, he was one of those who gave rise to the Tamkang-Xiachiao (China Tide) Line of the Folk Movement.[3] This political line, pursued within the new folk song (xin mingge新民歌 ) movement, was propagated by the Xiachao Magazine(夏潮) founded in 1976, a Tangwai movement magazine in which the four Tamkang-based pro-democracy activists published articles at the time.[4]

Soon, the aboriginal singer and blues poet Hu Defu also joined the dissident group which then began to pioneer xin minge (新民歌new folk songs) in Taiwan.

Already in 1974, Mo Naneng, who later became a noted aboriginal poet and aboriginal rights activist, had "spent about one or two months in Wang Jinping's hostel".[5] Mo then "traveled with some Han friends (i.e. Chinese friends) who cared about Taiwan's aborigines" - including Wang Jinping – to areas with aboriginal villages, in search of their culture and music.[6]

While Mo had kindled an interest in aboriginal culture in Wang Jinping and Wang's Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hakka friends, it was above all Wang Jinping who aroused an interest in Taiwan Nativist Literature in Mo. And thus, Mo " got to know Wang Tuoh, Su Qingli, Lee Shuang-tze, Chen Yingzhen, Yang Qingchu, Huang Chunming, Wang Lixia, Chen Guoying, Chen Wanzhen, Yang Zujun, Lin Zhengjie, Zhang Fuzhong, Song Dongwen and others, many of them in the Tangwai movement" – meeting them personally thanks to Wang Jinping, in 1977-1978.[7]

Like Liang Jingfeng, Wang Jinping was a very close friend of Lee Shuang-tze. He also formed close links with the blues poet and aboriginal singer Hu Defu in the 1970s.

In December 1976, the radical Tamkang-based pro-democracy and pro-Taiwan Nativist Literature activists, including Wang Jinping, were pulling the strings that led to the so-called Coca Cola Incident (Tamkang Incident). They motivated the student body to invite Hu Defu to perform at the annual English-language Western folk concert at Tamkang. And when Hu Defu could not come, Lee Shuang-tze stepped in as the replacement, went on stage, asked the other singers and the audience, Where are our songs? Why don't you sing our songs? And then, smashing a Coke bottle, a symbol of CocaCola-ization, on stage, shouted: "We should sing our songs!!" There was a storm of criticism of Lee Shuang-tze's act, in the KMT-controlled press, and it made the new folk song movement that returned to the roots really famous, islandwide. It really pushed it forward.

Soon after that, Wang Jinping, Liang Jingfeng and Lee Yuan-chen managed to get Chen Da invited to the Tamkang campus by the students, and then they started to distribute clandestine tapes with new folk songs – many of which had soon been banned by the GIO censors.

Then, the group of four, supported by other close friends, organized a "new folk song" concert in Taipei New Park today renamed 228 Peace Memorial Park, in memory of the bloody massacres committed by the KMT's army and military police in Kaohsiung, Taipei, Chiayi, Keelung and many other places under the eyes of their American supervisors on 28 February 1947 and shortly after that fateful day, killing at least 30,000 human beings (a "conservative estimate").[8]

In 1977 or 1978, Wang Jinping was fired by Tamkang College which bowed to KMT pressure. It was because of Wang's outspoken pro-Tangwai movement positions that he did not hide from the students. In addition to embracing the idea of unification with China (but in a way that was very different from the KMT's "re-conquest" ideas), Wang was also an internationalist and he cared for Third World literature, especially African literature. He thought highly of Basil Davidson. There were informers among the students who wrote reports on what faculty members and students said, and handed them in to the army officers stationed for that purpose on campus. Wang kept in touch with his students. In addition to the boarding house, he now had also a bookstore in Tamsui that was frequented by the students and that offered books by Taiwan Nativist Literature authors and sold magazines like Xiachao.

When Wang Jingping's friend Mo Naneng had a severe accident in 1979 that implied eye damage and then turned him blind, it was noted left-wing author Chen Yimgzhen[9] who personally "taught him braille writing", which signalled the beginning of Mo's career as a writer.[10]

Wang Jinping, just like the others of the small group at Tamkang and like most writers of the Taiwan Nativist Literature movement, wholeheartedly supported aboriginal rights. When Mo and Hu Defu succeeded to establish the Taiwan Aboriginal Peoples' Rights Promotion Association in late 1984, some two and half years before Martial Law was lifted by the KMT regime, Wang was on their side.[11]

Breach with old companions of the struggle for democracy?

While the four democracy activists dreamed of a united China in 1976, hoping that thus their goals of full democracy for the common people and real social justice would be fulfilled, Liang Jingfeng has since been quoted very often as saying that "my China is Taiwan..."[12] In contrast to this position, which favors Taiwan independence, Wang Jinping and Chen Yingzhen have clung to the dream of democratic unification of the motherland. Recently, Chen Yingzhen critiqued the Taiwan independence movement by saying that the Taiwanese majority should not claim victim status vis-a-vis the Chinese (on the island or on the mainland) because both the mainlanders and the Taiwanese had suppressed and colonized Taiwan's aboriginal population. Chen Yingzhen also put in question the "Hoklo-centrist" - thus Taiwanese "nativist hegemony" that emerged "in the 1980s and 1990s." Wang Jinping agrees with these views and critiques the Taidu movement or Taiwan Independence Movement, too.[13]

Wang Jinping became the leader of the "China Union for Unification" - an organization established in 1988.,[14] in which Chen Yingzhen also played a leading role.[15]

Wang was a professor of Tamkang University – the school that once was compelled by the KMT to fire him.[16]

Wang died in Beijing, China on 7 September 2019.[17]

References

  1. ↑ See: "Danjiang-Xiachao luxian de minge yundong (shang)" ( 淡江－夏潮 路線的民歌運動（上）/ On the Tamkang Xiachiao (China Tide) Line of the Folk Movement), in the journal: 《Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣 Isle Margins》, issue 5/1992：pp. 96-107.
  2. ↑ See the article on 莫那能 Mo Naneng in the Chinese Wikipedia 莫那能.
  3. ↑ See Zhang Nansheng's (張南生) article, "Danjiang-Xiachao luxian de minge yundong (shang)" ( 淡江－夏潮 路線的民歌運動（上）/ On the Tamkang Xiachiao (China Tide) Line of the Folk Movement), in the journal: 《Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣 Isle Margins》, issue 5/1992：pp. 96-107.
  4. ↑ Liang Jinfeng used the pseudonym Liang Deming. See: Samia Ferhat-Dana, Le Dangwai et la Démocratie à Taïwan: Une lutte pour la reconnaissance de l'entité politique taïwanaise (1949-1986), Paris : L'Harmattan, 1998 ISBN 2296369677, 9782296369672.
  5. ↑ See the article on 莫那能 Mo Naneng in the Chinese Wikipedia.
  6. ↑ See the article on 莫那能 Mo Naneng in the Chinese Wikipedia.
  7. ↑ See the article on 莫那能 Mo Naneng in the Chinese Wikipedia.
  8. ↑ Studebaker trucks then drove all night long for several days to Tanhai, just north of Tamsui, throwing dead bodies stuffed into rice flour bags into the sea. Many corpses washed ashore or ending up in the nets of fishermen were buried in Bali (see Bali District, just opposite Tamsui, at the foot of Mt. Guanyin (see Mount Guanyin (New Taipei) by grieving fisherfolk.
  9. ↑ Chen is the writer who is seen both in Taiwan and the PR China as Taiwan's most important author. See: Jeffrey C. Kinkley, "From Oppression to Dependency: Two Stages in the Fiction of Chen Yingzhen". In: Modern China (published by Sage Publications, Inc.), Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1990), pp. 243–268.
  10. ↑ . See the article on 莫那能 Mo Naneng in the Chinese Wikipedia.
  11. ↑ "In December 1984, Mona was able to establish the Taiwan Aboriginal Peoples' Rights Promotion Association together with the singer Hu Defu, who was a member of the "Promotion Committee" of the Taiwan Aboriginal Peoples' Rights Association. Mona Neng's poem, "Restore Our Name", was created for the Taiwan Aboriginal Peoples' Rights Association.
  12. ↑ See Samia Ferhat-Dana, Le Dangwai et la Démocratie à Taïwan: Une lutte pour la reconnaissance de l'entité politique taïwanaise (1949-1986), Paris : L'Harmattan, 1998 ISBN 2296369677, 9782296369672.
  13. ↑ See Pei-Yin Lin, "Literature's Role in Breaching the Authoritarian Mindset," in the book: The Vitality of Taiwan: Politics, Economics, Society and Culture , edited by Steve Tsang, London and Basingstole (UK) : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 9781137009890 . With regard to Chen Yingzheng, his Hakka roots may play a role, as the Hakka minority has been treated by many Taiwanese quite condescendingly. "Chen was born into a Hakka community in Zhunan, and later on moved with hin parents to Yingge, another Hakka county in northern Taiwan. In his memoirs, Chen also discusses..." the role "of the KMT government that continued to pursue internal colonization and terrorized the Taiwanese people as well as mainland Chinese refugees who came ... between 1947 and 1949..."; see: Peng-Hui Liao. "Modern Taiwan literature", in: Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Taiwan, edited by Gunter Schubert, London and New York, 2016, p.365. ISBN 978-1-138-78187-0.
  14. ↑ In this group, one finds a people with different political backgrounds and identities, among them members of the KMT, of the New Party, of the Labor Party and other parties, but also people from the business community, academics as well as workers and students. Despite the diversity of the membership, there is a common understanding that the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese and that both sides belong to one China. The China Union for Unification opposes "Taiwan independence" and "separatism."
  15. ↑ "Taiwan's famous Nativist literature writer Chen Yingzhen was elected as the first president" (of the China Union for Unification), "the current president is ...Taiwan University Professor Wang Jinping. See: Zhongguo tongyi lianmeng 中国统一联盟United Alliance of China, ibidem.
  16. ↑ See: Zhongguo tongyi lianmeng 中国统一联盟 United Alliance of China, ibidem.
  17. ↑ "在歌声中告别——记台湾中国统一联盟原主席王津平追思会" (in Simplified Chinese). onechina.org.tw. 11 November 2019. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
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