Chinese puppet regime passport
War-time unissued printing.
Another subject that interests me the most is the Axis coalition that was formed before and during the war and that was united to fight the Allies. At the height of the war, this coalition joined forces to battle its common enemy: Soviet Russia, and though at first it seemed possible and the collapse of the USSR was imminent, it quickly became evitable that the task was much harder than anyone assumed and the demise of the regime would be practically impossible, making me wonder and think about one of the most famous quotes of the war by Adolf Hitler who said that “we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down” – today, we all know how disastrous was the act of striking the USSR with the outcome of 1945.
The Axis coalition mainly consisted of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, already formalizing into the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, the Anti-Communist pact focused on the Communist International, temporarily being dissolved in 1939 with the infamous German-Soviet pact from 1939, then with another agreement, Tripartite Pact, being formulated on September 1940, which was a defensive military alliance later joined by other Axis countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Yugoslavia.
Thus, as the war continued, other regimes and organizations took sides with the Axis, be it in Europe or the Far East. One of these was the short-lived Chinese puppet-state of Wang Jingwei regime, headed by Chinese collaborationist Wang Jingwei (汪精衞), who already back in 1938 showed strong support for some negations with the occupying Japanese while living in French-Indochina. On March 30th 1940 he became head-of-state of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China (中华民国国民政府). The puppet-state did not enjoy full independence and it was basically a means to an end, a “pressure instrument” which the Japanese hoped to reach some sort of negations with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek.
The document in this article is an unissued Chinese passport issued by the above-mentioned regime, and after extensive research, I believe it to be some sort of printers-proof, a version that was tested, and used internally politically and not issued to the masses in the end. There is no record of an issued example or even a similar empty specimen in any archive in Taipei or even Nanjing or Beijing, strengthening my assumption that the puppet-state at the end was not given permission, for political reasons, to issue a passport. This cold even be the only existing known sample to date, still, further research is needed.
Have added images of this war-related treasure, which is located in the US, in a private collection.
Thank you for reading “Our Passports”.
