Wu Tingfang

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Wu Tingfang

Wu Tingfang (Chinese: 伍廷芳; Pinyin: Wŭ Tíngfāng; Wade-Giles: Wu T'ing-fang; Cantonese: Ng Choy 伍才) (1842-1922) was a Chinese diplomat and politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and briefly as Acting Premier during the early years of the Republic of China.

Wu studied at the Anglican St. Paul's College, where he learned to read and write English. He later studied law in England at Lincoln's Inn, after finishing his degree he returned to Hong Kong and became the first Chinese barrister in the colony.

He served under the Qing Dynasty as Minister to the United States, Spain, and Peru from 1896 to 1902 and from 1907 to 1909. In this role he lectured widely about Chinese culture and history, in part working to counter discrimination against Chinese emigrants by increasing foreign appreciation of their background.^[1] To further this end, he published America, through the spectacles of an Oriental diplomat in English in 1914.

Wu is mentioned several times in the diaries of Sir Ernest Satow who was British Envoy in China, 1900-06. For example on November 21, 1903: "Wu Tingfang came in the afternoon, and stopped talking for an hour and a half about his commercial code and connected subjects. His idea is to draft also a new criminal code, and put both into force at the outset in the open ports."

After the rise of the Republic of China in 1911, Wu joined the new republican government. He served briefly in early 1912 as Minister of Justice for the Nanjing Provisional Government, where he argued strongly for an independent judiciary, based on his experience studying law and travelling overseas.^[2] After this brief posting, Wu became Minister of Foreign Affairs for the ROC. He served briefly in 1917 as Acting Premier of the Republic of China.

[edit] References

^ Wong, K. Scott. (1995) Chinatown: conflicting images, contested terrain. MELUS 20(1):3-15.
^ Xu Xiaoqun. (1997) The fate of judicial independence in Republican China, 1912-37. The China Quarterly 149:1-28.