Yes, it seems that if CKS had died in 1936 Wang would've already been turned pro-Japan enough and be in the right place (Nanjing) to serve in the puppet KMT.
Xi'an Incident kills Chiang Kai-Shek
- Thread starter EasternRomanEmpire
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Was Wang by chance believing in the Pan-Asianist views that Asia should remain for Asians?
For what I've read he believed that China was surrounded on all sides from hostile powers and that Japan was a lesser evil compared to France, Britain, the US and USSR. And that China was too backward so it had to compromise with Japan.
There was and still is this perception in China that the Japanese, love them or hate them, got something right. A good deal of China's path to modernity was people studying in Japan and bringing back ideas from that country to implement at home. Wang's thinking was simply "if you can't beat them, join them." Japan's cultural similarity (relatively speaking) to China also played a role in this, though it's ironic that the Japanese out of all foreigners killed many times more Chinese and in more brutal ways than everyone else.
As for pan-Asianism, it would be like calling the Song-dynasty Chinese who collaborated with the Mongols and Jurchens "pan-Asianists." If you think about it, I guess they did facilitate the greater unity of East Asia.