Wei Tao-ming (; October 28, 1899 – May 18, 1978) was a Chinese diplomat and public servant. He was the Republic of China's Ambassador to the United States during the Second World War and foreign minister during the years when the People's Republic of China sought to oust the ROC from the United Nations. He was also civilian Governor of Taiwan Province (1947–1949), replacing Governor General Chen Yi.
Wei enlisted USA help to support Taiwan and oppose the Chinese communists.
Early life
Wei Tao-ming was born in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province in 1899. His father, Wei Tiao-yuan, was an educator and member of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement. Wei Tao-ming's early schooling was at a missionary school, though he graduated from Kiangsi (Jiangxi) First Middle School in 1918. He then studied French in Beijing for a year before moving to France in 1919. He obtained his doctorate in law from the University of Paris in 1925, and returned to China to pursue a legal career in Shanghai.
He was married to Zheng Yuxiu, the first female lawyer and judge in Chinese history. She earned her doctoral degree in law at the Sorbonne in France and was the first Chinese person to practice law at the French extraterritorial courts in Shanghai. Zheng was also one of the revolutionaries involved in the attempted assassination of military official and politician Yuan Shikai, commonly reviled in Chinese history for taking advantage of both the Qing imperial court and the Republicans. She advocated women having their own voices and choices in marriage, and wrote it into the Republic of China's law. Her autobiography, My Revolutionary Years (1944), was published while her husband was Ambassador to the United States, and is revered as one of the best first hand accounts of modern Chinese history.
Political career
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He became involved with the Kuomintang. At the age of 29, Wei became president of the Judicial Yuan. From 1930 to 1931, Wei served as mayor of special municipality of Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China.
Wei was among the Nationalist government insiders implicated in corruption during the 1942-1943 American Dollar Bond scandal. After the 1941 Japanese declaration of war against the United States and the United Kingdom, the two allies sought to support China in a concrete way despite logistical limitations following the loss of British Burma.