Wang Daohan

Early Life and the Early PRC

Wang Daohan was born in 1915 in Jiashan, Anhui (now Mingguang). He studied at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University and joined revolutionary work led by the Chinese Communist Party as a young man. From October 1949 he served as director of Zhejiang's finance and then commerce departments and as head of the industry department of the East China Military and Political Commission, before moving to posts in Beijing.

Mayor of Shanghai

Wang became mayor of Shanghai in April 1981 and stepped down in 1985, succeeded by Jiang Zemin. After retiring to a second-line role in the mid-1980s he devoted himself to cross-strait relations.

President of ARATS and the Koo-Wang Talks

When the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits was founded in Beijing in December 1991, Wang became its president. In April 1993 Wang, then 78, held talks at the NOL Building in Singapore with Koo Chen-fu, the 76-year-old chairman of Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation — the first meeting between heads of authorised bodies from the two sides since 1949 — and they signed four agreements on notarised documents, registered mail, a system of contacts and meetings, and a joint agenda. Tang Shubei, then ARATS executive vice president, recalled that the two opened by talking about Peking opera and, at reporters' request, shook hands several times, Wang joking that "we've become actors".

In October 1998 Koo visited the mainland and met Wang in Shanghai. According to the mainland scholar Zhou Zhihuai, Wang proposed there that "both sides should work together, under the one-China principle, to negotiate as equals and discuss unification together". Arrangements followed for Wang to visit Taiwan the next year, and the Koo family prepared a reception and meeting room for him on the 14th floor of the Taiwan Cement building in Taipei; after Lee Teng-hui described cross-strait ties as "special state-to-state relations" in July 1999, ARATS broke off contact and the visit never took place.

Final Years

When Koo died in January 2005, Wang wrote by hand to Koo's family, and ARATS vice president Sun Yafu and secretary-general Li Yafei went to Taipei to pay respects on his behalf. In May that year Wang met the visiting KMT chairman Lien Chan and People First Party chairman James Soong in Shanghai; Lien handed him a painting Koo had made years before. He died in Shanghai on 24 December 2005. Koo's widow, Cecilia Koo, travelled to Shanghai for his funeral; according to Zhou Zhihuai, the DPP also issued a statement praising his work with the SEF in "steering cross-strait relations in a more constructive direction". In 2025, Wang's son Wang Zhizhong, visiting Taipei to pay respects to Cecilia Koo, said the two men had become "the closest of friends" through their shared work on cross-strait relations.