Liang was a native of
Changle in
Fujian province. From 1888 to 1890, he lived in Japan, where his father had been dispatched to be a Chinese
diplomat. In 1903, he passed the
Imperial examination and in 1905 was accepted to the predecessor to
Beijing University. In 1908, he was sent as an official to
Shandong province. After the
Xinhai Revolution and the formation of the
Republic of China, he was recruited to the nationalist government by
Yuan Shikai. After the death of Yuan, he gave his allegiance to
Duan Qirui,
warlord of the
Anhui clique, serving as secretary to
Duan Zhigui. After the defeat of the Anhui clique in the
Zhili–Anhui War, he fled to the Japanese concession in
Tianjin. He returned to Beijing in November 1924 after the
Beijing coup and put in charge of a provisional government after an agreement with
Zhang Zuolin and
Feng Yuxiang, but fled again in 1928 after the successes of
Chiang Kai-shek's
Northern Expedition. When a warrant for Liang's arrest was issued by the
Kuomintang, he fled to
Dalian in the
Kwantung Leased Territory under Japanese jurisdiction together with Duan Qirui. After the
Manchurian Incident of 1931, Liang returned with Duan to Tianjin, and then to
Shanghai and was with Duan when he died in 1937. After the
Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the
Imperial Japanese Army quickly overran northern and portions of eastern China, and the Japanese
Imperial General Headquarters authorized the creation of a collaborationist regimes as part of its overall strategy to establish an autonomous buffer zones between
North China and Japanese-controlled
Manchukuo. The
Provisional Government of the Republic of China based in Beijing was formed on December 14, 1937, with
Wang Kemin as its prime minister of the five provinces of northern China. The
Reformed Government of the Republic of China based in
Nanjing was subsequently created on 28 March 1938 in eastern China and Liang was recruited to take the post of premier. The Reformed Government of the Republic of China was assigned nominal control of the provinces of
Jiangsu,
Zhejiang and
Anhui as well as the two municipalities of
Nanjing and
Shanghai. However, its activities were carefully prescribed and overseen by “advisors” provided by the Japanese
China Expeditionary Army. The failure of the Japanese to give any real authority to the Reformed Government discredited it in the eyes of the local inhabitants, and made its existence of only limited propaganda utility to the Japanese authorities. The Reformed Government was, along with the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, merged into
Wang Jingwei's
Nanjing Nationalist Government on March 30, 1940. In the new regime, Liang held only ceremonial posts, including the nominal governorship of
Jiangsu Province and chairman of the
Legislative Yuan, retiring before the end of
World War II. Liang was arrested by the government of the
Republic of China after the
surrender of Japan and tried for
treason in
Suzhou. He was
sentenced to death and executed by
firing squad in Shanghai on November 6, 1946. ==See also==