Wang Jinping or Wang Chin-ping (; 1946 – 7 September 2019) was a scholar and president of the "China Union for Unification". He was a noted activist of the Tangwai movement in touch with many writers of the Taiwan Nativist Literature movement since the mid1970s. He was also, together with Liang Jingfeng and a few others on the Tamkang campus in Tamsui, a key mover of a new political direction in native folk music.
A tutor and then a young activist teacher in Tamkang
Wang Jinping was first a tutor and then a full-time teacher at the Dept. of English of Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences, now Tamkang University, in Tamsui in the 1970s.
In 1974, when Wang was a tutor at Tamkang, he met Malieyafusi Monaneng (b. 1956), a member of one of Taiwan's aboriginal tribes whose Chinese name is Mo Na-neng (莫那能). This heralded Wang Jinping's and Liang Jingfeng's as well as Lee Yuan-chen's and Lee Shuang-tze's interested in aboriginal culture, especially aboriginal folk songs.
Together with two other members of the Faculty of Literature, Lee Yuan-chen (Li Yuanzhen 李元貞 - the founder of Women Awakening), Liang Jingfeng, and the noted composer, poet, painter and folksinger Lee Shuang-tze (李雙澤), Wang Jinping belonged to the group on the Tamkang campus in Tamsui that was called the "gang of four" radical pro-democracy activists. Thus, he was one of those who gave rise to the Tamkang-Xiachiao (China Tide) Line of the Folk Movement. This political line, pursued within the new folk song (xin mingge新民歌 ) movement, was propagated by the Xiachao Magazine(夏潮) founded in 1976, a Tangwai movement magazine in which the four Tamkang-based pro-democracy activists published articles at the time.
Soon, the aboriginal singer and blues poet Hu Defu also joined the dissident group which then began to pioneer xin minge (新民歌new folk songs) in Taiwan.
Already in 1974, Mo Naneng, who later became a noted aboriginal poet and aboriginal rights activist, had "spent about one or two months in Wang Jinping's hostel". Mo then "traveled with some Han friends (i.e. Chinese friends) who cared about Taiwan's aborigines" - including Wang Jinping – to areas with aboriginal villages, in search of their culture and music.
While Mo had kindled an interest in aboriginal culture in Wang Jinping and Wang's Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hakka friends, it was above all Wang Jinping who aroused an interest in Taiwan Nativist Literature in Mo. And thus, Mo " got to know Wang Tuoh, Su Qingli, Lee Shuang-tze, Chen Yingzhen, Yang Qingchu, Huang Chunming, Wang Lixia, Chen Guoying, Chen Wanzhen, Yang Zujun, Lin Zhengjie, Zhang Fuzhong, Song Dongwen and others, many of them in the Tangwai movement" – meeting them personally thanks to Wang Jinping, in 1977-1978.
Like Liang Jingfeng, Wang Jinping was a very close friend of Lee Shuang-tze. He also formed close links with the blues poet and aboriginal singer Hu Defu in the 1970s.
In December 1976, the radical Tamkang-based pro-democracy and pro-Taiwan Nativist Literature activists, including Wang Jinping, were pulling the strings that led to the so-called Coca Cola Incident (Tamkang Incident). They motivated the student body to invite Hu Defu to perform at the annual English-language Western folk concert at Tamkang. And when Hu Defu could not come, Lee Shuang-tze stepped in as the replacement, went on stage, asked the other singers and the audience, Where are our songs? Why don't you sing our songs? And then, smashing a Coke bottle, a symbol of CocaCola-ization, on stage, shouted: "We should sing our songs!!" There was a storm of criticism of Lee Shuang-tze's act, in the KMT-controlled press, and it made the new folk song movement that returned to the roots really famous, islandwide. It really pushed it forward.
Soon after that, Wang Jinping, Liang Jingfeng and Lee Yuan-chen managed to get Chen Da invited to the Tamkang campus by the students, and then they started to distribute clandestine tapes with new folk songs – many of which had soon been banned by the GIO censors.
Then, the group of four, supported by other close friends, organized a "new folk song" concert in Taipei New Park today renamed 228 Peace Memorial Park, in memory of the bloody massacres committed by the KMT's army and military police in Kaohsiung, Taipei, Chiayi, Keelung and many other places under the eyes of their American supervisors on 28 February 1947 and shortly after that fateful day, killing at least 30,000 human beings (a "conservative estimate").