Zheng Pingru (1918 – February 1940) was a Chinese socialite and spy who gathered intelligence on the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
She was executed after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Jingwei regime, a puppet government for the Japanese.
Her life is believed to be the inspiration for Eileen Chang's novella Lust, Caution, which was later adapted into the eponymous 2007 film by Ang Lee.
Zheng hid a Browning pistol and drove to 76 Jessfield Road; when she was about to enter, she was arrested by Li Shiqun and held at Ding's intelligence headquarters.
Her brother, Zheng Haicheng (鄭海澄), was a fighter pilot in the Republic of China Air Force who died in battle on 19 January 1944.
[4] Her fiancé, Colonel Wang Hanxun (王漢勛), also a pilot who fought alongside her brother, was killed in action near Guilin on 7 August 1944.
[4] The Kuomintang government in Taiwan formally declared Zheng a "martyr",[9] and the Chinese Communist Party called her an "anti-Japanese heroine".
[10] Zheng's story is generally believed to have inspired the character of Wang Jiazhi (Wong Chia-chih) in the novella Lust, Caution, written by Eileen Chang in 1979.
There was protest in the way that Wang Jiazhi was depicted since it was felt that her story "perversely twisted the heroic deeds of her prototype, Zheng.