result, Chiang continued to devote his primary attention to eradicating the Communists and ending the Chinese Civil War. On December 18, 1938, Wang Jingwei and several of his closest supporters resigned from their positions and boarded a plane to Hanoi in order to seek alternative means of ending the war. From this new base, Wang began pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the conflict independent of the Nationalist Party in exile. In June 1939, Wang and his supporters began negotiating with the Japanese for the creation of a new Nationalist Government which could end the war despite Chiang's objections. To this end, Wang sought to discredit the Nationalists in Chongqing on the basis that they represented not the republican government envisioned by Dr. Sun, but rather a "one-party dictatorship", and subsequently call together a Central Political Conference back to the capital of Nanjing in order to formally transfer control over the party away from Chiang Kai-shek. These efforts were stymied by Japanese refusal to offer backing for Wang and his new government. Ultimately, Wang Jingwei and his allies would establish their almost entirely powerless new party and government in Nanjing in 1940, in the hope that Tokyo might eventually be willing to negotiate a deal for peace, which, though painful, might allow China to survive. Wang and his group were also damaged early on by the defection of the diplomat Gao Zongwu, who played a critical role in arranging Wang's defection after two years of negotiations with the Japanese, in January 1940. He had become disillusioned and believed that Japan did not see China as an equal partner, taking with him the documents of the Basic Treaty that Japan had signed with the Wang Jingwei government. He revealed them to the Kuomintang press, becoming a major propaganda coup for Chiang Kai-shek and discrediting Wang's movement in the eyes of the public as mere puppets of the Japanese. Political boundaries In theory, the Reorganized National Government controlled all of China with the exception of Manchukuo, which it recognized as an independent state. In actuality, at the time of its formation, the Reorganized Government controlled only Jiangsu, Anhui, and the north sector of Zhejiang, all being Japanese-controlled territories after 1937. Thereafter, the Reorganized Government's actual borders waxed and waned as the Japanese gained or lost territory during the course of the war. During the December 1941 Japanese offensive the Reorganized Government extended