Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937-1945 (review)

Parks M. Coble's Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order completes a trilogy of books, thematically intertwined, but each able to stand on its own merits. Interestingly enough, his first, Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937, shows that the Guomindang (GMD) initially depended greatly on the Shanghai business community for the GMD's rise to power, but subsequently controlled the business community in order to advance the GMD's own centrist programs. In Coble's second book, Facing Japan, 1931-1937, he not only continues the chronological treatment but changes partners, so to speak, concentrating on the GMD-directed policy of appeasement-cum-resistance against the Japanese. The Shanghai business community virtually disappears in this book. Now, in the book under review, which covers the wartime period of 1937 to 1945, we have the interplay of the Japanese with the Shanghai business community, where, in Japanese-occupied China, this community had to survive as best it could under changing Japanese policies, and the GMD has become a mere offstage echo.

In this latest book Coble gives a detailed account and analysis of a number of entities within the commercial-industrial sector: textiles; chemical industries, including matches and rubber; and department stores, all of which fell under the supervision of the Japanese economic authorities. When Japan established a series of Chinese puppet regimes, this further complicated the relationship between Chinese businessmen and the competing political entities. Inasmuch as most of the Chinese businesses were run as family enterprises, Coble goes into great detail describing the Rong family, the largest of them all, and several other families including the Kwoks, the Zhangs, the Lius, the Yangs, the Tangs, and a half dozen other families. Not all were in Shanghai; some were in Wuxi, Nantong, and other cities of the lower Yangtze, but all were linked to the greater Shanghai region in one way or another. By studying not only these several families, each tending to dominate a different industry, but also specific individuals within them, such as Rong Zongjing and Rong Desheng, Coble makes these individuals come alive and shows how personalities made major differences in the short run. At the same time he takes some of the themes such as collaboration with the Japanese or resistance to their demands and shows how different industries, families, and individuals through the eight years of the occupation all interacted in different ways with the Japanese.

Coble's greatest strength is to wade through all the data that he has gathered with painstaking care, taking us along case by case and Japanese policy by policy and bringing us to both general and specific conclusions that contradict the conventional conclusions of Western and Chinese historians alike. For instance, on the question of whether Chinese businessmen in their operations were motivated primarily by nationalism, as a group of recent younger Chinese historians claim, Coble shows conclusively that they were simply trying to survive and occasionally benefit by accommodating themselves to Japanese demands. But did the Shanghai business community gain much from the Japanese? Coble concludes that they gained very little, for a number of reasons related both to economic necessity and wartime exigencies. No review, including this one, can do justice to Coble's meticulous research, penetrating analysis, and judicious conclusions.

However, even a book such as this is not completely without faults. By going into all the details of wartime business, perhaps more than some readers would care to read about, the narrative occasionally becomes repetitious. Coble is aware of this tendency, and has made his account as reader-friendly as possible (e.g., through the use of topical subtitles). A greater caveat is that the book does not touch at all on agricultural production, the marketing of rice and other grains, and the agrarian policies and controls of the Japanese. To be fair...