Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (review)

Research on Chinese compliance with Japanese power during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 to 1945 has been an undeveloped area in East Asian history. With this important book, an expanse of neglected and inhospitable terrain has been transformed. The tangled interpretive thickets which obscured the field have been thinned by sharp analysis, while the author's prodigious archival excavations may be compared to the removal of innumerable boulders from previously untilled soil.

Collaboration examines Chinese-Japanese interactions at the local level during the early period of the war. Organized thematically under intriguing chapter headings such as 'Complicities,' 'Rivalries,' and 'Resistance,' it focuses on the economic heartland of the Yangtze Delta area, including Shanghai. It depicts how, even as civilians continued to be robbed, raped, and murdered by Japanese soldiers, persons who might have sought refuge in safe havens chose instead to comply with the conquerors' demands that the Chinese state should be established anew in a peaceable partnership between East Asian nations. Why would someone endowed with the freedom to choose otherwise decide on active co-operation with the agents of a conquering military power? Or, from the invaders' point of view, how may a subjected people be induced to resume productive activities so that a locality may yield regular tax revenue again?

While armies continued operations further inland, Chinese and Japanese civilians assumed responsibility for the re-establishment of governance in the occupied zones. Dozens of educated Japanese men with administrative experience were dispatched to war-torn districts as part of an ambitious plan to restore peace and build 'self-government.' As well as the grim scenes of destruction that lay in the wake of an industrially equipped military machine regulated by archaic codes of conduct, the Japanese agents discovered that the human resources they needed to carry out their mission were in short supply. Not surprisingly, many of their educated counterparts among the inhabitants of the localities where they were posted had fled. Only a few of those who stepped forward to fill positions in new political entities possessed significant status in their communities. Although supplies of collaborators were available in every locality, the Japanese had to make do with poor quality. Their reliance on men distrusted by both sides as self-serving puppets did little to support official claims that the Chinese were governing themselves again.

Timothy Brook's interpretive statements are somewhat inconsistent. In the concluding chapter, for instance, he observes that Japan sought to build an empire 'on the cheap' but failed. He implies that Japan's failure in China contrasted with Britain's earlier creation of an overseas empire on the cheap because of Japan's utter lack of any means to maintain power other than military coercion. Yet the preceding chapters reveal ample supplies of collaborators who were not coerced into administrative service under the Japanese. Britain in a different era, moreover, had more than eight years' time to create administrative agencies by co-opting local elites around the world. Brook's view is that the Chinese could not accept Japanese-sponsored administrations as legitimate and that those entities were weak as a result. His view that Japan's early occupation of China was a political failure at the local level seems inseparable from a sense that Japan's defeat was already inevitable in 1937 and 1938 because of Japanese armies' extraordinarily bad behaviour. An unspoken thought seems to linger as a last taboo in the thicket of touchy topics he has so bravely opened. This is the idea that Japan's conquest of China might have been permanent. In that case, thanks to increasing success in co-opting elites, restoring production, and rebuilding revenue systems, Japanese-sponsored local Chinese governments would have gained legitimacy eventually. Given that, as Brook mentions in passing, Japan was defeated in 1945 not by China but by the United States, we know that in different circumstances Japan's domination of China might have lasted until today...