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Reviewed by:
  • Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China
  • Joseph Benjamin Askew (bio)
Timothy Brook . Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. x, 288 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 0-674-01563-0.

Timothy Brook has built on his distinguished publication record by writing a valuable and interesting account of the collaboration between some Chinese people and the Japanese State during the Pacific War. Although this is a well-known period in Chinese history, clearly there was more research that remained to be done, and Brook has provided a needed study that gives ample coverage of many of the relevant issues.

The strength and the weakness of this book is a reflection of the fact that the general topic of wartime collaboration is such an emotive subject. On the one hand it is a phenomenon of interest to and worthy of study by a great many people and not just academics. On the other hand it is notoriously difficult to find source materials on specific examples. China is no exception. It is clear from the book that there does not appear to be a great deal in the way of surviving administrative records or other government documents. Moreover, as Brook points out, some of the Chinese-language material was clearly written by native speakers of Japanese. While Brook was able to find some actual accounts of life under the Japanese occupation, these were all written after the war. They are not objective or complete, in the sense that some political options were closed off by the defeat [End Page 91] of Japan, as Brook acknowledges. There are no interviews with collaborators or veterans of the Japanese administration. Defeat silenced an entire school of Chinese political thought. What Brook did have access to, however, are a number of excellent accounts by Japanese officials who took part in the creation of various Japanese-backed administrations in China. These sources are invaluable, and this volume is important if only for bringing these accounts to light. But this also means that the book has a strange focus: while ostensibly a study on Chinese collaboration, it is forced, by the very nature of its sources, to be about Japanese administrators in China. Yet it only uses these sources to the extent that they reflect the author's theme; if the book had been about the Japanese construction of a collaborationist administration it would have been able to make much better use of the available materials.

This study gives the Pacific War a regional focus, as the Japanese defeat ultimately privileged narratives from the two centers of political "resistance," namely Yan'an and Chongqing, at the expense of the other regions occupied by the Japanese. Brook's work is an excellent remedy for this tendency. Yet due to the nature of the material there is a strong focus on the city of Nanjing and on the Rape of Nanjing itself. Brook is well published in this area, and this reviewer gets the impression that the author is covering similar ground to what is in his previous books. This in itself is not a problem, but of course Japanese-controlled China was much larger than just Nanjing. The strong focus on the lower Yangtze valley means that there is no room for a discussion of what was going on elsewhere in China. There are at least three other major Chinese population centers where collaboration existed. There is little or no discussion of Taiwan and North and Northeast China, or of the Chinese of Southeast Asia. The book does not even mention, for example, Lu Xun's brother Zhou Zuoren, who was sentenced to death for collaborating with the Japanese in Beijing. This is unfortunate partly because it does not allow Brook to explore the possibility of regional differences in collaboration. Wang Jingwei's Nanjing regime claimed to be a genuine heir of Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang, and Brook brings out this aspect of the Nanjing government very well. Yet this fact is unlikely to have had any relevance to the various northern-based collaborators, much less to those of Taiwan or Malaya. A...

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