A Selected Bibliography on Occupied Beijing, 1937-1945

A Sel~cted Bibliography on Occupied Beijing, 1937-1945 by Sophie Lee Japanese soldiers trJumphantly marched through the gates of Beijing on August 7, 1937 and assisted in the founding of a regional government that .. at least on paper, administered the provinces of Hebei, Shandong, and Shanxi, plus parts of Henan and Jiangsu. Wartime Beijing would dlsappoinJ those hoping to examine the city along some of the more familia~1 paths of inquiry concerning occupied China. The city offers practically nothing to those interested in battle plans and field maneuvers because 1t succumbed to the invaders without much of a struggle. Throughout the war years, with the help of underground networks in the city, saboteurs dispatched by the Communists and the Nationalists successfully made their presence known in Beijing. But without Western concessions which provided some protection for resistance groups until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Beijing, unlike Tianjin and Shanghai, cannot boast of a glorious wartime record of sabotage. Since the city was not an industrial center, it would not contribute much to an examination of the attempt to construct an economic block encompassing Japan, Manchuria, and north China, which Tokyo had promoted with fanfare. None of the Chinese leaders in Beijing's wartime government possessed the charisma or national stature of their eventual rival in the south, Wang Jingwei. An account of the relationship between Chinese and Japanese officials in Beijing would lack the intrigue and complexity that accompanied Wang's "defection." These seeming! y humdrum features notwithstanding, wartime Beijing was, of course, much more than just a city along the railroad tracks. It was the command center of Japan •s military forces in north China, and it was the capital of the north China's regional government, the ProvJsional Goif.vnment of China (Zhonghua minguo linshi zhengfu ( tf #.At Jl1 Jt,t .. if(;jf ) until Wang Jingwei 's assumption of •national" eadership in the spring of 1940 demoted the Beijing government, at least in name, to the North China P~}itical Affairs Commission (Huabei zhengwu weiyuanhui ( Jf d~ ~ i'!Q,j !J. -f': ). The regional government, headquarter;d in Beijing , controlled more than just this one city, but Beijing was North China's premier municipality, governed by an administration directly under the jurisdiction of the regional government and beholden to no intervening provincial office. (TianJ{p a~d 9ingdao were the other two special municipalities [tebieshi !{~ J•J -;p ] in the north China government.) 121 .:'or several years I have been conducting research on education , culture, and political control in wartime Beijing. The following bibliographical discussion will focus on that particular concern , but whenever appropriate I will also suggest sources relevant to studies of other aspects of wartime Beijing and to other Chinese cities under Japanese occupation. To date no comprehensive treatment of occupied China exists in Chinese, .Japanese, or English. A good place to begin is the selected translations from vol~me3 3.• ~nd 4 of the Taihei¥o senso e no michi: kaisen gaiko shi ~ -tj~ ~~ f r.. qJ....: fJJ /j,; ?/, ~ t_ series in The China Quagmire: Japan's Expansion on ttie ~sian Continent , 1933-1942, (Columbia University Press, 1983), edited by James W. Morley. The untranslated essays in these two volumes, entitled Ni t-Chii sen~o fJ tf ~~ J' (Asahi shinbun sha J:~ 11 ~~)i(J ;f:! , 1962-1963) * also deserve attention. Yasui Sanl'/ichi !:£ Jt J., -t. offers a cursory assessment o{ t;,heil"pugpet in "Nihon teikokushugi to kai£~i s~iken" t3 ~ $ Jl'J -J. -:A' i. in Vol. 6. ~Ko-Nichi sensa .(IJL 8 ~.:f ) of Koza ~~o.:..;;;_=~en=d~a=-isrh..l ,iA~ ~ Ji'jJLJ;;t 1-\ f... (Tokyo daigaku· ,1, f...1: ~ J1/J t 1978). John H. Boyle's China War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 1972) and Lincoln Li's The Japanese Army in North China, 1937-1941: Problems of Political and Economic Control ( 0 xford University Press, 1975) examine the Japanese occupation from different perspectives and in different regions. George E. Taylor's The Struggle for North China (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations , 1940) is based on personal observation. Though not strictly a book about China during the...