Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China

In this thought-provoking volume, Timothy Brook argues that it was collaboration rather than resistance that characterized much of China's experience in its war with Japan. Inspired by European historical revisionism that subverted the French myth of national resistance, Brook searches archives and reexamines Chinese politics of heroic patriotism. He finds that local elites in the lower Yangzi region entered into relationships of collaboration—"the continuing exercise of power under the pressure produced by the presence of an occupying power" (p. 2)—virtually as soon as Japanese forces drove out the Nationalist defense. Even before the final Nationalist retreat, elite members of Baoshan, a county near Shanghai, could be seen posing in photographs alongside their Japanese pacification (zenbu/xuanfu) handlers (p. 42). There were incentives on both sides, Brook suggests, for collaborative arrangements to take place. For the Japanese, battlefield success and continued Chinese Nationalist resistance had swung the policies from limited invasion to total war. On December 1, 1937, the supreme command in Tokyo handed down two "fateful orders" (p. 33): found an occupation regime in Beijing, and capture Nanjing. Brook shows that even as the military, with total disregard for all conventions of war, displayed its capacity for unrestrained brute force in Chiang Kai-shek's fallen capital, Special Service Department (tokumu bu) personnel with Mantetsu training (Chinese proficiency and knowledge of local conditions) were fanning out into desolate Jiangnan counties with a plan that would both edify the population (when and if found) against its misconceived goodwill toward Euro-American imperial powers and urge its return to a normal life of "peaceful living and blissful working" (anju leye) (p. 38) in the destroyed hometown.

Brook shows that local Chinese responses to Japanese peace gestures, even in the immediate aftermath of total destruction, were much more favorable than the Chinese nationalist myth of determined resistance would have prepared us to expect. Chinese reasons for collaboration were complicated, but nonetheless intelligible and authentic.

The bulk of the book, grounded in documents and recollections retrieved from archives and memoirs in both Japanese and Chinese languages, examines in rich empirical detail four cases of credible Chinese collaboration (Jiading, Zhenjiang, Nanjing, Shanghai) and one instance of enigmatic resistance (Chongming). Occupation (as today's newspaper readers are no doubt aware), unlike invasion, can quickly turn into a rather costly undertaking. In Japan's case, attempts to do so "on the cheap," with limited commitment of resources and personnel, were unlikely to gain decisive superiority, as it had taken on a target many times its own size, with millions in arms under a legitimate government that refused to cave in. The first order of business, for partners on peace initiatives in the occupied zone, thus concerned resources, both to sustain Japan's military presence on the Chinese mainland and to reduce incentives for the dispossessed to join the resistance. As the occupiers were short on the necessary capital for "payment," they resorted to "politics" and "persuasion" (p. 62) to procure the cooperation (hezuo) of prospective collaborators. Against that backdrop, Kumagai Yasushi, the pacifier of Jiading, found out to his dismay while on reassignment that the love of his adopted Chinese son, professed perhaps under duress, turned out to be disingenuous. In Zhenjiang, the collaborating Mayor Gao Zhicheng and his handler Katō Kōzan came to realize that, to revive the economic life of the strategic Yangzi port and to make it worthy for occupation, the occupiers need to invest in security as the collaborators worked to attract business capital. Yet too many security measures would inhibit the circulation of goods and people, which in turn would be detrimental to the trade and transportation that the collaborators sought to rebuild.

In Nanjing, the collaborators were complicit, during the infamous Rape of Nanjing, in the deaths of thousands of Chinese soldiers and the rape of Chinese women. But by leading the Japanese in their search for Nationalist soldiers and sex providers...