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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The question of moral judgment looms large over every discussion of World War II collaboration, at times clouding and distorting our understanding of this complex issue, as Timothy Brook poignantly remarks in his contribution to this journal's recent symposium. This moral question is certainly relevant and should not be dismissed, since collaboration came to be more or less directly associated with the civic and human rights infringements perpetrated by the occupying forces. Always complex, this question becomes murkier when linked to the rhetoric of patriotism and to postwar political agendas, as is the case with the “resistentialist” postwar narrative that has dominated the debate on collaboration until recently. This narrative has mythologized resistance and enshrined it as the only patriotic, moral, and honorable response to foreign occupation, gliding over difficult moral dilemmas raised by some strategies and practices of resistance. In the process, it has polarized the debate on collaboration by offering only two opposite and monolithically-conceived categories: moral and patriotic resistance versus unethical and treasonous collaboration. It has therefore left no conceptual tool for gaining a more nuanced understanding of behaviors that do not fit this pre-established and rigid dichotomy, such as “nationalist” or “state-building” collaborationism—referring, respectively, to attempts at protecting nation and population from the occupying forces and at state building in the face of the complete and bewildering disappearance of the preexisting order, as in the cases discussed by Brook. Finally, this resistentialist narrative has constructed a universal image of collaboration, which tends to reduce various forms of this phenomenon in different countries to a common denominator, obliterating all political, social, and cultural differences.
1 The close connection between human rights issues and the postwar moral judgment on collaboration is illustrated by the sudden change in French public opinion on collaborators. As news of the Holocaust began to emerge in the immediate postwar, the number of French who supported severe punishment for collaborators increased dramatically.
2 “Resistentialism” is a term generally used to characterize the postwar discourse on collaboration in France, but is extended here to include different forms of mythologizing of resistance in other countries including China. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991); Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, Contemporary French Culture and Society (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998).
3 For a discussion of collaborationist nationalism outside of the debate that developed in the 1990s in European history, see Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied wartime China” in Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) (chapter 7) and Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post-World War II Discourse on Collaboration,” The American Historical Review 113.3 (June 2008).
4 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003) and his contribution to this journal symposium.
5 Burrin, “Vichy,” in Pierre Nora ed. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1 Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1998); Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian.
6 Simon Kitson, The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Robert O. Paxton, “Vichy vs. the Nazis,” The New York Review of Books 55.3(March 6, 2008), p. 39-40.
7 I refer here to Kedward's analysis of Vichy, which, however, can easily be extended to the last years of the RNG. See H. Roderick Kedward, “Introduction” In Kedward and Austin eds., Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, 2-3.
8 Brook. “Collaborationist Nationalism.”
9 Brooks, “Collaborationist Nationalism”; Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity; Parks Coble, Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order; Hwang Dongyoun, “Wang Jingwei, the Nanjing government and the problem of collaboration,” Thesis (Ph.D.), Duke University, 1999.
10 Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian”; Chen Gongbo, “Zibaishu.”
11 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome.
12 We know that, for example, the French initially supported Vichy but soon changed their views as Vichy's inability to resist German pressures became apparent. Kedward, Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance 1940-1944, 2-3, and 17; Burrin, France under the Germans; Pierre Laboire, L'Opinion Française sous Vichy, 228 on.
13 Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian”; Chen Gongbo, “Zibaishu.”
14 Wang first allied against Jiang Jieshi with Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan in 1930, only to suffer military defeat at the hands of Jiang. Later, in 1931, he began a difficult collaboration with Chen Jitang in Canton.
15 Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press 2000).
16 In the city of Xi'an in December 1936 warlord Zhang Xueliang, at the time a general of the GMD army, kidnapped Jiang in cooperation with the Communists and elicited from him the assurance that he would declare war on Japan. What qualifies this incident as an event of “warlord politics” is not simply the fact that Zhang Xueliang was a warlord, but that it employed elements of “warlord” political dynamics, such as kidnapping and geographical power bases.
17 I borrow this term from Deák István, Jan Tomasz. Gross, and Tony Judt, The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
18 For a discussion of aspects of this shared experience see Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian.”
19 For a more detailed explanation of “material control” in the RNG see Henriot, Christian, “Rice, Power, and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937-1945).”
Twentieth-Century China 26, no. 1 (Nov. 2000): 41-84.; Wang Ke-Wen, “Collaborators and Capitalists: The Politics of ‘Material Control’ in Wartime Shanghai.” Chinese Studies in History 26, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 42-62; Zanasi, Saving the Nation (chapter 7). For a discussion of the Japanese role in the direct procurement of grains in the RNG see Yuan Yuquan. “Riben qinlue zhi paozhe de shangtonghui.” In Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1987.
20 We cannot forget the political importance of this aspect of the resistentialist discourse, at least in Western Europe (Eastern Europe's discourse on collaboration assumed different dimensions). For a comparison of the politics of retribution in Western and Eastern Europe see Deák et al., The politics of Retribution in Europe. The importance of the resistentialist narrative of resistance, collaboration, and anti-authoritarianism is illustrated by the political weight it still exercises, as exemplified by a 1990s Italian political debate, with resonance throughout Western Europe and North America. For that debate see, among others, Norberto Bobbio, Renzo De Felice, and Gian Enrico Rusconi, Italiani, Amici Nemici, I libri di Reset (Milano; Roma: Reset; Donzelli, 1996); Nicola Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo: fascismo e postfascismo (Roma: Laterza, 1996); and Silvana Patriarca, “Italian Neopatriotism: Debating National Identity in the 1990s,” Modern Italy 6, no. 1 (2001): 21-34.
21 In this sense, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—which vied with the GMD in claiming the politically important legacy of the resistance and was therefore constructing its own narrative of war—was better positioned to deploy Western European resistentialism, since it better resonated with its antifascist propaganda. However, the CCP's politically authoritarian nature and its increasing distancing from the Allies in the postwar years, affected the CCP discourse on collaboration, leading to the construction of its characteristic blend of patriotism and socialism. For a discussion of Communist propaganda and the construction of its distinctive resistentialist myth, see Parks Coble, “China at War, 1937-1945: Remembering and Re-remembering China's War of Resistance” Paper presented at the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China Biannual Conference “Chinese Nation, Chinese State,” Singapore, June 26-28, 2006)’ see also his “China's ‘New Remembering’ of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 1937-1945,” The China Quarterly 190 (June 2007), pp. 390-410.
22 This strategy also characterized Jiang's handling of the Cold War in support of his military confrontation with the CCP (1945-1949). References to anti-Communism at this time were sufficient to align him on the United States side without need to expatiate on antiauthoritarianism.
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