Liminality of collaborationism

One such question is about the proper time frame within which the legacy of collaborationism can be fully evaluated. Writing immediately after the liberation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre opined that some of the most reputable French politicians and intellectuals collaborated because they suffered from the ‘intellectual illness that may be called historicism’.Footnote ² They believed that Germany was destined for victory, and resistance would be rendered ineffectual by the principles upheld in a German-dominated Europe. If indeed collaborators were mentally shackled by a future-oriented historical philosophy, were they entirely wrong in their prediction? In terms of how briefly German and Japanese rule lasted, the answer is yes. That Sartre had the chance to bash collaborators to their very soul in 1945 was precisely due to the fact that it was the Allies who emerged victorious. But collaborators were right in realizing that people’s wartime choices were judged by standards set up by the victors. They were also right that the state of war would soon end, and confrontation would give way to cooperation and co-dependence among nations. France and Germany (or at least half of it) stuck together in the same camp during the Cold War that immediately ensued; soon after the war ended, politicians in Europe jointly established the Council of Europe, forerunner of the European Union. Even the Republic of China and Japan, despite having been at each other’s throats for decades, repaired their relationship in 1952.Footnote ³

Though the Second World War is often regarded as an important step towards globalization, for decades the writing of its history was dominated by nationalistic narratives that reinforced the legitimacy of resistance governments. The condemnation of collaborationism was an integral part of that narrative, which climaxed at national trials of traitors and other forms of retribution against them.Footnote ⁴ While the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set the legal patterns for pursing international justice, the state-operated national trials of collaborators constituted ‘an important aspect of the process of political globalization brought about by World War II’.Footnote ⁵ In the mutually reinforcing global and national discourses that upheld resistance, there was little chance for collaborators to redeem themselves.

Since then, criminal and historical verdicts have confined collaborationism to the liminal space of occupation during the Second World War. This narrative deprived collaborators of any liberty in defining the starting and ending points of their act—it started with the invaders’ order, or after the resistance forces denounced them as traitors, and ended with liberation. The ideological, institutional, and cultural foundations of collaborationism, had they existed, were dismissed as excuses for cowardice or opportunism. Collaboration was treated as deviance from national histories even though it is ‘as old as war and the occupation of foreign territory’.Footnote ⁶ For that very reason, collaboration has to be strictly contained within the chapter on the Second World War and rectified immediately after.

The topology of collaboration

As scholars on different subjects and localities of the Second World War come into closer dialogue, collaboration is recognized as one of the commonalities of the war. An overall, much-improved understanding of the circumstances of war itself led to a more nuanced, sometimes empathetic, attitude towards collaborationism. This applies to both the European and the Asian Pacific theatre; for lack of a better expression in native languages, ‘collaboration’ remains the word of choice when referring to the action itself.Footnote ⁷ In many cases, decisions to collaborate resulted not so much from fear of the external enemy as from frustration with domestic political struggles or a desire to preserve the population under occupation.Footnote ⁸ While local conditions varied, there was always a spectrum of options and arrangements between the two poles of surrenderism and unwavering resistance.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, a wide range of conduct and motivations ultimately fell under the umbrella of collaboration.Footnote ¹⁰ There were people who collaborated by chance and people who collaborated ‘under the influence of certain social and psychological laws’.Footnote ¹¹ More often than not it was a combination of reasons, some out of self-preservation and others for a larger cause.Footnote ¹² If we consider the verdicts rendered by resistance governments, collaborators fell into different categories according to their occupation (‘traitorous merchants’), social circles (‘cultural collaborators’), gender (‘female collaborators’), and race/ethnicity (‘White Russian collaborators’).Footnote ¹³

For Europeanists, the distinction between collaboration and collaborationism matters in clarifying the fundamental motivation: the former resulted from coercion or official responsibilities, and the latter often implied an ideological commitment to some degree.Footnote ¹⁴ Scholars of former colonies argue that a collaborationist political agenda could be a means of achieving anti-colonial objectives, as in the Vietnamese case, or ‘a structural feature of modernity’, as in the case of Korea.Footnote ¹⁵ Exactly how one collaborated also depended on individual capacity. Implied in the word ‘collaborator’ is a certain degree of power and influence, a position to bargain with the enemy; otherwise, one was just a foot soldier of the Nazis or the Japanese. In Asia in particular, that power and influence often came from collaborators’ previous status as political or cultural forerunners in their native land. By following Japan’s example, they had wished to liberate their nation from Western imperialism and find a unique path to modernity.

Stanley Hoffmann suggested in 1968 that ‘a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories’ for collaboration because of the complexity and moral ambiguities inherent in this topic.Footnote ¹⁶ Now we owe our much diversified and humanized understanding of collaborators to scholars in various fields and with different regional focuses. Yet we are still talking about collaboration under the same old premise—people from fallen regions who colluded with the occupiers and, by that very act, presumably did harm to their own people and threatened the postwar nation-states. And Europeans still struggle to comprehend collaborationism in other cultural contexts.

Contributions to this Forum

This Forum ventures to make a paradigmatic shift in the study of collaboration by examining collaborationism beyond the presumed time frame and power relations. Based on prewar institutions, networks, and shared ideals, we study the type of collaboration that laid the foundation for postwar cooperation between old enemies. Kalyvas once raised the theoretical plausibility of studying German and Japanese elites who collaborated with the Allied occupation forces following the Axis surrender.Footnote ¹⁷ We take a step further and examine a cluster of cases that pose a greater challenge to established frameworks of moral judgements and historical interpretation: Japanese individuals who collaborated with Allied nationals and institutions; Chinese intellectuals who carried on Sino-Japanese cultural exchange, a once much-welcomed undertaking that became evidence of ‘betraying the nation’ from the early 1930s; elite Taiwanese with drifting political positions who demonstrated strong Chinese nationalism in their writings; Chinese graduates from a ‘bogus’ university who demonstrated a strong agency in fighting social injustice, rehabilitating their reputation, and recounting the war; and Chinese practitioners of traditional medicine who collaborated with their Japanese counterparts for the shared goal of reviving East Asian medical traditions, a goal that was embraced by postwar governments in China and Japan. These are but a sample of individuals whose lives and legacies challenge the neat dichotomies of Axis versus Allies, war and peace, and patriotism and collaborationism.

Articles in this collection focus on collaborationism in the greater China theatre of the Second World War. We find China an excellent locality to study collaborationism, and collaborationism a revealing angle to understand wartime and postwar China. First, the areas in question provide a great range of modes of collaborationism. Under Japanese occupation there was a full colony (Taiwan), a puppet state that claimed sovereignty (Manchukuo), collaborationist regimes at all levels, organizations with real or superficial pro-Japanese agendas, and individuals who maintained cultural, professional, and emotional ties with Japan. Collaborating with Japan in wartime China were also people of different nationalities, including White Russians, Jews, and French nationals, which brings us to the second point.

Following the Opium War (1840–82), the Great Qing empire made repeated concessions to Western and Japanese demands, which resulted in a diversity of colonial arrangements in China. They included the regime of extraterritoriality, treaty ports, foreign concessions, and cosmopolitan institutions such as the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). By the time the Japanese threat was imminent in the 1930s, China had already become used to a wide range of multinational agencies, with large and diverse foreign communities (stateless persons included) in Shanghai, Beijing, Qingdao, Harbin, and other metropolises. In decades of contact with each other, these foreigners had experiences of collaborating, albeit with conflicts and negotiations, on various enterprises. Their prewar experiences and wartime choices greatly complicated the national and ideological categories that often confine the analyses of collaborationism.

Third, considering the routinized foreign presence and internal division in China since the 1840s, the distinction between wartime and peacetime in China was blurred compared to strong sovereign nations such as the United Kingdom or the United States. In international settlements in Shanghai and Kulangsu, for instance, there were diplomatically accepted collaborationist arrangements, and Chinese who lived in concessions had little choice but to acquiesce. In addition to the lack of full sovereignty, China also suffered from internal division, a situation worsened by Japanese encroachment on Chinese soil since 1931. By 1941, five regimes divided up jurisdiction in China, all of which were headed by Chinese but only one of which was upholding the resistance banner.Footnote ¹⁸ Different from Vichy France, however, the resistance government in Chongqing was the internationally recognized central government. It represented China as one of the Allied powers, set resistance as China’s main theme, and outlawed collaborators throughout the war.

Collaborationism in China had a long and complicated history before the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) formally broke out. It had engendered a complex web of relationships, yet only those involving Japan became illicit in the postwar settlement of rights and wrongs. Resistance literature and condemnation of Chinese collaborators (hanjian) constructed ‘a unified sense of national crisis’, whereas in this divided nation, many people prioritized allegiances to other forms of political or professional entities.Footnote ¹⁹ China, therefore, can serve as a perfect site from which to deconstruct the nationalistic narrative of the Second World War and return the transnational nature to the history of war.

Asianism and cosmopolitanism

Ultimately, we would like to explore how a better understanding of collaboration can effectively enrich the writing of history itself, not as antithesis to resistance, but as a plausible choice that had ideological roots and a fruitful future. Collaborationism had its own foundation and logic, which we identify in China (and other Asian countries under occupation) as Asianism and cosmopolitanism. Both were transnational ideologies that could explain the collaborationist behaviours of the Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Westerners that we examine in this Forum. Yet the two ideologies were essentially at odds with one another, for they were founded on different visions of civilizational hierarchy and power relations.

Asianism developed in the late nineteenth century as discourses and ideologies that emphasized an Asian unity based on racial and cultural commonalities. As a response to Western imperialism, it was embraced by intellectuals from Japan, India, China, and other parts of Asia.Footnote ²⁰ By the 1930s, Asianism had branched out in different directions, ranging from anti-colonial and egalitarian movements to expansionist ideology advocating Japanese hegemony. Numerous Chinese and Koreans played active roles in Asianist discourses and movements. Some received education in Japan and maintained a lifetime network of Japanese friends (like the famous Chinese writers Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren), and others enlisted Japanese help in their revolutionary or nation-building cause (such as Sun Yat-sen). With Japan’s successful modernization and its growing sense of exceptionalism, however, Asianism was increasingly utilized to legitimize Japan’s imperialist expansions. While we recognize the overwhelmingly negative consequences of Pan-Asianism, we will try not to ‘confuse the concept with the history’, but rather see, through the lens of Asianism, a transnational network of people, ideas, and institutions that had a profound impact on Asia.Footnote ²¹

More important, postwar peacemaking and cooperation among Asian countries warrants a new look at Asianism and its practitioners in the worst days of war. The ‘Manchukuo connection’ helped normalize the Japan-Korea relationship in 1965 under Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and Korean President Park Chung-hee, who both served in the ‘puppet’ Manchukuo and shared a political blueprint for a future Asia.Footnote ²² The Republic of China in Taiwan also relied on Liang Su-yung’s Manchukuo connection to sustain its diplomatic relationship with Japan until 1972. Liang had been a procurator in Manchuria, making him an indisputable collaborator by the very law of the same government—Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government—that relied on Liang for postwar peacemaking with Japan.Footnote ²³

As with Asianism, one cannot dislodge cosmopolitanism from its imperial roots. Pre-1945 cosmopolitanism is different from how it is understood in contemporary political philosophy wherein it is primarily an ethical doctrine with no direct political implications.Footnote ²⁴ Those self-claimed cosmopolitan institutions and individuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often products of colonial empires, the British empire in particular. Works on liberal imperialism have shown how Western-educated respectables adopted a cosmopolitan world view in the contact zones of empire, with a perception of themselves as simultaneously native and British.Footnote ²⁵ The British empire’s extended territory and sphere of influence provided its own citizens with a global vision and platform to practise cosmopolitanism under a racist premise. The works by Robert Bickers and Bernard Wasserstein portray Shanghai as a cosmopolitan locality where political and social life unfolded within an overt framework of racial hierarchy.Footnote ²⁶ The Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), a self-styled ruling body governing the International Settlement of Shanghai, which allegedly represented 14 nationalities, was run by a board largely dominated by Britons.

As with the SMC, the CMCS was a cosmopolitan institution founded upon imperial demand. The Inspectorate General of CMCS, in charge of China’s foreign trade, harbour management, and overseeing China’s foreign and domestic loans, had been occupied by a Briton since its inauguration in 1854. On the eve of the War of Resistance, the CMCS was headed by Frederick Maze with a Japanese national, Kishimoto Hirokichi, as deputy. From July 1937 to December 1941, all custom houses were under Maze’s authority and the customs revenues were still being paid to China’s foreign debtors. With the outbreak of the Pacific War, Maze and all British and American employees were captured and Kishimoto became the new inspector-general. In response, the resistance government under Chiang Kai-shek ceded all the custom houses from the Kishimoto service and successively appointed C. H. B. Joly, a Briton, and Lester Little, an American, to take charge of the ‘legitimate’ Chinese Customs in Chongqing. Little’s service lasted until 1 January 1950, months after the end of the Nationalist rule in mainland China. The changing of hands of the Inspectorate General denoted the reshuffling of imperial powers and their collaborating political forces in China. As several scholars have noted, the Second World War in Asia was essentially a conflict between empires.Footnote ²⁷ Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia War’ was essentially an imperial project that aimed to overturn Western dominance on land and sea.

Through the lens of collaborationism, this Forum outlines the process of the rise of Asianism and its competition with cosmopolitanism in the intellectual realm, at the institutional level, and as a powerful logic of network. The article by Chihyun Chang and Chiu-ya Kao, entitled ‘Cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its staff, 1932–1941’, demonstrates the ambiguities of the war and shifting alliance through the experiences of foreign employees of the CMCS. Vital to China’s financing of national defence, the CMCS remained a cosmopolitan institution throughout the war. Kishimoto in factuality collaborated with the Nationalist government between 1937 and 1941, half of the duration of China’s War of Resistance against Japan. Lester Little, whom Chiang Kai-shek appointed inspector-general in 1943, worked for the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei government as the Canton commissioner between 1939 and December 1941. In addition, a number of Japanese employees of the CMCS collaborated with Chongqing in different stages of the war. These intricate relations heralded the postwar US-Japan alliance in Asia.

The articles by Naoko Kato and Craig A. Smith tell the stories of nationalists with Asianist visions and networks. Kato focuses on the translator and librarian Qian Daosun, who was prosecuted as a ‘cultural collaborator’ for his close relationships with Japan and for taking positions at educational institutions under the occupation. With a detailed introduction to Qian’s background and social circles, Kato argues that Qian’s wartime choices were not the result of Japanese coercion or a pursuit of personal gain, but of his long-term commitment to translating Japanese literature into Chinese and increasing the Chinese holdings of Japanese books. By juxtaposing two sets of Sino-Japanese networks connecting pacifist Asianists in China and Japan, Kato raises the sharp question of where to draw the line between cultural exchange and cultural invasion. Qian’s experiences also compare strikingly to those of Zhang Wojun, a cultural collaborator who redeemed his reputation, as discussed by Craig A. Smith.

The recounting of the war

This Forum also concerns itself with the evaluation and commemoration of collaborationism. Resistance had been upheld as the main theme in China even before the war with Japan officially broke out. The state—first the KMT and then the Chinese Communist Party—endorsed cultural and artistic productions that celebrated resistance as the only legitimate response to the Japanese invasion; and historiography has reinforced the myth of the resistant majority. The war was named the War of Resistance against Japan and was widely considered the event that imbued nationalism into every echelon of Chinese society. In this narrative, there used to be no place for collaboration except on moral and legal trial stands. Though scholars have made us aware of the ‘collaborationist nationalism’ argument launched by Pétain and his Chinese counterparts, the truth is that such arguments have not rescued them from being loathed by their own people,Footnote ²⁸ or allowed them a voice in historical narratives.

Yet recounting history from the motives and circumstances of collaborators liberates us from adopting nationalism as the only logic of commemoration. How, then, do we commemorate the ‘traitorous elements’ of a nation’s most vulnerable past? Other than situating collaborationism within longer ideological and cultural trends that survived the war, this Forum explores how these people actively participated in commemorating the war and reclaiming their place in history. We observe that, contrary to intuition, collaborators and war criminals had a stronger agency than we think, and the less well-known they were, the more wiggle room they had. Craig A. Smith looks into the life and work of Zhang Wojun, a Taiwanese writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years and took a pro-Japanese, Asianist stance during the war. In the 1970s and 1980s, his two sons, in mainland China and in Taiwan respectively, each helped publish a compilation of his works and wrote an introduction. Both refrained from including Zhang’s pro-Japanese writings in their volumes. The compilations established the image of Zhang as a prolific writer with strong Chinese nationalist sentiments. Now Zhang is widely recognized for his contributions to New Literature in Taiwan and for his contributions to Japanese-language education in China, receiving praise such as the ‘Taiwanese Hu Shi’ and an ‘epoch-making educator’.Footnote ²⁹ Officially, Zhang Wojun was taken out of the collaborators’ camp and is now considered a progressive patriot. Smith examines the fluidity of Zhang’s identity and the ambiguity of his prewar and wartime writings to question the paradigm of collaboration.

Jonathan Henshaw examines a group of ‘bogus students’ who saved themselves from being forever blackmarked and erased from the much-celebrated history of student activism in China. They were considered ‘bogus’ (wei 伪) as they had studied at National Central University in Nanjing under the collaborationist Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei. After the war, their credentials were denied because of their ‘enslavement education’, and they continued to be marginalized under communist rule. Henshaw recounts the waves of protests organized by these students against puppet authorities over corruption and the sale of opium and, after the war, the discriminatory treatment they received from Chiang Kai-shek’s government. In the 1980s, after facing decades of prejudice in the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually acknowledged them as ‘alumni’. The shared experience and trauma of studying in a ‘bogus’ university forged an identity among this group of students, and forced them to take matters into their own hands. Other than incorporating the grassroots commemoration of war into history, Henshaw’s article also deconstructs the concept of ‘bogusness’ that doomed countless individuals’ political and professional futures.

Yun Xia’s article argues that medical exchange between China and Japan was fundamental for the sustaining of reforms of traditional Chinese medicine during wartime, and thus its continued development in post-1949 China. Yet such exchange has been largely overlooked by scholars of medical history and scholars of the War of Resistance. Chinese medicine had been systematically introduced to Japan before the 1600s and became the medical orthodoxy. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), it acquired a relatively independent identity as Kampō (漢方). Both Chinese medicine and Kampō, however, faced tremendous challenges from Western medicine from the mid-nineteenth century and struggled to survive under restrictive laws issued by their own governments. In the 1930s, despite deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations, the Kampō revival movement in Japan merged forces with struggles for preserving traditional medicine in China. In 1938, the Association of East Asian Medicine was founded in Japan, gathering Chinese, Korean, and Japanese advocates under the banner of ‘East Asian Medicine’. Xia’s article deciphers the various agendas of the participants in this transboundary network of ‘medical Asianism’ and its long-term impacts. Contrary to prominent ‘cultural collaborators’ who were persecuted and defamed, Chinese doctors in this wartime network of collaboration continued to thrive in the postwar period. Ye Juquan and Zhang Jiyou, for instance, founded traditional medicine universities after 1949, and became state-recognized masters in Chinese medicine. Moreover, they maintained their Japanese connections to the People’s Republic of China and institutionalized traditional medicine based on their wartime experiences and resources.

The protagonists of our stories constitute a small sample of diverse nationalities who lived through the war and continued with their prewar connections and careers, which placed them in the stigmatic camp of ‘collaborators.’ Some were fortunate enough to transform collaborationism into much-desired cosmopolitanism and cooperation in postwar circumstances. Others, like Qian Daosun, remained imprisoned in that camp during their lifetimes, and remain there until history finally does them justice. This Forum does not deny any war crime conducted by people who actively collaborated with the Nazis or with Japanese war criminals. Rather, we see collaborationism as a historical problem that needs to be properly periodized and contextualized. Sartre once described the truth of prisoner-of-war experiences as taking ‘a lot of inventiveness and skill to tell’, and ‘a lot of goodwill and imagination to have it understood’.Footnote ³⁰ Wartime collaborationism poses similar challenges to crafting history and comprehending humanity. In this Forum, we have striven to overcome these challenges—at least to some degree—and hope for the same level of sensitivity from our readers.