This article discusses the continuity between cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism from 1932–1941 by exploring the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and its international staff. The CMCS managed China’s international trade and directed the custom houses in northern China before 1937, and in occupied China and free China from 1937–1941. The customs revenues generated by this international trade were pledged to service China’s international obligations. This article argues that both Chinese and Japanese staff members’ activities to maintain the status quo could be considered as wartime collaborationism from the perspectives of Japan, Manchukuo, and the Collaborationist and Chongqing governments, but all parties tolerated their activities until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The reason for this was that all parties benefitted from the CMCS’s management of international trade and its implementation of international obligations which had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. This article situates wartime collaborationism within the long-existing institutional network that was welcomed as cosmopolitan collaboration in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, rather than treating it as a unique wartime setup and ideology. Such a view also illuminates the postwar exchange of personnel and cooperation among former enemies, which grew out of prewar collaboration and wartime collaborationism.

Qian Daosun (1887–1966) was imprisoned for collaborating with the Provisional Government in North China under Japanese occupation, and to this day he is labelled as hanjian (traitor). Yet, Qian was first and foremost a cultural literatus, librarian, and an exceptional translator with an in-depth understanding of Japanese culture and languages. This article examines the crucial role that Japan and the Japanese language played for Chinese cultural literati in their quest to save China. It also brings to the forefront the dilemmas and agonizing choices Qian faced in his attempt to promote Sino-Japanese cultural exchange in the midst of war, in particular as a librarian. Wartime libraries are highly contested sites of selection, destruction, censorship, preservation, confiscation, and knowledge production. An added layer of complexity was Japan’s cultural policy in China that promoted Japanese-language collections and governed libraries such as the Beijing1 Modern Science Library where Qian worked. What exacerbated Qian’s dilemmas was his upbringing, which led him to form close personal connections with like-minded Japanese literati. Lastly, this article revisits the hanjian label by comparing Qian’s fate to that of other librarians and returned students of Japan, such as May Fourth writer Lu Xun and patriotic bibliophile Zheng Zhenduo. By deliberately examining May Fourth writers alongside hanjian and Japanese intermediaries, the intention is to dismount arbitrary labels and divisions that have set them apart and against each other in the resistance versus collaboration dichotomy.

This article examines Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) and the memory of his ‘collaboration’ with Japan during the Second World War. A Taiwanese-born writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years, his drifting identity was full of ambiguities. Although he was one of the key intellectuals behind Taiwan’s New-Old Literatures Debate and responsible for introducing many May Fourth ideas to Taiwan, he also played an important role in bringing Japanese literature and thought into Chinese discourse during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During the war, he continued to teach in Beijing and travelled to Japan to attend the Greater East Asia Writers’ conferences. Some of his works from this period call for the Chinese people to support the empire and eradicate Western culture and literature from Asia, but many of his writings also indicate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism.

This article considers the memories of Zhang, his various intellectual contributions, and his oeuvre, arguing that his collaboration must be understood and contextualized within his intellectual landscape through a research methodology that examines continuities and change across decades of his life and work.

The Japanese empire’s occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and ‘bottom-up’ wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as ‘bogus students’ who supposedly received Japanese ‘enslavement education’ from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history.

This article examines a transnational network of advocates for Kampō (traditional) medicine in Japan, occupied China, and Manchukuo during the Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945), shedding new light on collaborationism, Asianism, and the modernization of traditional medicine in East Asia. In the 1930s, despite deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations, the Kampō revival movement in Japan joined forces with the struggle to preserve traditional medicine in China. In 1938, the Association of East Asian Medicine was founded in Japan, gathering together Chinese, Korean, and Japanese advocates under the banner of ‘East Asian medicine’. This article delineates the evolution of what I call ‘medical Asianism’ and how it was institutionalized in different parts of the Japanese empire. Participants in this network differed in their priorities and ideological commitments, yet they tactfully utilized the Japanese imperial infrastructure and wartime circumstances to promote traditional medicine. Their work laid important intellectual and institutional foundations for the postwar development of traditional medicine across East Asia. This study also contributes to a more nuanced understandings of collaborationism. The type of collaboration examined in this article was preceded by a long history of intellectual exchange, based on a shared body of knowledge and morals, motivated by mutual empathy, and for a cause that was much valued in postwar Asia. As a result, unlike most Chinese collaborators who were prosecuted as ‘traitors’, protagonists in this study continued to prosper professionally and became valuable assets in the postwar rebuilding of Sino-Japanese relations.

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Histories of conservation suggest that from the nineteenth century onwards, the custodianship and conservation of colonial antiquities enabled European powers to legitimize imperial claims. This article complicates this view by focusing on a series of visits made by British royals to the Caves of Elephanta, near Bombay, as part of their tours of India. Of particular interest are the visits in 1870 and 1875, which were essentially picnics, including fireworks and feasting, with little showcasing of ongoing conservation efforts. The article argues that these early visits also sought to advance a narrative of imperial legitimization through the British heirs’ presence at an Indian monument. Rather than acts of rational governance, such as conservation measures, these picnics were transactions within the ceremonial economy that privileged consumption as a means of legitimizing empire. They present a register of imperial engagement with an Indian monument that is neither ‘plunder’ nor ‘preservation’. Instead, they are posited as predecessors of the durbars (courts/assemblies) produced by the British administration from 1877 onwards. As acts of imperial political communication, the Elephanta visits drew upon the popularity of the picnic as a form of leisure, and consumption, and the long-standing aesthetic resonances of the site, such as the island’s picturesque framing and the Caves’ Romanticist associations. These enduring aesthetic frameworks made the acts of consumption legible as imperial political communication. The picnics at Elephanta demonstrate that colonial antiquities featured in imperial narratives of legitimization based on political pageantry, exceeding conservation and rational governance.

In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.

To explore the importance of death and the dead to the study of religious conversion, this article adopts an ethnographic and comparative approach to the lives and deaths of two male Muslim converts in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. Paying attention to the treatment of their dead bodies, which were donated and cremated, contrary to their wishes for an Islamic funeral, and the problematization of their proper names, it is argued that death is the point at which selves are made/remade. Death provides the opportunity for the dead, their kin, friends, and state institutions to make claims about religious identities and familial relations. I conclude that these multiple and often contradictory stances converted the dead into religiously indeterminate figures, though their belonging to their kin was successfully established.

Since at least the nineteenth century, the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji (r. 1674–80) has served as a central symbol in Indian politics. This article interrogates his legacy through the lens of his famous sword, the Bhavani Talvar. At least three swords have been identified as this weapon since the nineteenth century; by analysing each of these claims in turn, I consider how the discourse around Shivaji’s sword(s) traces the evolving legacy of Shivaji himself. Interested less in the historical merits of these claims than in the socio-political work they perform, I seek to uncover why the last of these three, now in London, has become essentially synonymous with the Bhavani Talvar in the popular sphere. Ultimately, I attribute this preference to the object’s political resonance: supposedly given to the Prince of Wales by a descendant of Shivaji in 1875, the object has been a rallying cry for Indian politicians of diverse ideological persuasions, who, in demanding its return, have sought to position themselves as the heirs to Shivaji and the healers of a nation still ailing from colonial wounds.

This article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom’s long-standing cult of the ‘Father-King’, the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people’s democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today’s youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of ‘equal friendship’ and ‘hierarchical siblinghood’ substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of ‘filial insubordination’ to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, ‘friendship-based’ polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand’s Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter’s ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances.